The extinct reptiles of Rodriguez

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Abstract
The earliest notice of the Tortoises and Lizards of Rodriguez we find in Leguat (Voyages et Avantures). He says “that there are such plenty of Land-Turtles in “Rodriguez, that sometimes you see two or three thousand of them in a flock, so “that you may go above a hundred paces on their backs.” According to Admiral Kempinfelt, who visited the island in 1761 (see Grant’s Maurit. p. 100), small vessels were constantly employed in transporting these animals by thousands to Mauritius for the service of the hospital. But early in the present century the work of extermination appears to have been accomplished, and there is, at present, of the Rodriguez Tortoise not a single living example in the island, or in any other locality. Remains of this Tortoise had been discovered and had reached Europe many years ago, but no particular attention was paid to them. M. J. Desjardins, one of the first explorers of the fauna of Mauritius, sent a bone of a Tortoise found in 1786 in a cave in Rodriguez, with some remains of the Solitaire, to Paris, where they were examined by Cuvier and Blainville, who erroneously stated them to have been recently found under a bed of lava in Mauritius. Another Mauritian naturalist, C. Telfair, in searching, in 1832, for bones of the Solitaire in Rodriguez, succeeded in obtaining “numerous bones of the extremities of one or more large species of Tortoise,” which were presented to the Zoological Society of London, and exhibited at one of the meetings. These bones were still in the possession of the Society three or four years before the publication of Strickland and Melville’s memoir on the Dodo (1848); but no further attention being paid to them they were lost. Another portion of Teleair’s collection was presented by him to the Andersonian Museum at Glasgow, where they are still preserved.

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