Darwin's Pigeons 
Darwin's Pigeons

    Starting with the ancestral rock pigeon (middle), a wide variety of morphologically distinct types can be produced in  few generations by selective artificial breeding. In Darwin's day, such breeding was done without knowledge of Mendelian principles.


Original line drawings from Darwin's "Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication" (1868); Text material © 2008 by Steven M. Carr