(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Researchers believe they know the final age of the Australian lungfish that lived for generations at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium until his death in 2017.
Shedd officials already knew “Granddad” — as the fish was known — was extremely old. He debuted, after all, at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair after a 20-day sea voyage from Down Under and stuck around for 84 years.
But how old was he? An article published in Frontiers in Environmental Science asserts Grandad was likely 109 when he was euthanized a half-decade ago (that would put his year of birth at 1908). This is based on analysis of Granddad’s DNA from preserved fin tissue that was compared against other lungfish data.
Researchers also determined Granddad’s origin was the Burnett River, Queensland, Australia, where his species had been discovered in 1870.
“Granddad was a remarkable animal who sparked curiosity about his species among millions of Shedd Aquarium guests,” Peggy Sloan, chief animal operations officer at Shedd Aquarium, said in a news release Tuesday. “We had the pleasure of caring for Granddad and introducing him to people for decades.”
Before the published research about Granddad, the oldest confirmed age of a wild lungfish was 77 years.
The Australian lungfish is now considered “centenarian species” and the longest-living freshwater sub-tropical fish species in the world.
The fish with the longest recorded lifespan, according to the research article, is the Greenland shark, one of which lived for 392 years.
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