A giant tortoise species studied by Charles Darwin and believed to be extinct for more than 150 years may be alive and well, an ambitious genetic survey has revealed.
Blood sampling of more than 1,600 tortoises on the largest Galapagos island, Isabela, has revealed that about 84 of them had at least one purebred parent from a supposedly extinct species that once lived at the other end of the archipelago.
Researchers hope they can find these tortoises in the flesh on Isabela Island, breed them in captivity and then release them back onto Floreana Island, their native home.
The study, published in January in the journal Current Biology, may be the first rediscovery of an "extinct" species ever made by looking for genetic markers in hybrid offspring.
The giant tortoise, among the largest living reptiles on Earth, is an icon of the Galapagos, the group of Pacific islands off the coast of Ecuador. The creatures are thought to have arrived on the volcanic islands about 2 to 3 million years ago from the South American mainland.
Each tortoise species - some larger, with domed shells, and others smaller, with saddleback shells - was unique to a particular island or volcano, living and evolving in isolation from one another.
The diversity of tortoise species that Darwin saw during his 1835 visit to the Galapagos Islands partly inspired his theory of evolution.
But by 1850, one of the tortoises - the saddleback Chelonoidis elephantopus, living on Floreana Island - had already vanished, due to humans and other predators.
In recent years, however, scientists sampling a different species, Chelonoidis becki, came across a surprising discovery. Within this population of tortoises native to Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island, there were a handful bearing traces of Floreana tortoise DNA in their genomes. At some time in the past, it appears, the Floreana tortoise had made it to - and mated on - Isabela.
Spurred on by this suggestion that the Floreana tortoise might still exist on Isabela, the researchers, led by population geneticist Ryan Garrick, who is now at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, decided to look more closely.
Garrick and colleagues took blood samples from 1,669 tortoises living on Wolf Volcano - about one-fifth of the tortoise population there - and ran them against a database of tortoise DNA.
The analysis showed that 84 of the tortoises had more than just traces of C. elephantopus within them: One of their parents was purebred C. elephantopus, a creature supposedly extinct for more than a century and a half.
Based on genetic analysis, the scientists estimate that about 38 C. elephantopus tortoises had parented these offspring on Wolf Volcano.
And though many of those parents may not be alive today, some probably are.
Thirty of the 84 hybrids Garrick and his co-workers found were less than 15 years old, and the creatures are thought to live for more than 100 years.
Purebred parents are very likely still roaming the volcano.
