The Aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a primate native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the ecological niche of a woodpecker. It taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its finger to pull the grubs out. The Aye-aye is the only extant species in the familyDaubentoniidae and infraorderChiromyiformes. A second species was exterminated over the last few centuries.
It is placed in its own infraorder (Chiromyiformes), and it is uncertain whether this infraorder split off from the ancestral strepsirrhine line before the lemurs and lorises, or after.
If the Aye-aye represents a form that is ancestral to all the rest of Strepsirrhini, then it evolved away from the strepsirrhine line between 63 million years ago (mya) (when the strepsirrhines split from the primitive primate line) and 50 mya (the lemur/loris split).
If Chiromyiformes is to be considered as the sister only to the lemurs, then it must have evolved after the lemur/loris split 50 mya.
The Strepsirrhini are divided into three major groups; the Loriformes which are distributed over wide ranges of Africa and Asia, and the Lemuriformes and Chiromyiformes, both endemic to Madagascar.
Based on their biogeographic distribution, there are many interesting questions about the colonisation of the two continents Africa and Asia and the island of Madagascar by strepsirrhines.
A highlight is the phylogenetic position of the bizarre aye-aye (Chiromyiformes, Daubentonia madagascariensis) and the question how often Madagascar was colonised by strepsirrhines.
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