By DANIEL CRESSEY - NATURE.COM
Added: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Mike for the link.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091116/full/news.2009.1089.html

A husband and wife team has spotted what could be the beginning of a new species of finch on one of the Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin developed his ideas about evolution.

Peter and Rosemary Grant, evolutionary biologists at Princeton University in New Jersey, have spent nearly four decades watching finches on Daphne Major, in the Galapagos archipelago where Darwin, too, studied finches. The birds later figured prominently in his discussions of variation and natural selection.

Over the decades, the Grants have measured and tagged the vast majority of the finches that inhabit Daphne Major, and as a result have been able to observe evolution in real time (see 'Evolution caught in the act').

It was in 1981, that the Grants spotted an unusually heavy medium ground-finch (Geospiza fortis). At 29.7 grams, the male was more than 5 grams heavier than any they had seen on Daphne Major before. Genetic analysis showed that it probably came from the neighbouring island of Santa Cruz.

The Grants numbered the bird 5110 and followed it and all its known descendants over seven generations. Many of its descendants stuck out from the other G. fortis on Daphne Major: they had unusually shaped beaks and their songs differed from those of the other finches.
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http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091116/full/news.2009.1089.html
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[UPDATE] 17-Nov good article in Wired
Thanks to Brema for the link
http://richarddawkins.net/changes/update.php?id=4619&idType=get


On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.

In many ways, the split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song.

This miniature evolutionary saga is described in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s authored by Peter and Rosemary Grant, a husband-and-wife team who have spent much of the last 36 years studying a group of bird species known collectively as Darwin’s finches.

The finches — or, technically, tanagers — have adapted to the conditions of each island in the Galapagos, and they provided Darwin with a clear snapshot of evolutionary divergence when he sailed there on the HMS Beagle. The Grants have pushed that work further, with decades of painstaking observations providing a real-time record of evolution in action. In the PNAS paper, they describe something Darwin could only have dreamed of watching: the birth of a new species.
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http://richarddawkins.net/changes/update.php?id=4619&idType=get

TAGGED: EVOLUTION