Photo by Mark Olsen[/caption] The most common shape for typical seed-eating birds is a short, thick, and conical beak. Think ...

A bird beak is the most important resource it has ... evening grosbeaks and purple finches have thick, short beaks designed for breaking open seeds with ease. The next time a bird lands at ...

The birds have been named for Darwin ... the ground finch has a short beak adapted for eating seeds buried under the soil, and the tree finch has a parrot-shaped beak suited for stripping bark ...

So the birds that were the winners in the game of natural selection lived to reproduce. The big-beaked finches just happened to be the ones favored by the particular set of conditions Nature ...