"Lonesome George is not alone", the geneticists reported in Current Biology back in 2007. It remains a mystery as to how it got there, but the smart money is on the pirates and whalers who were responsible for collecting hundreds of thousands of giant tortoises and moving them between islands. With ancient DNA from museum-based specimens giving a more robust picture of the genetic makeup of the Pinta species, it became clear that one of these Isabela tortoises was, in fact, a first-generation hybrid of a full-blown Pinta male and an Isabela female. I thought I had more time."Īlmost a decade ago, whilst analysing DNA from a sample of 27 tortoises from Wolf Volcano on the nearby island of Isabela, Caccone sensed she was on to something. "I grieved and I thought of the things I could have done that I did not do. "He was like a family member," she told me. But just when they'd found some, George had decided it was time to go. For years Caccone and her colleagues have been taking blood samples from giant tortoises in the hope that some of them might have a Lonesome George-like signature to their DNA. I also met Gisella Caccone, a geneticist from Yale University, who was in the Galápagos to take part in the first ever tortoise summit to be held in the islands. I travelled out to the Galápagos to report on the sombre mood after George's death and had the unsettling experience of seeing him once more, his carapace by then unceremoniously bubble-wrapped and duck-taped in an Electrolux freezer. But on 24 June this year, the world's most celebrated reptilian bachelor finally gave up the tortoise ghost in solitude.
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