On April 1 of this year, several news outlets reported the death of Jonathan, the nearly bicentenarian giant tortoise. Thankfully, the rumors of Jonathan’s demise were greatly exaggerated. The media and others had merely fallen prey to a viral social media post by a fraudster pretending to be his personal vet. In a sign of our modern times, the con artist used the buzz surrounding the fake death to ask for crypto donations.

Still, the public’s brief outcry and subsequent relief over Jonathan’s fate illustrates just how enamored people are about the tortoise all these years later. While his exact age isn’t known, Jonathan is estimated to be around 194 years old, and since the late 1800s, he’s called Saint Helena, a small island in the middle of the Atlantic, his home. Though there are sea-dwelling creatures that probably have longer lifespans, like the Greenland shark, along with a multitude of other long-lived organisms not in the animal kingdom, Jonathan is currently the oldest known land animal.

He’s specifically a Seychelles giant tortoise ( Aldabrachelys gigantea hololissa ), a subspecies of the Aldabra giant tortoise ( Aldabrachelys gigantea ). Giant tortoises tend to live plenty long, but Jonathan seems to be an unusual specimen even among his own kind. Most of these tortoises are thought to live roughly 100 to 150 years, though there are some that may have lived even longer than Jonathan (tracking the age of these animals is hard, given how they usually outlive the scientists studying them).

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