Last summer, when I first met Prof Siegert, I was too polite to remind him of what had happened to another British science project, the Beagle 2 mission to Mars, the spacecraft named after the ship that had carried Charles Darwin.

BBC: Why did the Antarctic drilling project fail?

The giant tortoises of the Galapagos helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution after he visited the islands in the 1830s, on his five year voyage aboard HMS Beagle.

CNN: Lonesome George, last of the Pinta Island tortoises, dies