Oldest Known Animal Lived More Than Five Centuries

Two scientists from Bangor University in North Wales found the world’s oldest known living animal, a 507-year-old clam, when they harvested it from the bottom of the Icelandic Ocean in 2006. The remarkable clam was among 200 specimens the scientists scooped from the icy bottom of the ocean to use in researching climate changes over the past 1,000 years.

They named the bivalve Ming the Clam after they determined it was born in 1499 A.D. That was near the middle of the Ming Dynasty that ruled China until 1644. 

After studying the ancient clam, marine geologists Paul Butler and James Scourse announced to the scientific world that they found the world’s oldest known animal. The marine scientists and administrative members for the university in the United Kingdom were criticized for killing the oldest known animal. The marine geologists routinely froze clams they harvested and took them to their lab in the university so they could examine the clams as part of a study about climate changes during the last 1,000 years.

At first inspection, the two researchers found the specimen they named Ming had growth rings indicating that clam was 405 years old. After studying the old clam for a year, they found more growth rings and changed the estimated age to 507 years old. Much like the growth rings found in a tree, a clam grows one ring a year as it matures.   

Butler wrote an article for “Science Nordic” magazine in which he suggested that other clams older than Ming might be found. “Thousands of ocean quahogs are caught commercially every year,” Butler wrote. “So it is entirely likely that some fishermen may have caught quahogs that are as old or even older than the one we caught.”

The Pando Forest

The quahog is the most popular clam used in making chowder. Fishermen bring up thousands of clams from the cold Icelandic Ocean bottom every time their specialized trawlers harvest the bivalves.  Therefore, a clam even older than Ming could make its way into the chowder of an unsuspecting seafood eater.

While Ming holds the record for the oldest animal known, other living earth organisms continue to exist for more than thousands of years. A 106-acre colony of aspen trees in Utah is at least 80,000 years old; some estimates put that age well past 100,000 years. Scientists call the forest Pando. Each tree is a clone (identical duplicate) of the other hundreds of trees in the spectacular forest. All the trees grow from a single, huge, underground root system, making that forest the oldest known living organism on the planet.

The shells for Ming the Clam stay in the research lab inside the North Wales university. No clams even close to the age of Ming have been found yet. Since clam chowder is a popular dish the odds another ancient living animal clam will equal to the 507 years of Ming is anybody’s guess.