However the lemurs’ ancestors got there, it must have been after Rendezvous 8 (at 65 Ma). As you can see from plate 8, that’s far more recent than Madagascar’s geographical separation from Africa (165 Ma) and India (88 Ma), so they certainly weren’t Gondwanan residents sitting there all along. In several places in this book I have used ‘rafting’ as a kind of shortened code for ‘fluke sea-crossing by some means unknown, of great statistical improbability, which only had to happen once, and which we know must have happened at least once because we see the later consequences’
