When it comes to life expectancy, the mere 80 or so years that humans have on Earth is just the blink of an eye compared to the Greenland shark or glass sponge. While super-long life spans are rare in the animal world, there are certain species that have won the evolutionary lottery with genes that effectively halt the aging process, and fend off age-related illnesses like cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.
Here are six of the longest-living creatures on Earth, starting with a nearly blind, buck-toothed rodent.
1. Naked Mole Rat (30 years)
The naked mole rat’s 30-year average lifespan might not sound impressive, but the homely rodents live more than 10 times longer than any other rodent species. For comparison, mice typically live just two or three years, while the oldest documented naked mole rat was 37!
“Naked mole rats are quite remarkable,” says biologist Vera Gorbunova, co-director of the University of Rochester Aging Research Center. “They live underground in very safe environments so they evolved this very slow aging process. Because nobody kills them, they can benefit from living longer.”
How do naked mole rats outlive all other rodents? For starters, they almost never get cancer, which is the leading age-related cause of death in animals. Gorbunova’s lab found that the skin of naked mole rats produces high levels of hyaluronic acid, a powerful anti-inflammatory that also suppresses cancer.
“When we took the gene from naked mole rats that makes hyaluronic acid and put it into mice, they started living longer,” says Gorbunova, who wants to test pharmacological treatments on humans.
In other studies, Gorbunova found that the ribosomes inside the cells of naked mole rats were exceptionally good at making proteins without any errors.
“Their ribosomes are very accurate, which can contribute to different aspects of disease resistance,” says Gorbunova, “but it’s most relevant for neurodegenerative diseases, because that's where bad proteins tend to aggregate and accumulate.”
2. Aldabra Giant Tortoise (100-200 years)
Aldabra giant tortoises, native to Aldabra Island in the Seychelles, are the largest and oldest tortoise species on Earth. Males can weigh up to 550 pounds and one specimen in a Kolkata, India zoo was believed to be 255 years old when he died in 2006.
Giant tortoises are famous for their longevity and scientists used to credit the tortoise’s long lifespan to its very slow metabolism. But now they think other genetic and biological processes are at work.
Like the naked mole rat, giant tortoises have few if any predators in the wild. And if attacked, they can retreat into their nearly unbreakable shells for protection. Because giant tortoises are so unthreatened, they have evolved differently than most species.
“Evolution doesn’t select for lifespan, but rather for reproduction and contribution to the next generation,” says Gorbunova. “For most mammals, reproductive output decreases over time, because once you reproduce evolution doesn’t care about you anymore. But in tortoises and some fish species, reproductive output actually increases as they get older.”
Giant tortoises never stop growing and they never stop reproducing, which means that they effectively don’t age. The oldest living giant tortoise is Jonathan, a Seychelles tortoise who was born in 1832. In 2024, he turned 192 years old.
3. Bowhead Whale (200+ years)
While the giant tortoise is the longest-living land animal, the ocean is home to several creatures with truly remarkable lifespans, including some whale species. The longest-living mammal is the bowhead whale, which lives over 200 years.
The bowhead whale inhabits frigid arctic waters and gets its name from a massive pointy head perfectly designed to break through thick sea ice. The bowhead, which measures 65 feet long and weighs up to 100 tons, also boasts the largest mouth on the planet. Its tongue alone weighs more than a ton.
How does this huge mammal survive for more than two centuries? Gorbunova says that marine biologists have never once found a malignant tumor on a bowhead whale. They appear to be immune to cancer.
“It’s quite remarkable, because not only do they live so long, but they don't develop cancer,” says Gorbunova. “They're a thousand times larger than the average human, which means they have thousands of times more cells than we do. You would expect that they’d get tumors a thousand times more frequently, but they don't.”
When Gorbunova’s lab examined the bowhead’s genome, they found that the whales were particularly adept at repairing their DNA without errors or mutations. By not accumulating mutations over time, bowhead whales avoid cancer and other age-related diseases.
4. Greenland Shark (400+ years)
Scientists always suspected that the Greenland shark was one of the longest-living shark species. The huge fish, which spends its entire life in deep, arctic waters, swims at a glacial pace and grows incredibly slowly—less than 1 centimeter a year.
But it wasn’t until 2016 that scientists could finally estimate the age of these lumbering giants, which can grow longer than 20 feet. You can calculate the age of other shark species by counting the growth bands on their vertebrae (like tree rings), but Greenland sharks have no hard tissue in their entire body.
Instead, scientists turned to carbon dating, which is usually reserved for long-dead organic matter. Greenland sharks are born with a special protein in their eyes that never deteriorates. By carbon dating that protein, it’s now estimated that the oldest Greenland sharks can live for a whopping 400 years. They don’t even reach sexual maturity until their 150th birthday.
“This is not exactly the life you would want, because they're very slow,” says Gorbunova. “They live in this freezing cold water and they eat maybe once every six months. Otherwise they just float.”
Like other long-living species, the secret to the Greenland shark’s longevity may be in its cancer-fighting powers. The Greenland shark’s genome is twice as large as a human’s and contains multiple copies of genes that play a role in DNA repair and tumor suppression.
5. Ocean Quahog (500+ years)
This rubbery little clam commonly found in clam chowder is actually the oldest mollusk species on Earth. Ocean quahogs are native to the North Atlantic, where fishermen only harvest mature specimens—at least 60 years or older. These slow-growing mollusks can get a lot older than that, though.
In 2006, an expedition from Bangor University in Wales found an especially large ocean quahog off the coast of Iceland. Using a powerful microscope, they counted the rings on the clam’s shell, which each correspond to a year of life.
The colossal clam turned out to be 507 years old! It was nicknamed “Ming” because it was born during the 14th-century Ming Dynasty.
Clams like the ocean quahog live so long because they do so little. As filter feeders, they spend their days passively ingesting sea water and filtering out nutrients. Like giant tortoises, quahog clams effectively don’t age. Scientists suspect there are clams out there that are even older than Ming.
6. Glass Sponge (11,000 years)
Coral and sponges seem to stretch the definition of animal life, but not only are these stationary creatures very much alive, but they’re some of the oldest animals on Earth.
Sponges are filter feeders that excrete elaborate exoskeletons made out of minerals absorbed from seawater. Glass sponges—which construct delicate, glass-like skeletal structures made of pure silica—first evolved 650 million years ago, a time before the dinosaurs. Scientists thought they were long extinct until an entire reef of glass sponges was found on a deep ocean floor in Canada in 1987.
It wasn’t until 2012, though, that a team of scientists was able to estimate the ages of these beautiful, latticed sponges. By studying the composition of the sponge’s silica layers and comparing it to historic ocean temperature data, researchers calculated that the glass sponge was roughly 11,000 years old (with a margin of error of ± 3000 years).
