ABSTRACT
It was Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Joseph Hooker who introduced island biology into science; but Thomas Vernon Wollaston, an English naturalist, was perhaps the effective founder of island zoogeography. In Insecta Maderensia, Wollaston described vast numbers of endemic species on Canary Islands, the Madeira Group and the Azores. Russell Coope has argued that most of the present North Atlantic beetle fauna originated on ice rafts, dispersed precariously during a fairly short period after ice sheets finally retreated 15–10,000 years ago. Volcanoes illustrate the dynamics of species arrival and replacement in particularly vivid ways. But, in fact, the species composition of all communities is similarly affected by turnover resulting from colonisation and extinction. A major advance in the understanding of island biotas was 'the theory of island biogeography' proposed by Robert MacArthur and Edward Wilson in 1963 and expanded into a book in 1967. The theory was the extension of ideas that had been around for a long time.
