Friday, May 22, 2026

Bizarre Beasts explains 'What Both Doomed & Saved The Galápagos Giant Tortoises' for International Day for Biological Diversity on Flashback Friday

Happy International Day for Biological Diversity and Flashback Friday! I'm revisiting de-extinction today, but in a different way than Colossal Biosciences is doing. Watch Bizarre Beasts explain What Both Doomed & Saved The Galápagos Giant Tortoises for how.

Galápagos giant tortoises once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with at least thirteen species. But now some of those species are gone forever and the same forces that doomed those tortoises might have ended up helping save others.
No need for geneetic engineering and cloning — old-fashioned selective and captive breeding could re-create species thought to be extinct. That's good news for today's biodiversity holiday!

Follow over the jump for a retrospective of two posts from the back catalog that relate to today's topic.


I'm featuring First post: Why this blog? from March 21, 2011 because of the shared theme of collapse and recovery, even if the video is about wildlife species, not human societies. I credited web search for its 86 raw page views during June 2025, tying it for 25th during the month, its one time appearing in a monthly top post list during the 15th year of this blog. It earned 638 raw page views by March 20, 2026 to place 48th overall for the blogging year.

This entry is no stranger to year-end retrospectives, beginning with being the fifth most read entry of the blog's first year. It reached third place all-time by March 20, 2013. It fell to tenth at the end of the 2014-2015 blogging year, then dropped out of the all-time top ten by the end of April 2015. It took a decade for it to show up again.


I should have included Infidel 753 and I talk fossils from September 7, 2016 in Virginia Tech student discovers new "murder muppet" dinosaur for Wayback Wednesday because both are about paleontology. Instead, it's here because this entry is about extinct animals, even if one of them disappeared in its pure form this century. It never made any monthly top post list, but it still accumulated 477 raw page views from web search during the blogging year to rank 69th.

This entry has also appeared in year-end retrospectives, having been the most saved share on Pinterest and the second most commented on entry during 2016-2017. It repeated as the most saved on Pinterest in 2017-2018, then the eighth most saved during 2018-2019. This seems to be its first time appearing in a retrospective for being among the most read.

That's a wrap for today's post and look back. Stay tuned for the follow-up to Detroit's population increases for first time since 1957 I promised twice followed by the Sunday entertainment feature.

Previous posts in this series Previous retrospectives about the back catalog.
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