Sep 21, 2026 · 36 min · 9 segments
Charles Darwin reaches the Galapagos Islands, and there he encounters the very, very unusual **Marine Iguana** ... an animal caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to evolution ... You…
Darwin's Menagerie Part 3 The Imps of Darkness Charles Darwin arrived in the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago of over a hundred islands around 600 miles out into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, in September 1835.
He was nothing like the first to go there and report on the strange animals inhabiting these islands.
Many ships had stopped in there over the preceding decades, centuries even, One of the books on board the HMS Beagle, part of the reference library Darwin had with him on his travels, was Voyage of HMS Blonde to the Sandwich Islands in the years 1824 to 1825.
And in there, in the section about that earlier ship's visit to the Galapagos Islands, we get this passage.
Seaguanas are the ugliest living creature we ever beheld.
They are like the alligator but with a more hideous head and of a dirty sooty black colour and sat on the black lava rocks like so many imps of darkness.
which we can be pretty confident Darwin read because his own diary entry for September 17th, 1835 is too similar to be a coincidence, I think.
The black lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large, two to three feet, most disgusting, clumsy lizards.
They are as black as the porous rock over which they crawl and seek their prey from the sea.
Somebody calls them imps of darkness.
Now I think it's getting a bit carried away to use words like ugly, hideous, disgusting in relation to these amazing lizards.
To modernise, mine anyway, these big lizards may not be exactly beautiful, but there's nothing hideous, certainly not disgusting, about them.
Darwin's Menagerie Part 3 The Imps of Darkness Charles Darwin arrived in the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago of over a hundred islands around 600 miles out into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, in September 1835.
He was nothing like the first to go there and report on the strange animals inhabiting these islands.
Many ships had stopped in there over the preceding decades, centuries even, One of the books on board the HMS Beagle, part of the reference library Darwin had with him on his travels, was Voyage of HMS Blonde to the Sandwich Islands in the years 1824 to 1825.
And in there, in the section about that earlier ship's visit to the Galapagos Islands, we get this passage.
Seaguanas are the ugliest living creature we ever beheld.
They are like the alligator but with a more hideous head and of a dirty sooty black colour and sat on the black lava rocks like so many imps of darkness.
which we can be pretty confident Darwin read because his own diary entry for September 17th, 1835 is too similar to be a coincidence, I think.
The black lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large, two to three feet, most disgusting, clumsy lizards.
They are as black as the porous rock over which they crawl and seek their prey from the sea.
Somebody calls them imps of darkness.
Now I think it's getting a bit carried away to use words like ugly, hideous, disgusting in relation to these amazing lizards.
To modernise, mine anyway, these big lizards may not be exactly beautiful, but there's nothing hideous, certainly not disgusting, about them.
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