Free Republic

The top of Darwin's Arch, the famous natural stone archway in the northern Galapagos Islands, has crashed into the waves, according to news reports. The arch, located less than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) off the steep and rocky coast of Darwin Island, collapsed as "a consequence of natural erosion," on May 17, the Ecuador Ministry of Environment and Water wrote in Spanish on Twitter. The natural arch was named for the English biologist Charles Darwin, who studied evolution in the Galapagos during his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle in the early 1830s. Now that the arch's top is gone, one...

<p>British archaeologists believed they have finally located the long-lost remnants of HMS Beagle, the ship which took Charles Darwin on the voyage during which he formulated the theory of evolution, a report says.</p> <p>The fate of the Beagle, which carried Darwin for five years from 1851, has remained a mystery for more than a century.</p>

Several million years ago, the Galápagos Islands popped, volcanically, out of the Pacific Ocean. The South American mainland being 600 miles away and nothing else nearby, each island was a tabula rasa. Various birds, lizards, sea mammals and seeds blew in and washed up. Biological colonization occurred by dumb luck. Very dumb luck, to judge by how the local critters flap, crawl and paddle up and present themselves to visiting omnivorous bipeds for examination of gustatory potential. Pirates, whalers and other nonmembers of the Sierra Club had an estimated 100,000 friendly, curious Galápagos giant tortoises for lunch. Isolation allowed unusual...