Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, photographed in 2008

Lonesome George: The Last Pinta Island Tortoise

On June 24, 2012, a tortoise named Lonesome George was found dead in his corral at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, Galápagos. He was approximately 100 to 110 years old. He was the last known Pinta Island tortoise in existence. When he died, his subspecies, Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, was officially extinct.

His story starts not with him, but with three goats.

What the Goats Did

Around 1959, three domestic goats were released on Pinta Island, one of the northernmost islands in the Galápagos archipelago. By the time anyone fully understood the damage, the population had exploded to an estimated 40,000. They stripped the island of vegetation. The dry scrub and low-growing plants that Pinta tortoises had eaten for millennia were gone. Scientists assumed the tortoises were too. No confirmed sighting had been recorded in decades.

Then in 1971, a Hungarian malacologist named József Vágvölgyi was on Pinta studying snails. He found a tortoise. One tortoise. Alive, alone on an island that was supposed to have none.

Forty Years at the Research Station

Rangers moved the tortoise to the Charles Darwin Research Station in 1972 for his own protection and to give scientists a chance to find him a mate. They named him Lonesome George.

A ten-thousand-dollar reward was offered to anyone who could locate a female Pinta Island tortoise. No one ever claimed it.

George lived at the station for four decades under the care of a keeper named Fausto Llerena. Researchers tried breeding him with females from related subspecies. In 2008, thirteen eggs were laid. None were viable. In 2009, five more eggs were laid. None viable. In 2011, females from Española Island were introduced. Still nothing. Every breeding attempt failed.

For forty years, scientists waited. George went on living, eating, moving at the slow pace of a Pinta Island tortoise, indifferent to the scientific weight of his existence.

The Morning Fausto Found Him

On the morning of June 24, 2012, Fausto Llerena arrived at George's corral and found him dead. Natural causes. He was somewhere between 100 and 110 years old, which for a Galápagos tortoise is not especially old. The subspecies can live well past that under normal conditions.

There were no normal conditions on Pinta Island. There hadn't been for decades.

George's body was sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where taxidermist George Dante preserved him. He was returned to the Galápagos on February 17, 2017, and is now displayed at the breeding center on Santa Cruz Island. The breeding center is named after Fausto Llerena.

One Update Worth Knowing

In 2020, researchers studying tortoises on Fernandina Island found an individual with genetic markers directly related to the Pinta Island subspecies. It raised the possibility that a small population may have survived somewhere in the islands undetected. As of 2024, no confirmed additional Pinta tortoises have been found, but the search continues.

Lonesome George is still the last confirmed Pinta Island tortoise. His story is used in conservation education worldwide, not because it ended well, but because it illustrates exactly how fast an isolated island species can disappear when a single outside pressure is introduced, and how little time there is to act once the last individual is found.

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