Tomas Diagne

[3] 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.

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.

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.

When he was told of a carcass of that animal, he drove 1,200 miles (1,900 km) across America's East Coast to retrieve it;[4] 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.

[8] That same year, he received the Tusk Award for Conservation in Africa, which was given to him by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge along with US $26,000, which Diagne was going to give to the Chelonian Institute.