Evolutionary Tour
Throughout the Garden
Through July 20, 2008
Charles Darwin’s great idea—what the world now calls evolution—was that all species are related through a common ancestry and that species change over time. He illustrated his premise with a drawing of a “Tree of Life,” reflecting an evolutionary history of life on Earth.
Each individual node or “branching event” on the Tree of Life represents a now-extinct, common ancestor from which newer organisms have evolved. The tips of the branches represent currently existing organisms.
Today, scientists at the Botanical Garden and elsewhere build on and enhance the plant and fungal branches with new discoveries and have updated the Tree of Life to demonstrate the most current thinking of how life-forms are related to one another.
To bring this revised version and Darwin’s insight to life, as part of Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure visitors are able to take an “Evolutionary Tour” through the Tree of Life, walking among the plants in the Botanical Garden’s living collections that highlight selected branches of the evolutionary tree. This approximately 40-minute walking tour reveals the history and habits of some 30 plants and fungi and how they connect to their closest evolutionary relatives.
Among the stops are representatives of some of the earliest forms of plant life, such as algae, mosses, and cycads. Other stops show the great diversity of flowering plants that have evolved in the past 140 million years, such as oaks, magnolias, and roses. One stop will show a reproduction of Darwin’s original notebook, where he famously drew a crude but unmistakable evolutionary tree.
An audio tour accessible by cell phone complements the self-guided tour with additional commentary about Darwin, evolution, and the Tree of Life.
View the Tree of Life and a sample of stops along the Evolutionary Tour
(requires Adobe Flash)
Information on current research by Botanical Garden scientists
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