Sometimes, a theory is best proved with pictures. To mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, photographer Susan Middleton and science writer Mary Ellen Hannibal raided the extensive collections of the California Academy of Sciences, one of the largest museums of natural history in the world. The product of their painstaking work is Evidence of Evolution, a showcase of the world's most wondrous creatures revealed as a marvel of the evolutionary process.
Wired.co.uk has been kindly granted permission to reproduce some of Middleton's work, accompanied by words from Ellen Hannibal and excerpts of Wired.co.uk's interview with Susan Middleton.
Above: A once-prolific seabird, murres have suffered human depredations since the Gold Rush, becoming nearly extinct due to a thriving "egging" business toward the end of the nineteenth century, and again pushed out of their habitat by an oil spill in the 1980s. Murre eggs are pyriform in shape and thus roll in circles, adapted to the steep, rocky cliffs where they are laid. Eggshells receive pigment when they enter the bird's uterus; if the egg is stationary during this pass, the pigment produces spots; if it is moving, the egg is streaked.
Photographer Susan Middleton further explains the photo's composition. "I searched through hundreds of these eggs in the natural history collections at California Academy of Sciences to select the 8 shown in the photograph. I wanted to make something beautiful but also meaningful and I think the arrangement reinforces the physical aspect of rolling in a circle."
Credit: Susan Middleton © 2009