• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Darwin Once Discovered He Was Eating The Extremely Rare Bird He’d Been Searching For For Years

October 3, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

Charles Darwin once discovered the rare bird he had been searching for for years – halfway through chowing it down for Christmas dinner.

When you picture Darwin, you may imagine him in the Galapagos diligently taking notes while observing a finch, maybe remarking on slight differences between it and another very similar finch. You probably don’t immediately imagine him riding around on a giant tortoise or chowing down on endangered species as if they were party snacks – but Darwin did both these things, with the latter leading to a particularly distressing incident in which he consumed a vital missing piece of his work.

Advertisement

Arriving on San Cristóbal Island in the Galapagos on his first trip, Darwin regularly – and without regard to their suitability for transport – rode around on tortoises, which he also considered food.

“I frequently got on their backs, and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away,” he wrote, “but I found it very difficult to keep my balance”

Darwin – a famous member of the Cambridge University Glutton Club which met to feast on “birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate” – of course ate the animals, which he preferred roasted or in the form of a soup.

Advertisement

“While staying in this upper region we lived entirely upon tortoise-meat: the breastplate roasted (as the Gauchos do carne con cuero), with the flesh on it, is very good,” Darwin wrote of the animals. “And the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent.”

As great of a naturalist as he was, Darwin was a hungry man. In December 1833, while at Port Desire, one of the ship’s crew shot a rhea to be eaten for Christmas dinner. Darwin had for a long time been searching for a bird he called the “Avestruz petise“, now known as Darwin’s Rhea. It interested him because of the slight differences between it and another species of rhea which lived to the island’s north. For years, the birds had eluded him – but they weren’t about to elude his stomach.

Darwin believed that he was eating a young greater rhea that Christmas, but was in fact eating the elusive petise which would one day be named after him. He jumped up during the meal and desperately tried to salvage the remains of the bird, managing to get a wing, the head, its legs, and plenty of larger feathers. 

Advertisement

With his leftovers in tow, he went off to study the remains (the biological matter formerly known as “lunch”) and became convinced that there were two species of rhea in South America, of which he was correct.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Myanmar shadow government unveils new strategy to oppose military rule
  2. Malaysia warns new Indo-Pacific pact may trigger nuclear arms race
  3. Soccer-Now I feel like a Villa player, says Bailey after sparkling cameo
  4. Boxing-Britain’s Joyce wants 2016 Olympic gold if fight manipulation is proven

Source Link: Darwin Once Discovered He Was Eating The Extremely Rare Bird He'd Been Searching For For Years

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • AI May Infringe On Your Rights And Insult Your Dignity (Unless We Do Something Soon)
  • How Do You Study Cryptic Species? We’re Finally Lifting The Lid On The World’s Least Understood Mammals
  • Once-In-A-Decade Close Encounter With Hazardous Asteroid 2025 FA22 Approaches
  • With 229 Pairs, This Beautiful Animal Has The Highest Number Of Chromosomes Of Any Animal
  • “An Unimaginable Breakthrough”: Loudest-Ever Gravitational Wave Collision Proves Stephen Hawking Correct
  • Exciting Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Considered Biosignatures
  • How Long Did Dinosaurs Live? “It’s A Big Surprise To People That Work On Them”
  • NASA’s Mysterious Announcement: “Clearest Sign Of Life That We’ve Ever Found On Mars”
  • New Brain Implant Can Decode Your Internal Monologue, Raising Fears Of Mind Reading
  • “Immediate, Sustained, And Devastating” Pain: The Most Venomous Mammal Packs An Extremely Nasty Sting
  • Domestic Cats Keeping Making Hybrids. That’s A Problem, And Yes – That Includes Some Pets
  • These Strange Little Lizards Have Toxic Green Blood, And No One Knows Exactly Why
  • How Does 2-In-1 Shampoo And Conditioner Work?
  • There Are 2-Billion-Year-Old “Millennium Rocks” In A Suburb, Hundreds Of Miles From Their Primeval Home
  • “That’s A Hellfire Missile Smacking Into That UFO”: Strange Video Emerges From US UAP Hearing
  • In 40,000 Years, Voyager 1 Will Have A Close Encounter With Gliese 445
  • Abnormally Long Gamma Ray Burst Unlike Anything We’ve Seen Before Baffles Astronomers
  • Critically Endangered Shark Meat Is Being Sold In US Stores For As Little As $2.99
  • Infectious Mouth Bacteria Lurking In Artery Plaques Could Be Behind Some Heart Attacks
  • What Would You Reach If You Kept Digging Under Antarctica?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version