Evolutionary Relationships
By: Hussein Shelleh
Charles Darwin was born in England in 1809, always showing an interest in nature. He lived at a time when scientific views of the natural world were constantly changing. Geologists and biologists were finding evidence that suggested that the planet was ancient and that both Earth and the variety of organisms living on it had changed over a long period of time, which is called evolution. Although Charles Darwin was not the first scientist to propose a theory of evolution, he made important contributions to that theory with his own interpretations of the evidence he had found.
In 1831, Darwin was invited to sail on the HMS Beagle for a five-year voyage. The captain and his crew were going to be mapping the coastline of South America, and Darwin would be collecting plant and animal specimens along the route. As he explored a range of habitats on the continents of South America, Australia, and Africa, Darwin carefully recorded his observations of various organisms. He noticed three patterns of biological diversity during his travels: Species vary globally, locally, and over time.
Darwin noticed that ecosystems in different parts of the world have some similar, but unique organisms. For example, he found large flightless birds in the grasslands of Australia, Africa, and
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For example, the Galapagos Islands are a group of islands off the Pacific coast of South America. It appeared as if plants and animals from the South American mainland inhabited these islands, but those species had diversified to become unique species on each island. Darwin collected 13 types of finches from the Galapagos Islands, and were similar in many ways, but each came from a population with enough unique features to be considered its own species. Some types of finches were only found on one island, while others could be found on two or