海角大神

A team of researchers has reported that Ming the Mollusk, the oldest clam ever found, is in fact 507-years-old, 102 years older than the previous estimate of its age. But that is as old as Ming will ever get.

Ming, an ocean quahog clam, was off the coast of Iceland in 2006. Scientists from Bangor University, in the United Kingdom, who were studying the long-living clams as palimpsests of climate change, analyzed the lines on its shell to estimate its age, much as alternating bands of light and dark in a fish鈥檚 ear-bones are used to tell how old the animal is. This clam was 402 years old, the team said. It was called Ming, after the 1368-to-1644 Chinese dynasty during which it was born.

But a new analysis of the clam has , which means that it was born in 1499. This is the same year that the English hanged a Flemish man, Perkin Warbeck, for (doing a bad job of) pretending to be the lost son of King Edward IV and the heir to the British throne. It鈥檚 also the same year that Switzerland became its own state, the French King Louis XII got married, and Diane de Poitiers, future mistress to another French king, Henry II, was born.

When it was first found in 2006, Ming, celebrated as a disinterested non-observer to centuries of world upheavals, a hermetic parable of the benefits of not interacting at all with humans, with whom the clam is unlucky enough to share the planet, was called the world鈥檚 oldest animal. But, about whether that distinction should go to some venerable corals, the distinction was downgraded to 鈥渨orld鈥檚 oldest non-colonial animal,鈥� because clams don鈥檛 grow in colonies as corals do. The Guinness Book of World Records simplifies the grandness of it all and just calls Ming the world鈥檚 oldest mollusk.

But this is a record that other clams are well placed to beat. That鈥檚 because Ming is not getting older. To study Ming鈥檚 senescent insides in 2006, the researchers had to pop the clam open. Ming died. It's Wikipedia page reads in the .

Following a fair bit of outrage about how badly Ming鈥檚 first contact with humans had panned out, the team pointed out to the BBC that ocean quahog clams are and that these soup clams might also be hundreds of years old. None of the other 200 clams dredged up in their climate change research got names, they also said.

Ocean quahog clams are well known to live to be very, very old, but it鈥檚 not certain why that is. Like other long-lived animals, such as the naked mole rat, the animal has been a subject of much research, in hopes of applying their long-life secrets to humans.

The previous Guinness record-holder for oldest clam, before the upstager Ming came along,聽was a 220-year-old ocean quahog clam pulled聽from American waters in 1982. A , collected in 1968, is聽also displayed in a German museum, National Geographic reported.