Saturday, September 6, 2014

My Year of Darwin 9/6/2014: when the most important book on biology gets prepared, Darwin looks for bird shit


 Charles Darwin


"Lately I have been looking during few walks at excrement of small birds; I have found 6 kinds of seeds, which is more than I expected"  Charles Darwin,letter to J.D. Hooker, November1856

Dispersal of plants has been a center of his thinking for over a decade. How plants have reached distant islands has been the question. Not just Darwin's though and many of his colleagues have proposed connections among islands through sea level rise and fall and erosion. Some of this must be true. But Darwin's coral theory shows that some islands have been disconnected from the mainland since their creation. How then, do small seeded plants get there?

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