It was reported over the weekend that one of the oldest creatures on the earth, Harriet the Tortoise, most recently a resident of the Australia Zoo in Queensland (the zoo owned by famed Croc hunter Steve Irwin and his wife), died in her sleep.

So the story goes, Harriet was 5 years old when she was found on the Galapagos Islands by none other than Charles Darwin. She lived in Great Britain and Australia for the rest of her days…176 years in all!

Read that again….176 years old!

The year Harriet was born, 1830, was also the year the Royal Geographic Society was founded. (Our National Geographic Society was not formed for 58 more years.) Darwin didn’t publish his controversial theses on evolution for thirty more years. King George IV died during this year, marking the end of the opulent Regency period in art and architecture.

World news that year was dominated by the French Revolution. Andrew Jackson was President of the United States. It was the year that The Best Friend, the very first steam engine locomotive produced entirely in the United States for passenger travel, made its public debut. It was the year of the Indian Removal Act, which over the next eight years forced thousands of Eastern Native American tribes to move west into Oklahoma and points west, culminating in the 1838 Trail of Tears. Texas was still part of Mexico and there were only 24 states—12 slave states and 12 free states.

It was the year that Emily Dickinson was born. In its second year of publication, Audubon’s Bird’s in America was still the talk of the publishing world. It was the year before de Tocqueville made his famous trip to the US.

So much of what we now consider to be ancient history happened during the life of this one creature.

It causes one to pause, to reflect, and to get a sense of perspective. And it makes 42 seem like early adolescence. That is a good thing.

Rest in peace, ancient one.