Now, what interested me was some of the scientific questions. The conservation biology was important but also the science was interesting. Here is the presumed former range, all the way down to Bali. Over time, their range was disrupted into these isolated populations that people have named as subspecies. There's good geographic variation in size and in pelage, that is, the "plummage" of mammals is called pelage. So it varies greatly from lighter animals in the north to darker animals down south.

But one of the things that interested me was whether some populations, for example in Siberia were isolated somehow by the last glaciation or whether the populations in Sumatra, Java or Bali, were isolated at the time when the sea levels rose up, because we know these areas were all connected to the mainland and to Borneo, when sea levels were lower. So biologically evolutionarily if these populations were distinct, that would result from a natural event and not because of human habitat destruction. So I sort of wanted to try to separate these things out.

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