Ming lived through the Spanish Armada, the World Wars and the Civil Rights movement. Though he isn’t as famous as these events, he was historic in his own right. So who is this mysterious fellow that lived for 507 years?
Ming is an ocean quahog (aka the species of clam in your delicious clam chowder soup) that was extracted from an Icelandic seabed in 2006 for analysis by scientists. Little did they know at the time that they killed the world's oldest-known individual animal.
Globally, the average human lifespan is 70 years, according to the World Health Organization. Ming seriously outlived us -- and he’s not the only animal to do so.
Other animal individuals -- like Cookie, a resident cockatoo at the Chicago Zoological park – can live for really long times (Cookie is 80). One koi fish, Hanako, lived to be 226 years old. And if you think getting old is hard on your body, try being this Layson albatross that hatched a chick at 62 years old last year.
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