Just in time for Easter, a cracked brown egg, believed to be the last of a batch personally collected and then cackhandedly packed by Charles Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle, has turned up in the collection of Cambridge University’s zoology museum.
The egg was found by a volunteer, Liz Wetton, who has been helping to catalog the museum’s gigantic collection of birds’ eggs for 10 years. She sorted, labeled and carefully repacked the egg, recording the fact that it bore the handwritten inscription “C Darwin,” and then moved on to the next drawer.
It was only when collections manager Mathew Lowe was reviewing her work that he realized the specimen was unique.
With Mike Brooke, curator of ornithology, he traced the acquisition of the egg back to the notebook of a late 19th-century zoology professor, Alfred Newton, a friend of Darwin and his son Frank.
The notebook also proved, lest anyone doubt her, that Wetton’s handling of the egg was blameless — the damage was done over 150 years earlier.
Newton recorded: “One egg, received through Frank Darwin, having been sent to me by his father, who said he got it at Maldonado and that it belonged to the Common Tinamou of those parts. The great man put it into too small a box, and hence its unhappy state.”
Tinamous are related to rheas and ostriches, though they can fly. They are now more commonly known as Nothura, and one is named in the naturalist’s honor, Nothura darwinii.
Darwin would have stolen his specimens from a male bird, which incubate the eggs and raise the chicks.
It was the extraordinary variety of adaptations of species to their surroundings which fascinated the young naturalist on his five-year journey around the world on the Beagle. He brooded over his observations for years — until he finally published On The Origin of Species in 1859.
“To have discovered a Beagle specimen in the 200th year of Darwin’s birth is special enough, but to have evidence that Darwin himself broke it is a wonderful twist,” Lowe said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but