A Birthday Party for Charles Darwin

A Birthday Party for Charles Darwin
Thursday, February 12, at 4:45 pm
Yale Peabody Museum
FREE Admission

The Yale Peabody Museum’s celebration of the life and legacy of Charles Darwin begins on the 200th anniversary of his birth, and you’re invited! Birthday cake will be served.
Nature’s Narrators
The 2008–2009 John H. Ostrom Program Series
The “Discovery” of the Gorilla and How It Shook the World
By Robert McCracken Peck
Thursday, February 12 at 5:30 pm
Yale Peabody Museum
FREE Admission

In 1859, the very year Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species, a young French–American explorer named Paul Du Chaillu emerged from the jungles of Gabon, West Africa, with breathtaking accounts of large, ferocious primates. While the gorilla had been described scientifically in 1847, Du Chaillu provided the western world with the first descriptions of living gorillas in the wild.
In this fully illustrated lecture, naturalist and historian Robert McCracken Peck, Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, will tell the fascinating story of the flamboyant and enigmatic Du Chaillu and the evolutionary firestorm his “discovery” ignited, tracing its enormous social repercussions from the 19th century to today. Peck will examine the explorer’s influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs (the creator of Tarzan), the propaganda campaigns of the First World War, and the making of the 1933 film King Kong and its later versions. Booksigning to follow.