This article shows a brief panorama of the most important biogeographic theories and how scientific knowledge rendered by travelling naturalists plays a relevant role in testing and sometimes rejecting some of these theories. The article also emphasizes the importance of becoming familiar with past travellers' and naturalists' reports in order to understand how severe human action was in geographically distributing some vertebrate groups.
Biogeography; theories; travelers' contribution; distribution patterns of some vertebrates; human action