Galápagos Giant Tortoise: Species Guide, Where to See Them & Conservation

A large male Galápagos giant tortoise can weigh more than 400 kg and measure nearly two metres from the tip of its extended neck to the base of its shell. Females are considerably smaller, averaging 136–181 kg. The heaviest recorded individual was Goliath, a captive tortoise from Santa Cruz that reached 417 kg before his death in 2002.

The shell does more than protect the tortoise. It also helps regulate body temperature, heating and cooling slowly so the animal can conserve energy. A tortoise basking in the early morning sun can store enough heat to carry it through hours of slow grazing. This ability to conserve energy, combined with stored fat and fluid reserves, allows giant tortoises to survive for up to a year without food or water. Unfortunately, that same trait made them valuable as provisions for sailing ships, leading to thousands being taken aboard and removed from the islands.

Galápagos giant tortoises can live for 150 to 200 years, although determining the exact age of wild tortoises is difficult. Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island tortoise, was estimated to be more than 100 years old when he died. A tortoise named Speed at the San Diego Zoo lived to an estimated 150 years. The true maximum lifespan remains unknown.

Their diet includes grasses, fallen fruit, cactus pads, and leaves. Their digestive system retains food for long periods, allowing seeds to pass through and be dispersed across the landscape, sometimes kilometres from where the tortoise originally fed. In this way, giant tortoises played an important role in spreading plants throughout the islands, even before they’d been named.

Hungarian scientist József Vágvölgyi wasn’t looking for a tortoise when he eventually found Lonesome George. In 1971, he had come to Pinta Island to study land snails, the island’s mollusks, not its giant tortoises. Pinta’s tortoises were considered extinct. Whalers had hunted them since the 17th century. In 1959, fishermen released a small number of goats on the island and left them there. Forty thousand goats later, the vegetation had been reduced to bare rock and low scrub. There was almost nothing left for a tortoise to eat. And yet, when Vágvölgyi looked up from his work, he saw one.

News reached the scientific community slowly, as it often did at the time. In spring 1972, Galápagos National Park rangers returned to Pinta and confirmed that a single adult male was living alone on a devastated island. They brought him to the Fausto Llerena Breeding Center at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, where he would remain for the next four decades.

Lonesome George’s name came from the American press, reportedly borrowed from a television comedian. It turned out to be an apt name. He was the last known individual of an entire species, living in an enclosure on a research station island while scientists tried to determine whether anything could be done to save his lineage. His caretaker was an Ecuadorian named Fausto Llerena, who joined the station not long after George arrived and remained with him until the end. The breeding center now bears his name.

Decades of searching found nothing. Genetic surveys examined zoo collections around the world and captive tortoises on several continents, while field teams returned to Pinta in search of another C. abingdonii. However, none was found. The breeding program continued anyway. Females from Wolf Volcano on Isabela were housed with George for a time, followed later by females from Española after genetic analysis identified them as his closest living relatives. George showed some interest, but no surviving offspring resulted.

On the morning of June 24, 2012, Fausto Llerena found George stretched out near his watering hole, motionless. He was estimated to be more than 100 years old. His cause of death was recorded as natural causes.

You smell them first. It’s earthy and organic — mud, wet vegetation, large reptile — and it becomes, after a few hours in the field, oddly familiar. Then you hear them: the low exhalation of a tortoise surfacing from a wallow, the methodical tearing of grass close to the ground, or occasionally — from somewhere across the pasture — the low grunting call of a mating male. That sound carries further than you’d expect. It sounds nothing like what you’d imagine a reptile producing.

Then you see one. Your brain initially reads the large domed shape as a rock — registers it as landscape, not animal — until it shifts. One slow movement, and then you’re looking at something that has apparently been there for some time.

People are consistently caught off guard by the scale. You’re looking at his neck, not down at his shell — that’s how tall a large Santa Cruz male stands. He walks with a mechanical, entirely unhurried precision, each foot placed deliberately on ground his ancestors crossed for generations. When he grazes, it’s systematic — a slow, clean strip of grass that leaves bare earth behind him, moving forward by increments so small you don’t notice the progress until you look at where he started. He doesn’t hurry. Doesn’t acknowledge you. You’ll find that the encounter runs on tortoise time, and sitting in a field watching one eat for forty-five minutes does something to your own sense of pace that’s fairly hard to explain until you’ve done it.