60 Fun Facts About Charles Darwin

In which town was Darwin born in 1809?

The family home, The Mount, sat in Shropshire; his father Robert was a wealthy society doctor and financier.

Both of Darwin's grandfathers were prominent campaigners for what?

The family's anti-slavery convictions stayed with Darwin, who argued bitterly about slavery with his captain in Brazil.

Darwin's grandfather Erasmus anticipated ideas of evolution and common descent in which 1794 work?

It was a poetic fantasy of gradual creation whose undeveloped ideas his grandson would later expand.

Darwin first went to university to study medicine. Where?

He found the lectures dull and surgery distressing, and neglected his studies for marine invertebrates.

As a medical student Darwin took taxidermy lessons from John Edmonstone, a freed slave from which region?

Around 40 hour-long sessions with 'a very pleasant and intelligent man' reinforced Darwin's lifelong opposition to slavery.

In 1827 Darwin announced that black spores in oyster shells were actually the eggs of what?

It was his first scientific discovery, made while helping Robert Grant study marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth.

Darwin's father sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1828 as the first step towards which career?

He preferred riding, shooting and beetle collecting to study, but still came tenth in his final examination.

At Cambridge Darwin joined the 'Glutton Club'. What did its members do?

The habit stuck: on the Beagle he ate puma, iguana, armadillo and giant tortoise.

On the Beagle voyage Darwin mistakenly ate which bird that he had intended to study?

The remains were salvaged and the smaller species was later named Rhea darwinii in his honour.

Darwin's second cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to which hobby at Cambridge?

He pursued it zealously enough to get some of his finds published in Stephens' Illustrations of British Entomology.

At Cambridge, Darwin was known to the dons as 'the man who walks with' which botany professor?

It was this mentor who later proposed Darwin for the naturalist's place on HMS Beagle.

In his final Cambridge examination in January 1831, where did Darwin place among 178 candidates?

He had crammed at the last minute and was delighted by the logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity.

Just before the Beagle voyage, Darwin spent a fortnight mapping strata in Wales with which geologist?

Sedgwick later predicted Darwin 'will have a great name among the Naturalists of Europe', then rejected his theory of evolution.

Who was the captain of HMS Beagle on Darwin's voyage?

He wanted a gentleman companion rather than 'a mere collector', and later founded what became the Met Office.

Who persuaded Darwin's reluctant father to let him join the Beagle, and to pay for it?

Robert Darwin thought the planned two-year trip a waste of time; it ended up lasting almost five years.

The Beagle voyage that began in December 1831 lasted almost how many years?

Darwin spent most of that time ashore, collecting and geologising, while the ship charted the coasts.

Which book did FitzRoy give Darwin, on land slowly rising and falling over immense time?

Its author, Charles Lyell, became one of Darwin's closest allies and later arranged for the Origin to be published.

Darwin identified the giant Megatherium, found in Patagonia, as an extinct kind of what?

The bony armour plates he found nearby turned out to belong to Glyptodon, a huge armadillo-like animal.

Which anatomist described the fossil bones Darwin brought back from South America?

He later turned into one of Darwin's fiercest critics and was discredited in the 'Great Hippocampus Question'.

What natural disaster did Darwin experience in Chile in 1835?

He saw mussel beds stranded above the high-tide line, evidence the land had just been lifted.

Darwin explained coral atolls as reefs that kept growing while the islands they ringed were doing what?

The theory became his first scientific book, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, in 1842.

Which Galapagos animals with island-varying shells did Darwin fail to collect properly?

The crew took some aboard as food and ate them, shells and all.

Seeing the platypus and the rat-kangaroo in Australia, Darwin mused that it was almost as though what?

He found the Aboriginal Australians 'good-humoured & pleasant' and noted how European settlement had depleted them.

At which Cornish port did the Beagle finally anchor on 2 October 1836?

Darwin went straight home to Shrewsbury and then to Cambridge to find experts for his collections.

Which ornithologist announced Darwin's Galapagos birds were twelve species of finch?

Darwin had taken them for a mix of blackbirds, 'gros-beaks' and finches and had not even labelled them by island.

Whose Essay on the Principle of Population inspired Darwin's 'struggle for existence' in 1838?

He said it 'at once struck' him that favourable variations would be preserved and unfavourable ones destroyed.

In his 1838 'Marry / Not Marry' note, Darwin wrote that a wife would be 'better than a' what?

On the other side of the ledger he listed 'less money for books' and 'terrible loss of time'.

Darwin married his first cousin Emma in 1839. What was her maiden name?

The pottery family and the Darwins had intermarried for generations, which later made him fret about inbreeding in his children.

What did the Darwins nickname their first London home in Gower Street, because of its gaudy interiors?

He moved his 'museum' of specimens in over Christmas 1838, days after being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Down House, where Darwin lived from 1842 until his death, is in which county?

The family left London to escape its pressures; he did most of his experiments in the garden and greenhouse there.

Telling Joseph Hooker about his theory in 1844, Darwin joked that it was 'like confessing a' what?

Hooker replied that no existing opinion satisfied him either and asked to hear how the change might have happened.

Which anonymously published 1844 best-seller drew wide interest in the transmutation of species?

Darwin scorned its amateurish geology and zoology but used the storm around it to sharpen his own arguments.

Darwin's eight-year study of which creatures earned him the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1853?

He found minute parasitic males living on hermaphrodites, an intermediate stage in the evolution of separate sexes, and declared 'I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before'.

Darwin's treasured daughter who died in 1851 at the age of ten was called what?

Her death devastated both parents and reawakened his fear that his own chronic illness was hereditary.

In 1849 Darwin found relief from his illness through hydrotherapy at Dr James Gully's spa in which town?

The cause of his lifelong stomach pains, vomiting and palpitations was never established.

In June 1858 Darwin received a paper on natural selection from which naturalist, then in Borneo?

Darwin was shocked at being 'forestalled' and put the matter in the hands of his friends Lyell and Hooker.

The joint 1858 papers announcing natural selection were read to which learned body in London?

Its president later remarked that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries.

Why did Darwin not attend the July 1858 reading of his theory?

Scarlet fever was sweeping the village; the baby, Charles Waring, died on 28 June after almost a week of illness.

How many copies were in the first printing of On the Origin of Species, oversubscribed on day one in 1859?

The book set out what Darwin called 'one long argument' and was translated into many languages within years.

Which publisher, arranged by Lyell, brought out On the Origin of Species?

It took Darwin thirteen months of ill health to boil his 'big book' down to the abstract that became the Origin.

Which word, the last in On the Origin of Species, was the only form of it in the first five editions?

Darwin first used the word 'evolution' in The Descent of Man in 1871 and only added it to the Origin's sixth edition in 1872.

Which supporter, on reading the Origin, exclaimed 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!'?

He became 'Darwin's bulldog', campaigning against clerical authority in science while Darwin's illness kept him at home.

Which bishop argued against Darwin at the famous 1860 Oxford evolution debate?

The same bishop later helped block a knighthood for Darwin that Prince Albert and the Prime Minister had recommended.

Britain's highest scientific honour, awarded to Darwin in 1864, was which award?

On the same day Huxley held the first meeting of the 'X Club', devoted to science 'untrammelled by religious dogmas'.

Darwin predicted a long-tongued moth to pollinate an orchid with a sixteen-inch nectary from where?

The moth, Xanthopan, was found in 1903, more than twenty years after his death.

What was Darwin's unsuccessful hypothesis of heredity, published in his 1868 book, called?

The book was the first part of his planned 'big book'; the second part stayed unpublished in his lifetime.

Which mechanism in The Descent of Man (1871) explains features like the peacock's plumage?

The book also set out evidence that humans are animals while insisting that all humans are one species.

Which 1872 Darwin book was one of the first ever to feature printed photographs?

It argued that human psychology evolved and is continuous with animal behaviour.

Darwin's final book, published in 1881, was about the action of which creatures on the soil?

The idea dated back to 1837, when his uncle showed him cinders that had vanished under loam.

Darwin was the first person to recognise the significance of what in plants?

His book Insectivorous Plants grew out of experiments on sundews carried out from his sickbed.

In an 1871 letter to Hooker, Darwin suggested life may have begun in a 'warm little' what?

He had earlier answered critics of the unexplained origin of life by noting that gravity was accepted without a known cause.

In an 1879 letter, which word did Darwin call 'the most correct description of my state of mind'?

He added that he had 'never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God'.

Which half-cousin of Darwin coined the word 'eugenics' in 1883?

Darwin found his statistical arguments intriguing but preferred to leave breeding decisions to individuals.

The phrase 'survival of the fittest', often credited to Darwin, was actually whose?

It was lumped in with 'Darwinism' as free-market progress, an application Darwin himself rejected.

Darwin expected to be buried in the village churchyard at Downe. Where was he actually buried?

Public and parliamentary petitioning won him a place close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.

How many children did Charles and Emma Darwin have?

Three of the sons, George, Francis and Horace, became Fellows of the Royal Society and were all knighted.

The 'Lady Hope Story' of 1915 made what claim about Darwin, which his children repudiated?

Historians have dismissed the tale as false; his last words were to his wife and children.

Alongside HMS Beagle, which bird appeared with Darwin on the Bank of England £10 note from 2000 to 2017?

The Beagle also lives on in the name of the capital of Australia's Northern Territory, whose harbour his shipmates named after him.

The city of Darwin, named after the naturalist, is the capital of which part of Australia?

Darwin Harbour was named by his former shipmates on the Beagle's next voyage.

How many Fuegians, seized on the Beagle's first voyage and educated in England, sailed home with Darwin?

They were returning with a missionary, and Darwin found them friendly and civilised.