I'm not so interesting, in all honesty. I'm old, I live in a tree, sometimes I turn myself into an owl and hunt mice. I used to be someone. But that was a long, long time ago, and I don't care to remember. It was a different Age and the world has moved on.
—Cucuvea, The Secret World
It had been Garfield who'd been the surprise. All his life he'd gotten the upside of having animal DNA and it had applied to his age as well. The Galapagos tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra) lives to be over 170 years old. Sturgeons (Acipenser oxyrinchus) have been known to live 125 years. Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) live to be over two hundred years of age. And there's Turritopsis dohrnii, the "immortal jellyfish," which can cycle between maturity and adolescence, apparently forever, never actually dying. It cheats, though, turning into a colony creature during its childhood and replacing all of its cells. In any case, "Beast Boy" grew old enough to see his great-great-grandchildren married and established as young adults.
I am the oldest of the firstborn, spawned out of the slime after the deluge! Time's byways are mine to prowl and hunt, and all other wolves are my progeny!
Jack: I wonder how old she is.
Russell: Thirty-some.
Jack: Try thirty thousand. She can't be killed - at least not by a point-blank shotgun blast, or by drowning - and she can masquerade as another person down to the fingerprints and retinas. Who was she before Rae Archer? Before that? She might go all the way back through human history.
Russell: She might have come to this planet even before humans evolved, wandering around as a saber-toothed tiger. As a dinosaur before that.
