Requiem for a Heavyweight
"Four score and seven years and four score and nine more years ago, a tortoise hatched in the Galápagos. She spent the past half a century known as Harriet. For more than a century before that, she was called Harry. Before that she almost was called dinner, but fate had other plans. Her heart, which began beating when Abraham Lincoln was barely out of his teens, finally stopped on June 23.
Her fame came from her longevity and from her celebrity friends. She spent her last years at the Australia Zoo in Queensland, run by Terri and Steve "the Crocodile Hunter" Irwin. And she was most likely rescued from the soup tureen that she strongly resembled by Charles Darwin. Yes, that Charles Darwin, born the same day as Lincoln."
"I find her walk through time to be extraordinary," says Scott Thomson, a paleontologist and taxonomist at the University of Canberra in Australia, whose analysis of Harriet's DNA helped to show that her life began in 1830, give or take a couple years."
It's a Scientific American article so they didn't get into finances or mention what the tortoise was using for an SWR...
"Four score and seven years and four score and nine more years ago, a tortoise hatched in the Galápagos. She spent the past half a century known as Harriet. For more than a century before that, she was called Harry. Before that she almost was called dinner, but fate had other plans. Her heart, which began beating when Abraham Lincoln was barely out of his teens, finally stopped on June 23.
Her fame came from her longevity and from her celebrity friends. She spent her last years at the Australia Zoo in Queensland, run by Terri and Steve "the Crocodile Hunter" Irwin. And she was most likely rescued from the soup tureen that she strongly resembled by Charles Darwin. Yes, that Charles Darwin, born the same day as Lincoln."
"I find her walk through time to be extraordinary," says Scott Thomson, a paleontologist and taxonomist at the University of Canberra in Australia, whose analysis of Harriet's DNA helped to show that her life began in 1830, give or take a couple years."
It's a Scientific American article so they didn't get into finances or mention what the tortoise was using for an SWR...
