Darwin's egg found at Cambridge

A Cambridge University volunteer has found an egg collected by English naturalist Charles Darwin during his voyage on HMS Beagle. The 80-year-old retired volunteer, Liz Wetton found the small dark brown egg at the university's zoology museum, BBC reported. "It was an exhilarating experience. After working on the egg collections for 10 years this was a tremendous thing to happen," said Wetton. The egg, known as the only existing one from the Beagle collection, bears Darwin's name and a large crack caused by the small box it was forced into. The collections manager, Mathew Lowe referred to the discovery as an important one, saying, “To have rediscovered a Beagle specimen in the 200th year of Darwin's birth is special enough, but to have evidence that Darwin himself broke it is a wonderful twist," The museum's curator of ornithology, Dr. Mike Brooke, said that Professor Alfred Newton, a friend of Darwin's and a professor of zoology in the late 19th century, wrote in his notebook that the egg belonged to a Tinamou. "One egg, received through Frank Darwin, having been sent to me by his father who said he got it at Maldonado (Uruguay) and that it belonged to the Common Tinamou of those parts,” Newton's notes read. "The great man put it into too small a box and hence its unhappy state." Darwin had thought the bird was a partridge and his 1833 notes say that the bird had a "high shrill chirp" and its cooked flesh was "most delicately white."