greenland-shark

In 2006, researchers dredged a clam from the seabed off Iceland and counted the rings on its shell. The number stopped them cold: 507 years. The animal, later nicknamed Ming, had been alive since before Columbus sailed. It is the oldest individual animal ever reliably aged — but it isn't even the strangest entry on this list. One creature appears to cheat death entirely, reversing its own aging on demand.

A Greenland shark alive today may have been born before the Thirty Years' War ended in 1648. An ocean quahog clam called Ming was 507 years old when researchers accidentally killed it by opening its shell. A bowhead whale carries harpoon fragments from weapons manufactured in the 1800s, embedded in its blubber for over a century. Extreme longevity in animals is not accidental — it is the product of specific biological mechanisms that researchers are now mapping in molecular detail.