CHICAGO--Accompanied by the last bars of U2's "Beautiful Day," as the slides of dancing lemurs, glowing butterflies and stark volcanic craters faded from the stage, the crowd at Sean Carroll's AAAS plenary talk stood for a spontaneous ovation. The molecular biologist had just finished his hour-long adventure tale with a resounding last chapter.

Carroll came to the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting to celebrate three men--Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Henry Walter Bates-- whose travels around the globe gave rise to "the first golden age of evolutionary biology." Their stories, as told by Carroll, were filled with harrowing episodes of tropical fevers, devastating fires, native guides who collected human skulls, and uneasy revelations sprung from their notebook musings.

Together, the three men forever erased the idea that each species is a "special creation," and instead showed how the astonishing variety of life on Earth could lead to the evolution of new species, said Carroll.

Carroll is a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research centers on the genes that control body patterns and play major roles in the evolution of animal diversity. His latest popular book, Remarkable Creatures, follows the intersecting lives of Darwin, Wallace, and Bates.

The three explorers had "obsessive collecting disorder," joked Carroll, which led them to South America and the Malay Peninsula to satisfy their yen for new and different specimens. Their travels turned them from collectors to scientists, as they began to ask "not just what creatures existed in a place, but how those creatures came to be," said Carroll.

With the help of original letters and research notes, Carroll compared Darwin's glacially slow caution in divulging his new view of the origin of species with Wallace's quick publication of the insights that led him independently to the theory of natural selection. The pieces of the theory fell into place for Wallace in 1858, and he promptly wrote to Darwin about his revelation, not knowing that Darwin's eureka moment had come 20 years before.

Henry Walter Bates, who explored the Amazon basin with Wallace, lent support to the new theory with his studies of butterflies that mimic their more poisonous cousins. Despite the potential for professional competition, the three men had "great mutual admiration" throughout their lives, said Carroll.

At the end of his explorers' tale, Carroll said genetic science is bringing about a second golden age in evolutionary science, where modern-day collectors capture their exquisite finds from the natural world in electronic databases.

The genomes of more than 2000 species--from the platypus to the fruit fly--have been sequenced, "and now we're seeing glimpses from the laboratory of exactly how species are made," he said. "As we mine this massive record...we share the same sense of wonder and surprise and discovery as these pioneers."

Times may even be better, Carroll concluded, since most scientists don't have to "cope with malaria or headhunters--just peer review."