On the Origin of Species the publication of "On the Origin of Species" and the bicentenary of Darwin's birth were scheduled for 2009. They celebrated the ideas which "over the last 150 years have revolutionised our understanding of nature and our place within it". In a survey conducted by a group of academic booksellers, publishers and librarians in advance of Academic Book Week in the United Kingdom, "On the Origin of Species" was voted the most influential academic book ever written. It was hailed as "the supreme demonstration of why academic books matter" and "a book which has changed the way we think about everything".
On the Origin of Species forms, matching the branching of common descent from an ancestor. Patterns of extinction matched his theory, with related groups of species having a continued existence until extinction, then not reappearing. Recently extinct species were more similar to living species than those from earlier eras, and as he had seen in South America, and William Clift had shown in Australia, fossils from recent geological periods resembled species still living in the same area. Chapter XI deals with evidence from biogeography, starting with the observation that differences in flora and fauna from separate regions cannot be explained by environmental differences alone; South