Posted on 02/22/2008 6:32:51 AM PST by decimon
A rarely-seen collection of crabs from Charles Darwin's voyage aboard HMS Beagle has been given a new lease of life on the web.
The University of Oxford has released images of specimens held in its museum collections that have been digitised for an online Darwin database.
The crustaceans changed hands several times after Darwin's return to Britain, before fading into obscurity.
They were then rescued by Oxford University's Museum of Natural History.
Charles Darwin developed an interest in natural history while studying divinity at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently accepted as the naturalist on an expedition aboard the Beagle.
From 1831 to 1836, Darwin travelled the world on the ship, making ecological and geological observations as well as collecting copious numbers of specimens.
When Darwin returned to England, his collection of crustaceans did the rounds, eventually ending up in the hands of the zoologist Thomas Bell.
Bell immersed himself in helping Darwin classify his Galapagos turtles, and apparently lost interest in the crustaceans.
In 1862, they were rescued from obscurity by John Obadiah Westwood, Oxford's first Hope professor of zoology, who bought them for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History where they still reside to this day.
According to the Oxford Science Blog, Darwin wrote to Westwood in August 1861 to give his blessing to the relocation, although he later regretted splitting up the fruits of the Beagle voyage amongst so many different specialists.
The neglected crabs have now been electronically catalogued and can be viewed as part of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History's Darwin database.
Not the first person to go on an around the world sea voyage and return with a bunch a crabs, but he may have been the first.
Yeah, that would’ve made more sense If I had said,
not the “only,” but the “first”
Interesting!
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Gods |
Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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makes me wonder if algore developed an interest in globull warming while studying divinity...and wasn't Stalin a failed monk? (Or was that Rasputin?) Whoops!
It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent allied races. If Buffon had known of the gigantic sloth and armadillo-like animals, and of the lost Pachydermata, he might have said with a greater semblance of truth that the creative force in America had lost its power, rather than that it had never possessed great vigour. The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds lived at a late period, and were the contemporaries of most of the existing sea-shells. Since they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can have taken place. What, then, has exterminated so many species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America up to Behring’s Straits, we must shake the entire framework of the globe.
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