Ten days before the Higgs boson was announced, Lonesome George died.
The last tortoise of the Pinta Island subspecies died on 24 June 2012; CERN announced its discovery on 4 July.
The events
- Discovery of the Higgs boson2012 · Geneva (CERN). On 4 July 2012 CERN physicists announced that the Large Hadron Collider had found a particle predicted almost 50 years earlier. The Higgs boson completed the Standard Model, earning Peter Higgs and François Englert the Nobel Prize.
- Death of Lonesome George2012 · Santa Cruz Island, Galápagos. On 24 June 2012 Lonesome George, the last tortoise from Pinta Island, died in the Galápagos. Found in 1971, he spent 40 years as scientists searched in vain for a mate of his own kind. He became a global symbol of vanishing species.
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