Research group suggests Madagascar's unique animals arrived on rafts

Research group suggests Madagascar's unique animals arrived on rafts


- (PhysOrg.com) -- Ever since the island of Madagascar was first visited by people, some two thousand years ago, there has been speculation about the unique plants and animals that live on the world’s fourth largest island; one where roughly ninety percent of the wildlife is found nowhere else. For many years, it was believed they came to be there during the time when the island was still physically connected to Africa, but that reasoning has fallen by the wayside as it has been shown that the island separated some 88 million years ago, while most of the animals that live there didn’t arrive till just 60 million years ago, forcing evolutionary scientists to search for other explanations. Now new evidence by an international group of researchers is proposing that the animals got there by floating on rafts during a time when prevailing currents would have made the journey more plausible. They have published a paper on their ideas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


I couldn't have made this up, but yeh that makes sense.

The raft idea sounds silly but it's a major mechanism in the global dispersion of animals. But by raft they don't mean intricate carvings and oars, simply anything big that floats in the ocean, such as a log or floral mat.

macrocephale wrote:The raft idea sounds silly but it's a major mechanism in the global dispersion of animals. But by raft they don't mean intricate carvings and oars, simply anything big that floats in the ocean, such as a log or floral mat.

Yeh it does make sense, I have this cartoon image in my head of animals heading off with a spotted hanky tied to a stick... not dissimilar to a scene in Bambi I believe. - maybe that's worrying?

More like the scene from Disney's Dinosaur surely? (I cannot remember Bambi at all lol..)

macrocephale wrote:More like the scene from Disney's Dinosaur surely? (I cannot remember Bambi at all lol..)

Disney's Dinosaur? - not come across that. Perhaps you should review it in film/book