Beagle Investigations Return with Darwinian Data

"Ecuador has confirmed that a giant tortoise found in 2019 in the Galápagos Islands is a species considered extinct a century ago.

The Galápagos national park is preparing an expedition to search for more of the giant tortoises in an attempt to save the species."

 source: Giant tortoise found in Galápagos a species considered extinct a century ago | Galápagos Islands | The Guardian

• All students should and can learn to formulate their own questions
• All educators can easily teach the skill as part of their regular practice

The Darwin's Finch Morphology database contains data, mostly morphological (e.g., beak dimensions), on individual Darwin’s finches. The data are from a number of published and unpublished sources.

View metadata

Explore in Radiant

Note: You must be a member of the BIRDD group to explore this data in Radiant.

Bibliography

• Price, F. and Donovan, S. (2006). "BioQUEST Library VII: BIRDD: Beagle Investigations Return with Darwinian Data Version 2.0 (User Notes)."  BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium.
• Lack, D.L. (1945). “The Galápagos finches (Geospizinae): a study in variation.” Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences 21: 1-159.
• Lack, D.L. (1947). Darwin's Finches: an essay on the general biological theory of evolution. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press.
• Lack, D.L. (1969). “Subspecies and sympatry in Darwin's Finches.” Evolution 23: 252-263.
• Snodgrass, R. E. and E. Heller (1904). “Papers from the Hopkins-Stanford Galapagos Expedition, 1898-99 XVI. Birds.” Proc. Wash. Acad. Sci. 5: 231-372.
• Sulloway, F. J. (1982). “The Beagle collections of Darwin's Finches (Geospizinae).” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Zoology series 43: 49-94.
• Swarth, H. S. (1931). “The avifauna of the Galapagos Islands.” Occ. Pap. Calif. Acad. Sci 18: 5-299.

Explore in Radiant

Note: You must be a member of the BIRDD group to explore this data in Radiant.

Phylogeny.fr is a free, simple to use web service dedicated to reconstructing and analysing phylogenetic relationships between molecular sequences.

Phylogeny.fr runs and connects various bioinformatics programs to reconstruct a robust phylogenetic tree from a set of sequences.

Explore in Radiant

Note: You must be a member of the BIRDD group to explore this data in Radiant.

Over 6500 specimens that were measured by David Lack. These data were transcribed from records deposited at the California Academy of Sciences.

Explore in Radiant

Note: You must be a member of the BIRDD group to explore this data in Radiant.

Citation

• Lack DL (1947) Darwin's finches: an essay on the general biological theory of evolution, Cambridge University Press.
• Lack DL (1947) Data from: Darwin's finches: an essay on the general biological theory of evolution. Dryad Digital Repository. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.150

Markdown workflow in R (PDF)

A quick reference guide to markdown. 

swirl teaches you R programming and data science interactively, at your own pace, and right in the R console!

For teachers:

swirl is a platform for teaching R programming and data science. However, an educational platform is only as good as the content it delivers to students. Although we have contributed some content ourselves, swirl is designed in such a way that you can create your own interactive content and share it freely with students in your classroom or around the world.

"This is a great source for basic R functionality like importing and manipulating data.  It also has very helpful information on making graphs (see this page). "

Scientists pinpoint genes behind famous beak variations.
by Geoff Marsh published 11 February 2015

This is a nice update on recent research into the finch phylogeny. It includes video and an interview with Leif Andersson about his research on the evolutionary relationships between species based on genomic sequences. 

This lesson plan, created by Discovery Channel, is for grades 6-8 and its goal is to study native vs introduced species and their effects. It's been hard to find resources for older kids.

Very rudimentary. The "Classroom Investigations" are for grades 5-8. However it is not uninteresting and includes links to simulations and worksheets. It was created by the National Science Teachers Association. Could be a fun resource to included if for no other reason than because it's cute. The "Galapagos Guide" is within the site, explaining different areas of the islands. The "Resources for Teaching Evolution" tab does not have designated grades and appear to be a little more intensive. It contains things like discovery channel videos and a virtual tour of a volcano. 

John recommended looking into the work of Robert Bowman and this is his section from the larger work about galapagos finches Notícias de Galápagos 1 (which would probably be helpful but most of the rest of the work is in Spanish) much of it is comparing the giospiza to other species of song birds, and goes into why the galapagos finch is the perfect subject for studying bird song in an evolutionary focus.