When I first met Lonesome George, I will admit he didn’t leave much of an impression. But there was a story about him that did.
Lonesome George is famous for being the last giant tortoise from the Galapagos island of Pinta. My genial guide had told a story about a beautiful woman who had come to the Galapagos to collect sperm from George (so that it might be used in an artificial insemination attempt). On my return to Britain, I wanted to find out if there was any truth in what he’d said. I set about tracking down Lonesome George’s girlfriend.
When I located her in Switzerland, we arranged to talk on the phone and she made a brilliant interviewee. Rather than drawing a veil over this rather extraordinary chapter in her past (as I had imagined she might), she was only too willing to talk and the interview formed the basis of my first feature in Nature. I spoke to others of course, and soon realised that opinions differed over what to do about George. With so many interesting, politely quibbling voices, I began to work on a book-length treatment of George’s life, one that would stray widely to cover challenges facing conservationists all round the world.
As it turned out, that first uninspiring encounter with Lonesome George had a profound influence on my life. I published Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon in 2006, went on to write countless articles about George and the Galapagos (like this favourite On George’s Island), became an ambassador for the Galapagos Conservation Trustand the editor of Galapagos Matters. I have even written another book on these remarkable islands: The Galapagos: A Natural History.
When George died unexpectedly in 2012, I flew out to Ecuador to report on dramatic postmortem efforts to rescue cells from his lifeless body, cells that might one day be used in a cloning effort (see this news story for Nature). Before his death, I’d been looking forward to seeing George again. I just never imagined he’d be bubble-wrapped and duck-taped in a freezer. It was a weird reunion (as you can hear in From Our Own Correspondent).
When I was in the islands, there was discussion about what should happen to Lonesome’s body. The American Museum of Natural History had already offered to put their best taxidermists onto it. But just days before George’s death, Ecuador had announced it was considering an application for political asylum from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. With political tensions running high, there was uncertainty about whether George - if sent to the US - would ever return.
Eventually, it was decided he would go to New York for a high-end taxidermy workout. More than two years after his death and a year since work on his body began, the world’s most famous tortoise returns to the limelight this week, going on show this week at the American Museum of Natural History. According to the museum’s press office, the taxidermy captures the tortoise at full stretch, “showing the height George could achieve by extending his neck and limbs.”
The American Museum of Natural History has yet to release photographs of the taxidermy of Lonesome George. But this, apparently, is the kind of posture they’ve gone for.
On Thursday, the museum is hosting a sell-out event to reflect on “what the tortoise taught us”. I am interested to see that one of the speakers will be Arturo Izurieta, director of the Galapagos National Park (GNP). Back in 1995, when an angry mob stormed the offices of the GNP (disgruntled at fishing quotas imposed by conservationists), they threatened to kill both Izurieta (who was then serving his first term as GNP director) and Lonesome George.
In my book on George, I imagined what would happen when the celebrity reptile eventually passed on:
One day, of course, George will give up the tortoise ghost. Even then, he will be of immense value to the Galápagos. His remains should not be taken back to his native island. Nor should they be flown to Quito to act as a centrepiece in the Museo Ecuatoriano de Ciencias Naturales. Lonesome George must remain in the archipelago, at the research station on Santa Cruz. By then, this is where he will have spent most of his life; this is the place that Lonesome George would call home. Even in death, it is here that he will have his greatest audience.
It’s clear that when I wrote it in 2005, I had not fully anticipated just how big Lonesome George would become. There are plenty of celebrity tortoises – Tu’i Malila, Harriet or Charles Darwin’s real Galapagos tortoisespring to mind – but Lonesome George is in a completely different league, now undeniably “the world’s most famous tortoise”. His sad death propelled him still more forcibly onto a global stage, working George and his message still tighter into the fabric of our increasingly globalised human culture. Five years ago, I would still meet people who had never heard of Lonesome George. Now I don’t.
Lonesome George is no longer merely a provincial symbol for the Galapagos but a national icon with a truly international audience. Indeed, in the week after George’s death, Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa mourned the loss of a national treasure and began formal proceedings to recognise the tortoise as a part of Ecuador’s national heritage. So when Lonesome George returns to Ecuador in January 2015, it seems increasingly likely that he will go to Quito after all, with a replica going to the Galapagos.
These physical incarnations of George are very important. They guarantee that he will not be forgotten. Even in death Lonesome George will continue to communicate his conservation message, one summed up neatly in the following sentence that once appeared on the information panel beside his enclosure:
Whatever happens to this animal, let him always remind us that the fate of all living things is in human hands.
