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Daphne Major Island, Galapagos

Daphne Major is an island just north of Santa Cruz Island in the archipelago Colon, commonly known as the Galápagos Islands.

It consists of a tuff crater, devoid of trees, whose rim rises 120 metres above the sea.

An intensive study of Darwin's Finches was conducted here by biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant over a period of 20 years.

They examined the behaviour and life cycles of finches, with the results strongly supporting Darwin's theory of evolution. The Grants spent six months of the year each year since 1973 capturing, tagging, taking blood samples and releasing finches from the islands.

The Land Iguana became extinct on Baltra in 1954. However, in the early 1930s, William Randolph Hearst (a leading newspaper publisher), had translocated a population of Galapagos Land Iguanas from Baltra to North Seymour Island, a smaller island just a few hundred metres north of Baltra. The iguanas survived and became the breeding stock for the successful Charles Darwin Research Station captive breeding programme in the 1970s which reintroduced the iguanas to Baltra and other islands.

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Daphne Major Island, Galapagos