Winners: BigJohn & theDriver; Droppin’ & Frankee
Tonight was the final round of the Fall Teams Championship. In a stunning comeback, Driver Shea who had been behind with two weeks to go finished strong and won the “Big Prize” easily. He used the $200 in BestBuy gift certificates that he won to buy Mistress Daphne a new camera. How gallant. Now we can all look forward to following their extended cruise trip with lots of high quality pix (NOT!).
Fading into 2nd place after leading most of the season was Pluto – no longer a planet, and now no longer a leader. He folded like a house of cards in the last 2 weeks, and has been seen walking around muttering “What happened? How did I get so stupid, so quick.” Much thanks to our host Darin for contributing such a generous prize for our own little version of “Who Wants to be a $Millionaire”.
Good Question: What type creature was “Lonesome George”, who in 2012 was the last of his subspecies to die?
Choices: Tortoise, Black Rhino, Giant Panda, Vampire Bat
Answer: Tortoise
Google “Lonesome George” and you find this:
“The rarest animal in the world today is a giant tortoise which lives in the Galapagos Islands. There is only one Pinta Island tortoise (Geochelone elephantopus abingdoni). It is a male known by his keepers as Lonesome George. And when he dies the Pinta tortoises will be extinct.”
Well, he has died, but he lives forever on the internet. A good example of why one needs to be careful when researching using the big G.
Once there were millions of giant tortoises. In the age of the dinosaurs they covered most of the Americas, Europe and Asia. Like the dinosaurs they began to die out when mammals evolved and they were neither clever enough nor fast enough to compete for food.
But three million years ago, the Galapagos Islands burst out of the Pacific Ocean. For centuries these volcanic wastelands were bare. Then seeds carried by birds took root, the birds themselves stayed, and animals arriving on rafts of vegetation carried by ocean currents no longer perished.
Among the animals were the giant tortoises. They landed on 10 of the islands and have become adapted to the conditions of each. On arid, sparsely vegetated islands such as Pinta and Espanola only those with flared up shells and longer necks could reach the high-growing plants. In wetter regions such as Santa Cruz Island and southern Isabela they retained their domed shells and grew much bigger.
Charles Darwin, visiting the islands in 1835, saw that the tortoises on each island were different although they had obviously descended from a common stock which was now extinct on the mainland. This observation helped lead Darwin to form part of his world-changing Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
He Lives! He Lives!
If Lonesome George’s demise has saddened you, as it has me, then I have good news:
Lonesome George, the last of a now extinct type of giant tortoise from the Galapagos Islands, could be cloned after scientists have preserved some of his cells by cryogenically freezing them.
As the last of his kind, his life was a lonely one and his death brought the extinction of a lineage of animals that stretched back hundreds of thousands of years. Now Lonesome George, the last giant tortoise from Pinta Island in the Galapagos Islands may be able to achieve in death what he could not in life – and produce an heir.
Scientists have cryogenically frozen tissue taken from the five foot long reptile just after his death in the hope that they may be able to resurrect the subspecies of Galapagos giant tortoise. Maybe they will store him right next to Ted Williams. By using the same cloning techniques that created Dolly the Sheep, they believe it may be possible to one day bring the now extinct Pinta Island tortoises back to life.
It is a fitting legacy for an animal that had become a national icon in Ecuador, featured on the country’s bank notes. His plight became a symbol for the efforts to conserve threatened species around the world, and attempts to find him a mate were followed by a global audience.
sources: tortoisetrust.org, telegraph.co.uk
