Washington, Jan 23 (Inditop.com) Lemurs, flying foxes and narrow-striped mongooses reached the large isolated island of Madagascar 65 million years ago by hitching rides on natural rafts blown out to sea, new research confirms.
Matthew Huber and Jason Ali, professors at Purdue and the University Hong Kong respectively, say the flowing ocean currents between Africa and Madagascar millions of years ago would have made such a trip not only possible, but fast, too.
The idea that animals rafted to the island is not new. Since at least 1915, scientists have used it as an alternative theory to the notion that the animals arrived on Madagascar via a land bridge that was later obliterated by shifting continents.
Rafting would have involved animals being washed out to sea during storms, either on trees or large vegetation mats, and floating to the mini-continent, perhaps while in a state of seasonal torpor or hibernation.
Huber and Ali’s work, based on a three-year computer simulation of ancient ocean currents, supports a 1940 paper by George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most influential paleontologists and evolution theorists of the 20th century.
Once the migrants arrived on the world’s fourth largest island, their descendants evolved into the distinctive and sometimes bizarre forms seen today.
“What we’ve really done is prove the physical plausibility of Simpson’s argument,” Huber said. Anthropologists and paleontologists have good reason to be interested in Madagascar’s animals.
The island is located in the Indian Ocean roughly 300 miles east of Africa over the Mozambique Channel and is otherwise isolated from significant land masses.
Madagascar has more unique species of animals than any location except Australia, which is 13 times larger, says a Purdue release.
Its population includes 70 kinds of lemurs found nowhere else and about 90 percent of the other mammals, amphibians and reptiles are unique to its 226,656 square miles.
The findings are slated for publication in the February edition of Nature.
