Bishop of the Falkland Islands Stirling, a missionary from the Patagonian Missionary Society (renamed the South American Missionary Society in 1868) was consecrated in Westminster Abbey on 21 December 1869, as the first Bishop of the Falkland Islands. Stirling had episcopal jurisdiction over "the whole of South America with the exception of British Guiana". Stirling served the people of the Falkland Islands for 30 years, later becoming Canon of Wells Cathedral. Until well into the twentieth century, the Bishop of the Falkland Islands had episcopal authority over the whole of South America, until power shifted to the Bishop of Argentina. In 1982, the Argentinian episcopal
History of the Falkland Islands the Ice Age, the Falkland Islands may have been joined to the mainland of South America. While Amerindians from Patagonia could have visited the Falklands, The presence of the warrah, "Dusicyon australis", has often been cited as evidence of pre-European occupation of the islands. However, in 2009, this hypothesis was disproved when DNA analysis identified the Falkland Island wolf's closest living relative as the maned wolf ("Chrysocyon brachyurus") – an unusually long-legged, fox-like South American canid, from which it separated about 6.7 million years ago. It would seem that the lineages of the maned wolf and the Falkland Islands wolf