Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was a Welsh naturalist, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. Having worked with Walter Henry Bates in the Amazon (and having lost all his collections in a catastrophic fire at sea), Wallace spent 1854 to 1862 wandering across the East Indies (now Malaysia and Indonesia) from Sumatra in the west to New Guinea in the east, earning his living as a bird-skin collector. It was while he was in the Aru Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, that (quite independently of Darwin) Wallace realised the true 'origin of the species'.
