'island in the sky'

An 'island in the sky' shelters new life.

By going where no human had gone before, scientists found 40 new species in Indonesia.

A giant rhododendron and a half-inch-long frog; a lost bird of paradise and a spiny, worm-eating, egg-laying mammal. Sound like creatures from another world? That's what the scientists who found them thought, too.
Twelve scientists from Indonesia, Australia, and the United States recently returned from a two-week trek through the Foja Mountains on the island of New Guinea. Their finds have yet to be evaluated and officially classified by experts around the world, but a preliminary count of new species includes one bird, four butterflies, five palms, one flower, four or five mammals, and 20 frogs; close to 40 species in total.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0216/p14s01-sten.html