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FEATURE
People and Places: Cerro Tijeretas, Isla San
Cristóbal, Galápagos
Randy Moore
One of the most iconic places in science is the Galápagos archipelago, a group of islands
straddling the equator about 1000 km west of Ecuador. Although Flemish cartographer
Abraham Otelius first placed “Islas de Galápagos” on maps in 1574, the Galápagos are
most famous for their visit in 1835 by the 26-year-old Charles Darwin. This visit, which is
described in most introductory biology textbooks, has become legendary (Sulloway 1982).
Darwin arrived in the Galápagos 45 months after leaving England (and 9 days after leaving Peru). His first view of the Galápagos was on September 15, 1835, when he saw Mount
Pitt on the northeastern tip of an uninhabited island that is today called Isla San Crisbóbal
(it was called Chatham in Darwin’s time). The next day, Darwin first set foot on the Galápagos at a rocky cove named Cerro Tijeretas at the island’s southwest end (Figure 1).
F i g u r e 1. Cerro Tijeretas, Isla San Cristóbal, Galápagos.
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Cerro Tijeretas, Isla San Cristóbal, Galápagos
This cove, which is now a popular visitors’ site called Frigatebird Hill, is near the town of
Puerto Baquerizo Moreno and its Interpretation Center (established in 1998), which tells
the history of the archipelago. This site is popular for swimming and snorkeling, and features frigatebirds, boobies, and pelicans. It’s also marked by a large statue of Darwin, who
is surrounded by Galápagos wildlife and is holding a book entitled Galápagos (Figure 2).
F i g u r e 2 . Statue of Darwin, Isla San Cristóbal, Galápagos.
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Cerro Tijeretas, Isla San Cristóbal, Galápagos
The organisms most closely associated with Darwin’s visit to Galápagos are finches. Indeed, textbooks’ discussions of Darwin’s visit to Galápagos are inevitably accompanied by
discussions of the archipelago’s finches as examples of adaptive radiation. As is true of all
legends, much of the lore surrounding Darwin’s finches and his visit to Galápagos is questionable and, in some instances, inaccurate. For example,
Darwin did not have an epiphany about evolution by natural selection while in the
Galápagos. He arrived in the Galápagos a creationist and departed from the Galápagos a creationist. It was ornithologist John Gould, and not Darwin, who later studied
and named the finches collected at the Galápagos (Sulloway 1982).
Darwin spent five weeks in the Galápagos, during which time he spent 19 days and
10 nights on only four of the archipelago’s islands: Chatham (San Cristóbal), Hood
(Española), Charles (Floreana), and Albemarle (Isabela; Grant and Estes 2009). Most of
today’s commercial tours of Galápagos visit more islands than Darwin visited in 1835.
Darwin did not separate finches by island while he was in the Galápagos. He later
reconstructed his collection of specimens by guessing (sometimes incorrectly) where
his specimens came from and by gathering finches collected by some of his shipmates
(including Captain Robert FitzRoy).
Darwin’s understanding of the Galápagos finches was retrospective. Indeed, Darwin
did not mention finches in any of the four “Transmutation of Species” notebooks (written between 1837 and 1839), nor did he mention them in his monumental On the Origin of Species. Darwin was impressed with the Galápagos mockingbirds and tortoises,
not finches; he is often given credit for finches he never saw (Sulloway 1982, 1987).
Although the term “Darwin’s Finches” was probably coined by English surgeon and
ornithologist Percy Lowe (1936), work by David Lack (especially his book Darwin’s
Finches, which was published in 1947) popularized “Darwin’s finches” as an example
of speciation via geographic isolation (Lack 1947).
There are numerous books about the Galápagos, most of which focus on natural history
and the archipelago’s interesting (and, at times, notorious) history. An excellent account of
Darwin’s time in the Galápagos is Darwin in Galápagos (Grant and Estes 2009).
References
Grant KT, Estes GB. 2009. Darwin in Galápagos: Footsteps to a New World. Princeton, (NJ): Princeton
University Press.
Lack D. 1947. Darwin’s Finches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lowe PR. 1936. The finches of the Galápagos in relation to Darwin’s conception of species. Ibis,
13th ser, 6:310–321.
Sulloway FJ. 1982. Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend. Journal of the History of Biology 15(1):1–53.
Sulloway FJ. 1987. Darwin and the Galápagos: Three myths. Oceanus 30(2):79–85.
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Cerro Tijeretas, Isla San Cristóbal, Galápagos
About the Author
Randy Moore is the HT Morse–Alumni Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota.
Author’s address
Randy Moore
University of Minnesota, MCB 3-104
420 Washington Avenue SE
Minneapolis MN 55455
[email protected]
Copyright 2011 by Randy Moore; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
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