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| - The photograph of Jonathan is authentic. 1832 is his estimated birth year based on his size when he arrived on Saint Helena in 1882.
Although the estimate is widely accepted, Jonathan’s exact birthdate and age are not known with certainty.
On Nov. 25, 2024, a Reddit user posted (archived) a photo purportedly showing a tortoise born in 1832 to the r/pics subreddit. At the time of this writing, the post had received around 155,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments.
(Reddit)
The text of the post read: "Say hello to Jonathan he was born in 1832 & is 192 years old."
The same image also appeared on X (archived), on Facebook (archived), and in other (archived) Reddit posts (archived) in October and November 2024.
In short, as we found in 2022 when we looked into another photo purporting to show the same animal, it is true that a Seychelles giant tortoise named Jonathan has lived at Plantation House, the official gubernatorial residence in Saint Helena — an island in the South Atlantic that is a constituent part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha — for well over a century.
Archival evidence suggests that Jonathan was already fully grown when he arrived on the island in the 1880s, and as a result he is generally believed to have hatched in or around 1832 — making him roughly 192 years old in 2024.
A reverse image search found that the image in the post first appeared on Wikimedia Commons in 2021. The account that originally uploaded the photo was no longer active at the time of this writing and could not be reached for confirmation of the identity of the tortoise in the photo.
However, a representative for the communications office of the Saint Helena government confirmed over email that the tortoise was indeed Jonathan.
Jonathan the Tortoise
Interviewed for The Washington Post in 2022, Joe Hollins, a veterinarian who provides care for Jonathan and Saint Helena's other giant tortoises, explained (archived) that the estimate of Jonathan's age was based on a letter that mentioned the tortoise been a gift to the island's governor in 1882. According to Hollins, the letter said Jonathan was "fully grown" when he came to Saint Helena — which, based on the growth patterns of Seychelles giant tortoises, suggests he was at least 50 years old at the time.
A black-and-white photo showing the fully grown Jonathan shortly after his arrival on Saint Helena, which we looked into in 2022, provided further evidence that the tortoise had already stopped growing by the 1880s.
For these reasons, the government of St. Helena has chosen to recognize 1832 — 50 years before the tortoise's arrival on the island — as Jonathan's unofficial birth year.
It should be noted that the estimate of Jonathan's age is based on the growth patterns of Seychelles giant tortoises — nobody knows for certain exactly how old the tortoise was when he arrived on Saint Helena in the 1880s. Hollins, for example, told The Washington Post in 2022 that he suspected the tortoise may have hatched even earlier than 1832.
Similarly, Matt Joshua, Saint Helena's head of tourism, told CNN in 2022: "Jonathan could actually be 200 because the information regarding his arrival on the island is not exact and because there's no real record of his birth."
In other words, Jonathan might be even older than the 1832 estimate of his birth year suggests — although there's no way to know for certain. As a result, it's most accurate to say he was born around, rather than in, 1832. That's the approach Guinness World Records took when recognizing Jonathan as the oldest living land animal and oldest chelonian — that is, member of the order that includes all tortoises and turtles.
To summarize, a photo that circulated on social media in November 2024 did show Jonathan, a giant tortoise widely estimated to have been around 50 years old when he arrived on the island of Saint Helena in 1882. Because Jonathan's precise birth year is unknown, we've rated this claim as mostly true.
Snopes' archives contributed to this report.
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