Evolutionary theory and the WFT beard...

I woke up all worried early yesterday morning, concerned I didn't yet have anything sorted out for this week's Nature Friday. 

Gail seemed uncharacteristically reluctant to rouse herself, so I asked to be let out into the back garden.

Can you believe that when I came back inside and jumped on her bed a few minutes later, sporting the perfect Nature Friday material about my person, my owner seemed unimpressed...

Until, that is, I reminded her how Charles Darwin had long ago recognised that animals and birds carrying seeds in their furs and feathers were an important means by which different plant species are dispersed around the globe, and these ideas on species distribution formed a key building block in Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. I can only surmise that the great man omitted to cite the particular case of wire-haired fox terrier beards introducing plant seeds into new environments (such as human bedding) due to his need to publish 'The Origin of Species' ahead of his rival evolutionary theorist, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Happy Nature Friday friends! And huge thanks once again to our dear friends Rosy, Arty, Jakey and Sunny, for hosting our favourite blog hop.

FFHT August: I can't believe I ate….

Really, I don't know why Gail is protesting about my desire to participate in Murphy and Stanley's  August FFHT on account of the subject matter. She claims that this month's phrase "I can't believe I ate…", will encourage glorification of the baser side of our natures.

Does she not realise that the urge to break the boundaries of the conventional 'approved' diet is not confined to non-human species but has a distinguished lineage including some of this country's most illustrious scientists.

No less than Charles Darwin, top of my (and Gail's) list for 'Greatest Ever Briton' had an adventurous appetite in more ways than are usually recognised.

At Cambridge Darwin was a member of a dining club which met weekly in order to eat, basically, roadkill. He enjoyed hawk and bittern, but balked at a dish of old Brown Owl, describing it as 'indescribable'. On the Beagle voyage he ate armadilloes ('taste like duck'), puma ('veal'), iguana and Giant Tortoise. A Phylum Feast is a shared meal containing as many different species as possible, eaten by biologists on February 12th to celebrate Darwin’s birthday.

Before Darwin, the noted English geologist William Buckland, who wrote the first full scientific description of a dinosaur and later in his life promoted the notion that glaciation explains many of the landscape features formerly ascribed to the biblical flood, took exotic eating to another level (you may have to click on the image below to enlarge and read):

One suspects that "I can't believe I ate…" was not a phrase much heard in the celebrated Reverend Buckland's Oxford household...