Preserving Lonesome George

Last year, I wrote about the American Museum of Natural History's preservation of Lonesome George, the last Galapagos tortoise of his species, after he died in 2012. Now, you can see how museum staff and taxidermist George Dante did it in a new short documentary created by the museum, above. The painstaking process—which was especially difficult, given the fact that no one had ever taxidermied this kind of tortoise before—took more than a year; just try not to tear up at the emotional reactions of members of the Galapagos Conservancy and Galapagos National Park Directorate when see the taxidermy mount for the first time.