Tortoise found alive in storeroom after 30 years! [WTF]

Photograph by: Perla Rodrigues , TV Globo

Besides the guy who wet his pants when Bigfoot walked into his camp, this is the craziest story we've read about all week. A red footed tortoise that a family assumed missing for 30 years was recently found in a storeroom-- Alive! WTF?! How has he been able to survive all these years, you ask? Was it hibernation? Or magic perhaps? Here's one possible explanation by a family member via the Edmonton Journal:

Almeida's neighbour in Rio de Janeiro spotted the bag and asked Almeida if he was throwing out the turtle as well.

"At that moment I was white and did not believe," explains Almeida.

Crawling around in a box with an old record player was Manuela, a red-footed tortoise the family had written off as lost back in 1982.

Manuela had disappeared during a home renovation, and the Almeidas always assumed he had escaped through a door left open by workers. However, it seems Manuela was hanging out for 30 years in the upstairs storeroom where Leonel Almeida, the father, kept all sorts of old junk he hadn't gotten around to fixing up.

When Leonel died earlier this month, Leandro and his siblings decided to clean out the storeroom, and that's how Manuela came to be by the curb.

The red-footed tortoise feeds in the wild on fruit, leaves, feces and dead animals, a professor told Brazil's Globo.com, but can go up to three years without eating.

The family speculated that Manuela may have survived on termites while in the house.