Using a new computational toolkit, Yale researchers recovered evolutionary clues from highly degraded DNA and identified two extinct lineages of giant tortoises. Some Galapagos giant tortoise specimens preserved in museums contained so little usable DNA that less than 1% of their genomes could be read. Yet Yale researchers were still able to recover enough genetic [...]

The Galápagos snapdragon, once close to disappearing, is showing encouraging signs of recovery through a long-term partnership between the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galápagos National Park Directorate. For decades, the Galápagos snapdragon was known from little more than a specimen pressed into an herbarium collection. It had been gathered near Caleta Tagus in 1962, [...]

A single female specimen, collected 1,773 m below the surface near Darwin Island, has been described as a new species of deep-sea octopus, and it doesn’t fit neatly into the Megaleledonidae family it belongs to, forcing a revision of the textbook definition.

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