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Island life, with all of its quirks and anachronisms, also fascinated Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection before Darwin published his, but the fact that he was not an independently wealthy gentleman who owned a country house with a swan-encrusted ornamental lake and hedge maze meant Darwin got all the glory. Wallace’s Island Life considered how isolation could preserve animals such as Mauritius’s dodo and New Zealand’s moa, but left them totally unprepared for contact with dogs, pigs and hungry sailors and/ or Māori, which rapidly population-bottlenecked them into extinction.
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