The islands or island continents that have shaped the evolution of mammals are, in the order we shall visit them, Madagascar, Laurasia (the great northern continent which was once isolated from its southern counterpart, Gondwana), South America, Africa, and Australia. Gondwana itself might be added to the list, for, as we shall discover at Rendezvous 15, it too bred its own unique fauna, before it broke up into all our Southern Hemisphere continents.
