The real story
Alfred Russel Wallace spent eight years, from 1854 to 1862, travelling the Malay Archipelago and collected more than 125,000 specimens of birds, beetles and butterflies. When he crossed from Bali to Lombok in 1856, he noticed the birds changed almost at once: Asian species to the west, cockatoos and honeyeaters with Australian links to the east. The reason is the Lombok Strait. It is so deep that even when Ice Age sea levels dropped and joined Bali to Java and Asia, it never became a land bridge.
In 1858, shaking with malarial fever in the Moluccas, Wallace worked out the idea of natural selection and mailed an essay from Ternate to Charles Darwin, who had been working on the same idea privately for twenty years. Their papers were presented together in London on 1 July 1858, and Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' followed a year later. The boundary Wallace mapped was later named the Wallace Line by the biologist Thomas Huxley.
