Notebooks containing some of Charles Darwin’s foundational thinking on evolution are to go on display having been missing for 20 years.

The two manuscripts were returned anonymously in March this year to Cambridge University Library having been reported stolen in 2001.

Among the pages of the previously missing booklets are the notable tree of life sketch from 1837, which looks similar to modern day evolutionary trees.

Darwin’s book On The Origin Of Species, published in 1859, is said to be based on the ideas first jotted on the pads.

The display runs from 9 July to 3 December in the Milstein Exhibition Centre at University of Cambridge.

A police investigation into the notebooks going missing is still ongoing.

Professor Jim Secord, the director of Darwin Correspondence Project, said the pages showed the “place where Darwin works out his theory of evolution”.

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“When we think about Darwin and how he discovered evolution we often think just about the Beagle voyage and the Galapagos but, in fact, the main work of making the theory was done in London after he got back,” he said.

“Darwin was living in a bachelor pad and he was keeping these notebooks which were largely secret and he’d carry them around with him and when he had a good idea or he’d get an observation, he’d write it down.”

He added: “When we see the notebooks we’re really seeing one of the great moments of the process of scientific discovery and, in fact, world history.”

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Dr Alison Pearn, associate director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, said: “We want people to take away that he was human.

“He was a very young man once.

“I think we forget he was only 22 when he went on HMS Beagle.”

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