• 60 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

Evolution Writing Prompts

A beak for the job, many generations, a notebook on an island, what would change.

Evolution Writing Prompts

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  1. Invent a bird for a place with only one kind of food. Describe its beak, then say why that beak would be a problem anywhere else.Angle: a beak that is perfect for one meal is clumsy at another.
  2. Back home, an expert tells a traveler that the birds she took for three kinds are all one family. Write the meeting.Fact: birds the naturalist took for blackbirds, grosbeaks and finches were all ground finches, an expert found.
  3. Tell the story of a family of moths over fifty generations, in a town whose trees turn dark with soot.Fact: in 19th-century England, dark peppered moths became more common as air pollution grew.

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All 60 prompts

A beak for the job 15

  • A bird with a thin beak and a bird with a thick beak trade beaks for a day. Write the day. First line: By noon, neither of us had eaten a thing.
  • A dry year leaves only the hardest seeds on an island. Write the year from the side of a small-beaked bird. Fact: on the Galápagos, the food available could change dramatically in a drought.
  • A young bird hatches with a beak a little larger than its parents' beaks. Write its first season, in a year when that matters. Fact: traits vary among individuals, and they can be passed from one generation to the next.
  • An island finch's nearest relative lives on the mainland. Write the letter the finch sends to its cousin back there. Fact: the closest known relative of the Galápagos finches is a South American grassquit.
  • Explain, as a bird, that nobody designed your beak for you. Then say where it did come from. Fact: traits that help with survival and reproduction become more common over the generations.
  • The famous finches of the Galápagos are not true finches at all. Write the scene where they find out. Fact: the Galápagos finches belong to the tanager family and are not closely related to true finches.
  • Invent a bird for a place with only one kind of food. Describe its beak, then say why that beak would be a problem anywhere else. Angle: a beak that is perfect for one meal is clumsy at another.
  • Look in a kitchen drawer. Match five tools to five bird beaks and write why each pair goes together. Angle: tongs, tweezers, a nutcracker, a straw, a skewer.
  • On islands with few other birds, finches took up the jobs that other birds do elsewhere. Write the help-wanted board. Fact: with other kinds of birds absent, the finches adapted to new niches.
  • Think of a bird's beak as a tool in a toolbox. Write the label on its drawer, and what happens when the wrong beak is taken out. Fact: the finches of the Galápagos differ most in the size and shape of their beaks, each suited to a food.
  • Two finches eat from the same cactus in different ways. Write their lunch as a cooking contest. Fact: long-beaked cactus finches punch holes in the fruit; shorter-beaked ones tear at the cactus base.
  • Write a field guide entry for a beak, as if the beak were the animal. Angle: say what it eats, where it is found and what it is often mistaken for.
  • Write a job interview in which a finch must show what its beak can do. Angle: cracking, probing, tearing, sipping. Which job is open?
  • Write a menu for an island, with one dish for each shape of beak. Fact: the finches' beaks let different species eat different foods, such as nuts, fruits and insects.
  • Write an owner's manual for one beak: what it is for, what it is not for, and how to look after it. Angle: a seed-cracker is not a flower-sipper. Put the warnings in.

Many generations 15

  • A bird that cannot fly still has wings. Write the wings' defense of themselves. Fact: the wings of flightless birds are structures that have lost their original function.
  • A change too small to see in one lifetime adds up. Write a time-lapse of one kind of animal, one frame every thousand years. Angle: say what the camera is pointed at: a leg, an ear, a coat, a beak.
  • A fish's family lives for many generations in a cave with no light. Write what the family keeps and what it loses. Fact: blind cave fish still have the remains of eyes that no longer work.
  • A hippo and a whale compare notes. Write how they work out that they are related. Fact: hippopotamuses are the closest living relatives of whales.
  • A pale moth rests on a pale tree and a bird flies past. Write the minute from the moth's side, then from the bird's. Fact: birds easily caught dark moths on clean trees and pale moths on trees darkened with soot.
  • A whale has hip bones it does not walk on. Write what the bones would say if someone asked what they are for. Fact: hip bones in whales and snakes are structures that have lost their original function.
  • The air over a factory town gets clean again. Write the moths' town meeting. Fact: after clean-air laws cut pollution, the light-colored peppered moth became the common one again.
  • The ancestors of whales walked on land. Write the day, long ago, when one of them waded in a little deeper than usual. Fact: the life of whales in water began about 50 million years ago, from hoofed land mammals.
  • Corn began as a wild plant and needed large changes to become a crop. Write the farmers' side of the story, one planting at a time. Fact: maize was bred in Mesoamerica from teosinte, its wild form, and it took especially large changes.
  • Every kind of dog comes from choices people made about which dogs had puppies. Write the first of those choices. Fact: selective breeding created the wide range of dog breed sizes, from a Chihuahua mix to a Great Dane.
  • More young are born than can survive. Write a spring in a pond from the side of one tadpole among thousands. Fact: living things often produce more offspring than can possibly survive.
  • The nostrils of whales' ancestors were at the tip of the snout. Write the long move to the top of the head as a moving-day story. Fact: in early whale ancestors the nasal opening was near the tip of the snout; it later became the blowhole.
  • Tell the story of a family of moths over fifty generations, in a town whose trees turn dark with soot. Fact: in 19th-century England, dark peppered moths became more common as air pollution grew.
  • Write a chain letter passed from parent to young for a thousand generations. What one line is changed each time? Angle: each generation changes almost nothing. Read the first letter beside the last.
  • Write a conversation between two animals of one family line, a million generations apart, who do not look alike at all. Angle: pick any animal. What would each find strange about the other?

A notebook on an island 15

  • A naturalist forgets to write down which island each bird came from. Write the letter asking shipmates what they remember. Fact: his shipmates had labeled their birds by island, and he used theirs to work out where his own came from.
  • A ship's cabin is full of jars, skins and notes. Write the night the naturalist tries to sort them by island. Fact: on the voyage he noted that the mockingbirds of different islands were of different kinds.
  • Back home, an expert tells a traveler that the birds she took for three kinds are all one family. Write the meeting. Fact: birds the naturalist took for blackbirds, grosbeaks and finches were all ground finches, an expert found.
  • Describe a bird in ten lines of a notebook, so that someone else would know it again without a picture. Angle: beak first, then size, color, call, and what it was doing.
  • The news about the island birds reached the papers. Write the short news story. Fact: the expert's report that the birds formed a new group of 12 species made the newspapers.
  • On the island in your story, the birds have never seen a person. Write your first hour on shore. Angle: who is more curious, you or they?
  • Researchers have gone back to the same islands year after year to measure the same birds. Write the thirtieth trip. Fact: researchers have returned to the Galápagos for decades to study the finches.
  • Two naturalists on opposite sides of the world reach the same idea, each without knowing of the other. Write the day one of them finds out. Fact: the theory of evolution by natural selection was conceived independently by two British naturalists.
  • Write a notebook entry about two birds that look almost alike and live on two different islands. Fact: the mockingbirds he labeled by island turned out to be separate species, not just varieties.
  • Write a notebook entry by a naturalist's helper who thinks all these little brown birds look the same. First line: He has asked me to label another one. It is, again, small and brown.
  • Write a notebook entry for a day of rain on the island, when nothing can be collected and everything can be watched. Angle: what does a wet day show that a dry one hides?
  • Write a notebook page that holds only what you saw. Then write the same page with your guesses in the margin. Angle: keep the two apart. A notebook is useful years later because it says which was which.
  • Years later, a naturalist opens an old notebook and sees what she missed. Write the page and the note she adds. Fact: during the voyage, the naturalist was unaware of the significance of the birds of the Galápagos.
  • You are a young naturalist with five weeks on a group of islands. Write the first page of your notebook. Fact: the naturalist whose finches became famous spent just five weeks in the Galápagos.
  • You have one page left in your notebook and one day left on the island. Write what goes on the page. Angle: the thing you are surest of, or the thing you cannot explain?

What would change 15

  • A beetle is green in a field that is turning brown. Write the next hundred summers. Angle: there were always a few brown ones. Follow them.
  • A city's streetlights burn all night for a hundred years. Write what might change in its moths, and what would not. Angle: change needs differences that are already there, and that the young inherit.
  • A pond dries up a little more each year. Write the frogs' story over many generations, with no frog deciding anything. Angle: nobody chooses. Some have more young that live, and the young take after them.
  • A snake becomes able to eat a poisonous newt, and the newts grow more poisonous. Write the very slow argument between them. Fact: the common garter snake has evolved resistance to the toxin of the newts it eats.
  • A suntan is not passed on to children. Write a short scene in which someone finds this out the funny way. Fact: a suntan comes from sunlight on the skin and is not passed on to a person's children.
  • All living things are distant relatives. Write the invitation to the biggest family reunion there could be. Fact: all life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived about 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.
  • Choose an animal you know well. Write one way its world could change, and which of its features would then matter most. Angle: colder, drier, darker, a new hunter, a new food.
  • Imagine an island where the only food is high in the trees. Describe the animals there after a very long time. Angle: start with the ones that already reached a little higher than the rest.
  • Nothing in this story changes in one lifetime. Write it anyway, and make the reader feel the time. Angle: use a repeated line, one for each thousand years.
  • People have changed plants and animals by choosing which ones to breed. Write about a plant you would change, and what you would choose for. Fact: wheat, rice and dogs have been different from their wild ancestors for thousands of years.
  • The snow on a mountain stops falling for good. Write what happens to a family of white hares over many generations. Angle: no single hare changes. Say what is different about the hundredth generation.
  • Two groups of the same lizard are cut off from each other by a new river. Write both banks, a very long time later. Fact: in animals, new species most often form in populations that are cut off from each other by geography.
  • What would have to change for a land animal's family to live in the sea? Write the list, in the order you think it happened. Fact: whales surface to breathe air and have finger bones in their fins.
  • Write a letter from an animal of today to the one that will stand in its place a million years from now. Angle: what do you hope it keeps?
  • Write the story of one feature, such as a long neck or a striped coat, with no animal ever wanting it. Angle: wanting changes nothing. Which young lived, and why?

How it works

These evolution writing prompts are written for a science class: no animal in them tries to change, and nothing changes in one lifetime. A beak fits a food, a moth matches a tree, and the story is in the generations between.

Read the full guide

Story ideas about evolution

Many generations holds fifteen: moths in a town whose trees turn dark with soot, a whale's ancestor wading in a little deeper, a fish's family in a cave with no light. Each fact line is from a Wikipedia article named under the list.

A notebook on an island

These prompts follow a young naturalist through five weeks on the Galápagos and the years after: birds that look almost alike on two islands, labels that were never written, an old notebook read again. The naturalist is not named, so the notebook can be yours.

  • Never write that an animal wanted or needed a change. Write which young lived, and what they took after.
  • Count in generations. A hundred of them is a better clock for these stories than a hundred years.

Questions and answers

What is a good evolution writing prompt?

A bird with a thin beak and a bird with a thick beak trade beaks for a day: write the day. Or write a letter from an animal of today to the one that will stand in its place a million years from now.

What is natural selection?

The process by which traits that help with survival and reproduction become more common in a population over successive generations, Wikipedia's Evolution article says. It works on differences that already exist and that the young inherit.

Why did the peppered moth change color?

In 19th-century England soot darkened the trees. Birds caught pale moths on dark bark more easily, so dark moths became common. When clean-air laws cut the pollution, the pale form came back. Three prompts tell it from the moths' side.

Are these prompts about human evolution?

No. The list is about finches, moths, whales, dogs, corn and other animals and plants, some of them invented. No prompt is about people's own ancestry.

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