Oldest Living Animal Killed During Research Ming the clam dies at 507 By: NICK KELLEY

Maybe it was a plot by the 2nd oldest living creature - also a clam - who was overheard at last year's Clam Ball saying, "I'm just so sick and tired of him going on and on about the patterns of his numerous ecru and indigo calcified shell layers" ... "327 years of hearing this guy brag about his age" ... "oldest living creature on the planet... Blah blah blah." ... "I say we call up Ho Jo 's and get him stripped, breaded and fried" (from audio as captured by Woods Hole Oceanographic, 2012, on their Clam Cam)
-Julia Hicks de Peyster

Have you ever wondered what the world's oldest living animal is? Well, it’s a clam, and it's dead.

Scientists killed the 507-year-old bivalve mollusc named Ming (a reference to the Chinese dynasty in power when it was born) in an attempt to determine how old the creature actually was. The mollusc was found in an Icelandic seabed in 2006 by researchers from Bangor University, according to The Independent.  

Determining the age of a clam is similar to counting the rings on a tree. In Ming's case, more than 500 growth lines were compressed into just a couple millimeters. "It’s worth keeping in mind that we caught a total of 200 ocean quahogs [hard clams] on our Iceland expedition,” scientists told Science Nordic. “Thousands of ocean quahogs are caught commercially every year, so it is entirely likely that some fishermen may have caught quahogs that are as old as or even older than the one we caught.”