The daily mission included patrolling large areas of unstable razor-sharp lava fields and of spiny thick vegetation across Volcano Wolf, the tallest of the Galápagos. Our team of park rangers, scientists, and veterinarians from 10 countries were divided in nine groups of three to four people each. It was ambitious, logistically complex, and very strenuous. Our recent expedition was aimed at finding the animals with a high proportion of ancestors from Floreana or Pinta. These hybrids include animals whose parents represent purebred individuals of the two extinct species. Many of these tortoises made it to shore and eventually mated with the native Volcano Wolf species, producing hybrids that still maintain the distinctive saddleback shell found in the species from Floreana and Pinta. These animals were collected from lower altitudes islands (Floreana and Pinta) during centuries of exploitation by whalers and pirates, who made the archipelago a regular stop-off for their crews to stock up on these handy living larders. Old logbooks from the whaling industry indicate that, in order to lighten the burden of their ships, whalers and pirates dropped large numbers of tortoises in Banks Bay, near Volcano Wolf. It is likely that people have been moving tortoises around the islands.
![pinta tortoises pinta tortoises](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dU1opl1nxtQ/TjwWLHk6i_I/AAAAAAAAE0U/7eFdokG128A/s400/Pinta+Island+tortoise3.jpg)
DNA analyses revealed an astonishingly large number of tortoises with mixed genetic ancestry in this sample: 89 with DNA from Floreana and 17 with DNA from Pinta. These exciting discoveries led to an expedition on Volcano Wolf in 2008, where we tagged and sampled over 1,600 tortoises.
![pinta tortoises pinta tortoises](https://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2015/10/938772_1_george_standard.jpg)
Volcano Wolf – the highest point of the Galápagos Islands.