Showing posts with label paleontology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paleontology. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

My Year of Darwin (2/18/2014)

 Charles Darwin

"I thought they must belong to an enormous Armadillo, living species of which genus are so abundant here." Charles Darwin - Letter to J.S. Henslow, October 1832

Darwin has explored the Atlantic coast of Brazil and, with great sea-sickness, turned Cape Horn, and is now exploring the west coast of South America. There he finds a huge relative of the modern armadillos. Seeing related but phenotypically different species in the past was key to Darwin's thinking. What forced shaped organisms through time. That was the question.