Under these drastically changing conditions, the struggle to survive favored the larger birds with deep, strong beaks for opening the hard seeds. Smaller finches with less-powerful beaks perished.

"In my very first publication on the finches, back in 2001, I showed that changes in the beaks of Darwin's finches lead to changes in the songs they sing, and I speculated that, because Darwin's ...

Darwin noted how different finches from the Galapagos Island developed different kinds of beaks, based on the food that they specialized in eating. Later studies showed how rapid fluctuations in ...

In particular, changes to the size and shape of the beaks have enabled the different species to specialise in different types of food: seeds, insects, cactus flowers and fruits or even bird blood. The ...

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Medium ground finches with larger beaks could take advantage of alternate food sources because they could crack open larger seeds. The smaller-beaked birds couldn't do this, so they died of ...