§ 1. Sometimes the road to romance is long. ‘Lonesome George’, a giant Galapagos tortoise, is the last of his subspecies and thus profoundly alone. Living far out in the Pacific on the island of Pinta in the Galapagos Islands, he is officially the rarest living creature on Earth.
§ 2. No animal better captures the history of the Galapagos Islands than the giant tortoise. There used to be thousands of them roaming over these Islands. Observations of them by Charles Darwin even formed part of his world-changing theory of evolution.
§ 3. Sadly, however, mostly because for centuries the passing sailors had been hunting the giant tortoises for food, there are now only an estimated fifteen thousand left in the Galapagos Islands. Of the fifteen known subspecies, four are already thought to be extinct, as was the Pinta giant tortoise until Lonesome George was discovered in 1971. This came as a pleasant surprise to scientists since no other Pinta tortoises had been found on Pinta Island since 1906.
§ 4. Since George was discovered, he has become the star attraction at the Charles Darwin Research Station where conservationists have been hoping to rescue some of his genes by mating him with another tortoise. Two females from the nearby island of Isabela, the most closely related to the Pinta subspecies that could be found, were put into his enclosed territory with him in 1992, but he failed to take the hint.
§ 5. Then, Professor Jeffrey Powell, an evolutionary biologist from Yale University, came up with a possible reason why Lonesome George was not finding true romance with the ladies from Isabela. Perhaps, he suggested, they were simply too different to him to be a suitable match. Sailors often carried the tortoises from one island to another, he pointed out. So there could be a perfect Pinta match for George alive and well on Isabela or even on some more distant island.
§ 6. To begin testing his theory, Professor Powell compared DNA from seven Pinta tortoises with blood samples from twenty-seven giant tortoises living on Isabela. Among these samples, they found one tortoise with clear signs of Pinta ancestry (происхождение). Sadly, however, the newly discovered tortoise was not suitable for George: he was male.
§ 7. Powell with his team intends to return to Isabela and take blood from more than two thousand tortoises. If they do indeed find a Pinta female, they hope to take her to George’s territory and attempt to breed the pair. The possibility remains, then, that Lonesome George may one day not be so lonely after all.
