Hello to a New Tortoise Species — and Goodbye to an Old One?
Big news for tortoise lovers: In 2011, a brand new species of southwestern land tortoise was discovered — unless of course it was actually found in 1861. It was a century and a half ago that naturalist James Graham Cooper identified the Agassiz land tortoise, which ranged across Arizona, southern California and the Baja peninsula — plenty of room if you're a tortoise since, let's be honest, you're not going anywhere fast. But zoologists long suspected that some of the tortoises across the Agassiz range might belong to another species. A multi-national team of scientists thus went back to the lab, extracted DNA from tissue samples of Cooper's original find and compared them to existing critters. The doubters turned out to be right: the Arizona and Baja tortoises are a separate species from the California group. Why does that matter? Because it immediately makes the Agassiz a potentially endangered species. A critter that's lost 70% of its range and a fair share of its kinfolk is one that could easily be in trouble.