Love at 111

Last weekend we went to Invercargill, two and three quarters hours south of Dunedin, because I was teaching a seminar there. The highlight of the weekend for Dave was visiting Henry, a tuatara who lives at the Southland Museum. I had seen Henry before on an earlier trip to Invercargill, but Dave had missed him. Here's Henry:

Henry is about a foot long. Tuataras are reptiles but not lizards. Their closest relatives are dinosaurs. They have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and live only in New Zealand. They do everything really slowly and rarely move. Dave was fascinated that in warm weather their hearts beat ten times a minute and in cold weather only one or two times a minute. Henry is world famous because he just became a father for the first time at age 111. I saw an article about his 11 babies in an American news magazine (The Week), and pointed it out to Dave. Because I'd seen Henry before, it was pretty cool to read about him in an American magazine. Here's an article about Henry's babies:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/henry-the-tuatara-is-a-dad-at-111-1516628.html

The Southland Museum has several other Tuataras, and 21 babies were born this year. Some of them were on display, and they actually moved around some. Those frisky little kids! The babies were about 5 inches long.

Below is one of the other tuataras that's the same species as Henry, and the last picture is a tuatara that's a different species, with big spikes on the back of its head.