CNN founder Ted Turner’s ranch helped save a rare tortoise from extinction

For thousands of years, the Bolson tortoise had been missing from the grasslands of New Mexico. Then a private ranch offered the species something it had not had in generations: space to start again. What began with just 30 captive tortoises grew into a population of roughly 800 through a long-running conservation effort backed by Ted Turner’s Turner Endangered Species Fund. Among the animals was Gertie, an elderly female estimated to be at least 80 years old, whose eggs have helped keep the breeding programme going.As reported by Turtle Conservancy, in 2023, nearly two dozen tortoises were released onto Turner’s vast Armendaris Ranch, marking a new chapter in the attempt to establish a free-living population. Their return is not a quick rescue story. It is a slow experiment in whether a species absent from the American Southwest for thousands of years can find its way home again.How Ted Turner helped bring the Bolson tortoise back to the USThe Bolson tortoise is North America’s largest and rarest tortoise species. It was not even known to science until the late 1950s, and much about its natural history remains poorly understood. Fossil evidence, however, shows that its range was o...