The oldest tortoise

No real point to make here, I just thought it was kind of amazing:

…[T]oday we pause to note the death of Adwaitya, an Aldabran tortoise who died last Wednesday at the Calcutta zoo. He is believed to have been about 250, nearly 80 years older than the next-oldest animal, a 176-year-old Galapagos tortoise living in Australia….
(snip)
He had lived in the Calcutta zoo since 1875 and was one of four tortoises captured from Aldabra – which one tortoise historian calls a “low coralline atoll … in a little-visited part of the Indian Ocean about 400 kilometers north of Madagascar” – and presented to Lord Robert Clive, who was the architect, if that is the word, of the British empire in India. If Adwaitya was truly 250, he was born in the same year as Mozart.

Whoa. It’s that last sentence there that really drives it home for me.