100 things blogging challenge 70
The 100 things blogging challenge.
So, farewell then, Lonesome George, evolutionary deadend:
No one knew if he was gay, impotent, bored or just very shy. But he is thought to have been about 100 years old and in his prime when he died on Sunday at the Charles Darwin research centre in the Galápagos Islands, although the giant tortoise known as Lonesome George and commonly called the "rarest animal on Earth" may in fact have been far older - or much younger.
....
Scientists' attempts to get George to mate with other giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands and to eventually repopulate Pinta all failed and were often comical. Artificial insemination did not work, nor did a $10,000 reward offered by the Ecuadorean government for a suitable mate. In the 1990s, Sveva Grigioni, a Swiss zoology graduate student, smeared herself with female tortoise hormones and, in the cause of science, spent four months trying to manually stimulate him - to no avail.
In 2008 and 2009 George unexpectedly mated with one of his two companions, but although two clutches of eggs were collected and incubated, all failed to hatch.
Henry Nicholls, author of Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of the World's Most Famous Tortoise, reported that George was irresistibly attracted to the late Lord Devon's wartime helmet*, presumably because it resembled the shell of a young tortoise.
With Lonesome George, they never knew what the problem of mating was. One researcher said he seemed to just run out of steam. That can be said of many a male.
*Surely that was Timothy, last surviving veteran of the Crimean War, or maybe this is just one of those stories that gets attached to any tortoise who attains some degree of notoriety. We feel that the Earl of Devon's helmet story is more probable in her case, and not just because of disparity of size.
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