Animals4 steps
Older than trees
A rabbit hole is a short chain of facts where each one hands you to the next. Start at the top and see where it leaves you.
- Sharks are older than trees.
Sharks are older than trees. Shark-like fossils go back roughly 450 million years, while the first true trees appeared tens of millions of years later — sharks predate the…
And some individual sharks are practically historical figures…
- A Greenland shark isn't ready to breed until about 150.
A Greenland shark grows about a centimetre a year and may not reach breeding age until around 150. They cruise the Arctic slower than a person walks, and a large one alive today…
Yet the Greenland shark isn't close to the oldest animal we've met…
- The oldest animal ever found was 507. We froze it.
The oldest known animal was an ocean quahog clam dredged off Iceland in 2006. Shell rings and radiocarbon dated it to 507 years old — alive since around 1499 — and it was…
And one animal seems to have opted out of ageing entirely…
- One jellyfish can age backwards. Indefinitely.
The jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can respond to injury or starvation by reversing its own development, collapsing into a blob and reverting to its juvenile polyp form before…