Darwin's Neglected Crabs

tags: , , , , ,

Fiddler crabs are easily recognised by their distinctive asymmetric claws. This specimen was captured in May 1835 when the Beagle arrived in Mauritius.

Image: Oxford University Museum of Natural History [larger view].

The University of Oxford Museum of Natural History has electronically catalogued Charles Darwin's crabs that had been collected by the famous naturalist while he was making his voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836.

These crustaceans were brought back to England where they eventually came into the possession of zoologist Thomas Bell, who was helping Darwin classify the Galapagos tortoise collection. Finally, the crab collection was purchased in 1862 by John Obadiah Westwood, Oxford's first Hope professor of zoology. The newly-purchased collection was housed at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, where it was neglected until very recently, when museum staff digitized it, along with the original labels that were hand-written by Darwin himself, and made this entire database searchable online for the public to use.

Most of these specimens were also referenced in Darwin's diaries, at least some of which have been published, where more information about some of the specimens is available.

Sources

free PDF from the University of Oxford Museum of Natural History. Includes images.

More like this

One of the events organized for Bora's visit to London was a fantastic behind-the-scenes tour of the Darwin Centre, a newly built section of the Natural History Museum which houses the museum's researchers and contains a vast collection of around 70 million bottled animal specimens. The…
Darwin published hundreds of pages of text, but he also kept notebooks many of which come down to us today. They can be roughly divided into two aspects, the Beagle field notebooks of 1831 - 1836, and his later notes. Sometimes these notes are found in a single book, and one way they are told…
How important it is to walk along, not in haste, but slowly, looking at everything and calling out Yes! No! -- Mary Oliver Almost everyone has heard about "Darwin's Finches" -- those dark little birds that live on the Galapagos Islands. But most people don't realize that Darwin didn't set eyes…
My recent brief mention of Thomas Huxley (in connection with the Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective volume) reminded me to look anew at this Tet Zoo ver 1 post from 2006... Here's a little known fact. Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), the most important biologist of…

Fascinating.
The fiddler crabs in our neighborhood often congregate on the street during the spring and summer. They are especially plentiful at the entrance where as many as 100 may be crushed by incoming and departing cars. My research on the internet has turned up interesting facts about these crabs but no mention of this behavior.