Page 9 - Atlas Of The World's Strangest Animals

9

Africa

From dew-drenched forests to parched deserts, from glorious

grasslands to sun-baked beaches, Africa is a continent that both
stimulates and surprises.

his vast landmass, spread across 300,330,000 square second-largest rainforest on Earth. It’s an area of dense,
kilometres (11,600 square miles), is the world’s steamy jungle, which contains around 70 per cent of all of
Tsecond-largest continent, encompassing more than Africa’s plant life and an estimated 10,000 animal species
50 nations and a billion people. In the north of this tear- – many found nowhere else.
shaped land is the great Sahara Desert, which sprawls, Thanks to such a rich variety of ‘ecosystems’, the
untamed, across an area larger than the United States of African continent supports a bewildering array of weird
America. On the edge of this sea of sand, the desert starts and wonderful wildlife. It’s here that you’ll find many of
to disappear, giving birth to swathes of scrubby grassland the world’s biggest, fastest and most dangerous species. It’s
known as savannah.These are regions that depend on one also home to some of our planet’s animal ‘superstars’ – the
season of the year for most of their rainfall, and many elephants, lions and zebras that appear so often on our
animals roam across these regions in pursuit of the rains. television screens. But there’s more to this amazing land
In fact, the Serengeti savannah plays host each year to the than killer cats and wild game. In this section, you’ll read
largest, longest overland migration in the world. about some of Africa’s more curious inhabitants – rodents
In central Africa, nestled in the Congo Basin, is the that behave like insects,‘living fossils’ and some genuinely
continent’s great rainforest.This beautiful region is the strange record-breakers!

(c) 2011 Marshall Cavendish. All Rights Reserved.