ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
In the late 19th century, German zoologist August Brauer toured the mountains of Mahé island in the Seychelles archipelago off the east coast of Africa, collecting specimens as he went. In 1901, three of his finds—freshwater turtles that seemed to belong to a unique, endemic species—made their way to the Zoological Museum in Hamburg, Germany. There, Austrian herpetologist Friedrich Siebenrock inspected the specimens, placing them in a new taxon, Sternotherus nigricans seychellensis (later changed to Pelusios seychellensis). The species was never again observed, however, leading researchers to assume that it had gone extinct. But new molecular evidence suggests the species never existed in the first place.
Taxonomic confusion accompanied P. seychellensis from its very introduction to science. Its validity as a separate species was first ...
