Paradise LOST

Spin a globe slowly to find New Zealand. It’s one of the world’s most isolated island countries. Australia, the nearest significant land mass, is over a thousand miles away. Composed of two big islands stretching almost 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from north to south, and a galaxy of smaller islands, New Zealand is believed to be a fragment of the ancient southern continent of Gondwanaland.

Over the past 100 million years, as New Zealand inched its way into its present isolation, plant and animal life emerged on the island. As these hardy survivors adapted to their new island home, they evolved into species that are unique to the region. The process is called adaptive radiation. It involves one plant or animal splitting into many species, to fill different ecological niches—ways of life in the same geological area. When this process is well under way, an organism no longer mates with its ancestral type and a new species emerges,