In 1837 Gould also helped Charles Darwin a fledgling naturalist but no ornithologist to classify his species of finches and mockingbirds after the return of the Beagle.

ECONOMIST: John James Audubon

Last summer, when I first met Prof Siegert, I was too polite to remind him of what had happened to another British science project, the Beagle 2 mission to Mars, the spacecraft named after the ship that had carried Charles Darwin.

BBC: Why did the Antarctic drilling project fail?

The giant tortoises of the Galapagos helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution after he visited the islands in the 1830s, on his five year voyage aboard HMS Beagle.

CNN: Lonesome George, last of the Pinta Island tortoises, dies