Madagascar is of special interest to biologists for reasons that also help explain the attention the island receives from international conservation organizations. First and foremost, the majority of Madagascar’s plant and animal species are endemic, occurring nowhere else on the planet.1 This applies to more than 90 per cent of the island’s 13,000+ plant species (Phillipson et al., 2006), and the same is true for the various groups of animals, with rates of endemism ranging from 37 per cent in birds to 100 per cent in amphibians and lemurs (Goodman and Benstead, 2003, 2005). Not only does Madagascar have high levels of endemism, the endemic groups present on the island are ancient, having evolved from their closest relatives many million years ago and therefore forming groups without any close relatives elsewhere (Crottini et al., 2012; Holt et al., 2013). In contrast to other large islands, the vast majority of Madagascar’s plants and animals are restricted to one landmass. This has important implications for conservation, as the extinction of a species in Madagascar usually means global extinction. Madagascar is the Earth’s fourth largest island and can be seen as an intermediate between a continent and an island (de Wit, 2003), hence its common label of ‘the island continent’. This has played a major evolutionary role – Madagascar is large enough to have a number of very distinct biomes, allowing colonizing species to radiate into distinct species in different environments. It is the combination of high levels of endemism, phylogenetic distinctness2 and the large number of species at high risk of extinction that makes Madagascar one of the most important sites for biodiversity conservation worldwide (Myers et al., 2000).