What’s the oldest know tortoise with a documented hatching date?

Submitted by The_Real_Mr_F t3_11z6jvg in askscience

You always hear about how tortoises are the longest living land animals, but all the record-setting ones (Like Jonathan on St. Helena) only have estimated ages, which as I understand it can be pretty rough guesses and are often contested. I’m sure by now that science has been tracking at least some tortoises, I’d imagine in captivity, from the time they hatch, right? What’s the oldest verified tortoise in the world?

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Dorocche t1_jdcp454 wrote

It's worth pointing out that Jonathan is still the oldest verified living tortoise disregarding the estimated birth date, because there are solid records of him being transferred in 1882. So he's verified over 161 years old, just not verified for his full estimated 191.

Finding a tortoise with a verified birth date is going to severely limit your options for how old they might be; even the oldest humans alive today are "unverified" because they predate birth certificates. The oldest tortoise with a verified birth date is likely less than 90, and thus very difficult to find on "oldest" lists, just because we didn't start verifying births long enough ago.

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annieselkie t1_jdd7j3w wrote

>even the oldest humans alive today are "unverified" because they predate birth certificates.

I must object xD Birth documents are very old, in the "dark ages" churches eg had birth and death registers for the local population. And noble people always did care for their birthdate. And they weren't the first in ancient Rome birthdays (at least of important families) were registered, they had a calender and even wrote their own family history/tree (with some gods mixed in way back lol). Some of the oldest humans may have lost their certificate over time or were born in a place/time where noone cared for one for them or it gets unreadable etc. But we have many "oldest" humans verified by their birth certificate/ID/an equivalent of it, and registering birthdates and deathdates or at least times (month/year) is very old culturally.

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Dorocche t1_jdd7t6o wrote

I see what you mean; the oldest humans alive today were born in a time where the vast majority of people in the vast majority of places did not keep strict birth records.

The concept wasn't invented in 1910 (to pick a random date), you're right, but the ubiquity is the important part. Maybe there's a random tortoise or two out there who luckily happen to have good birth records.

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annieselkie t1_jdd8sit wrote

😂 yeah tortoises probably didnt receive birth certificates then and werent that documented as modern zoo tortoises. In 1876 the german government started to do birth register and birth certificates, before it was churche's duty and pretty common even. In other countries it may have been in other times or not common at all and surely some people "fell through the cracks" and did not recieve one here as well.

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Rolldal t1_jdh8ele wrote

Just for the record (sic) accurate records were kept in Great Britain from 1837 (Civil registration bill being passed in 1837) and France from shortly after the French Revolution. This is aside from the parish records some of which (especially the Methodist ones) carry a great deal of detail. The best of these latter records record not just the names of parents but the mother's maiden name, father's occupation, location (ie farm name for instance), and date of birth if it differed from that of baptism. In England law was passed in 1538 by the then new Church of England making the keeping of such records a legal requirement, though most parishes did not enact it until 1598 and even then records were patchy (not to mention disruption by Civil war in the 17th century). As with any sytem there will be those who slip the net.

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virusofthemind t1_jdeunx3 wrote

Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos in 1835 and the giant tortoises were one of the many unusual species which greeted him of which he collected several specimens to return to England for further study. One of those tortoises, Harriet, went on to become the oldest recorded Galápagos tortoise – she finally succumbed to a heart attack in 2006 at the ripe old age of 175, surviving Darwin by well over a century.

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