Tui de Roy/NaturePL.com
MILLIONS of years before the Galapagos Islands existed, there was another archipelago in the same stretch of water off the west coast of South America. And it seems those long-vanished lands probably shaped the evolution of some of the unusual Galapagos wildlife that later inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Today’s archipelago probably owes its existence to a nearby geological phenomenon, a plume of unusually hot rock rising from deep in Earth’s interior. When the plume meets the crust beneath the Pacific …