Who Needs Fiction: The Land That Time Forgot

Explorers entered an extinct volcano that has been cut off from the rest of New Guinea for 200,000 years. Life in that volcano habitat has been evolving on it's own for all that time. Below is an excerpt from an article about the expedition and what they found. If you click here, you find the whole article. Of course there is a slide show featuring some of the newly found creatures.

A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea.


A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world.