After perusing letters between Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, and Royal Museum of Natural History director Japetus Steenstrup, the National History Museum of Denmark realized that Darwin had bestowed his museum colleague with a gift.
However, the gift remained undiscovered, at least until the museum started digging through its many collections.
Steenstrup and Darwin had a friendly relationship and often wrote letters to each other. Those letters referred to some cirripedes (small barnacle-like crustaceans) sent from the famous scientist to his Danish colleague. After Steenstrup studied the crustaceans, he sent them back to Darwin.
However, another letter referred to Darwin sending a second gift to Steenstrup in 1854: a box of 77 more barnacle-like crustaceans of varying species. The letter referred to a list of the species in the box, but no such list was ever seen by museum staff or even by the Darwin Correspondence Project. So the Denmark museum staff started searching for this mysterious list, eventually finding it with Steenstrup's other papers and documents.
"We thought that there was a possibility that the list was among Steenstrup's papers in our archives -- and there it was!" says Hanne Strager, head of exhibitions for the museum. "It was just a plain handwritten list with numbers and scientific names, and had we not read the letter, we would never had known what it was."
This prompted the museum to search through its many collections for the barnacles. Eventually, it recovered many of the specimens that Darwin sent. The specimens had been assigned to various exhibits within the museum, with no one realizing their significance and relationship to Darwin.
Most interestingly, the gift was given before Darwin released his theory of evolution in "On the Origin of Species" in 1859.
Not all 77 crustaceans were recovered (some probably ended up being lent out and never returned), but those that were will be part of a special exhibition that opens at the museum on Oct. 1. The exhibit will also feature Denmark's newest dinosaur, "Misty."
"Maybe researchers working on the specimens just didn't return them. And there is a very good chance that they were completely unaware that what they were working on was a gift from Darwin," says Strager.
Charles Darwin was responsible for one of the most major breakthroughs in biology, the theory of evolution, which explains how species "evolve" from earlier forms of life. His work is widely accepted by scientists all over the world and still fuels scientific research and studies today.
