Steve Austad’s paper in Journal of Comparative Pathology (PubMed), Methusaleh’s Zoo: How Nature provides us with Clues for Extending Human Health Span, promotes the idea that “exceptionally long-lived organisms have important roles to play in our future understanding of the causal mechanisms and modulation of ageing.” Austad writes that most of what is known about the aging process is derived from experiments performed on short-lived laboratory species like Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans and Mus musculus. He suggests that studying long-lived species such as naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) and some bats like Myotis brandti that lives for 41 years, might offer insight into the mechanisms of the aging processes. There are many more species to discover and study. As Austad concludes: “However, with the dramatic acceleration in our genome sequencing capability, it is likely that new investigatory tools for these species of exceptional gerontological interest will be developed at an accelerating pace. The role of Methusaleh’s Zoo in ageing research is likely to blossom in the near future.”