For early naturalists such as Charles Darwin, cataloging new species wasn’t just extraordinary because of its effects on science, but also because of the amazing stories of danger and discovery their travels produced.
Many of those accounts have been overshadowed by the impressive science that lives on. Darwin’s theory of evolution that he famously laid out in his 1859 Origin of Species still is a source of controversy.
But how these groundbreaking naturalists gathered their research is as historic as their contributions to modern biology, said Sean B. Carroll, professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.