Family's tortoise missing for 30 years turns up in the attic
Pet owners everywhere would agree: the loss of a pet is a difficult event to process—especially in the case of a missing pet. Dealing with the ambiguous loss of a pet gone missing is exactly what the Almeida family in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, went through in the 1980s. During a home renovation, Read More...
Tortoise discovered in a home in Pompeii
Almost 2000 years after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and its trapping of the city of Pompeii in time, archaeologists are still making discoveries in the ash-frozen city. They have recently found chariots, pieced together ancient frescoes, and even charted the genome of one of the frozen Pompeiians. Read More...
Giant tortoise believed extinct for 100 years is actually alive
We previously shared a story about a family finding their pet tortoise alive and well in their attic after it had been missing for over 30 years. Now prepare for an equally endearing tortoise comeback story. Considered extinct for more than a century, a giant tortoise is actually alive in the Read More...
Meet Jonathan, the world's oldest tortoise
At The Optimist Daily we love telling you about incredible happenings from around the world, both human and animal focussed. At the start of 2022, we reported on one of these remarkable events, when the world’s oldest person turned 119. This time, the story is similar but in another organism, Read More...
Conservationists release 36 endangered tortoises on Galapagos island
Following the introduction of predators, competitors, and vegetation change on the Galapagos’ San Cristobal island, the population of the endemic Chelonoidis chathamensis giant tortoise was reduced from 24,000 animals to about 600 in the early 1970s, pushing the species to the brink of Read More...
Tortoise believed extinct for 100 years rediscovered on remote Galapagos island
A species of giant tortoises believed to have been extinct for more than a century has been rediscovered on the Galapagos Island of Fernandina. The discovered reptile is an adult female, suspected to be more than 100 years old. The species is unique to the Fernandina Island, one of the many dozen Read More...