George Windsor Earl the Physical Geography of South-Eastern Asia and Australia", published in 1845, described how shallow seas connected islands on the west (Sumatra, Java, etc.) with the Asian continent and with similar wildlife, and islands on the east such as New Guinea were connected to Australia and were characterised by the presence of marsupials. This formed the insipiration for Alfred Russel Wallace to propose the faunal boundary line now known as the Wallace Line. He published a paper in 1850 that invented the term 'Indu-nesians', for a quaint racial classification, derived from the Latin for India and island. He published a seminal
Sunda Shelf these areas of the Asian continental shelf that were exposed during the last ice age. Sundaland included the Malay Peninsula on the Asian mainland, as well as the large islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra and their surrounding islands. The same steep undersea gradients that mark the eastern boundary of Sundaland are identified biogeographically by the Wallace Line, identified by Alfred Russel Wallace, which marks the eastern boundary of Asia's land mammal fauna, and is the boundary of the Indomalaya and Australasia ecozones. The shelf has resulted from millennia of volcanic activity and erosion of the Asian continental mass, and