Charles Darwin's Tortoise, World's Oldest Animal, Turns 175

Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Harriet the Giant Galapagos Land Tortoise, collected when she was 5 by Charles Darwin in 1835, turned 175 today at the Australian zoo where she resides.

The world's oldest known creature, Harriet was born the same year as the country from which she hails: the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean belong to Ecuador, which was founded in 1830. In 1835, Darwin, a U.K. naturalist, picked up Harriet during a visit to the archipelago aboard the Beagle, a scientific voyage whose discoveries led to his theory of evolution.

``Harriet, the Giant Galapagos Land Tortoise is turning a whopping 175 years of age'' today, the Australia Zoo in Beerwah, Queensland, said on its Web site. ``Not only was she once a personal friend of Charles Darwin, she is also the world's oldest living resident -- what a ripper!''

The zoo was celebrating Harriet's birthday by offering visitors birthday cake, trampoline and inflatable castle rides and face painting for children, according to the Web site. The zoo didn't say how it knows Nov. 15 is the tortoise's birthday.

Darwin caught three tortoises and took them home to the U.K. aboard the Beagle, according to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. The animals were taken to the Australia Botanical Gardens in Brisbane in 1841. Flooding destroyed records on the animals in the 1920s, and as Harriet moved between zoos, her links to Darwin were forgotten according to the Web site. In 1992, tests confirmed Harriet was a tortoise from the Galapagos, and over 142 years old, Wikipedia says.

Giant Galapagos Land Tortoises can weigh as much as 400 pounds (181 kilograms) and measure up to 4 feet (1.2 meters) in length. They can live for more than 150 years -- as evidenced by Harriet -- and in the wild reach sexual maturity at 40 years (in captivity they may do so after about 25 years.)

30 Million Years

The tortoises have been around for 30 million years, and the Galapagos Land Tortoises have evolved in isolation on the islands to cope with the archipelago's volcanism, according to the Darwin Foundation Web site. Features of the species include a strong, curved mouth, to help eating cacti and other spiny plants, a slow metabolic rate that helps it survive the dry season, and scaly feet to help negotiate lava terrain.

The species, whose Latin name is Geochelone Nigra, is listed as ``vulnerable'' in the so-called Red List produced by the World Conservation Union, or IUCN. That's the third-highest degree of threat for creatures still present in the wild.

Observations made by Darwin during and after his visit to the Galapagos, particularly in relation to the archipelago's finches, a bird species, and also concerning tortoises, helped him formulate the theories of evolution he published in 1859 in ``The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.''

The year 1830 was also when Belgium was founded, the first passenger rail service began in the U.S., and the New York Stock Exchange registered its slowest trading day when just 31 shares changed hands on March 16.