SUBFOSSIL INDRI-INDRI FROM THE ANKARANA MASSIF OF NORTHERN MADAGASCAR

Subfossil specimens of Indri indri have been recovered recently from t he Ankarana Massif cave system in the far north of Madagascar. Taken t ogether with material from the central highland site of Ampasambazimba , the range of this species appears to have once included much of the northern half of the island and to have extended north and west beyond the eastern rainforest (not unlike Hapalemur simus), It is probable t hat forest corridors connected the subfossil localities to the current range at some time in the past. Climatic desiccation (fluctuating or long-term) and/or human degradation of the environment may have create d the disjunct distributions of living and subfossil I. indri. It is a lso possible that I. indri once included populations or subspecies tha t were better adapted to dry forest, woodland, or mosaic environments, habitats very different from those occupied by their living conspecif ics. Such adaptive diversity would have been similar to that of Propit hecus diadema which today has subspecies in the montane forests and on e (P.d. perrieri) in the dry forests of the northeast. These discoveri es add new information on range extensions to the distributional datab ase for the primates of Madagascar, and illustrate the piecemeal proce ss of their extinctions. (C) 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.