Isaac Petersen named his two female Aldabra giant tortoises Cera and Ali after two dinosaurs in The Land Before Time" animated franchise.
It was a throwback to the time when Petersen, as a teenager, touched his first giant tortoise at the Reptile Gardens in South Dakota.
“I just didn't want to stop touching them. I felt like I was touching a brachiosaurus baby. It was just magical," said Petersen, the 38-year-old owner of the Reptile Zoo in Monroe and son of the "Reptile Man.
Now, Cera and Ali are entering a new era at Woodland Park Zoo as Petersen’s Reptile Zoo goes the way of the dinosaur on Feb. 16. And they've got new names from the donor who brought them to Woodland Park Zoo — Mary and Elise.
Visitors will be able to get their first brush with the reptiles in May or June. They'll be able to see the tortoises up close, and even feed and pet them, said Luis Neves, senior director of animal care.
Mary, who is about 15 years old and 201 pounds, and Elise, who is 23 years old and 258 pounds, are currently in a temporary holding enclosure after finishing a three-month quarantine.
While Petersen secures new homes for the roughly 130 reptiles at his roadside zoo before its closure, the giant tortoises have landed at Woodland Park Zoo’s “Wild Encounters” exhibit, a reconfiguring of its Family Farm that will be renovated over the next year or so.
Woodland Park’s new interactive exhibit
The Family Farm, which catered to children by providing hands-on experiences with barnyard animals, will soon offer interactive experiences for all ages.
The exhibit will also feature lorikeets and lories — arboreal parrots from the Indo-Pacific region — which visitors can feed with cups of nectar in a walk-through aviary.
Woodland Park Zoo is crafting new experiences like Wild Encounters to foster visitors’ empathy for animals, Neves said.
People’s empathy levels for reptiles are usually very low, Neves said, but “ once you have a good reptile experience, you actually become very easily fascinated by them.”
The reimagined area will also house animals familiar to zoogoers. Goats, sheep and other farm animals already at the Family Farm will be set up in the former cow and donkey area.
In the second phase of the zoo's project, set to open in 2027, the area will have flexible, viewable habitats for its wandering ambassador animals, including a porcupine, skunk, armadillo, owls, hawks and a boa constrictor.
The Reptile Zoo’s extinction
Mary and Elise are only in the dawn of their long lives. Female Aldabra giant tortoises can live well over 100 years, some even reaching about 150 years, Neves said. They will be the oldest animals at the zoo and will likely outlive every other animal and staff member working there.
Considering the reptiles' long lives, Madeline Haydon, a longtime donor for Woodland Park, and her husband bought them from Petersen for $55,000 to rehome them at Woodland Park.
“These gentle giants, who once were hunted to near extinction and are a Vulnerable species, needed a suitable and knowledgeable new home that could commit to them for the rest of their long and lengthy lives,” said Haydon.
Petersen bought the tortoises for $33,000 three years ago from a middle man who’d rescued one from an animal facility and the other from a private owner in San Diego. They were in a 6-by-10-foot pen with no outdoor area, he said.
The tortoises are moving as the Reptile Zoo is closing for good.
The 30-year-old roadside zoo survived a near-extinction when Petersen considered closing in October and sold Mary and Elise. Ticket sales tripled that fall after having fallen one year after another.
But when Petersen reopened the Reptile Zoo in October following a four-week break to renovate the enclosures, low turnout and high prices for materials hurtled again toward the small business.
“It's sad. This is my dream,” Petersen said. “But it’s just what's right for my family.”
More than 100 of the reptiles at the Reptile Zoo have new homes set up once the business closes. The similarly named Reptile Zoo in Fountain Valley, Calif. — a roadside zoo with a large internet presence — will get about 35 animals, including an albino alligator, and about 10 will go to the Cougar Mountain Zoo, another roadside zoo, in Issaquah.
A new tenant may bring another roadside zoo specializing in mammals and birds to the building come March, Petersen said, but that’s still unconfirmed. Should things work out, Petersen will leave an alligator snapping turtle, a two-headed turtle and some un-adopted crocodilians with the new zoo.
Most of the animals, however, will go to private owners in the state, Petersen said. He said he vets interested adopters to ensure they have relevant experience with reptiles, proper income, a partner for safety purposes, and an enclosure already built before he makes an agreement.
Most of the reptiles won’t leave the Reptile Zoo until after it closes. It hasn’t quite hit Petersen yet that they’ll soon be gone, but when the giant tortoises were taken to Seattle in October, Petersen said he was “sad to see them go, but I knew that the Woodland Park Zoo had a lot more resources than we do.”
He hasn’t visited the tortoises yet, not wanting to get in the way of Woodland Park Zoo’s process to integrate them into their new habitat.
Once he does, he’ll see them in a large new home.
Mary and Elise will roam a nearly 1,600-square-foot indoor and outdoor, two-level enclosure that was previously a donkey yard. They’ll have mud wallows, heat lamps, soft substrate to slowly wander around on, and plenty of children to wow with their prehistoric wonder.
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