🕯️ LEGENDS GARDEN
🐢 Lonesome George
Pinta Island giant tortoise · Pinta Island, Galápagos, Ecuador
Lives in Legends Garden
A Hungarian scientist studying snails found a single tortoise on Pinta Island on 1 November 1971, decades after the island's tortoises were assumed wiped out by whalers and goats. Rangers moved him to the breeding centre on Santa Cruz in 1972, where he lived for 40 years as the last known member of his subspecies. A $10,000 reward for a mate found nobody, and three clutches of eggs laid by paired females between 2008 and 2009 were all infertile. He died on 24 June 2012, and his subspecies died with him; his taxidermied body returned to Galápagos in February 2017 and is on display at the breeding centre.
What they do
Stretches his long neck straight up through the raised notch at the front of his shell to reach a high leaf, holds it there, then slowly folds it back down.
The last of his kind, and utterly unbothered about it, which somehow made it worse.
Lore
- ★He was called the rarest creature in the world; a $10,000 reward was offered for a female of his subspecies and it was never claimed.
- ★He weighed about 75 kg and was around 100 years old, which is not even old for a Galápagos tortoise.
- ★Three clutches of eggs from females paired with him between 2008 and 2009 all proved infertile, and his death in 2012 marked the extinction of the Pinta Island tortoise.
Helping the real one
💛 Support Lonesome via Galápagos ConservancyFetched and confirmed as a live giving page. Funds Iniciativa Galápagos, the giant tortoise restoration programme run jointly with the Galápagos National Park Directorate that is rebuilding tortoise populations on islands where they were wiped out. This opens their own official page. Money never touches this site.
Where this comes from
Every link here was checked twice before it was published. If one is dead or wrong, tell us.