After returning from his Beagle Voyage and before writing Origin of Species, Charles Darwin labored to establish himself as a bona fide scientist. It was all well and good to send reports back from the Beagle and publish an account of his observations during the voyage, but another thing entirely to publish a scientific treatise.
Darwin chose as his subject an animal that he had encountered on the Beagle voyage—barnacles. Most people know barnacles as an encrusting menance on their boats or docks. These strange arthropods live free as larvae, but as adults some settle on a hard surface and form a hard calcite shell around them, others live attached by flexible “stems”.
Darwin spent 8 years laboring over his microscope dissecting the tiny animals. It was all his children knew of his research during that time, and they are reported to have asked their playmates, “where does your father do his barnacles?” Darwin published several monographs on living and fossil barnacles.
Photo credit: http://www.darwininlondon.co.uk/index/darwin-in-london/darwin-and-evolution/
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