The first public appearance of Charles Darwin’s beard since the father of evolutionary theory died in 1882 will take place on November 14 at the Natural History Museum. The small collection of loose hairs were rediscovered this summer by Randal Keynes, the naturalist’s great, great grandson, who found them wrapped in tissue paper in a small leather box.

The public display of the beard is a coup for the museum. Not only is it the most iconic beard to appear in a glass case in a national museum, but also arguably the seventh most renowned beard in world history. The running order, which Times Online concedes is subjective, is as follows:

1. Karl Marx

The author of The Communist Manifesto was once renowned as much for his economic theories as for his beard, but the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has dented his credibility for the former. The glory of his beard, on the other hand, remains undiminished.

The life of Darwin

It has been said with truth that we must go back to Newton before we meet with Darwin's peer

Related Links

• Darwin at the Natural History Museum

• The beard is back

• Bushier the better in the land of beards

2. Grigori Rasputin

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia’s favourite mystic was noted for two bodily features as well as his impressive resistance to assassination: his beard, which is sadly lost to history, and his penis, which was supposedly preserved as a relic by his daughter, who died in 1977. An antique dealer approached Bonhams, the auctioneers, in 1994 claiming to have the item. Tests conducted by Imperial College London concluded that it was a sea cucumber.

Times Archive: the death of Rasputin

3. Brian Blessed

He has climbed Mount Everest in a woolly jumper, sparred with the Dalai Lama, and has received standing ovations in Chicago for nothing more than reciting his most memorable line in Flash Gordon: “Dive!” But the 71-year-old actor and explorer’s most enduring asset is his beard. “If I shave it off,” he said recently, “I look 20 years younger. I have the skin of a baby.”

4. Jesus Christ

Christ is predominantly remembered for his deeds rather than his looks, but his beard attained such iconic status in the 16th century that Prince Frederick the Wise of Saxony kept what he believed to be a strand of it in his collection of dubiously sourced relics. Other highlights included threads from the Virgin Mary’s veil and a twig from the burning bush. Historians might more accurately refer to the Teutonic aristocrat as Frederick the Credulous.

5. Charles Dickens