Travel to the Galápagos Islands with science educator Matt Downing, who spent a year navigating the archipelago as a certified naturalist guide in 1978. Drawing on firsthand experience, Downing will explore why the Galápagos became one of the world’s greatest natural laboratories for the study of evolution.

From Darwin’s famous finches and giant tortoises to the endemic Scalesia plants, his talk will examine the unique organisms that shaped our understanding of natural selection. Learn how finch beak variations reveal patterns of colonization across the islands, and how isolation, climate, and ocean currents continue to shape the archipelago’s extraordinary biodiversity.

Downing will also look at human stories of the islands, including some early 20th-century settlers on Floreana Island, whose disappearances and suspicious deaths gave rise to one of the Galápagos’ most enduring mysteries.

About the speaker:

Matt Downing is an adjunct professor at Rowan University, where he teaches invertebrate paleontology. He recently retired after a 35-year career teaching high school science in California, Ecuador and New Jersey. He holds an M.S. in Biology from the University of San Francisco and an M.A. in Education from the University of Alabama. As a graduate student, Downing served as a certified naturalist guide in the Galápagos Islands, traveling extensively throughout the archipelago by boat. His scientific interests include genetics, symbiosis, ecology and fossils. He is also a volunteer at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, where he is helping catalog the museum’s extensive paleontology collection.