A pair of Charles Darwin's iconic notebooks have been returned to their rightful home more than 20 years after they were mysteriously stolen. The contents of the notebooks include the naturalist's first doodle of the "tree of life," which he sketched out decades before formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection.
The notebooks are part of the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library in the U.K., which contains journals, manuscripts and more than 15,000 letters written by Darwin. The journals were originally stored in the library's high-security Special Collections Strong Rooms but were removed from storage in November 2000 for a photo shoot. Library officials assumed that the notebooks had been returned to safety after the photo shoot, but during a routine audit in January 2001, librarians discovered that the notebooks were missing. The library staff initially suspected that the notebooks had been misplaced, but in 2020, the staff conducted a new search for the documents — the largest in the library's history — and came up empty-handed. The library concluded that the notebooks had most likely been stolen, Live Science previously reported.
