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A man from Florida found a huge clam on the beach and wanted to make fish soup from it. It turned out to be over 200 years old.

    Left: A man holds a shellfish he retrieved from Mission Creek in San Francisco, Florida. On the right a bowl of clam chowder soup.

    A clam from Mission Creek, California (left) and a bowl of clam chowder soup.Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images; Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

    • Blaine Parker found a large clam on the Florida coast and wanted to make clam chowder from it.

    • But Parker found out from a marine lab that it was over 214 years old.

    • He named his new friend “Aber-clam Lincoln,” after the president who was also born in 1809.

    A Florida man and his family found a giant clam at Alligator Point, Florida. They planned to cook it but realized it was over 200 years old.

    Blaine Parker told the Tallahassee Democrat that when he found the shell over Presidents Day weekend, he thought it was just big enough for two servings of chowder.

    “We just wanted to eat it, but we thought about it for a while and thought it was probably pretty special. So we didn’t want to kill it,” Parker told the Tallahassee Democrat.

    Parker, a member of the AmeriCorps volunteer group, eventually brought the shell to the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab in Panacea, Florida. Parker is also a specimen collector for the lab, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.

    The lab realized that Parker’s find was a six-inch, 2.6-pound clam estimated to be more than 214 years old.

    Realizing how old it was, Parker named the clam Aber-clam Lincoln.

    “Age can be calculated by the number of layers on the shell, each layer representing a year; with this, Blaine counted 214 layers on Aber-clam Lincoln’s shell, meaning that this shell was born in 1809, the same year as Abraham Lincoln, hence the name!” the lab wrote in a Feb. 21 post on Facebook.

    The lab added that most Ocean Quahog Clams weigh about half a pound. This makes Aber-clam Lincoln five times the weight of an average clam.

    In 2006, scientists found a 507-year-old Quahog shell that they nicknamed “Ming” — after estimating it lived in 1499, during China’s Ming dynasty.

    The Tallahassee Democrat reported separately on February 28 that Parker had sent Aber-clam Lincoln back to his home under the sea. Parker released the shell into the Gulf of Mexico about a week after finding it at Alligator Point.

    The Gulf Specimen Marine Lab did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

    Read the original article on Insider