Old Animals

Human beings generally live to be around 80. This isn’t a hard fact, it’s just an estimate. It isn’t unheard of for people to live longer than 80 years. But anyone living into their 90s or 100s is thought to be the exception and not the rule. Other animals live longer. Before he died, Adwaita, the tortoise, was thought to be 250-years-old; though some people dispute that number. But even that pales in comparison to the estimated age of the Greenland shark.

In a recent study, scientists claimed that Greenland sharks might live to be up to 512-years-old.

The Greenland Shark

greenland shark

Greenland sharks also have weird teeth

500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was still alive, Thomas More’s Utopia was published, and somewhere by Greenland, a shark that might still be alive today was being born.

But since no scientists from back then are still alive, and radio collar tracking wasn’t a thing yet, how can we be sure how old these animals are? That’s where things got clever.

Greenland sharks don’t accumulate any hard tissues. The easily found reference points of age aren’t found in them, so scientist had to get creative.

Using carbon dating, they were able to analyze the shark’s eyes and see that many of them had been around since long before the 1950s. This was based on the presence of an isotope left behind in the wake of nuclear bomb testing common in those times. They also have seen that the sharks only grow about one centimeter per year. Combining this data, they judged the average life expectancy to be 272 – 512 years.

To make matters odder, the meat of Greenland sharks is known to be toxic to humans, but people in Greenland and Iceland still eat it. They’ve learned that the meat loses its potency if it’s allowed to ferment for a long enough span of time.

Greenland sharks are certainly some of the oddest creatures in the deep.