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This website is devoted to information about Darwin and His Bears: How Darwin Bear and His Galápagos Islands Friends Inspired a Scientific Revolution (Blast Books), by Darwin scholar and evolutionary psychologist Frank J. Sulloway.

The site also contains information about Charles Darwin’s historic visit to the Galápagos Islands in 1835, including photographs of the different locations visited by him and the various endemic species he encountered in these islands.

Darwin and his bears, out for one of their regular nature walks. Darwin found that walking was conducive to his thinking. He had a sand-lined path (called the Sandwalk) constructed behind his house in Downe, and weather permitting, he walked the full length of this path (about three-quarters of a mile) several times a day, usually at noon and 4 PM. He solved some of the most difficult problems associated with his argument for evolution by natural selection as he was walking around what he sometimes called his “thinking path.” Always ready to assist him were his 16 hard-working research assistants who played an important but generally unrecognized role in Darwin’s life and scientific research.

Darwin and his 16 Galápagos bears hard at work conducting research for his book On the Origin of Species (1859).  Seated on the desk next to Darwin’s is Darwin Bear, who is recording Darwin’s microscopic observations to confirm that frogs eggs are killed by salt water.  This finding explains why frogs’ are almost totally absent from oceanic islands, in spite of the ecological suitability of most amphibians for such islands. Each of the other bears is engaged in a research project that relates directly to one or more chapters in the Origin. The three bears seated around the jar containing salt water, for example, are soaking seeds to see whether they will still germinate after extended immersion, an experiment designed to elucidate how remote oceanic islands received their first colonists.