A leaping coquerel's sifaka

An infant ring-tailed lemur

The Madagascar hog-nosed snake

An aye-aye, Madagascar's strangest lemur

The fossa, Madagascar's largest predator

A fan-tailed gecko cleans its eye

In the dawn light, mist caresses the forested mountains of an alien world. A strange shape appears in the trees -- a furry creature looking like something from the pages of a Dr. Suess book. It throws back its head and lets out a deafening wail.

Welcome to planet Madagascar - a world unto itself, where evolution has taken the familiar and created the bizarre. Split off from the African mainland since the age of dinosaurs, Madagascar's isolation provided a safe haven for creatures from a forgotten time. Here, they flourished into countless forms that exist nowhere else.

This installment of the award winning "Living Edens" series presents an extraordinary cast of characters. Chameleons of every color, shape and size snap up insects with marksman-like accuracy. A panther-like carnivore called a fossa pursues its prey through the tree tops with frightening agility. Brilliantly colored frogs emerge from the ground and compete vigorously for mates. A majestic fish eagle, one of the rarest birds of prey in the world, gracefully plucks its meal from a river. And then there are the charismatic lemurs. Many of these primitive primates look like stuffed toys, and each seems more whimsical than the last.

Madagascar is a world of the unfamiliar; where insects masquerade as dead leaves and twigs; where a piece of tree bark transforms into a stalking lizard. It is home to one of the strangest creatures on earth, the aye-aye. Emerging at night with its amber eyes, wiry hair and bat-like ears, the aye-aye is a actually a lemur. It gnaws into a dead tree and fishes out grubs with a skeleton-like finger.

The island's habitats are also diverse. They include lush tropical rain forests where ruffed lemurs endure the daily deluge as sopping balls of fur; sun-baked dry forests where dwarf lemurs spend most of the year in hibernation to escape desiccation; a vast realm of towering limestone pinnacles, and a forbidding spiny desert, where ring-tailed lemurs gingerly negotiate the two-inch thorns of a didierae tree to find food.

This "Living Edens" portrait is an experiential journey though the natural wonders of this unique island. Gliding over mountain tops, into tree holes and down streams, the camera takes on the perspective of the island's creatures, many of which have never before been filmed.

One of these is the bandro, a secretive teddy-bear like lemur that lives amongst the reeds of an ancient marsh. Today, the bandro's world is disappearing. Encroaching humans now set fire to the marsh to improve access to fishing grounds. As a bandro family struggles to escapes the flames, we are reminded that no paradise can be taken for granted.

Madagascar's story is a testament to the fragility of all the Earth's living Edens, and of the care that must be taken to see them endure.

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