Exciting news folks. A bunch of geneticists, mainly at Yale University in Connecticut, may be close to finding me a mate. They’ve just brought out a paper in Current Biology provocatively entitled “Lonesome George Is Not Alone Among Galápagos Tortoises”, describing how they stumbled upon an animal that has clear signs of Pinta ancestry. It is unfortunately a male but could of course have sisters. I reserve the right to snub them, but I’ll come clean here and now. I’m interested.

Back in 2000, the geneticists scrambled ashore at Puerto Bravo on Wolf Volcano – the northernmost on Isabela – and collected blood from 27 animals. One of these turns out to be a hybrid animal, a cross between a Pinta male and an Isabela female. What’s more, it seemed to be quite young. The geneticists estimate it might have been only around 30 years old. This would mean that its father – a bona fide Pinta tortoise – reproduced on Isabela at around the same time I was discovered on Pinta in 1971. Amazing.

The story got a lot of good coverage, with my biographer Henry Nicholls writing the definitive piece for New Scientist, an excellently balanced piece in Nature, a nice article in the Guardian and a piece on the highly visible BBC News website.

The snag is that the tortoise and its putative siblings are still on Isabela. The blood samples date back from 2000, so there’s a degree of urgency about mounting an expedition to go and find these Pinta-like creatures. Tortoises do live a long time, but every year that passes my chances of a fruitful pairing diminish.

The Yale group has said that it might cost $50,000 to mount an expedition back to Wolf to track down other tortoises with Pinta genes. On top of that, they’re going to need about $30,000 to do the DNA analysis. They have started the graft of raising funds by through the Yale University website. The instructions are to “Make a pledge”, select “Other” and type in Lonesome George. The funds will be administered by the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies and used only to search for a mate for me.