'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth
- ID
- 33347
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 08 Oct 2026, 4:01 AM
- Fetched
- 09 Oct 2026, 6:35 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.404media.co/oldest-living-land-animal-jonathan-the-tortoise/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 2.0
- Created
- 09 Oct 2026, 6:36 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
Researchers have sequenced the genome of Jonathan, a roughly 194-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) living on Saint Helena, and published the results in Science Advances. Jonathan hatched around 1832 in the Seychelles and was moved to Saint Helena in the 1880s; his genome shows unique variants across most aging pathways, including DNA repair, insulin regulation, mitochondrial function, and low-entropy methylation, compared against other tortoises such as a 36-year-old named Tank. Study author Stephen Clark of the Kallel Foundation first approached Jonathan's caretakers in 2017, and the work was delayed by incomplete samples, Covid, and new regulations governing access to the animal; a blood draw was rejected as too risky, so a cheek swab was used.
Why it matters
There is no practical builder takeaway here: this is a comparative genomics and aging study, not tooling, infrastructure, policy, or funding that changes what developers, agent users, or SaaS founders ship or buy. It is on the Hacker News front page (265 points, 156 comments), so it is a signal about what the dev community upvotes, not about anything you should change in your stack. If you were expecting a Malaysia or SEA angle, there is none in the text.
Discussion angle
Worth a short live riff rather than a deep dive: why does a tortoise genomics paper rank high on Hacker News while substantive technical posts get buried? Use the thread's 265 points / 156 comments as evidence and discuss what framing makes your own technical write-ups actually get read.