Changsha Zoo in Hunan province responded. It had a turtle, but had no idea what kind. It had been bought from a travelling circus about 50 years earlier and had spent the past half century alone and largely unnoticed in a man-made pond.

With its stained, leathery shell, it attracted little interest among visitors to the rundown zoo. But its pig-like snout and wide, flattened dorsal shell resembled the photograph on the conservation society circular. Experts rushed to Changsha. Not only was it indeed a Yangtze turtle, but it was female and, though no teenager, she was still fertile.
[i]
'Can you imagine the excitement?' asked Paul Calle, the society's director of zoological health. 'T...

Changsha Zoo in Hunan province responded. It had a turtle, but had no idea what kind. It had been bought from a travelling circus about 50 years earlier and had spent the past half century alone and largely unnoticed in a man-made pond.

With its stained, leathery shell, it attracted little interest among visitors to the rundown zoo. But its pig-like snout and wide, flattened dorsal shell resembled the photograph on the conservation society circular. Experts rushed to Changsha. Not only was it indeed a Yangtze turtle, but it was female and, though no teenager, she was still fertile.

'Can you imagine the excitement?' asked Paul Calle, the society's director of zoological health. 'There's four left in the world and only one of them is female. You can't get much more endangered than that without being hopeless. You can't get more critical.'

Today China Girl, as she has been affectionately named, is in a specially adapted enclosure 600 miles away at Suzhou Zoo, where she is becoming acquainted with her centenarian suitor. She was moved three weeks ago and almost immediately the pair began preliminary breeding activities. Bearing in mind that neither had seen another of their own kind for many decades, and that males can be particularly aggressive when breeding, it has gone better than could have been hoped for.
... Guardian