Amanda Proctor, age 11, of Springfield, I11., for her question:
WHO NAMED THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS?
The Galapagos Islands can be found in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles west of Ecuador, and they belong to that country. The Spanish word for "turtles" is "galapagos." When Spanish explorers found the islands covered with turtles, they immediately gave them that name.
Strange and wonderful birds and animals live on the Galapagos. Included are large numbers of giant turtles that weigh more than 500 pounds.
Penguins, widely believed to live only in the Antarctic, also live on the islands, as do rare cormorants that cannot fly. There are also mockingbirds of a type unknown anywhere else on earth.
The islands are made up of volcanic peaks and cover an area of 2,869 square miles. They were also once known as the Enchanted Islands. Pirates used to bury stolen treasure there and castaways found the islands a refuge. Mutineers were also sometimes left there.
Officially called the Archipelago de Colon, there are about 4,000 people living on the Galapagos Islands today.
One of the most fantastic of all creatures, the lizards called iguanas, grow to be 4 feet long in the Galapagos.
More familiar creatures include herons, sea birds called boobies and scarlet crabs, which are the same as the Atlantic species from which they have been separated for possibly 35 million years.
Charles Darwin, the great English naturalist, made a study in 1835 of the animals found on 15 of the islands.
The five largest islands are Isabela (Albemarle), Santa Cruz (Indefatigable), San Cristobal (Chatham), Fernandina (Narborough) and San Salvador (James).
In 1942, Ecuador allowed United States troops to guard the Panama Canal from the base which was established on the Galapagos. The U.S. returned the base to Ecuador in 1946, after World War II.
The Galapagos played an important part in the geographic distribution theory of evolution.
The geographic distribution theory of evolution deals with plants and animals that live in restricted areas that are cut off from other areas where similar plants and animals live.
On the Galapagos are 26 kinds of land birds, all resembling species found in western South America. But 23 of these species seem to have changed in many different ways since they reached the islands, for the Galapagos birds are distinct species.
Comparable difference are shown by lizards and tortoises, of which there were 11 species on as many different islands. They apparently developed here because of changes that took place after their ancestors drifted from the mainland of South America.