It’s Dust To Dust, Mr. Darwin

This Darwin Year has almost come to its close. This day, in the year 1859, Darwin got his ‘On the Origin of Species’ published. And the first edition of it must have had a particular strong gen to survival: according London Christie’s announcement of last weekend, that published the sale (today!) of one of the 1250 samples of that same 1859 first edition. Found on a guestroom’s toilet’s shelf in Oxford, UK! It must have ‘fitted’ very well down there! This ‘piece of toiletpaper’ is estimated a value of about 100,000 us dollars. I’m sure it will find a ‘niche’ more appropriate vey soon, somewhere on this earth. Two other (related) occasions happened on this day. One in the year 1974, when 3.5 feet tall ‘Lucy’ till recently the oldest hominid ever known, was found. Not in an Oxford toilet, but in the Ethiopian region of Hadar. And the second, the year 2004, when it was feared that the ‘Black Faced Honeycreeper’, a bird with the exotic name of Po’ouli, had ‘surfed’ badly on an Hawaian island and got extincted by the death of the single one imprisoned (in an attempt to get offspring) and the only two remaining birds (gender unknown) vanished. Image by Photobucket/neesky