Aim This paper addresses two opposing theories put forward for the origins of the beetle fauna of the North Atlantic islands. The first is that the biota of the isolated oceanic islands of the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland immigrated across a Palaeogene–Neogene land bridge from Europe, and survived Pleistocene glaciations in ameliorated refugia. The second argues for a tabula rasa in which the biota of the islands was extermin...