R.I.P. Lonesome George

We've followed the saga of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island Tortoise, for years. But George has been around much longer, and was believed to be around 100 years old. Fausto Llerena, George's keeper for the past 40 years, found George dead in his pen this morning.

Park officials said they would carry out a post-mortem to determine the cause of his death.

With no offspring and no known individuals from his subspecies left, Lonesome George became known as the rarest creature in the world.

For decades, environmentalists unsuccessfully tried to get the Pinta Island tortoise to reproduce with females from a similar subspecies on the Galapagos Islands.

The Pinta Island subspecies of Galapagos Tortoise can live up to 200 years, so George was not particularly old. Read his biography -what we know of it- at BBC News. Link -via Metafilter