Happy Darwin Day!!

It's Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, hurray!!  And this year marks the 150th publishing anniversary of his book The Origin of Species (and the 170th publishing anniversary of The Voyage of the Beagle). 

The Bell Museum at the U of MN is having some special events for Darwin Day, including the opening of a really interesting sounding photography exhibit.  And today my department celebrated by having short Darwin-esque themed presentations during seminar hour.  The seminar was both preceded and succeeded by "fossil cake", which turned out to be chocolate and banana layered cake with nut "fossils."  Apparently the sliced almonds went extinct and never made it to the banana layer...I did not notice this becuase I was far to busy going "CAKE!!!" and shoving it into my mouth to investigate the geology of the cake.  I'm such a horrible scientist...

To paraphrase a friend and fellow EEB student's Facebook status, I hope you all get lots of evolutionary presents under your Darwin Day (phylogenetic) trees. And don't forget to leave out seed for the finches that bring those presents!