Did Galápagos Turtle Lineage Survive Ancient Blast?
About 100,000 years ago the top of Volcano Alcedo in the Galápagos Islands exploded in a violent eruption that smothered the region in pumice and blew away all but one lucky lineage of the giant tortoises that lived there, according to a new study. “The only lineage that probably survived the eruption was the one that repopulated the region,” said Luciano Beheregaray, a molecular ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.