Wednesday 30 September 2009

A New Discovery on Komodo Dragon

I should be thankful to friends who are very kind in distributing news about Indonesia, or other facts about this beautiful country. Today I've got an e-mail forwarding the news about the origin of the Komodo Dragon. To read the report from Sarah Clarke for The World Today ABC, you can read it here, or her interviews with the scientists over here.

In the interview Scott Hocknull said:
The fossils that were found in Queensland in eastern Australia show that the Komodo dragon had its origins here in Australia about four million years ago and persisted in Australia to at least 300,000 years ago and perhaps even younger than that.
It would remind us about the Wallace line. It is written in wikipedia:
During ice age glacial advances, when the ocean levels were up to 120 m lower, both Asia and Australia were united with what are now islands on their respective continental shelves as continuous land masses, but the deep water between those two large continental shelf areas was — for a period in excess of 50 million years — a barrier that kept the flora and fauna of Australia separated from that of Asia.
Indonesia with more than 17,500 islands is the product of the glacier period. New findings seems to enhance a lot of older theories. This new finding about the Komodo Dragon is related to the research of the hobbits in Flores. BBC News published the story of the scientific theory that hobbits were not modern pygmies in May, and now we've got another story related to that hobbits theory.

So, Komodo Dragon has a very long track of history, should we risk their chance to continue their existence in Indonesia? (Read my post on komodo dragon here)

2 comments:

reymos said...

Ive watched a documentary about this in UK television and I was amazed about this animal. Some of them are really huge in size... Maybe someday, I will visit this place and experience the presence of this amazing creature.

Retty Hakim (a.k.a. Maria Margaretta Vivijanti) said...

Hope you'll have your chance one day...
Have you read my post about Pesta Blogger? I've noted about an Australian blogger who is going to revisit us. (Last year he came for the blogger party as official guest, and this year he will be revisiting us sponsored by Air Asia). He has no luck for the best job, but he gained other experiences here...hope your time will come...