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An 1844 engraving of the Sulawesi Bear Cuscus (Ailurops ursinus). The marsupial species, with its origins on the Australian continent, occupies Indonesia's Sulawesi Island in the centre of the Indo-Australian Archipelago​. 

Since the 1840s, biologists have been drawing lines and staking-out areas on maps of the Indo-Australian Archipelago indicating where they consider the boundary between the land animal suites of Australasia and Asia should lie. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a hugely complex mess. A major ‘autopsy’ by HKU’s Department of Earth Sciences’ Dr Jason Ali and his colleague Dr Larry Heaney from the Field Museum in Chicago has just unpicked it all. Appearing in the journal Biological Reviews, the paper entitled Wallace's line, Wallacea, and associated divides and areas: history of a tortuous tangle of ideas and labels (doi: 10.1111/brv.12683) sets the record straight. Dr Ali commented: “We now know who wrote what and the development of the key ideas, plus the misunderstandings that arose that have caused great confusion. The work should guide future workers years and decades into the future as they report their findings from the amazing geo- and biological laboratory that is offshore SE Asia.”

Map of the Indo-Australian Archipelago showing some of the earliest line proposals (1845-1870). From Ali & Heaney 2021.

Paper URL https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/brv.12683