Lonesome George was the last known individual of the Pinta Island subspecies of Galapagos giant tortoise, discovered in 1971 and the focus of decades of conservation efforts, including attempts to find him a mate from closely related subspecies, none of which produced viable offspring. he died in june 2012 at an estimated age of about 100, officially marking the extinction of his subspecies. his body was preserved through taxidermy and is now on permanent display at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos, after spending a few years on loan to a museum in New York.
the decades of trying to find him a mate and it just never working is genuinely sad in retrospect
at least he's preserved and on display rather than just gone, feels like a small mercy for how significant he was