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Description
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
On a summer day in 1947, an engineer named Andres Herrera stumbled on the answer to one of the greatest wildlife mysteries of his time: where the world's smallest sea turtle goes to nest. From his plane high above Mexico's coastline, Herrera filmed thousands of Kemp's ridley turtles swarming Rancho Nuevo to lay eggs on the 14-mile stretch of beach. He had no idea that a few minutes of grainy black-and-white footage would become so important to the species' survival. So the film reels sat in a drawer until 1961, when biologists caught wind of the details. Later analysis confirmed that 40,000 females had nested on Rancho Nuevo that day.
That statistic would confound biologists for decades. Because when they returned a few years... |
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