Galápagos tortoises are recognizable creatures that can live for over 100 years and weigh up to 400 kg. Only the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean—nearly 1,000 km from Ecuador, the closest landmass—have them. Consequently, how they got there in the first place has long baffled experts.
Some people believed that gigantic tortoises had been transported by sailors from the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean to the Galápagos Islands at the beginning of the 19th century. But because of DNA analysis, we now understand that South America was the ancestral home of Galápagos tortoises.
Paleontologist Georg Baur postulated that the creatures must have crossed a prehistoric land bridge in the late 1800s. He reasoned that since tortoises aren’t known for their swimming prowess, they couldn’t have swum an ocean. But later, in 1923, a yacht’s side was thrown over by naturalist William Beebe! Fortunately, the reptile was a skilled swimmer, carefully navigating the water while raising its neck to breathe. But it passed just a week after the incident. Beebe found the concept of a tortoise swimming from Ecuador to the Galápagos just too much to bear since he assumed that it had consumed too much seawater.
In the end, #TeamSwim needed two lines of proof to win the case. The Galápagos Islands were created by volcanic activity, according to research on plate tectonics conducted in the middle of the 20th century. Islands emerged from the water. A land bridge was never built. Additionally, in 2004, a huge tortoise from the Indian Ocean’s Aldabra island made its way onto a beach in Tanzania, Africa, after swimming (or drifting) for 750 kilometers. It was okay, if malnourished and encrusted in barnacles.
Scientists now believe that the Galápagos tortoises arrived on the islands roughly two million years ago after a pregnant female ancestor or breeding pair made a comparable lengthy swim from South America.
