Charles Darwin's Influence On The Galapagos Islands

Charles Darwin was an English naturalist who was known for his scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. His studies became the foundation for modern evolutionary studies. To form his theories, Charles Darwin set out on a five-year voyage across the world on the HMS Beagle on December 27, 1831, where he eventually arrived at the Galapagos Islands. The Galapagos Islands is an archipelago of 13 main islands and is located in the pacific ocean about 600 miles from the Ecuadorian coast. The Galapagos islands are isolated making it a home to a variety of unusual plant and animal life. On the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin study different species. He observed that some of the same species differ from island to island. The Galapagos finches are one of the most important studies that he did in the Galapagos. He studied all sorts of different finches and concluded that each each bird had a different beak that were adaptations to different diets available among the islands. The finches all looked similar but the main difference are their beaks. Divergent evolution states that “one ancestral stock evolves into two species, which continue to evolve and become less and less alike over time”. Darwin’s finches all evolved from a single ancestor that flew to the islands thousands of years ago. There are 13

There are four types of tree finches and three of the four are insect eaters. Large insectivorous tree finches have powerful curved beaks that can bite through bark of twigs. Small insectivorous finches have grasping bills that enable them to pick up adult insects and bite through bark of twigs and leaf stems. The woodpecker finch is an insect eater like the large and small insectivorous finches but this finch has a probing bill. The last specie of tree finches are the vegetarian tree finches which have a parrot like bill. Unlike the other tree finches the vegetarian finch feeds almost entirely on plants, fruits, and