Two unpublished Darwin manuscripts in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge: insights into Charles Darwin’s Beagle fossil collecting and its significance during and after the voyage

Two manuscripts in Charles Darwin’s autograph, held by the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge, are published for the first time. Both list fossil material found by Darwin in South America between 1832 and 1835. One lists fossil mammal remains, most of which are now in the Natural History Museum in London.

The other lists fossil plants, many of which are in the Sedgwick Museum. Internal evidence is used to infer that both documents were memoranda written in the months following Darwin’s return from the Beagle voyage, recording details of the provenance and identification of specimens under study by his appointed specialists, Richard Owen and William Clift in the case of the mammals, and Robert Brown for the plants. The manuscripts touch on the significance of the fossils for Darwin’s theoretical interests regarding the relationship of living to extinct species, and the crustal movements of the Earth, at a formative time between the voyage and the full development of his evolutionary ideas.

The documents also lead to new insights concerning Darwin’s collecting localities and methods of field recording, and into the varying survival and documentation of fossils from the Beagle voyage.