When Charles Darwin write about giant tortoises populate on Floreana in 1835 , he noted a marked decline in their population from previous year . Eleven geezerhood later , another visitant to the island declare the entire specie out . But a fortuitous discovery has lead researchers to believe that they can add this brute back from the evolutionary grave . Although the tortoise vanished from the Floreana , a handful were preserved by the very sailors who impart to their extinction . When they did n’t need the tortoise for food , the sailors would drop the tortoises off at their whaling grounds , notably the Galapagos island of Isabela . There the Floreana tortoises interbred with the aboriginal tortoises , allowing their DNA to live on :
“ The [ living tortoise ] samples were collected in 1994 , but we had no idea what was in there because we did n’t have Floreana data , ” say Gisella Caccone , an evolutionary life scientist at Yale University in New Haven , Conn. “ OK , now we have genotype for 15 to 25 animals from the museum , so we did the psychoanalysis and windfall ! ”
unhappily , the biologists wo n’t be represent any Jurassic Park - expressive style cloning to resuscitate the reptile , as is being plan for ababy mammoth fossildiscovered in Siberia last yr . alternatively , they will make up one’s mind if there are enough tortoise bear the Floreana DNA to set about a selective breeding programme . Extinct Giant Tortoise Could Be Revived[LiveScience ]

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