Skull Island: A Documentation of the Most Terrifying Place on Earth

by SomethingWittyIGuess

In the summer of 1889, a British Naval ship sails from India to Australia, however a tropical storm causes it to wash up on a lost island in the Indian Ocean. The crew dubs the landmass Skull Island and they take note of the odd and even deadly fauna and flora that call this place home. Since then, several expeditions were made to explore this land and what lived there.

37. The Central Semi-Desert

The Central Semi-desert

Since its discovery, Skull Island has been a textbook example of how islands can become homes for ancient and bizarre species found nowhere else on Earth, their isolated homes being time capsules harkening back to bygone eras. While Skull Island as a whole is a unique place home to several strange, almost prehistoric, lifeforms, the island's semi-desert is perhaps its oddest biome. Surrounded on all sides by mountains, the semi-desert is nestled near the center of the island, blocking monsoon winds from encroaching upon the dusty landscape, bringing about a dry and arid pocket in an otherwise humid and rainy landmass.

Discovered in 1948, the semi-desert is, arguably, the oldest location on the island, with many of its fauna and flora being descendants of the Indo-Madagascar subcontinent stock that made up Skull Island's original Late Cretaceous populations. As more and more small islands compiled during the Paleocene to make the Skull Island we know today, the semi-desert became surrounded by mountains created from continental drift, resulting in a (mostly) isolated world that closely resembles the spiny forests of Madagascar, with thorny trees jutting from a vast swath of sand, dirt, and rock. Even stranger are the animals that inhabit this K/Pg boundary time capsule, with notosuchians, gondwanatheres, and other ancient oddities appearing in higher abundance than the rest of the island.

This semi-desert has proven itself useful to science, as the rich number of species otherwise lost to the sands of time has made constructing phylogenetic trees of life easier. Also, the region has helped geologists, meteorologists, and climatologists find out more about the forces that affect Skull Island and the surrounding regions. It turns out that, up until the Miocene, the region the island occupies was once a heavily volcanic area (hence the island's rich history of continental drift and connecting land bridges), but any of the island's volcanoes eventually became extinct by the beginning of the Pliocene. Hopefully, this beautiful semi-desert, as well as the island's other well-known regions, can provide further insight into the natural history of our planet in the near future.