Seven years. That is how long it took scientists to realize they were holding the oldest non-colonial animal ever catalogued on Earth, and that they had already killed it in the process. In 2006, a Bangor University team off the coast of northern Iceland retrieved a deep-sea bivalve mollusk that would later be named “Ming.” The shell had lived on the seabed near Iceland until it was dredged by researchers from Bangor’s ocean-science division in 2006. Its true age, established long after its death, would upend much of what science believed about animal longevity.
Key takeaways
- Scientists dredged up a mollusk that had lived for more than 500 years without knowing it
- They had to crack open its shell to uncover its secret, killing it in the process
- This ordinary animal hides extraordinary climate archives carved into its calcium carbonate
A dredging campaign designed for the climate, not for a record
At first, nothing about the sampling portended a front-page discovery. The mission’s aim was strictly climatic: to understand how the oceans of the past warmed or cooled. A team from Bangor University in the United Kingdom retrieved this deep-water Icelandic creature from the sea floor, along with about 200 other ocean quahogs. The species in question, Arctica islandica (the northern quahog, a meadow of the cold seas), possesses a trait that makes it a valuable scientific instrument: it can live an exceptionally long time, and its body records, year after year, the conditions of its surroundings.
Among the hundred shells recovered that day, one specimen looked unassuming. Nothing about its size or outward appearance suggested it had lain on Iceland’s sands for more than five centuries. It was only in the laboratory, as researchers methodically opened each shell to study it under a microscope, that the full magnitude of the find—and the price of obtaining it—became clear.
Counting the rings, a science as precise as it is imperfect
The method resembles the approach used to date a tree. Each summer, when the ocean warms and food becomes abundant, a new growth ring appears on the shell. Counting these growth bands should, in theory, allow us to step back to the animal’s year of birth. In practice, the exercise proved far more perilous than anticipated. In 2006, some bands were so narrow they could not be visually separated from one another.
On October 28, 2007, Bangor’s sclerochronologists announced that they had studied the shell’s annual growth rings and determined that the mollusk was between 405 and 410 years old. A breathtaking age, enough to set a world record. But the story did not end there. Seven years later, the scientists used radiocarbon dating to determine an age of 507 years. A gap of about a hundred years between the two estimates, to be precise.
This interval between discovery and publication was not accidental. The researchers themselves acknowledged their caution when confronted with such a striking figure. “We misjudged its age at first, so we were a bit reluctant to publish our results at the time,” explained Paul Butler, one of the researchers who helped make the discovery. The name “Ming” was chosen in reference to the Chinese dynasty ruling at the time of its birth, around 1498 or 1499, during Europe’s Renaissance era. The paradox remains: to uncover this five-century-old secret, the shell had to be opened, and an opened shell no longer protected the animal inside.
A living climate archive, etched in limestone
Beyond the record, the scientific dimension was what justified the dissection. Each growth ring does more than mark a year: it records the water temperature, food availability, and the marine chemistry of the moment of its formation. The mollusk thus acts as a biological thermometer, capable of revealing, century after century, the evolution of currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic.
Ming wasn’t a lone example in this study. Other clams examined were found to be over 300 years old. This collective longevity mattered to paleoclimatologists far more than the single record: by stacking the archives of several specimens born in different periods, they could reconstruct a continuous, unbroken climate timeline across centuries. Some researchers even tracked down shells much older stored elsewhere: clams collected during a July 1868 oceanographic expedition around Iceland, later kept in Kiel’s museum drawers in Germany. All of these pieces form a climate puzzle that, thanks to these shells, extends well beyond direct human memory.
An ordinary animal, an extraordinary fate
What stands out in this story is the mismatch between the mollusk’s plain appearance and the magnitude of what it represents. The northern quahog is nothing exotic: a common clam fished and eaten for decades along the Atlantic coasts. James Scourse, a marine geologist who participated in the project, recalled that the same species sometimes ends up on our plates: “whoever has eaten clam chowder in New England has likely eaten flesh from this species,” some individuals of which could be hundreds of years old without anyone ever knowing.
The Ming shell’s remains now reside at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, where they continue to serve as a reference point for marine sclerochronology work. Bangor teams are continuing their analyses on other centenarian specimens dredged in the same Icelandic waters, with the aim of extending this climate timeline further, by pairing data from recent shells with those much older, stored since 1868 in Kiel’s museum collections.
Sources: dailygeekshow.com | rse-magazine.com
