"What sort of creature gave its name to the Galápagos Islands?"
This is a popular quiz question, and the answer is "a tortoise".
No problem with that - except that it's not as simple as it might seem.
It's at best misleading to state, as Wikipedia does, that "Insulae de los Galopegos [is Spanish for] 'Islands of the Tortoises', in reference to the giant tortoises found there." Because if you speak Spanish, you'll know that the Spanish for a tortoise (or a turtle) is tortuga.
Wikipedia cites, as its source, Michael Hume Jackson's Galápagos: a natural history (University of Calgary Press, 1993). I don't know if the misunderstanding is down to Hume himself, or the anonymous Wikipedia contributor.
The Spanish word galopego actually refers to the front part of a saddle. And when the first Spanish sailors landed on what we now know as the Galapagos islands, and saw the giant tortoises, the front part of the tortoises' shells (which has a very high arch, to enable the tortoise to lift its head) reminded them of a galapego; so they named the tortoise after it.
The islands then got named after the tortoises. So it would be more correct to say that Insulae de los Galopegos means 'Islands of the Galapagos' – and that a galapago is a type of giant tortoise.
I've verified my explanation (that the tortoise was named after part of a saddle) on several Internet sources, including here, here, and here; the last translates galápagos as 'saddleback'.
© Haydn Thompson 2017