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Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS ( 8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913 ) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist.

He is best known for independently proposing a theory of evolution due to natural selection that prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own theory.

Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace Line that divides the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts, one in which animals closely related to those of Australia are common, and one in which the species are largely of Asian origin.

He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the " father of biogeography ".

Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made a number of other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory besides being co-discoverer of natural selection.

These included the concept of warning colouration in animals, and the Wallace effect, a hypothesis on how natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridization.