Lonesome George, Immortalized

Lonesome George, Immortalized
Natural History Museum Displays a Giant Tortoise
By HENRY FOUNTAINOCT. 23, 2014


A mold of the head of Lonesome George, the giant Galápagos tortoise whose death in 2012 signified the end of his subspecies. Credit D. Finnin/American Museum of Natural History

Extinction is forever, as the conservationists say. Desiccation, it turns out, is only nearly so.

The giant Galápagos tortoise known as Lonesome George, whose death in 2012 signified the end of his subspecies, has been preserved for posterity in a one-of-a-kind effort by expert taxidermists. But the work took about half a year longer than expected, in large part because the tortoise stubbornly refused to dry out.

“That’s always the great unknown, how long the animal will take to dry,” said George A. Dante Jr., whose studio, Wildlife Preservations, in Woodland Park, N.J., was given the task of preparing the 170-pound, five-foot-long tortoise. Lonesome George — now fully dry and fully preserved, posed as if he were looking for his favorite food, cactus — is on display until early January at the American Museum of Natural History, one of the partners in the effort.

George was found on Pinta Island in the Galápagos archipelago off Ecuador in 1971, a time when the Pinta Island subspecies was thought to be extinct. The tortoise lived most of the rest of his life — he was thought to be about 100 when he died of natural causes — at a research station on another island. Efforts to breed him with tortoises of other subspecies were unsuccessful.


George A. Dante Jr. of Wildlife Preservations and his team prepared the 170-pound, five-foot-long tortoise for exhibition. Credit R. Mickens/American Museum of Natural History

Like four other subspecies (of 15 total) that became extinct, Pinta tortoises suffered from overhunting by whalers and other seafarers in the 19th century. The giant reptiles were prized because they could be captured and kept alive on deck until needed as a source of meat and oil — a fact that Mr. Dante is now all too well aware of.

“We found that the shell was leaching grease almost continuously,” Mr. Dante said. “We were not totally surprised. But I’d never seen so much.”

Mr. Dante began working on the tortoise in June 2013, shortly after the animal arrived at the museum, frozen with its innards removed, from Ecuador.

“We went into this project knowing that no one had done one of these giant tortoises in many, many years,” Mr. Dante said. In preparation, he and his staff did some research, looking for taxidermy notes or other information. “There’s nothing out there,” he said.

Mr. Dante practices what might be called old-school taxidermy, like that done by Carl Akeley and other masters of the craft who were responsible for the museum’s signature dioramas in the first half of the 20th century. (Mr. Dante was involved in restoring the North American mammal dioramas several years ago.) For Lonesome George, that meant sculpting an anatomically accurate mannequin — of clay over foam — for the legs, neck, head and tail, and then sewing the skin over it and attaching the shell to it.


They made George look as he did when they first found him on Pinta Island. Credit R. Mickens/American Museum of Natural History

But the skin and shell had to be tanned first, and to be tanned, needed to be dunked in a degreasing solution. Mr. Dante’s team used a commercial product meant for pigskin. “Taking a skin and degreasing it is one thing,” he said. “But a tortoise shell is like this honeycomb.” The shell had to go through the process several times to be fully degreased.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
Once that hurdle was overcome, Mr. Dante soon faced another. When sewing the skin, he and his staff put a coating of water-based paste between the skin and the mannequin, which they could then manipulate to make wrinkles and other fine details. With the typical taxidermy job, the problem is keeping this paste from drying out too quickly — often the skin has to be covered with wet towels and plastic bags.

But with Lonesome George — an animal, the museum curators noted, that was adapted to the dry climate of the Galápagos Islands — the paste dried very slowly. Too slowly, in fact.

“Weeks after we started, most areas on him were still as soft as the day we put him together,” Mr. Dante said. “This really concerned us, as our deadline was getting closer.”

So they built a small tent with a dehumidifier and silica gel, put Lonesome George inside and left him there for several weeks. Eventually the paste hardened.


A taxidermist at Wildlife Preservations works on the one-of-a-kind effort, which took about half a year longer than expected, in large part because the tortoise stubbornly refused to dry out. Credit Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

“He fought us all the way, but he really dried perfectly,” Mr. Dante said.

The shell, which had been sawed apart using a chainsaw after George died, was repaired and attached to the mannequin with glue and screws. Then Mr. Dante spent about a week recoloring the skin and shell using a combination of techniques, including airbrush and hand brushes. “The goal was to make George look like he did when they first found him on Pinta Island,” Mr. Dante said.

He also installed two custom-made hand-painted glass eyes. “I think we can safely say they are the most accurate tortoise eyes ever created,” he said.

The yearlong project was also sponsored by the Galápagos Conservancy, the Galápagos National Park in Ecuador and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. The tortoise will be returned to Ecuador and permanently displayed at the research station in the Galápagos.

Mr. Dante described the project as an “emotional roller-coaster” because of Lonesome George’s status as a symbol of extinction.

“No matter how you look at it, it’s a very sad story,” he said. “On the flip side, it’s a great story that instead of being buried, George is now immortalized. We’ve used his body to become a monument for conservation.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/arts/artsspecial/natural-history-museum-displays-a-giant-tortoise.html?ref=topics