30-Foot Fingernails: The Curious Science of World's Longest Nails

Shridar Chillal displays his nails. — Shridar Chillal hasn't trimmed his fingernails in 62 years.

(Image credit: Courtesy of Guinness World Records)

A man in India earned a Guinness World Record this week for doing, well, nothing at all. He didn't eat a bunch of hot dogs or jump off a building. All he did was forgo basic hygiene, by growing out his fingernails for an astonishingly long time.

Shridar Chillal hasn't trimmed his claws in 62 years. The last time he put scissor to nail was 1952 (to place that in perspective, Harry Truman was president of the United States at the time, and gas cost 20 cents a gallon). As a result of Chillal's refusal to trim, each of the fingers on his left hand ends in a swirling mass of keratin that cumulatively measures about 30 feet (9 meters) long.

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A study by researchers at the University of Florida suggests that the latter explanation makes the most sense. Primates have had fingernails for at least 55.8 millions years, according to the study, which described the world's oldest known fingernail, found on the tiny, lemurlike primate Teilhardina brandti, The animal likely used its long nails to grasp small branches while moving around in its forest habitat, the study researchers told Live Science in 2011.

Specifically, the growth of the nail begins at the ventral floor, which is the part of the nail that connects the germinal matrix (that's where all the new cells are made) to the ligaments in your fingers. New living cells push forward along this germinal matrix, which ends at the lunula, or the crescent shape at the bottom of your nail that usually has a whitish tinge. Once the cells reach the edge of the lunula, they lose their nuclei and harden into the protein keratin, which you might know as a fingernail.

You may be wondering how such lengthy nails affect Chillal's daily life. In a video posted on the Guinness World Records website, Chillal explains that his crazy-looking claws tend to make life more difficult. At night, he wakes up every half hour or so to gingerly move his left hand to the other side of the bed. And he said he has had trouble finding employment (people thought he was "dirty"), getting around town and finding a wife who isn't afraid of him.

Of course, most people tend to keep their nails shorter than Chillal's, and even those who strive for length might find that their nails grow more slowly than those of others. Even all the fingernails on one hand don't grow at the same rate. You can see evidence of this by looking at the variation in Chillal's nail length. This variation has also been demonstrated in studies conducted by the late Dr. William Bean, an internist and medical historian who carefully studied the growth of the nails on his left hand for 35 years. His research was published in a series of papers, the latest of which appeared in 1980 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.