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Asked by anon-177214 to Becky, Daniel, Helen, Urslaan on 21 Jun 2018.
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Urslaan Chohan answered on 21 Jun 2018:
Oh fantastic question! We can interpret it in a few ways. If you mean the oldest animal still alive today, I don’t really know. But what I do know is that an “ocean quahog” (a type of mussel that lives in a shell) lived to 507 years old! Wow! Now if you mean the oldest species that exists similar to its evolutionary ancestors, there’s a few – but bacteria would be great candidates! These have been around for 2.8 billion years!! Now that’s eye wateringly old. But yes, you got me – it’s not an animal! Looking at the “origins of life” (i.e. where did life come from), we can actually find the oldest life form that ever existed. There are plenty of “single celled organisms” that started life itself. These evolved over time to form the animals we see today, so the oldest animals would be these first few animals that evolved. But we don’t really know which ones exactly they are, we use fossils to guess.
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Daniel Marsh answered on 21 Jun 2018:
Giant tortoises have been documented as having the longest lives out of any terrestrial animal still existing.. some possibly over 250 years so maybe there is something in taking life slowly and not racing about!
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Becky Thomas answered on 21 Jun 2018:
Great question with some already fantastic answers. I’d can’t really add much else, except to give an example of my favourite ‘oldest animal’ – the oldest breeding bird in the world is Wisdom the Laysan albatross. This year, at 67 years old she raised her 35th chick, which is amazing because these albatrosses don’t breed every year (because it takes 7 months to rear a chick) and when they do they only have one chick. What a great mum!!
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