Department of Biology | College of Arts and Sciences



Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life: Study GuideEstimates of the number of species on earth range from There are about known species of monkeys.How many species of hummingbirds are there? How many species of bats are there? How many species of beetles are there? How many species of flowering plants are there? Google Search: Charles Darwin was born on in .Darwin was years old when he took a position as gentleman naturalist on the British surveying ship, the , which set sail in to map coastlines around the world.After four years of the voyage, in September 1835, the Beagle landed on the Islands, where Darwin found creatures that existed nowhere else on earth.Darwin observed that Galapagos tortoises living in wet habitats have an upper shell with a front, as they graze on the ground. Tortoises living in dry habitats have a shell with a front that allows them to reach upward to graze on shrubs and other vegetation, since ground vegetation is scarce.Darwin wondered whether species were not created as they were, but rather changed over time.Darwin sent many of the specimens he collected on his five-year voyage to , an accomplished zoologist who was able to classify the specimens.Owens invented the name to describe the “terrible lizard” fossils found in many ancient rocks.Owens founded the , which now houses many of Darwin’s specimens.Darwin discovered the jaw of a in South America. It had been extinct for more than 10,000 years. Owen named it in Darwin’s honor.After his voyage, Darwin married his cousin, Emma, and settled in at where he did his pondering and writing.His most famous work was his recognition thatOrganisms could produce many offspringThose offspring best suited to their environment were most likely to survive and reproduce.This would cause a gradual shift in the population to the best suited type of organism.He called this idea .Darwin attributed the different sizes and shapes of the of different species of Galapagos finches to natural selection.In Darwin’s manuscripts, the two words were written above a tree-like diagram showing how ancestral species could branch into diverse descendant species.Darwin was a prolific letter writer, communicating with many other scientists of his time.He studied artificial selection at . Dogs are all descended from one wild species, the .Darwin wrote to breeders of and to ask about their breeding practices and results.Darwin conducted artificial selection experiments with in his own greenhouse.Question: Did Darwin readily discuss his ideas about natural selection in public? Why or why not?Question: Fourteen years after he began writing, Darwin wrote a letter to his wife Emma, asking her to do something for him should he pre-decease her. What did he ask her to do?In June 1858, 22 years after his voyage, Darwin received a package from , a botanist working in Indonesia. In the package was an essay that set out exactly Darwin’s ideas about natural selection. Wallace said the idea had come to him while he lay in a fevered state during a bout of . The senior members of the scientific group the decided to read both scientists’ ideas at a meeting on . Only about people were in attendance, but neither Darwin (ill and grieving the death of his infant son) nor Wallace (still abroad) were present. The ideas did not appear to create much of a stir.In the year , Darwin sent his manuscript to his publisher, John Murray, III. Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, was published on . David Attenborough owns a copy of the edition of the Origin of Species, which he bought as a boy for the “princely sum” of one shilling.Question: Upon its publication, what public reaction was elicited by Darwin’s Origin of Species?Question: Were Charles Darwin and Richard Owen lifelong friends? How did their relationship progress?What type of specimens, stored, unidentified, in many drawers, was David Attenborough required to for his practical exams as an undergraduate student? Richard Owen purchased a fossil of two years after N.S. was published.List three reptile characteristics shown by Archeopteryx: List two bird characteristics shown by Archeopteryx: An extant bird, the , shows the link between reptiles and birds.What trait shown by baby hoatzin is a remnant of their reptile ancestry? , which they lose when they mature.Question: The is one of the two most primitive living mammals. What characteristic does it share with reptiles? In Darwin’s time, the oldest known fossils were from the Cambrian.The fossil record starts abruptly in the period with mostly (look like “sawblades”) and (look like “giant wood lice”).Pre-Cambrian fossils in the Charnwood Forest (Lewisian gneiss) near Attenborough’s boyhood hometown of Leicester are in the oldest rocks in the world. Imprints in these were first dismissed as mechanical settling of sediments.In year – Schoolboy found remains of Charnia, a colonial living organism. (Similar to a “sea pen”)Round imprints are present in pre-Cambrian rocks. (Life didn’t start suddenly in the Cambrian.)It started much earlier with simple, microscopic forms and soft-bodied organisms that did not readily fossilize.Victorian scholars geneology was used to date the origin of the earth at the year About 50 years after publication of Origin, Polish scientist , working in Paris, discovered radioactivity, setting the stage for radiometric dating.Question: What hypotheses did Darwin pose to explain the existence of frogs (which can’t swim in salt water) on widely separated continents?The idea of continental drift was first put forth in the year by a German geologist .A mechanism for this continental movement was first discovered in the when sea floor mapping revealed volcanic rifts that could drive continental movement.: Intelligent Design, using stopwatch as an argument for necessity of a designer, God.The was used as an example of how a simple structure can gradually increase in complexity with natural selection.What type of organism has a simple pigment spot to detect light? What type of organism has a patch of pigment cells that allow shadow detection: What type of organism has a simple eye that confers a blurry image: What type of organism has a complex eye that can see as well as a human eye: discovered laws of inheritance by breeding and studying .He postulated that heritable “factors” encoded characteristics. Those factors are now called .1953 – discovered the structure of DNAA gene taken from one animal can work in another: Jellyfish luminescence can be expressed by a mouse.DNA fingerprinting can establish parenthood, as well relationships among different species.DNA comparisons have revealed thatKangaroos are related to .Shrews are related to Elephants are related to Questions:What type of animals were the first ones to arrive on land?Did insects arrive on land before or after vertebrates?Amphibians first move onto land approximately million years ago.A mass extinction of all dinosaurs except the ancestor of birds occurred 65 million years ago.Question: Did mammals exist in any great numbers while dinosaurs “ruled the earth”.On Darwin’s 200th birthday, the Natural History Museum of London replaced the “center stage” statue of its founder, Richard Owen, with a statue of . ................
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