Can Gondwana vicariance, rather than Cenozoic chance dispersal, better explain the disjunction of Ambulicini hawkmoths between Madagascar and New Caledonia?

The geographic disjunction between the hawkmoth genera Compsulyx in New Caledonia and Batocnema in East Africa-Madagascar is a biogeographic pattern shared with other plant and animal taxa, irrespective of their individual means of dispersal. The disjunction is almost identical to a sister species relationship in the plant genus Acridocarpus (Malpighiaceae), similar to Cunonia (Cunoniaceae) in New Caledonia and South Africa, and comparable to Dietes (Iridaceae) on Lord Howe Island and Madagascar/East Africa. These and other geographic disjunctions represent scattered elements of the numerous trans-Indian Ocean connections involving more widespread taxa, some with distributions that include the Pacific. The biogeographic patterns are consistent with Mesozoic tectonic events that disrupted the continuity of widespread ancestral distributions. The tectonic correlations are not in conflict with younger fossil or island calibrated molecular divergence ages that represent minimum estimates only. And they provide a potential falsification of centers of origin and chance dispersal models generated by ancestral-areas programmes.