Question

1)Describe what Darwin discovered from his study of the finches on the Galapagos Island? Does this give insight into the Dodo? How?

Answer 1

The Galápagos finches are probably one of the most well-known examples of evolution and will forever be tightly linked to Charles Darwin’s voyage and his theory of natural selection_. With their diversity of bill sizes and shapes, each species has adapted to a specific type of food; the ground-finch (Geospiza) has a thick beak adapted to feeding on a variety of crunchy seeds and arthropods, whereas the warbler finch (Certhidea olivacea) developed a slender, pointy bill to catch tasty insects hiding between the foliage. The woodpecker finch(Camarhynchus pallidus) even uses twigs or cactus spines to pry arthropods out of tree holes.

The Galápagos finches are seen as a classic example of adaptive radiation, the rapid evolution of ecologically different species from a common ancestor. This means they form a monophyletic group, a group of organisms all descended from one ancestral species.

The dodo is an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The lack of mammalian herbivores competing for resources on these islands allowed the solitaire and the dodo to attain very large sizes and flightlessness. Their fearlessness and its inability to fly made the dodo easy prey for sailors. Now when we compare Darwin`s finches and Dodo then we find both were confined to their islands. But due to conditions that were favourable to Darwins`s finches and no human intervention made them evolve into so many finches. But on the contrary, such privilege was not available to Dodo and human intervention made the things worse making them extinct as they did not even get the time to evolve and before that they got extinct.