Pinta Island
Pinta Island (also known as Abingdon Island) is an island located in the Galapagos Islands group, Ecuador. It has an area of 60 km and a maximum altitude of 777 meters.
Pinta is the original home to Lonesome George, perhaps the most famous tortoise in the Galapagos Islands. You can now visit Lonesome George at the Charles Darwin Research station on Santa Cruz island.
Pinta Island is also home to swallow-tailed gulls, marine iguanas, sparrow hawks, fur seals and a number of other birds and mammals. The most northern island in the Galapagos, at one time Isla Pinta had a thriving tortoise population.
The elongated island of Pinta is the northernmost of the active Galapagos volcanoes. Pinta is a shield volcano with numerous young cones and lava flows originating from NNW-trending fissures.
On January 28, 2008, Galapagos National Park official Victor Carrion announced the killing of 53 sea lions at Pinta, Galapagos Islands nature reserve with their heads caved in. In 2001 poachers killed 35 male sea lions.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Pinta Island
