

The new study suggests that the number of species may need to be updated after the.

Of these, 13 species are currently alive, while the Pinta Island tortoise went extinct in 2012 after the last of its species, Lonesome George, died. The experts believed that mid 20th Century saw the majority of the tortoises in Pinta Island wiped out because of excessive hunting, and had become extinct until they found a lone male that, over a period of time would acquire the name “ Lonesome George” and become world famous. Overall, there are 14 recognised species of Galápagos giant tortoise, with one other yet to be described. This is how Albert Gunther described it in 1877 when he brought a certain specimen to London. That is until 1971, when Joseph Vagvolgyi (1974), a malacologist from Harvard University, traveled to Pinta to collect land snails and encountered a live adult male tortoise. Tortoise Chelonoidis Nigra Abingdonii or the Pinta Island tortoise also referred to as the Abingdon Island tortoise the Pinta giant tortoise or the ‘giant’ tortoise of the Abingdon Island, originally belonged to the subspecies of the Galapagos tortoise, a native to Ecuador’s Pinta Island. Although tortoises evidently survived on Pinta into the 1950s, by the 1960s the consensus of the scientific community was that the Pinta Island tortoise was extinct.
