Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a
British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of
evolution through
natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of
Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in
On the Origin of Species. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the
Amazon River basin and then in the
Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the
Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect
Australasia.