When Evelyn Jensen visits a museum to scrape bone from a long-dead Galápagos tortoise, she has two hopes in mind.
First, that the specimen’s genetic material will be well-preserved. Second, that she will find that it is a Floreana tortoise — a species that has been extinct for 180 years.
A lecturer in molecular ecology at Newcastle University, Jensen has, over the last four years, studied 78 Galápagos tortoises at museums in Britain and the United States. But she has found only five from Floreana. Only one yielded high-quality DNA.
“It just kills me that after all of this — just one,” she says.
Nevertheless, that single sample is helping to guide the restoration of giant tortoises that are remarkably similar to the original Floreana tortoise to that Galápagos island, a project that is critical to restoring its…
Read the full article originally published at e360.yale.edu.