

For 160 years they lay forgotten in a dusty cabinet, lost to science because they had been hastily filed away. Now a treasure trove of fossils collected by the young Charles Darwin has been discovered by chance. They were collected in the 1830s in South America during his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle.
Experts say the find sheds new light on this formative period for Darwin, then in his 20s, whose study of tropical plants and wildlife set the stage for his ground-breaking theory of evolution. The fossils, neatly pressed on to slides, some bearing Darwin’s signature, were discovered by Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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