The world mourned the death of Lonesome George and said that the last tortoise on that Galapagos Island has gone, and yet another subspecies was extinct. However, three years after its death, scientists in Ecuador and the US now believe that they might have discovered a way to ‘bring it back’ with the help of pioneering methods for reviving both the extinct Pinta Island species to whom George belonged.

They could also restore a species from Floreana Island, last seen by Charles Darwin. The professor of vertebrate conservation biology at State University of New York, James Gibbs, said, “I don’t think this has ever been attempted before. We can’t bring back exact copy of George, as he was genetically unique. But we do now think we can go long way towards restoring species with 95 per cent of same DNA”.

While speaking to The Telegraph, he said that there was still hope that both the Pinta and Floreana Island tortoises couldn’t be extinct after all.

He added that they discovered an unbelievable colony of tortoises living on another island, located at the foot of an amazingly isolated active volcano where the discovery of a new kind of pink iguana took place. There is a possibility that there might be surviving tortoises of a kind thought to be extinct on this volcano.