Wallace’s LineThe British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace is most famous for his contribution

Wallace’s LineThe British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace is most famous for his contributions to the theory of natural selection. He independently developed and jointly published his ideas with Darwin. Wallace’s progress pushed Darwin to finally release his own long-unpublished book, On the Origin of Species. But like Darwin, Wallace amassed a variety of work throughout his life in many fields.His work in Southeast Asia led him to propose a line between the faunas of Asia and Australia. West of the line, Asian animals like elephants and orangutans are present. East of the line, Australian organisms such as marsupials and eucalyptus can be found.This ecozone east of the line came to be known as “Wallacea.” Other lines were later noted to the east, indicating where Australian animals outnumber Asian ones and where the truly Australian ecozone starts, but the Wallace line remains the most famous. Wallace was one of the first true biogeographers, noting the divisions between biomes and founding a field which has helped us to understand the past distribution of continents on earth. His understanding of the diversity and ancient lineages of life would fuel a lifelong passion for environmental activism, and Wallace became one of the earliest conservationists as well.The theory of plate tectonics had not yet been developed and so Wallace had no way to explain why a narrow 10 kilometer strip of water running through Oceania could separate such drastically different collections of animal life. Later geologists would discover that the Wallace Line represents a tectonic boundary. The animal life on either side were previously separated by a vast distances and evolved separately, only intermixing as the Asian and Indo-Australian plates moved closer together in recent geologic time.-DKPicture and more info here: http://bit.ly/28JDB2O -- source link

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