A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

Who doesn’t love lemurs? The strepsirrhine primates, or wet-nosed cousins of ours, are favorite documentary subjects and extremely popular zoo attractions. And, in one of those bits of zoological trivia that everyone knows, lemurs only live on the island of Madagascar off Africa’s southeastern coast. The question is how they got there.

Documenting the paths of animals during geological history is not an easy task. In the days before scientists understood plate tectonics, land bridges, now sunk beneath the ocean, were often used to explain the dispersal of organisms. While some land bridges did exist in the past, like the one that allowed mammoths to cross from