Animals that live long and prosper

ACCORDING to the Examiner of June 26, the light died, last month, for the oldest known living animal.

Tortoises are serene creatures, who never rage, so Harriet, a 23-stone giant from the Galapagos, would have gone ‘gently into that good night.’ She lived through interesting times. Her career in public life began when Charles Darwin arrived at the Galapagos on September 15, 1835. He left on October 20, taking Harriet and a host of other creatures, dead and alive, with him back to England. In 1841, Harriet became one of the most travelled reptiles in the world when she was taken to Australia. She took up residence at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens but was moved to Queensland Zoo in 1980. Harriet was about the size of a dinner plate when captured and she would have been are least five years old then, suggesting that she had reached the age 175 ‘at close of day.’

But Harriet was not the world’s oldest animal. According to The Guinness Book of Records, a Madagascar radiated tortoise was presented to the Tonga royal family by Captain Cook in either 1773 or 1777. That tortoise died in 1965 when it was at least 188-years-old. But there is a third claimant. Robert Clive, ‘Clive of India’, was a soldier who rose through the ranks of the East India Company to become the first Governor of Bengal.