Two stolen notebooks written by famous scientist Charles Darwin in the 1830s have been mysteriously returned to Cambridge University, 22 years after they were stolen.
The small leather-bound notepads are worth millions of pounds and include the scientist’s "tree of life" sketch which inspired his famous theory of evolution.
"They're safe, they're in good condition, they're home," a BBC report cited the university's librarian Dr Jessica Gardner as saying.
But no one knows who returned the two notepads as they were left anonymously in a pink gift bag containing the original blue box the notebooks were kept in and a plain brown envelope.
On it was printed a short message: "Librarian, Happy Easter X."
The package had been left on the floor, in a public part of the library with no CCTV, outside Dr Gardner's office, the BBC report said.
The manuscripts date back to the late 1830s after Darwin had returned from the Galapagos Islands. On one page, he drew a spindly sketch of a tree, which helped inspire his theory of evolution and more than 20 years later would become a central theory in his pathbreaking work On the Origin of Species.
"The theory of natural selection and evolution is probably the single most important theory in the life and earth environmental sciences and these are the notebooks in which that theory was put together," says Jim Secord, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University.
The manuscripts were last seen in November 2000 after "an internal request" to remove them from the library's special collections strong room to be photographed.
It was only during a routine check two months later that they were found to be missing. Initially, librarians thought they had been put back in te wrong place amongst the library’s huge collection of more than 10 million, books, maps and manuscripts.
But despite thorough searches, the notebooks could not be found. It was in 2020 that Dr Gardner finally concluded they had probably been stolen and informed the police and Interpol.
