Sadly, I am not able to take part in the fieldwork myself so much anymore, as both of my legs were amputated following an airplane crash twelve years ago.

The whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved.

It occurred to me that if I did not handle the crash correctly, there would be no survivors.

To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony.

It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.

It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.

Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.