“When Charles Darwin arrived at Floreana in 1835 on the journey that would spark his theory of evolution, he heard of whaling vessels taking as many as 700 tortoises on one visit. ‘Their numbers have of course been greatly reduced in this island,’ he wrote. Historians estimate that between 1774 and 1860, passing ships took some 100,000 of the nearly 300,000 tortoises that lived on the islands when the Spanish arrived in 1535, driving populations of all 15 Galápagos tortoise species into steep decline and three to extinction. The Floreana tortoise, last seen in the 1850s, was the first to disappear.

Almost two centuries later, though, the Floreana tortoise is set to become the first extinct Galápagos species to be returned to its ancestral home.”

From National Geographic.