'', Senegal flapshell turtle, 2013 photo by Tomas Diagne Diagne was born in a family that had military and civil experience, but little interest in wildlife; a love of animals helped make him a conservationist. In the late 1990s, he chaired the African chapter of the
Turtle Survival Alliance. An early major project (for which he was given a
Rolex Award) was setting up a center in Noflaye to protect Senegal's endangered tortoises. At the center (which he founded with his cousin Lamine captured tortoises (especially the
African spurred tortoise) are bred; he started it when he was 23. Diagne aimed to fill what he saw as a kind of void: people cared about larger animals, but less about reptiles like turtles and tortoises which, he said, fulfill important ecological functions, including the dissemination of tree seeds, the maintenance of
seagrass meadows, and the providing of food for other animals by way of the many eggs they lay and the hatchlings that come from them. One of the threatened turtles Diagne studies is the
Nubian flapshell turtle. When he was told of a carcass of that animal, he drove across America's East Coast to retrieve it; he buried it in his wife's backyard and three months later had it cleaned out so he could display the skeleton at the African Chelonian Institute in Senegal, which he founded in 2009. He said, at the time, it might be the last example of the species. ==Awards==