Nautilus

Darwin’s Lost Beetle Is Back

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of finding an original Darwin specimen, collected during the Beagle’s first voyage. But finding it, and realizing it was a lost specimen collected by Darwin, was just the first step in a much longer journey.Photograph by fiddledydee / Flickr

On August 24, 1832, HMS Beagle dropped anchor at Bahía Blanca, a deep natural harbor in present-day Argentina. On board was a 23-year-old naturalist, Charles Darwin. He had been at sea since December 27, 1831, when the left Plymouth. Darwin had spent most of those months incapacitated with seasickness. During one bout of nausea, staring sadly down at a long, slow inescapable swell unfurling below him, he wrote, “This & three following days were ones of great & ceaseless suffering.”

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus8 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Consciousness, Creativity, and Godlike AI
These days, we’re inundated with speculation about the future of artificial intelligence—and specifically how AI might take away our jobs, or steal the creative work of writers and artists, or even destroy the human species. The American writer Megha
Nautilus7 min read
The Feminist Botanist
Lydia Becker sat down at her desk in the British village of Altham, a view of fields unfurling outside of her window. Surrounded by her notes and papers, the 36-year-old carefully wrote a short letter to the most eminent and controversial scientist o
Nautilus7 min read
A Radical Rescue for Caribbean Reefs
It’s an all-too-familiar headline: Coral reefs are in crisis. Indeed, in the past 50 years, roughly half of Earth’s coral reefs have died. Coral ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and valuable places on Earth, supporting upward of 860,000 speci

Related Books & Audiobooks