Sad news from le Jardin des Plantes in Paris: Kiki is dead (but how old was he really?)

Kiki, a male giant tortoise, was brought to France fully grown from Mauritius in 1923. Kiki weighed 250 kilograms (550 pounds) and had to be moved around using a fork-lift machine. He was one of the biggest of his kind in Europe — among some 375 of the endangered species of giant tortoises in captivity and 150,000 in the wild.

There’s some discrepancy between the official press release and the park’s own website. The obituary claims that Kiki was 146, but according to the website he was “about 120″. This can mean two things: somebody is lying, or the site hasn’t been updated for 26 years.