He now lives at the Giant Tortoise Breeding Center of the Galapagos National Park on Santa Cruz Island.
Yale researchers have discovered a single giant tortoise whose species was last seen more than 100 years ago. This is Fernanda, the only known living giant tortoise, writes Scitech Daily.
According to a Yale University study published in the journal Communications Biology, Fernanda, what scientists call a 50-year-old turtle and a 20th century male specimen now held at the California Academy of Sciences are closely related.
However, the search raised many new questions.
“A large number of genomes in the two animals are similar, but we do not know the process that explains how this happened. It also shows the importance of using museum collections to understand the past. Fernanda, named after his home on Fernandina Island, is the first representative of his species identified in more than a century. Princeton geneticist Stephen Gaugran successfully extracted DNA from a sample collected from the same island more than a century ago ago and confirmed that Fernanda and the museum specimen belong to the same species and are genetically distinct from all other tortoises in the Galapagos,” said Adalgisa Kakkone, senior fellow and faculty member in Yale’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Turtles on Fernandina Island are thought to have died out due to volcanic eruptions on the island, including about 25 eruptions in the last two centuries. Patches of vegetation, scientists suggested, were cut by lava flows.
“These turtles are the largest cold-blooded terrestrial herbivores on Earth and play a very important ecological role. Therefore, their protection is important not only because of their cult status, but also because they are an important factor in ecosystem stability in the Galapagos Islands. We still don’t know much, and what we learn will help protect them, and with them the fragile and unique place on Earth they call home,” he added.
We remind, in West Bengal found a rare turtle belonging to the species of Indian lobed turtles. Usually, these turtles are green in color and are found in South Asia. They reach 22-35 centimeters.
In Turkey, a turtle attacked a tourist from Russia
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Source: korrespondent
