What a nice story to start my day! In the remote forest of the Foja Mountains, west of Papua New Guinea, Bruce Beehler has discovered a Garden of Eden.

On his month long expedition Beehler has discovered a number of new species, including 20 frogs, 4 butterflies, 5 palms and a Rhododendeon Macgregoriae. In a place untouched by man, species close to extinction were found to be breeding in harmony and completely unafraid of human contact!

There is a slide show here that includes evidence of the smoky honeyeater, a golden fronted bowerbird and a Berlepsch’s six-wired “lost” bird of paradise. Six species of tree kangaroos were also recorded including the golden-mantled tree kangaroo, a species new to Indonesia and one of the cutest things I have ever seen! While I understand this place to be an incredibe laboratory for biodiversity scientists I hope that it can be totally preserved and left free of the unintended consequences of human civilisation.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 9:22 am and is filed under News and tagged as animals, paradise, science. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.