I'm not a creation zoologist, but I seem to recall seeing a
tortoise when when we took the kids to the Henry Vilas Zoo in Omaha a number of years ago. Clearly, there were many members of the tortoise baramin "running" around back then and no one thought they were extinct. How could the tortoise have been thought extinct for a century if extant tortoises were known to and observed by scientists during that entire time?
An
English tortoise that died in 2004 was the last known survivor of the Crimean War. A Kentuckian tortoise is known to have traveled as far afield as Washington, D.C. Clearly no one who wasn't a drug-addled Darwinist assumed that the created kind that is the tortoise had ceased to be.