Henry Walter Bates and his co-naturalist Alfred Russet Wallace embarked together in 1848 on an expedition to the forests of the Amazon in search of plants and animals that would help solve the problems of the origin of species. Wallace returned to England in 1852, but tragically lost his entire collection in a shipwreck, while Bates stayed on for seven more years, accumulating more than 14,000 specimens, of which a staggering 8,000 were previously unknown to science.