Senile mutant ninja turtles

If you have listened to the podcast yet, you'll know that we discuss the subject of aging research to great lenghts during which i bring up the point that perhaps some of the clues of old age could be gained from organisms that do not age or are very long lived. Recently, examples have come up quite close from here, in Quebec. The arctic shark, or greenland shark is found in the St-Lawrence or living under the ice in the North Atlantic. This 6m long beast weighing up to 2 tons may be the longest living vertebrate, presumably because of its slow metabolism and because sharks are long lived in general (and cancer free). Another example is the turtle, which some biologist think might not experience aging at all. Could this be related to their ability to breathe through their ass? The article gives quite a bit of interresting facts on turtles... This one was particularly interresting: "Geneticists have proposed that the turtle shell may have appeared quite suddenly in the distant past, rather than emerging slowly through modest, mincing modifications of pre-existing structures. They suggest that the dramatic innovation could have arisen from just a few key mutations in master genes like the so-called homeobox genes, which help specify an animal’s basic body plan. If the shell did burst on the reptilian stage more or less fully formed, they said, that would explain the lack of “intermediary” fossils or prototurtles in the paleontological record. "