Martinique Martinique Martinique () is an insular region of France located in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean Sea, with a land area of and a population of 385,551 inhabitants as of January 2013. Like Guadeloupe, it is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department. One of the Windward Islands, it is directly north of Saint Lucia, southeast of Greater Antilles, northwest of Barbados, and south of Dominica. As with the other overseas departments, Martinique is one of the eighteen regions of France (being an overseas region) and an integral part of
Mammals of the Caribbean connecting South America with one or more off-shelf islands). Colonization of a series of islands can occur either by an iterative rafting process ("island-hopping"), or by colonization of a large ancestral island which is then subdivided by into smaller islands by subsequent geologic or sea level changes (island-island vicariance). The restricted, unbalanced nature of the Caribbean mammal fauna implies that rafting was part of the overall process. This is consistent with the fact that megalonychid sloths, platyrrhine monkeys and caviomorph rodents have all shown a capacity for this type of dispersal (in their colonization of North America from South America