Charles Darwin

On the picturesque Isle of Wight, a Jurassic-sized property deal involving a historic past and close links to the discovery of a rare dinosaur is up for auction. The Grade II listed property on Rectory Lane, Brighstone Bay, is listed for £1.4 million, where the remains of a rare fossil were discovered on a cliff nearby by clergyman and palaeontologist Reverend William D Fox. However, the house has more than dinosaur bones in its closet, as Charles Darwin himself paid a visit to the reverend at the sprawling six-bedroom home. The building has a history intertwined with Rev. John Bruton's remarkable work. Fox, who discovered a fossil in a bed of blue shale clay at a cliff on Brighstone Bay in 1865, was the first explorer of a dinosaur fossil. He brought the bones back to his home and meticulously reconstructed the ancient beast across the lawn

In the late 1930s, David Barron was just into his teens when he first appeared at the Mid-Yorkshire Institution for the Mentally Defective. He had been taken from a foster home where he had been cruelly treated, and had been taken there by local council authorities. 'Goodbye, lad,' 'We're hoping you'll soon settle in,' they said. He was led into a huge dining room that was packed with around 500 people. It was not the noise that would remain in his memory, but the sight of the bars on the windows. With the clanging of keys locking and unlocking every room and corridor, the sense that he was in jail has been closed in. David was an orphanage. There was no one around who was missing him, and there was no one to investigate him. The institution, which is ten miles west of York, is located on a large, forbidding'reformatory' building surrounded by strictly segregated dormitory blocks for both men and women, later renamed Whixley Colony.

Children born as a result of a first-cousins or close relatives have a higher chance of inheriting a variety of genetic disorders than the general population. For example, one academic study looking at the prevalence of 'extreme' inbreeding - where parents of a child are presumed to be first- or second-degree relatives - found 125 British people out of a sample of 450,000. The first degree links include those between parent and child, while the second degree includes more distant, but also genetic close relatives, such as half-siblings. The 2019 report was extrapolated to the wider population, implying that 13,000 Brits were born by extreme inbreeding. The authors noted that true rates could be significantly higher or lower depending on the subject and the small number of Brits included in the study. For the first cousin marriages, they were once more popular and included some well-known historical figures. Charles Darwin (right), the father of evolution, married Emma Wedgwood (left), and Albert Einstein (right) married his first cousin Elsa Lowenthal (right).