I stumbled across this guy the other day. I had nothing to do with his demise. Even though he was probably a bit more animated in his day, I still found him to be a wonder. His name is Gunther, he’s Galápagos tortoise and he lives (kinda) at the Natural History Museum in downtown Los Angeles.

Gunther was named after Albert Günther a zoologist at The British Museum who in 1875 conducted the first systematic survey of giant tortoises in the wild. Gunther was captured by scientists in 1900 and brought to California. Very little was know about the species at the time and it was hoped that Gunther would help researchers learn more about the species, and how they age and grow. He survived in captivity for fourteen years and in that time he grew from twenty-nine pounds to 450 pounds.

He gets mad when kids approach him and say, “Look at the big turtle!” Tortoises live exclusively on land and turtles spend some or most of their time in the water. The Galápagos tortoise is native to the islands of the same name in the eastern Pacific Ocean. At one point there were over 250,000 of them in the wild but by the 1970s they were near extinction. Today they’re making a comeback and estimates are that about 20,000 tortoises walking around somewhere in this unique archipelago.

They eat greenery and berries and leaves and fruit if they can get it, and they can put it away. The largest Galápagos on record weighed about 880 pounds. They are cold blooded so they spend hours each day warming themselves and then spend nine hours or so each day foraging. They are most active in the mornings and have been clocked walking at about .2 miles per hour.

Giant tortoises are the longest-lived of all vertebrates. One has been documented to survive until the age of 152 and the average lifespan is about 100 years. Poor Gunther gave his life to science, but he’s been making friends and showing people what he’s made of (literally) in the shadow of the L.A. Coliseum for well over a century.