As he sat in a remote field station in Madagascar, surrounded by dense rainforests, Mark Krasnow realized that his journey halfway around the world was worth it. The handful of biologists gathered around him agreed that the mouse lemur could be the animal he was looking for.

The HHMI investigator from Stanford University School of Medicine was on a quest for a better animal model for human disease. The fruit flies and mice he’d been studying couldn’t help him answer many basic research questions on lung diseases, and he knew that scientists studying other disorders had similar experiences. He wanted to find a better disease model.

After a year of research into species worldwide, Krasnow had brought an unlikely team of high school students, molecular biologists, mouse lemur experts, and a veterinarian to the East African country to search for an animal that might be a closer match to people than mice, the perennial lab favorite. Madagascar’s early separation from the continental land masses, some 80–90 million years ago, created an evolutionarily eccentric collection of plants and animals, including lemurs. “It’s like a biologist’s dreamland,” says team member Sarah Zohdy, a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki and one of a small number of scientists studying mouse lemurs.

Photo illustration by Ping Zhu