It was alive when Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa. It was filtering water in the dark depths of the Atlantic Ocean while the Ming Dynasty ruled China and before the English language had even standardized. For five centuries, this small ocean quahog remained undisturbed on the seabed off the coast of Iceland.
In 2006, however, its centuries of quiet existence came to an abrupt end. Researchers unknowingly plucked the oldest non-colonial animal ever discovered from the ocean floor and, in the process of trying to determine its age, accidentally ended its life.
The Discovery in the Freezing Atlantic
In 2006, a team of researchers from Bangor University in the United Kingdom embarked on a dredging expedition to the North Icelandic Shelf. Their goal was to study the effects of climate change over the last millennium. To do this, they were collecting live specimens of Arctica islandica, a species of edible clam known for its extreme longevity.
The scientists dragged their nets along the seabed at a depth of approximately 80 meters (262 feet), hauling up thousands of shells. Among the catch was one particular specimen that did not look significantly different from the others. The team froze the clams on board the ship to preserve them for later analysis in the laboratory, unaware that they had just captured a record-breaking organism.
A Fatal Calculation
Once back in the laboratory, the researchers began the standard procedure for analyzing the clams. To count the annual growth rings inside the shell—similar to counting the rings of a tree—they had to pry open the bivalve. This process requires cutting the adductor muscle, which inevitably kills the animal.
The scientists opened the specimen and began examining the internal bands under a microscope. Their initial count suggested the clam was 405 years old. This preliminary finding alone was enough to earn it a place in the Guinness World Records. Because the animal was born during the reign of the Ming Dynasty in China, the media quickly dubbed it “Ming.”
The True Age Revealed
Seven years later, in 2013, the scientists performed a more advanced analysis using Carbon-14 dating and corrected their initial margin of error. They realized their first count was inaccurate because some of the rings were so close together they had merged.
The new, verified count revealed that Ming was actually 507 years old. This meant the clam had settled on the ocean floor in the year 1499. During its lifetime, the clam survived the entirety of the colonization of the Americas, the Industrial Revolution, and two World Wars.
The Scientific Value of the Shell
While the death of the world’s oldest animal caused a stir in the press, the shell provided the exact data the researchers were seeking. The growth rings in Ming’s shell acted as a detailed historical record of the ocean’s temperature and food density over half a millennium.
By measuring the oxygen isotopes in the shell layers, scientists reconstructed a timeline of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures dating back to the 15th century. The animal remains the oldest verified solitary animal discovered to date.
It was alive when da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.
It survived 507 years on the ocean floor, outlasting empires.
But in 2006, scientists made a fatal mistake.
They found the oldest animal on Earth and, in trying to study it, they accidentally killed it…🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/yVJx0D31GR
— Fascinating True Stories (@FascinatingTrue) December 15, 2025