Torricelli Mountains, a tiny mountain range in northern Papua New Guinea, is estimated to host roughly 4% of the world’s known species, many found nowhere else on Earth, Mongabay’s John Cannon reported in March.
“I mean, for 0.003% of the world’s land area — it’s a ‘wow’ factor for me,” Jim Thomas, CEO of the Tenkile Conservation Alliance (TCA), told Cannon. “I’m so lucky to be working here.”
Tim Flannery of the Australian Museum in Sydney told Mongabay that PNG’s Torricelli Mountains and its immensely rich biodiversity emerged as a result of slow geological processes.
“It was only that slow development of understanding of the geological history of [the Torricelli Mountains] that we started to make sense of this exceptional richness that we were discovering up there,” Flannery told Mongabay.
