Tribute to the world’s oldest animal
Well, the oldest animal currently living in captivity anyway. Jonathan, pictured below, is 176 years old.
The average or maximum lifespans of these tortoises aren’t really known, since birth records of the tortoises kept in captivity are sketchy at best, they are often of indeterminate age when they are taken or rescued from the wild. They appear to take around 20 years to become sexually mature and can grow for several decades. It’s even thought that they exhibit negligible senescence, which is to say they don’t really age at all. Their deaths, when they come, are possibly always the result of something other than ‘old age’
Some proof of Jonathan’s extreme age comes in the form of this photo, which shows Jonathan in the year 1900 posing with a Boer war prisoner on the remote island of St Helena:
