A human being, when he reaches the goal of the century, arouses the curiosity of those who know him and the interest of scientists and gerontologists. In the living world, what is the most long-lived species?
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The undisputed leader of this ranking is the turtle that can reach the venerable age of 180 years. Next comes the parrot, which in some cases is more than a century old. Among the aquatic mammals, the sea orca, which can reach ninety years of age, stands out. The longest-living land mammal is the Asian elephant (some specimens may be seventy years old). The bear can easily exceed sixty years of age. The salamander is fifty-five. For the horse, the most remarkable age we know of is fifty-one. The Hippopotamus also reaches half a century of life, the rhinoceros at the age of forty-seven, the seal is over forty, like the whale, the chimpanzee can touch "the 37". The pigeon lives up to 35 years. The lion and the monkey can reach 30 years of age. Among the most distinctly domestic animals, the oldest cat turns out to have been "Puss", a tiger that belonged to an English noblewoman, who died in 1939 at the age of 36. Dogs over the age of twenty are rare.
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Another curious "classification" is the one concerning less widespread or endangered animals. The rarest mammal in the world is the "Burramys Parvus", a pygmy possum. A male of this species was found in 1966 in a ski lodge on Mount Hotham in Victoria, Australia. Previously there was only one fossil of the Burramys Parvus. The Javanese rhinoceros, found in freedom only in Udjong-Kulon, a reserve in the western part of the island of Java, is now reduced to about forty units and is in danger of ending up like the Bali tiger that died out in the 1930s. Even in these years, unfortunately, from 2010 to 2020, we had to say goodbye to many extinct animal species. The most recent extinction is the Sumatran rhinoceros. Several animal species have remained with very few specimens, while others have had to leave our planet after thousands of years, from the Tasmanian wolf or tiger to the tropical monk seal to name a few.
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Greetings from kork75!
