World's Oldest Animal Was Older Than Scientists Originally Thought, Before They Killed It

Despite earlier reports, it has been determined that world's oldest animal was discovered and killed when it was 507 years old.

The animal was a mollusk, also known as an ocean quahog, named Ming. It was originally discovered in 2006 during an expedition to Iceland. Researchers from Wale's Bangor University killed Ming as they pried it open, hoping to count its rings and determine its age.

Originally, scientists thought Ming was 405-years-old, but after new research, it has been determined that Ming was 507-years old at the time of its death.

"We got it wrong the first time, and maybe we were a bit hastingly publishing our findings back then, but we are absolutely certain that we've got the right age now," Paul Butler, ocean scientist at Bangor University, said in an interview with ScienceNordic.

To put that age into perspective, Ming was therefore born in 1499, right after Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas and over a decade before Martin Luther's Reformation of the Catholic Church. The animal gets its name from the Ming Dyanasty, which lasted from 1368 - 1644.

"On the outside, the mollusk shell is curved, and that makes it difficult to get the right angle for measuring and counting the growth rings," Butler said. "The growth rings are also better protected inside the hinge ligaments."

The original age error came because Ming's old age caused its rings to compress together, forcing 500 of the rings into a hinge ligament that was only a few millimeters wide.

"The fact alone that we got our hands on an animal that's 507-years-old is incredibly fascinating, but the really exciting thing is of course everything we can learn from studying the mollusk," Jan Heinemeier, head of the AMS 14C Dating Centre at Aarhus University and associate professor who helped with the new dating, said.

Ming may not actually be the world's oldest animal, however. If we consider primitive organisms in our definition of the animal kingdom, then primitive metazoans like cnidarians and worms beat Ming by thousands of years.

See a picture of the late Ming here.