The remote location has enabled researchers to study the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection. The direct observation of the origin of this new species occurred during field work carried out over the last four decades by B. Rosemary and Peter Grant, two scientists from Princeton, on the small island of Daphne Major. It's the other half of the pairing that gave rise to the Big Bird population 
 
 By identifying one way that new species can arise, and following the entire population, the researchers state this as an example of speciation occurring in a timescale we can observe. In 1981, a graduate student working with the Grants on Daphne Major noticed the newcomer, a male that sang an unusual song and was much larger in body and beak size than the three resident species of birds on the island. If you didn't know anything about [Daphne Major's] history and a taxonomist arrived on this island they would say there are four species on this island," said Prof Andersson. He was so different from the other birds that we knew he did not hatch from an egg on Daphne Major," said Peter Grant, the Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, emeritus. The researchers took a blood sample and released the bird, which later bred with a resident medium ground finch of the species Geospiz fortis, initiating a new lineage. The investigators discovered that the original male parent was a large cactus finch of the species Geospiza conirostris from Española island, which is more than 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) to the southeast in the archipelago. The offspring were also reproductively isolated because their song, which is used to attract mates, was unusual and failed to attract females from the resident species. Researchers previously assumed that the formation of a new species takes a very long time, but in the Big Bird lineage it happened in just two generations, according to observations made by the Grants in the field in combination with the genetic studies. This new finch population is sufficiently different in form and habits to the native birds, as to be marked out as a new species, and individuals from the different populations don't interbreed. However, in recent years it has become clear that some closely related species, which normally avoid breeding with each other, do indeed produce offspring that can pass genes to subsequent generations. One of the most striking aspects of this study is that hybridization between two distinct species led to the development of a new lineage that after only two generations behaved as any other species of Darwin's finches, explained Leif Andersson, a professor at Uppsala University who is also affiliated with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Texas A&M; University. "A naturalist who came to Daphne Major without knowing that this lineage arose very recently would have recognised this lineage as one of the four species on the island," said Leif Andersson of Uppsala University in Sweden, who conducted the genetic analysis. This clearly demonstrates the value of long-running field studies," he said. The group of finch species to which the Big Bird population belongs are collectively known as Darwin's finches and helped Charles Darwin to uncover the process of evolution by natural selection. "Charles Darwin would have been excited to read this paper." The study, "Rapid hybrid speciation in Darwin's finches," by Sangeet Lamichhaney, Fan Han, Matthew T. Webster, Leif Andersson, B. Rosemary Grant and Peter R. Grant, was published in the journal Science on Nov. 23, 2017.
– After four decades of work, researchers published the origin of Big Bird (not that one) in Science this week—and it's scientifically unprecedented. The BBC reports that for the first time ever, researchers were able to watch the rise of a new species play out in nature. "It's an extreme case of something we're coming to realize," a speciation expert says. "Evolution in general can happen very quickly." According to a press release, in 1981 an interloper arrived on Daphne Major, a tiny island in the Galapagos archipelago where Peter and B. Rosemary Grant were studying Darwin's finches. The new bird, bigger than the three species living on the island, was a large cactus finch that had apparently flown from an island more than 60 miles away. Unable to return, it mated with a local medium ground finch. The resulting offspring, nicknamed the Big Bird lineage for their size, were unable to attract partners from the local finch population due to their weird song and unusual beak size and mated only among themselves. B. Rosemary Grant calls it a "terrifically inbred lineage," Science Alert reports. Within just two generations, the Big Birds were a distinct species, as confirmed by genomic sequencing and their own unique physical characteristics. An expert says if a naturalist came to the island today, they would simply believe there were four native finch species with nothing giving away the Big Bird as a recent addition. It was touch-and-go there for a minute—droughts in 2002 and 2003 killed all but two Big Birds—but there are now 30 or so members of the hybrid species living on Daphne Major. (The savior of the Galapagos tortoise is a dirty, dirty old man.)