Happy Birthday Charles Darwin! Darwin would have been 206 today. Thank you for the work that you devoted your life to, “The theory of #Evolution via #naturalSelection" The most in depth genetic study ever conducted on the #Finches of Charles Darwin’s shows a “messy” family tree. The birds collected on the Voyage of the Beagle in the #Galapagos Island show a previously unknown levels of interbreeding of the species. It also suggests that changes in one gene triggered the wide variation seen in the beak shapes. The study done by Swedish and US scientist sequenced 120 individual birds from 17 different species for the study. The paper was published in the journal #Nature. This “most singular group of finches" appeared in the Charles #Darwin book about the voyage. They were classified by the ornithologist John Gould. They are pictured above with Gould hand written descriptions. “Darwin was amazed by the beak diversity in the species that were otherwise very similar,”said Prof. Leif Anderson senior author on the paper, o #Uppsala University in #Sweden. Only about 1.5 million years ago, the species stared to brink away from the common ancestor. That activity colonized the relatively young volcanically created #Galapagos Islands. Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace's famous theory of the way that natural election works, made it so the birds rapidly adapt to new food sources. The birds face very little competition form other birds for the food. The larges adaptive behavior were the change in the size of the beaks, different strength’s of beaks for different seeds, so shorter or more blunt for insects. @natgeo @thephotosociety @RobertClarkphoto @InsituteArtist
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