Richard Owen’s restoration of Glyptodon. From Brinkman (2009).

Perhaps one of the primary reasons that there is so much to say about Charles Darwin is that he left us so much material to scrutinize. Outside of his famous printed works there are numerous notebooks and a staggering amount of personal correspondence which are constantly being parsed for insights into how he formulated his evolutionary ideas. Indeed, there is still scholarly debate about when Darwin embraced the idea of evolution and what observations spurred him to that intellectual turning point, and a new paper by Paul Brinkman examines the role fossils played in the young naturalist’s transformation.

According to many recent biographies Charles Darwin did not fully