A clam dredged from icy Arctic waters is being hailed as the world's longest-lived animal.

Climate researchers at Bangor University in the United Kingdom recently counted 405 annual growth rings in the shells of a quahog clam.

When this animal was young, Shakespeare was writing his greatest plays and the English were establishing their first settlements in the Americas.

The team plucked the mollusk from 262-feet-deep (80-meter-deep) waters off the northern coast of Iceland.

The team is studying growth lines in clam shells as part of a project to understand how the climate has changed over the past thousand years.

"On a side note, we discovered this very old clam," said Al Wanamaker, a postdoctoral researcher at the university.

Some protest