Wednesday, December 28, 2011

PREMORSE. YOU JANE. In what may be my most glaring bout of premorse yet, I have learned that Cheetah the Chimpanzee, star of many a Tarzan movie and apparently the Darwin's tortoise and Churchill's parrot of the great ape world, died on Christmas Eve at the age of eighty. I am, of course, shocked that any chimpanzee could live so long as to only be dead now, not least one this famous.

A much more thorough treatment of Cheetah's life, times and career.

Also, for long-lived animals, check out Adwaita, a tortoise who lived to be perhaps 255 years old.

6 comments:

  1. Jordan12:50 PM

    So who (what?) is now the animal with the stalest obit?

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  2. Alternate headline?  CAESAR IS HOME.

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  3. Eric J.4:13 PM

    Wasn't there an article a few years ago in the Washington Post magazine throwing significant doubt on whether this chimp was Cheetah?

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  4. Carrie6:50 PM

    @EricJ: Dave Itzkoff @ the NY artsblog made that point this afternoon. This may be the biggest hoax since Anastasia!

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  5. Shayera4:22 PM

    When I was little, and still lived in India, (the early '70s), the tortoises used to run wild on the grounds of the Calcutta Zoo. There are pictures of my brother and I on the back of at least one of them. 

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