Madagascar’s fabulously improbable wildlife, from gremlin-like aye-ayes to satanic leaf-tailed geckos, may be thanks to dozens of dramatic oceanic journeys that would put Robinson Crusoe to shame, new research says. “It seems like a far-fetched idea that animals could survive drifting across the sea, because it’s hard enough for humans to survive that, let alone animals,” says Matthew Borths, a curator of fossils at Lemur Center at Duke University. But a comparison of genetic data from modern Malagasy species with the fossil record of their ancestors from the African mainland has revealed that this is likely what happened for most land vertebrates, according to the research, published in May in the journal Biological Reviews. Reptiles, amphibians, and mammals from mainland Africa would have been stranded on giant rafts of vegetation and floated to Madagascar, where they eventually evolved into the wildlife we know today. Some 95 percent of mammals and 98 percent of reptiles are endemic to the country, which means they live nowhere else in the world. While it seems improbable for animals to survive the roughly 30 to 35 days it would have taken to get across the Mozambique Channel, the vegetation may have held fruits or other food sources, as well as trapped rain to keep the animals alive. “With geological time, something which is statistically unlikely or highly unlikely becomes a certainty. If you keep throwing the dice for five million years, eventually you’re going to come up with 10 sixes,” says study co-author Jason Ali, a geophysicist at the University of Hong Kong.