When Wallace travelled the region, he was exposed to “more than ten thousand species of trees, about a tenth of the world's flowering plant species, about an eighth of all mammal species, nearly a sixth of all reptile and amphibian species, a sixth of all bird species, and about a third of all fish species” (Daws & Fujita 1995, p. 185). Today, as the world's largest exporter of crude palm oil, Indonesia is witnessing the rapid disappearance of its rainforests, which is forcing the region's biodiversity into a highly stressful condition. Many of the zoologists we interviewed during the exhibition research doubted that it would be possible to develop a theory of evolution today because of the extremely degraded condition of the environment.