Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates were all under 25 when, more than 150 years ago, they set out from England to explore the wild and virtually unknown jungles of South America.
While Darwin embarked on his famous voyage in 1831 on the navy vessel the HMS Beagle, Wallace and Bates explored the Amazon two decades later on commercial trading ships. These three naturalists not only proposed and developed the idea of natural selection, but helped provide the evidence to support their beliefs and solve “the problem of the origin of species.”