The truth about giant tortoises (BBC)
Presented by
Henry Nicholls
Reputation: Giant tortoises live on islands. They can be aged by studying growth rings on their shells, which is how we know they are the longest lived vertebrate on record. Charles Darwin found they moved a whole lot faster than he'd imagined.
Reality: Giant tortoises are a recent evolutionary innovation and used to be everywhere, not just on islands. It's impossible to age them accurately unless you know when they hatched. They are actually pretty slow. Darwin was probably chasing them.
The largest tortoises in the world are to be found on the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean and in the Galápagos in the Pacific. But this truth has given rise to the false belief – often found in textbooks – that their large size is a product of island life. It almost certainly isn't.
This much is evident from a cursory inspection of the fossil record. A typical Galápagos tortoise has a carapace around 100 cm long. If this is the benchmark for "giant", it is clear that giant tortoises were not restricted to small islands. They were everywhere.
In the southern USA and Central America, for instance, there was a monster of a tortoise known as the southeastern giant tortoise (Hesperotestudo crassiscutata) that only went extinct around 12,000 years ago.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150519-the-truth-about-giant-tortoises
WARNING! One of the BBC's "new style" Web pages. Expect Firefox to slow to a crawl. This will probably be the last time I link to a BBC page.
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