I'm going to switch gears. We'll take you to the middle of the Congo Basin in the Central African Republic (also called CAR). Here's the Central African Republic. Here's Cameroon, here's Congo and over here is the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. I want to take you to an area called the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in the CAR near a town called Bayanga. We first started going there about four years ago when we began to create an African rainforest in our new biodiversity hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

So over the last four or five years, some of us have gone there four times. In late 96 we took twenty people there, mostly people from the exhibition department and an outside film crew to collect all the materials for the rainforest exhibit. During that time, we also did science. We did exploration because the science -the inventory -had to support the content, the scientific content of this exhibit. Without this content, the exhibit would just be a bunch of pretty leaves but no information would be available. So one of the things we did was an inventory. We collected plants, insects, birds, mammals, and so forth.

This is a wonderful, wonderful forest. It lies at the northern edge of the Congo basin rainforest. About 30 or 40 kilometers to the north it starts changing into grasslands and savanna. But this forest is, in many places, very lush. The World Wildlife Fund has a conservation project there and that is one of the reasons why we chose it, because we wanted to have a story line to convey to the museum visitor about biological diversity, about the threats to it, and about what's being done to save it.

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