Later Life
Harriet was thought to be male for many years and was actually named Harry after Harry Oakman, the creator of the zoo at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, but this was corrected in the 1960s by a visiting director of Hawaii's Honolulu Zoo. (As it happens, Tom, the specimen in the Queensland Museum, was also a female.)
On November 15, 2005, her much publicized 175th birthday was celebrated at Australia Zoo. This event was attended by Scott Thomson (the researcher on Harriet's history), three generations of the Fleay family, Robin Stewart (author of Darwin's Tortoise), and many hundreds of others who knew this tortoise during the latter part of her life.
Harriet died in her enclosure on June 23, 2006, of heart failure following a short illness.
Read more about this topic: Harriet (tortoise)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall.... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)