Original Article: https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/fernanda-tortoise-2/

“For many years it was thought that the original specimen collected in 1906 had been transplanted to the island, as it was the only one of its kind. It now seems to be one of a very few that were alive a century ago,” said Peter Grant, Princeton’s Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, and an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Grant has been studying evolution in the Galapagos Islands for more than 40 years, and this discovery of a living member of the Fernandina Island Galapagos giant tortoise (Chelonoidis phantasticus) by Princeton’s Stephen Gaughran and his colleagues is a cause of celebration for the world!

Fernandina, Youngest and Most Idyllic Island in Galapagos, and Its Endemic Giant Tortoise

Fernandina is the westernmost island in the Galapagos Islands, the youngest and the most active of the 13 major volcanic islands.

British buccaneer Ambrose Cowley was the first person to record it on a map and his navigational chart in 1684. It is the home of a large population of iguanas along with Galapagos penguins — the only penguins found north of the equator — and the Galapagos flightless cormorants.

But it was the discovery of a unique giant tortoise on the island that made Fernandina more famous. It was a male tortoise with extraordinary flaring of its prominent saddleback carapace along the outer edge. The lone specimen was found and collected by Rollo Beck of the California Academy of Sciences Expedition in 1906.

Since no other tortoise of its kind was ever discovered again, it was believed that the Chelonoidis phantasticus (fantastic giant tortoise) species must be already extinct.

Genome Sequencing Confirmed Fernanda Belongs to Long-Believed Extinct Giant Tortoise Species

In 2009, another giant tortoise was found in Fernandina Island but many doubted that it belongs to the same species that was discovered in 1906.

The female tortoise nicknamed Fernanda was more than 50 years old, stunted, and lacks the flaring saddleback carapace of the 1906 male specimen. Many deduced that a storm must have swept it on the island, or some seafarers could have brought it there as was their custom.

“Like many people, my initial suspicion was that this was not a native tortoise of Fernandina Island,” said Gaughran, a postdoctoral research fellow in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton and co-first author of this latest study. “We saw — honestly, to my surprise — that Fernanda was very similar to the one that they found on that island more than 100 years ago, and both of those were very different from all of the other islands’ tortoises.”

It was Gaughran who sequenced the genomes of both Fernanda and the museum specimen from the California Academy of Sciences. He then compared his findings with the other 13 species of Galápagos giant tortoises. The results showed that Fernanda and the museum specimen belong to the same species, distinct from the rest.

Though, of course, the discovery leads to many more exciting questions especially there are evidence that two or more tortoises like Fernanda may still exist on Fernandina Island.

“The finding of one alive specimen gives hope and also opens up new questions, as many mysteries still remain. Are there more tortoises on Fernandina that can be brought back into captivity to start a breeding program? How did tortoises colonize Fernandina, and what is their evolutionary relationship to the other giant Galápagos tortoises? This also shows the importance of using museum collections to understand the past,” remarked Adalgisa Caccone at Yale University and senior study author.

Fernanda now lives safely and healthily at the Galápagos National Park.

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Source: The Animal Rescue Site Blog