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Fernandina Island Galápagos Tortoise

Reptiles

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The Fernandina Island Galápagos tortoise, Chelonoidis niger phantasticus, is a subspecies of Galápagos tortoise discovered in 1906 and long thought extinct, until a single female was found living on Fernandina Island by an expedition in February 2019. A genetic test carried out in May 2021 by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences confirmed that the tortoise found in 2019 does belong to the subspecies phantasticus, whose name had often been misspelled phantastica since an error introduced in the 1980s, corrected in 2017.

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