Tasty tale of the tortoise
Despite the title, giant tortoises have had anything but a sheltered life, at least since humans became interested in them. Unlike other giant species, such as killer kangaroos or cave lions, tortoises managed to survive the ice age, taking refuge on isolated archipelagos like the Galápagos islands in the Pacific, or the Mascarene islands in the Indian Ocean. But mankind has proved a more deadly opponent than nature because, unfortunately for the giant tortoises, they tasted great…
In September 1835 Charles Darwin arrived on the Galápagos islands. He was distinctly unimpressed by what he saw. The volcanic islands were, he wrote, "what we might imagine the cultivated parts of the Infernal regions to be". But as Chambers argues, it was a conversation about giant tortoises with the governor of these islands, Captain Nicholas Lawson, which provided the father of evolution with a vital piece of evidence that he would recall many months later as he began formulating his paradigm-shifting theory. Lawson boasted that he could tell from which island a tortoise came simply by looking at the shape of its shell. "In time," Chambers writes, "Governor Lawson's remark would be the spark that started a fully fledged scientific revolution."