‘Fantastic giant tortoise,’ believed extinct, confirmed alive in the Galápagos
A tortoise from a Galápagos species long believed extinct has been found alive. The tortoise, named Fernanda after her Fernandina Island home, is the first of her species identified in more than a century. The Fernandina Island Galápagos giant tortoise (Chelonoidis phantasticus, or “fantastic giant tortoise”) was known only from a single specimen, collected in 1906. The discovery in 2019 of a female tortoise living on Fernandina Island provided the opportunity to determine if the species lives on. By sequencing the genomes of both the living individual and the museum specimen, and comparing them to the other 13 species of Galápagos giant tortoises, Princeton’s Stephen Gaughran showed that the two known Fernandina tortoises are members of the same species, genetically distinct from all ...
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