Claim: A picture has surfaced online claiming to depict Jonathan, a tortoise born in 1832, five years prior to the coronation of Queen Victoria. Posts sharing the picture state that Jonathan is due to turn 190 years old in 2022, making him the oldest-known land animal alive today.
Fact: The picture in fact shows ‘A11’, a half-century-old Galápagos Giant Tortoise who lives in Australia.
On 8 November 2021, Soch Fact Check received the link to a Facebook post shared on the same day that features a photo of a tortoise sticking its neck up towards the sky, with at least two baby tortoises by its side. The image was accompanied by the following text: “Born circa 1832 – five years prior to the coronation of Queen Victoria – Jonathan the tortoise is due to turn 190 years old in 2022. That makes him the oldest-known land animal alive today.”
The post was shared in a public group called ‘Wonder Of Nature’ — which has over 95,800 members — and received more than 1,200 likes and over 600 shares.
Soch Fact Check used Google Reverse Image Search to determine the origins of the photo in question. Among the search results was a 2 May 2014 post by ZooBorns — a website that posts pictures of “baby animals from the world’s accredited zoos and aquariums” — which concerned the birth of tiny Galápagos tortoise babies under a breeding programme. According to the ZooBorns post, the image is from the Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Australia.
The Google Reverse Image Search also turned up a post on the Guinness World Records website about the real Jonathan, “the world’s oldest animal on land” who, at the time of the post, was 187 years old and lived on the island of Saint Helena. Jonathan — who belongs to the Seychelles giant tortoise species — is currently 189 years old. This search result likely popped up because of the caption accompanying the image being circulated — the image itself, as previously stated, is not of Jonathan.
Soch Fact Check also used TinEye Reverse Image Search, which turned up Google Currents (formerly known as Google Plus) posts from 2014 by the Taronga Zoos, which owns one zoo each in Sydney and Dubbo, Australia.
Soch Fact Check combed through Taronga Zoo’s Twitter account, using the search terms “from:tarongazoo “galapagos”” and “from:tarongazoo since:2014-01-01 until:2014-12-31” and manually went through the posts in chronological order.
The original post by Taronga Zoo dates back to 2014. It contains the image that is now being widely — and wrongly — shared as a photo of Jonathan, the oldest-known land animal who holds the Guinness World Record.
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The reptile in the image is a Galápagos Giant Tortoise, pictured alongside three young tortoises. “Our photo shows the tiny pair next to three-year-old hatchling, NJ and one of our adult males,” Taronga Zoo wrote in the photo caption.
Soch Fact Check also ran an image-based CrowdTangle analysis, with the search term, “Born circa 1832 five years prior to the coronation of Queen Victoria Jonathan the tortoise is due to turn 190 years old in 2022. That makes him the oldest known land animal alive today.”
The CrowdTangle analysis showed that posts carrying the wrongly-captioned image received a whopping 39,000 interactions across close to a 100 posts. While a select few posts were about the real Jonathan, most featured the same picture of the Galápagos Giant Tortoise from Taronga Zoo.
Multiple posts over the past 12 months had the same claim, according to CrowdTangle. Interestingly, many of these posts were accompanied by text in languages other than English, including Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, French, Russian, and Spanish.
(Clockwise) Images with text in two versions of English, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and two versions of French
According to a report by AFP Fact Check, also an International Fact-Checking Network partner, a Taronga Zoo spokesperson confirmed back in June 2021 that the animal seen in the viral photo is known as ‘A11’, “who is in her fifties and living in a zoo”.
Conclusion: The reptile in the viral image is not Jonathan, the oldest-known land animal alive today. The picture in fact depicts ‘A11’, a Galápagos Giant Tortoise who resides in Australia’s Taronga Zoo.