Jack Ashby

We've got about two million specimens covering the whole of the animal kingdom, the whole of geological time, or biological time, I should say, the whole of the world.

So, as you say, we've got a lot of Darwin specimens here.

He was a student at Cambridge for a few years, and...

ended up leaving his collections to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which is one of the founding parts of our museum.

We have, and we've got... What Darwin did when he came back from the Beagle is to partition off different groups of animals to different experts in those fields.

And we ended up, or Cambridge ended up, with the fishes, which might not be the sexiest part of the Beagle collection, but...

So we've got Darwin's Fishes from the Beagle.

We've also got the finches that came back from the Beagle, which are probably the most famous thing to come off the Beagle because Darwin's finches, I'm doing air quotes around Darwin's finches here, are perhaps the best example of how evolution worked in Darwin's eyes.

So these are...

The Galapagos finches.

A finch, it turns out, or one species of finch, flew from South America to the Galapagos Islands and there evolved into 14 different species with different beaks.

Some beaks for big nut-cracking beaks for smashing seeds.

Some really fine beaks for pecking flowers.

And

And Darwin used this as an example of adaptive radiation, to say this is how it evolved.

But the reason I did air quotes is because our finches aren't actually collected by Darwin.

They were collected by the captain Fitzroy and one of the crew, Fuller, who actually did a far better job than Darwin of labelling the specimens and where they came from.

The first platypus specimen I saw was actually in the museum in which I now work in Cambridge as an undergraduate many years ago.

And our course in zoology was essentially you were given one group of animals per week and we'd have a load of lectures about that group and then we'd go to the museum for practical sessions with the specimens.

Absolutely.