Bruce Museum welcomes Madagascar's extinct and present-day marvels

With its yellow-orange eyes, pointed face and long, skeletal fingers, the aye-aye is an animal that can engender some rather intense reactions.

"It can be startling to come upon one in the dark of the forest," said Daniel Ksepka, the Bruce Museum's curator of science. 

The world's largest nocturnal primate, the aye-aye makes its home on Madagascar, where it is considered an ill omen by some and a creature worth protecting by others. Overall, however, it is an example of the more than 10,000 species on Madagascar that are found nowhere else on earth. The Greenwich museum will be celebrating the history, diversity and importance of this island country located off the coast of southeast Africa in the new exhibition, "Madagascar: Ghosts of the Past," which runs through Nov. 8. 

Visitors are brought back some 88 million years ago, when the land mass that would become Madagascar broke away from the southern continents, taking with it dinosaurs and crocodilians. For a while, times were good for animals such as the Majungasaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur, and the Masiakasaurus knopfleri, a small predatory dinosaur named after the Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler. Crocodilians, ancestors to today's crocodiles, roamed as well, including an odd one that was a vegetarian. Click here to continue reading.