The island of Madagascar lies off the coast of Mozambique.

Madagascar, often described as a naturalist's paradise, separated as an island from Africa more than 150 million years ago. This isolation has made the world's fourth largest island a living laboratory for evolution.

It possesses a rugged mountainous backbone, deserts, rivers, lakes and a vast array of habitats such as the rainforests along the east coast, dry forest in the west, and the spiny desert in the south. This environmental diverstiy has promoted the evolution of plants and animals that occur nowhere else on our planet.