A collection of crabs obtained by Darwin on his famous voyage aboard HMS Beagle has been made available online by the Natural History Museum.The new database is part of an ongoing effort to digitize the museum's catalogues, and contains images and details of 40 different taxa.The crustaceans were collected while Darwin was sailing on his five-year journey 1831 – 1836, which led him to develop his theory of natural selection. The crabs were just one type of the vast array of organisms he collected, and upon his return found their way into the collection of the zoologist Thomas Bell. Darwin and Bell became immersed in cataloguing the Galapagos turtles, and the crustaceans were apparently forgotten.The University of Oxford recovered the collection in 1862, which has been kept in the Natural History Museum ever since. The new database of images can now be viewed at
http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/database/zoology/darwin.htm
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Darwin’s crabs hauled onto the net
