Madagascar's Central Highlands are largely composed of grasslands, interspersed with patches of forest. The historical perspective was that Madagascar's grasslands had anthropogenic origins, but emerging evidence suggests that grasslands were a component of the pre‐human Central Highlands vegetation. Consequently, there is now vigorous debate regarding the extent to which these grasslands have expanded due to anthropogenic pre...

Germline mutations are the raw material for natural selection, driving species evolution and the generation of earth's biodiversity. Without this driver of genetic diversity, life on earth would stagnate. Yet, it is a double‐edged sword. An excess of mutations can have devastating effects on fitness and population viability. It is therefore one of the great challenges of molecular ecology to determine the rate and mechanisms b...

Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot that is facing rapid rates of deforestation, habitat destruction, and poverty. Urgent action is required to document the status of biodiversity to facilitate efficacious conservation plans. With the recent advent of portable and affordable genetic technologies, it is now possible to take genomic approaches out of the lab and into the field. Mobile genetics labs can produce scientifically re...

Hibernation is an adaptive strategy some mammals use to survive highly seasonal or unpredictable environments. We present the first investigation on the transcriptomics of hibernation in a natural population of primate hibernators: Crossley's dwarf lemurs ( Cheirogaleus crossleyi ). Using capture–mark–recapture techniques to track the same animals over a period of 7 months in Madagascar, we used RNA‐seq to compare gene express...

Implementation of the coalescent model in a Bayesian framework is an emerging strength in genetically based species delimitation studies. By providing an objective measure of species diagnosis, these methods represent a quantitative enhancement to the analysis of multilocus data, and complement more traditional methods based on phenotypic and ecological characteristics. Recognized as two species 20 years ago, mouse lemurs (gen...

Understanding the remarkably high species diversity and levels of endemism found among Madagascar’s flora and fauna has been the focus of many studies. One hypothesis that has received much attention proposes that Quaternary climate fluctuations spurred diversification. While spatial patterns of distribution and phylogenetic relationships can provide support for biogeographic predictions, temporal estimates of divergence are r...

The lemurs of Madagascar are a unique radiation of primates that show an extraordinary diversity of lifestyles, morphologies and behaviours. However, very little is known about the relative antiquity of lemuriform clades due to the lack of terrestrial fossils for the Tertiary of Madagascar. Here, we employ a Bayesian method to estimate divergence dates within the lemuriform radiation using several unlinked gene loci and multip...