60 Fun Facts About Charles Darwin

In which town was Charles Darwin born?

Shrewsbury: at school there, his home chemistry experiments earned him the nickname 'Gas' and a public rebuke from the headmaster.

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

Abolition of slavery: at Bahia in Brazil, Darwin argued with his captain, who defended slavery, and was briefly banished from the captain's table.

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

Zoonomia: this medical treatise suggested all warm-blooded animals may have arisen from 'one living filament'; Charles said it had no effect on him, yet allowed such early views may have favoured his own.

Where did Darwin first go to university, to study medicine?

Edinburgh: he rushed out of the only two operations he watched, in the days before anaesthetics, and neglected medicine for natural history.

Which skill did the young Darwin learn from John Edmonstone, who had travelled with explorer Charles Waterton?

Taxidermy: Darwin wrote home that lessons cost a guinea for an hour every day for two months, and he often lingered to talk with his teacher.

Which fancy birds did Darwin breed himself while gathering evidence for On the Origin of Species?

Pigeons: the book opens with their astonishing variety of breeds, all descended from the wild rock dove, to show what selection can do.

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

Country parson: his father chose the Church once Charles clearly didn't want to be a physician, and at the time Charles believed every word of the Bible.

What did members of the 'Glutton Club' that Darwin joined at Cambridge do?

Ate exotic birds and beasts: they tried hawk and bittern, but gave up after an old brown owl proved 'indescribable'.

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?

Beetle collecting: holding a beetle in each hand, he once popped one into his mouth to grab a third, and it squirted a fluid that burnt his tongue.

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

John Stevens Henslow: this mentor later proposed Darwin for the self-funded naturalist's place on HMS Beagle.

Cramming for his Cambridge finals, Darwin delighted in the logic of which theologian?

William Paley: Darwin later wrote that Paley's argument from design, once so conclusive to him, 'fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered'.

Just before the Beagle voyage, Darwin toured Wales mapping rock strata with which geologist?

Adam Sedgwick: the same mentor later told Darwin he had read On the Origin of Species 'with more pain than pleasure'.

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

Robert FitzRoy: he wanted a gentleman companion rather than 'a mere collector', and in 1854 he founded what became the Met Office.

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

His uncle Josiah: Darwin had already written to refuse the offer when his uncle talked his father round.

While Darwin explored ashore, what was the Beagle's main task?

Charting coastlines: Darwin was told the voyage would last two years, but it lasted almost five.

Which book, a gift from the Beagle's captain, taught Darwin that land slowly rises and falls over immense time?

Principles of Geology: at his very first stop, in the Cape Verde islands, Darwin was already reading the rocks Lyell's way.

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

Ground sloth: following Cuvier, Darwin credited it with the bony armour he had found, though the plates came from Glyptodon, a giant armadillo relative.

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

Richard Owen: he later became a fierce critic of Darwin's theory, and was shown wrong when he claimed human brains had parts missing in apes.

Which 1835 disaster in Chile, witnessed by Darwin, raised mussel beds still clinging to rocks above high tide?

An earthquake: when the Beagle reached Concepción soon afterwards, Darwin found the city in ruins.

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

Sinking: he worked the whole theory out on the west coast of South America, before he had ever seen a true coral reef.

Which Galapagos animals did the islands' vice-governor say he could trace to their home island with certainty?

Tortoises: yet Darwin failed to collect them properly, and the ones taken aboard were kept as food rather than for study.

Struck by Australia's strange animals, Darwin mused that it was almost as though what?

Two Creators had been at work: that evening he watched wild platypuses diving in a dry-country creek, and found stuffed ones gave no true idea of them.

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

Falmouth: from there Darwin headed home, and was soon hunting for experts to describe his collections.

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

John Gould: Darwin had taken the birds for a mix of blackbirds, 'gros-beaks' and finches, and hadn't labelled his by island.

In 1838, reading which economist made it strike Darwin at once that favourable variations would tend to survive?

Thomas Malthus: his warning that unchecked human numbers double every twenty-five years showed Darwin how fierce the struggle for existence must be.

In his 1838 notes weighing up marriage, Darwin wrote that a wife would be 'better than a' what?

Dog: having decided in favour of marriage, he proposed to Emma that November.

What was the maiden name of Emma, the first cousin Darwin married in 1839?

Wedgwood: before the wedding, Emma wrote that honest doubts about religion cannot be a sin, but would be 'a painful void between us'.

In 1844 Darwin left his wife a 'most solemn and last request' to spend £400 on what if he died?

Publishing his theory: he had just finished a sketch of it, yet he waited more than a decade to publish it himself.

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

Kent: Darwin and Emma both preferred rural life, and moved there to escape London's coal smoke.

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

Murder: his 'crime' was admitting that species are not immutable, quite contrary to the opinion he had started with.

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

Vestiges of Creation: Darwin thought its zoology 'far worse' than its geology, yet credited it with preparing the ground for views like his.

Which creatures did Darwin spend eight years classifying, work that helped win him the Royal Medal in 1853?

Barnacles: by the end he wrote, 'I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow-sailing ship.'

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

Annie: in a private memoir Darwin wrote, 'We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age.'

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

Malvern: he was surprised to find the water cure helped, and ten years later he was taking it again at Ilkley when the Origin came out.

Which naturalist's essay on natural selection, sent from the island of Ternate, reached Darwin in June 1858?

Alfred Russel Wallace: shocked at being 'forestalled', Darwin sent the essay on to Lyell that same day.

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

The Linnean Society: its president later said the year had brought none of 'those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize' a science.

Why did Darwin miss the July 1858 reading of his theory in London?

His infant son had just died: neither author attended, leaving the joint papers in the hands of Lyell and Hooker.

Which topic did On the Origin of Species, whose first printing sold out on day one, almost entirely avoid?

Human ancestry: he allowed himself a single hint, 'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.'

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

John Murray: the editor Murray consulted urged a book of observations instead of the theory, but Darwin held firm to his plan.

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 first reading the Origin, exclaimed how 'extremely stupid' he had been to miss the idea?

Thomas Huxley: he fought the public battles over the Origin while illness kept Darwin away.

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

Samuel Wilberforce: he is said to have taunted his opponent by asking whether his descent from an ape came through his grandfather or grandmother.

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

The Copley Medal: it came only after an earlier nomination had failed, and the Society's president praised his geology rather than his Origin.

To explain an orchid's extraordinarily deep nectar spur, Darwin predicted an undiscovered moth living where?

Madagascar: 21 years after his death, just such a long-tongued moth was discovered there and named praedicta.

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

Pangenesis: tests transfusing blood between different breeds of rabbits found no sign of the particles it said carried traits.

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

Sexual selection: in 1860 Darwin told Asa Gray that 'the sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!'

Which 1872 Darwin book did the photographer Oscar Rejlander help illustrate?

The Expression of the Emotions: to gather evidence, Darwin also circulated a questionnaire asking observers how people show their feelings.

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

Worms: testing their hearing, he found they ignored a metal whistle, shouting and even the deepest notes of a bassoon.

In 1860, Darwin wrote that he cared more about which plant than 'the origin of all the species in the world'?

Sundew: his long series of experiments on it confirmed that plants can catch and digest insects.

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

Pond: he added that today such matter 'would be instantly devoured or absorbed', which wouldn't have happened before life existed.

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

Agnostic: in the same letter he insisted 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?

Francis Galton: his half-cousin's On the Origin of Species turned him to the study of heredity.

Which philosopher coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' after reading On the Origin of Species?

Herbert Spencer: Darwin adopted the phrase in the Origin's fifth edition, calling it 'more accurate' than his own term.

Darwin expected a grave in the village churchyard at Downe, but where was he actually buried?

Westminster Abbey: the Royal Society's president asked for the honour and was among his pall-bearers, and Darwin lies not far from Isaac Newton.

Above his first sketch of an evolutionary tree, in an 1837 notebook, Darwin wrote which two words?

I think: the branching-tree idea he sketched there later became the only illustration in On the Origin of Species.

What did the 1915 'Lady Hope Story' claim about Darwin?

He returned to Christianity on his sickbed: Darwin's children publicly rejected the story.

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

A hummingbird: yet it was finches and mockingbirds, not hummingbirds, that helped spur his ideas.

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

Northern Territory: in 1839 the Beagle's crew named its harbour Port Darwin after their former shipmate.

Which Fuegian, taken home on the Beagle, later declined an offer to return to England?

Jemmy Button: Darwin put his choice down to the arrival of his 'young and nice-looking wife'.