One male and one female yearling mouflon were released onto Haute Island of the Kerguelen archipelago in 1957, thus giving rise to the isolated population under study. To make that possible, a single yearling male and a single yearling female Corsican mouflon were brought from the Vincennes Zoo in Paris and released on Haute Island, a 6.5 square kilometre patch of land roughly 3,000 kilometres from Réunion, the departure point for supply ships serving the archipelago's research base at Port-aux-Français. No one involved at the time could have anticipated that this pair would later challenge a familiar assumption in population genetics.
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