enslaved person, John Edmonstone, while he studied medicine in Edinburgh. Darwin's father was a physician and he initially studied medicine in Edinburgh. He apparently hated it, but during that time studied privately with a man named John Edmonstone who taught him how to taxidermy and preserve specimens. John had been enslaved in South America, in Guyana, where he had learned to taxidermy animals from a traveling naturalist. At some point, the plantation owner went to Scotland with John. If he hadn't been freed before then, he would have been upon his arrival since slavery was at that point in time outlawed in Scotland. He later worked at Edinburgh's zoological museum stuffing birds where he met Darwin.

Darwin considered him an excellent taxidermist. The skills he learned from John were essential when he'd later travel as the ship's naturalist on the HMS Beagle. It was on that trip, collecting specimens and observing them closely, that he began to come up with the idea of evolution by natural selection. In fact, some of the most influential specimens he collected on that journey to his ideas were mockingbirds in the Galapagos, which he carefully taxidermized and preserved (and which are still kept in London).