I was pretty sad to learn the other day that Harriet the Tortoise had a heart attack and died at the age of (about) 175. Aside from just being awesome, Harriet was collected by Charles Darwin himself during his Voyage of the Beagle days from the Galapagos Islands and brought back to UK with him. Later in life, Harriet was brought back to Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo, where I was lucky enough to see her while visiting that crikeyiffic place a couple of years go.

It was pretty strange to see this turtle walking around, knowing that it had personal contact with one of the greatest people to ever walk the face of the Earth. For me at least, Darwin has always been more myth than man, even if you know he was a real person who actually existed blah blah blah it was still pretty neat to see something that he had collected that was still alive. This was no museum piece, it was a living breathing piece of history and gave me and infitismally small connection with something that I usually think of as the very far distant past. Forget about geological time, in tortoise time it’s only been one generation.

So I’m sorry to see Harriet go. Other science nerds will no longer get this same strange feeling from meeting her and this connection with the past is officially gone. But at least I was lucky enough to get that for myself, just in time. RIP, Harriet the Tortoise.