Socotra Island: The Alien Trees and Rare Animals Found Nowhere Else on Earth

Socotra Island: The Alien Trees and Rare Animals Found Nowhere Else on Earth Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, closer to the Horn of Africa than to the Arabian mainland it politically belongs to, sits a small archipelago that looks like it was pulled from the pages of a science fiction novel. Welcome to Socotra — often called the "Galápagos of the Indian Ocean" — a Yemeni island so biologically isolated that roughly a third of its plant species and a striking number of its animals exist nowhere else on the planet. Cut off from mai…