Alfred Russel Wallace

British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. 8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913 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. In the Malay Archipelago, where Wallace 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.