A vast archipelago with a total of 17,508 islands has made Indonesia the home of a large variety of plant and animal life, both terrestrial and aquatic. As the land mass is divided into islands, often mountainous, many terrestrial species are endemic, originating and living in one particular island or part of a larger island.
Zoologists divide Indonesia into three zones.
Zone I, nearest the Asian continent, was defined by British Naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace in the 1 9th century. Wallace postulated that because the islands of Sumatra, Java and Kalimantan were joined to Asia by the now submerged Sunda Shelf, the Indo Malayan fauna had not spread beyond the shelf's eastern boundary which came to be known as the Wallace Line. Zone 11, is the intermediate zone between the Indo-Malayan zone and Zone 111 where Australian animal and plant life predominate. In Zone 111, both the fauna and flora are predominantly Australian in character and affinity, as these islands share the same continental shelves, the Sahul Shelves with Australia. Wildlife Most famous of the rare fauna of Indonesia are the Komodo dragons, the giant lizards which are found only on Komodo and neighbouring islands, and believed to be the only one of their kind in the world.