The Living Story of Sulawesi

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi is a 12,000-square-mile jigsaw puzzle. During the past 25 million years, drifting tectonic plates tore four separate paleo-islands from the far corners of the South Pacific and smashed them together in a steamy corner of Southeast Asia. This turbulent history has turned Sulawesi into a complex biological cipher. Today, it houses a mélange of species with confusing origins: some may have been passengers on the original islands, some may have arrived afterward, and some may have evolved from the mix. Jim McGuire, curator of herpetology at Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and a professor of integrative biology, is studying how these species evolved and came to be distributed on Sulawesi today.