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DAILY TELEGRAPH (Sydney, Australia) 10 October 05 World's oldest party girl
Harriet the tortoise ... 175 years young. She was originally collected by legendary botanist Charles Darwin, who promptly went and mis-identified her as a male. SOON to turn 175 years of age, Harriet the Galapagos tortoise - possibly the world's oldest living creature - is finally getting the recognition she surely deserves.
Harriet, which was first taken from her home on the Galapagos Islands, off South America, by English naturalist Charles Darwin, is now the subject of a book about her amazing life.
Harriet was hatched in 1830. Five years later, she and two other tortoises were collected by Darwin and taken to England aboard his ship, HMS Beagle.
The three, then named Tom, Dick and Harry, were cared for by Darwin, but five years of freezing English winters and a lack of sunshine reduced them to a state of virtual hibernation and they were brought to Australia in 1842.
Dick died in the late 1880s and it is not known where its remains were buried, while Tom died in 1949.
In 1960, a visiting director of Hawaii's Honolulu Zoo examined Harry and found he was a she, a move that prompted the name Harriet. She now lives at Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo.
Three other tortoises are believed to have lived to a greater age than Harriet but have died.
Of the 15 sub-species of giant tortoise, some weighing more than 200kg, only 11 remain and it is expected a fifth will become extinct.
Their numbers have been depleted due to harvesting by seamen and the release of feral animals which have destroyed their food and eaten their eggs.
Harriet will celebrate her 175th birthday with a party at the zoo on November 15.
World's oldest party girl

it blows my mind that an animal can live that long. i wonder how far back she can remember? do tortoises get senile?

my favorite bit is how her neck seems extra extra scrawny and wrinkly, just like a little old lady.

That is crazy!
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TurtsandTorts Discussion Group
2 Russians (Harley and Marley)
2 RES (Sunny and Fatty)
2 Gerbils (Sydney and Vienna)
1 Cat (Abby)

She is gorgeous.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HARRIET AND MANY MORE TO COME!!!!

Yours Truly

Bob from Wells, Maine

PS
If you get lonely c'mon over. LOL

THE TIMES (London, UK) 11 October 05 Survival of slowest - Darwin's tortoise fit and well at 175 (Giles Whittell)
A giant Galapagos tortoise born when Queen Victoria was still a teenager is about to celebrate her 175th birthday under a cloud of genteel controversy over her bona fides.
Harriet, who was mistaken for a male for at least the first 124 years of her life, is thought by her Australian handlers to have been plucked from obscurity in 1835 by none other than Charles Darwin.
That would make her a key player in the evolution of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, as well as the oldest creature currently walking the planet.
But a British micro-palaeontologist who has undertaken the most serious reconstruction yet of Harriet’s epic plod from the eastern Pacific to Australia believes she was picked up by whalers for something more prosaic than research, namely her urine (for drinking) and fresh meat.
Is she really Darwin’s tortoise? The theory rests on claims that she was one of four giant tortoises known to have been collected by Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in 1835. The four were loaded onto the Beagle, reaching Plymouth in October 1836, where they swiftly took sick.
Two were dead by the following spring. According to biographies offered by Harriet’s successive Australian keepers, she was one of the other two, shipped down under in 1841 by John Wickham, a shipmate of Darwin from the Beagle.
This story is supported by the presence of another giant tortoise in the Queensland Museum in Brisbane. With the words “Tom — giant land tortoise died 1929 Brisbane Botanic Gardens” carved on its shell, Tom is thought to be one of three tortoises brought to the country for exhibition in 1841. Harriet may be the third. However, analysis of her mitochondrial DNA by US researchers shows she is almost certainly from Santa Cruz island in the Galapagos. The Beagle’s tortoises were taken from Espanola, Santa Maria and San Salvador.
The British expert Paul Chambers has shown that Wickham was probably in Australia when he is supposed to have been travelling there with giant tortoises in his luggage.
“Some in Australia are confident, but there is certainly a bit of a dispute about whether (Harriet) was actually part of Darwin’s collection or not,” Colin McCarthy, collection manager of reptiles, amphibians and fish at the Natural History Museum, said yesterday.
What is not in doubt is Harriet’s age. The US research on tortoise DNA “baselines” showed big changes in tortoise DNA on Santa Cruz island after a terrible cull there. Harriet’s DNA predates the cull, making her at least 170.
The size of an enormous paella dish, she is fond of aubergine, courgette, beans and parsley. There are thought to be barely a dozen of her sub-species left. This is partly her fault. She still ovulates, but has not had a mate for 100 years.

THE TIMES (London, UK) 11 October 05 Hooray for Harriet - At 175 and counting, she is doing something right
On October 11, 1830, under the headline “Points of Honour”, The Times reported that “Colonel Montgomery was shot in a duel about a dog, Captain Ramsay in one about a servant, Mr Fetherson in one about a recruit, Sterne’s father in one about a goose, and another gentleman in one about an ‘acre of anchovies’.”
Whatever the purpose or true nature of the anchovies, the world into which Harriet the giant tortoise was born on or about that date was unquestionably different from the one in which she now lives out her twilight years in the affectionate embrace of Australia Zoo on the Gold Coast of Queensland. Indeed, she might imagine that the only constant, apart from this newspaper’s wry concision, was humanity’s preoccupation with honour. It was honour that made Col. Montgomery take a bullet for a dog, and it has become a point of honour for Harriet’s keepers that she really was plucked from the Galapagos by Charles Darwin himself.
Perhaps she was. But he would have conceived of evolution even if she wasn’t, for it was a mere human, boasting that he could tell which island a tortoise came from just by looking at it, who planted the idea in the great naturalist’s mind. What is remarkable about Harriet is the brute bulk of her eight score years and 15, during which we have graduated from steam to interplanetary rocketry, dreamed up and rejected communism, allowed live breakfast broadcasts to New York from Buckingham Palace — and hunted giant tortoises to the brink of extinction. What Harriet was doing for the years before the rest of us were born only she knows, and she ain’t saying.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-1819801,00.html
Survival of slowest - Darwin's tortoise fit and well at 175