The next two paragraphs are a test to see how much I remember from elementary school science class :
The continents of Africa and South America were once part of a massive supercontinent known as Pangaea, which existed around 335 million years ago. Pangaea began to break apart about 175 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era due to the movement of tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface.
As Pangaea broke apart, the land masses that would form Africa and South America drifted away from each other, a process known as “continental drift.” This process not only shaped the geography of the continents but also influenced the distribution of plant and animal species that were once part of the same land mass.
OK, I’ll be honest: My first attempts at those two preceding paragraphs were so riddled with errors that I went back and did some research and rewrote them. My elementary school years were not known for their good study habits, so my grasp of certain details is fuzzy. I had the dates all wrong, and for some reason, I thought “Pangaea” was spelled “Pangyra” (which is apparently the name of a New Age boutique in Sedona, Arizona ), and I thought “continental drift” was something that happened to my grandfather when he tried to steer his Lincoln and light a cigarette at the same time.
The point I’m trying to make is that South America and Africa were once joined together and that as they drifted apart geographically, the animals that lived there needed to choose which half they wanted to live on.
OK, yes, I’m aware this statement isn’t quite what natural science historians call “accurate” or even “defensible,” but hear me out. I spent the past two weeks in Peru , and have been to Africa many times, and I think I have a trailblazing insight into the evolution of our planet.
Africa is a continent filled with enormous and deadly animals. A fully mature adult male lion is about 10 feet long and nearly 500 pounds and can run about 50 miles per hour. Cheetahs are leaner and smaller but hit speeds of 75 miles per hour. Both of them can tear you apart before you can scramble back on the safari truck. If you doubt this, try searching YouTube for “Japanese tourist lion attack” and see what I mean.
Elephants, of course, are known to be intelligent and gentle, but I wouldn’t want one of them to step on my foot by accident. Same with giraffes. In Africa, you know something is dangerous because it is enormous.
South America, on the other hand, offers a different kind of scary wildlife. There, it’s the tiniest things that you need to avoid. There’s an itty-bitty caterpillar, barely visible, that makes a microscopic scratch on your skin and then defecates a toxic substance into the wound. On my recent trip to Peru, no guide would tell me exactly what effect this might have on the human body, but they all shuddered and waved me away as if to say, You don’t want to know.
There are spiders that bite, frogs that spray venom, mosquitos that carry malaria and a host of other diseases, and ants that can chew through your boots. We all know about piranhas, but do you know about the candiru fish? Also known as the “toothpick fish,” it is small enough to swim up into the urethra of an unsuspecting river bather, and when it’s inside your body, it opens up like an umbrella. If you doubt this, try searching YouTube for “Horror Story: Candiru: the Toothpick Fish” and see what I mean. Being attacked by a candiru in the Amazon would make you envy that Japanese tourist who is eaten by a lion in Kenya.
In South America, it’s the small things that get you. In Africa, it’s the large ones. It’s as if the creatures sorted themselves out during the long Pangaea-splitting era, big scary ones sticking with the big scary ones, and small scary ones hopping over the crack to be with the other small scary ones. As a tourist, you have your choice: Do you want to be terrified by the seen or unseen? Do you prefer your monsters large and visible and coming right at you, or tiny and invisible and possibly heading for your crotch?
Come to think of it, we have that choice all the time, no matter where we are.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
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