GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR, June 24--An eight-man film team, including four Harvard graduate and undergraduate students, took the first pictures of an erupting volcano in the Galapagos Islands early this week.

Flying in an Ecuadoran Air Force plane, the group--which is retracing Charles Darwin's epic voyage in the Beagle over 130 years ago--spent two hours circling the volcano.

Werner Bundschuh, a cameraman on loan from Polymer Films, took the pictures while perched in the bomb hatch of a World War II PBY.

After touring the Galapagos with noted naturalist Carl Anglemeyer, the filmers will leave for Santiago, Chile, around July 13 to continue their documentary. It is slated for production at various universities in the United States and possible on a national television network.

One of the Harvard undergraduates, Frank Sulloway '69, explained recently that the film will examine the influence of South America on Darwin's theory of evolution in terms of people, places, flora, fauna, geological formations and fossil deposits.

On first arriving in Quito, the capital of Ecuador and a seven-hour trip from here, the group discovered that it might have trouble obtaining passage to the Galapagos at the right time and at the right price. At one point, Sulloway said, it appeared they might have to return to Ecuador in December because the Summer schedule, including stops all around the continent, was too tight for an extended wait to get to the islands.

But some top-level wrangling with Pinar Gote, who has a monopoly over travel to the Galapagos, and two high Ecuadoran Air Force officers, produced a viable compromise. Sulloway credited an introductory letter from President Pusey and the energetic intervention of an American working for the Ecuadoran National Tourist Agency with breaking the deadlock.