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Blobrana


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RE: Harriet the tortoise
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Steve Irwin has angered the family of an eminent naturalist with his plan to bury Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise claimed to have been the world's oldest living creature.
Irwin and his wife, Terri, want a private memorial service for Harriet when the tortoise - said to have been 176 years old - is buried at the Australia Zoo this week.

Before being sent to Australia Zoo in the late 1980s, Harriet lived for 40 years at Fleay's Fauna Reserve on the Gold Coast. The reserve was owned by the late David Fleay, an internationally renowned naturalist.
Fleay's daughter, Rosemary Fleay-Thompson, said that Harriet was one of the last of a distinctive subspecies of tortoise found only on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos.
Ms Fleay-Thompson said she was disturbed at the prospect of Harriet being buried.

"It really would be a terrible waste. She is a very interesting animal scientifically and she should be kept as a specimen in the interests of science" - Ms Rosemary Fleay-Thompson.

Harriet was suspected of being one of three tortoises brought to Brisbane in the mid-1800s by government official John Wickham, who was an officer on Darwin's ship, The Beagle.

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Blobrana


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Hum,

"Despite her longevity, Harriet is not the world's oldest known tortoise.



That title was awarded by the Guinness Book of World Records to Tui Malila, a Madagascar radiated tortoise that was presented to the royal family of Tonga by British explorer Captain James Cook in the 1770s. It died in 1965 at the age of 188."

(another tortoise, called Adwaitya, is believed to be older. That animal was said to have been born around 1750, and died in 2006 at the possible age of 255.)

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 16:43, 2006-06-25

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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
Date:
Galapagos tortoise
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Harriet the tortoise, the world's oldest animal in captivity has died on the Sunshine Coast at the ripe old age of 176. The giant Galapagos tortoise died of a suspected heart attack. She was a star attraction at Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo since the 1980s and even features in the Guinness Book of Records for her longevity. It was originally thought that Harriet was first captured by Charles Darwin in 1835 on the Galápagos Islands. As the tortoises were then dinner plate sized, it is estimated they would have been six years old. However, the story regarding Darwin is most likely apocryphal. Though Darwin caught three tortoises and took them home to Britain aboard the HMS Beagle, genetic tests indicate that Harriet belonged to a sub-species endemic to one of the Galapagos Islands that Darwin never visited.
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