Origin Unknown: The Lost Sketchbook of Charles Darwin

It was the 1820’s, Charles Darwin was discovering that his dispassion for boring lectures and the stress of surgical study was so great that he could no longer pursue medicine as a field of study; he dropped out of Edinburgh University. He was forced by his father to attend Christ’s College in Cambridge in hopes that completing his Bachelors in Arts Degree would be his first step towards becoming an Anglican Priest. It was here that Darwin re-connected with his cousin William Darwin Fox who took him on long journeys into the woods to collect beetles. It would seem that Darwin had somehow discovered a passion for natural science in those woods; several of his findings were published, excelling his desire to seek out more exotic journeys and make more discoveries. Years later he would set out on an exploration that would span just over five years, hundreds of miles, and lead to a great number of discoveries aboard a ship made famous by his presence, the HMS Beagle. It is well known that Charles Darwin kept several journals during his travels, and as ship documents suggest, during a repair, a mishap would cause loads of cargo on the Beagle to be lost to the sea.

Origin Unknown: The L­ost sketchbook of Charles Darwin is a series of reconstructed journal remnants discovered off the shores of a remote island in Indonesia forensic studies have lead the scientific community to believe that they were in fact penned by Charles Darwin during his travels. After decades of restoration, anthropologist Dr. J. B. Doronio has compiled these drawings, footnotes, and salvaged logs and turned them into a series of books that would come to be known within scientific circles as The Origin Unknown Documents. Through these documents, Charles Darwin reveals several specimens that still remain undiscovered, as well as offering us a glimpse into what seems to be a documented personal psychedelic experience. This psychedelic experience has led skeptics to doubt whether or not his observational drawings correspond to living creatures or a hallucinatory experience. This book is presented to you as physical evidence of a great man’s journey, the decision to believe that Darwin’s discoveries were of the physical sort or meta-physical sort is left up to the reader.

Only 10 of these have been made. Out of these, only 6 are still available for purchase at Meltdown Comics.