Who is the world’s oldest person? Today, the world’s oldest person is a lady in the US named Edna Parker. She is a whopping 114 years old! But if you asked the question ten years ago, the oldest living person would have been Jeanne Louise Calment of France. When she died in 1997, she was 122 years old! Wow! I wonder what her secret was?

Humans can live for a long time, but did you know that many animals can live even longer? It’s true. The giant tortoise often lives to be 150 years old in nature, and even older in a zoo. Over all, larger animals seem to live longer than smaller ones, with elephants clocking in at 69 years, horses at 50, and hippos at 49. But this isn’t always the case.

Recently the longest living animal found on Earth so far was pulled out of the icy waters around Iceland. If we had a birthday party for it, there would have to be 405 candles on the cake. To hold all those candles, the cake would have had to be hundreds of times bigger than this creature, which measures just a few inches across. It is a quahog clam.

The clam’s age was determined by counting growth rings on its shell. You can also learn how old a tree is by counting its growth rings too. Both types of rings can provide scientists with information about the climate. A clamshell can provide information about the temperature of the ocean and the amount of salt in it, among other things. And scientists hope to learn a lot about the past 400 years of Earth’s climate from this long-lived clam!