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