Biological Reviews

Uh, I'm not gonna do a whole detailed play-by-play of the shifting history of the line, but for a brief summary of developments, I was just looking at, uh, the abstract of a paper called Wallace's Line, Wallacea, and Associated Divides and Areas: History of a Tortuous Tangle of Ideas and Labels.

This is by Ali and Heaney, published in the journal Biological Reviews in 2021.

So the authors go through the concept which we discussed in the last episode, the idea of a faunal boundary being basically a place where you find, uh, animals mainly of one sort on one, uh, one side of the line, and animals mainly of a different sort on the other side of the line, and this raises questions, how did it end up like that? Um, the authors write that the earliest dividing lines in this region were considered quite sharp, especially the line Wallace drew in 1863.

Uh, and this was based on looking at the distribution of land mammals and some birds.

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So I was looking for some more recent papers on the Wallace line, and I came across one that I thought was pretty interesting.

This was a 2023 study published in the journal Science by Skeels et al.

called Paleoenvironments Shaped by Exchange of Terrestrial Vertebrates Across Wallace's Line.