The Greenland Shark That May Have Been Born in the 1600s — And Could Still Have Living Relatives in the Arctic

Imagine swimming through the dark, freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean while the world above you changes beyond recognition. Empires rise and fall. Nations are founded. Cities grow from small settlements into sprawling metropolises. Humans invent airplanes, explore space, and build technologies that would have seemed impossible centuries earlier.

Now imagine that you have been swimming through those waters for nearly 400 years.

It sounds like something from a science-fiction novel, but scientists have discovered an animal that may come remarkably close to this extraordinary scenario: the Greenland shark.

In 2016, researchers published a groundbreaking study suggesting that Greenland sharks could live for centuries, with one enormous female estimated to be approximately 392 years old. According to the study, the animal's estimated age came with considerable uncertainty, but even the lower end of the range pointed to a lifespan of at least 272 years.

If the central estimate is close to the truth, the shark may have been born around the early 1600s, long before the United States declared independence and centuries before humans achieved powered flight.

The discovery, published in the prestigious scientific journal Science, challenged scientists' understanding of vertebrate longevity and revealed just how much remains unknown about life in the deepest parts of the ocean.

Even more astonishingly, the individual examined in the study is no longer alive, but other Greenland sharks may still be swimming through the Arctic today with lifespans stretching back hundreds of years.

Some could have been alive before the modern world took shape.

A Shark From Another Century

The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is one of the most mysterious large predators in the ocean. Found primarily in the North Atlantic and Arctic regions, it inhabits cold waters where sunlight fades quickly with depth and the environment can be unforgiving.

Unlike the fast-moving sharks often portrayed in documentaries and popular films, Greenland sharks are generally slow swimmers. They move through their environment without the dramatic bursts of speed associated with many other shark species.

Their appearance is equally distinctive. They have thick bodies, rounded snouts, relatively small eyes, and muted grayish or brownish coloration that helps them blend into the dim underwater environment.

They are also remarkably large. Adults can reach lengths of more than 16 feet, or approximately five meters, and some individuals may grow even longer.

Yet their size is not what makes them truly extraordinary.

Their lifespan is.

For decades, researchers suspected that Greenland sharks lived far longer than most other fish. Scientists had observed their extremely slow growth and knew they occupied cold, deep environments where biological processes could proceed at a reduced pace.

However, suspicion was not enough. Researchers needed a reliable way to estimate the age of an animal that could outlive several human generations.

That challenge eventually led to one of the most remarkable discoveries in marine biology.

The 2016 study, led by marine biologist Julius Nielsen and colleagues, examined 28 female Greenland sharks. By analyzing the chemistry of proteins in their eye lenses, the team estimated that the largest shark in their sample was approximately 392 years old, with an uncertainty range of roughly 272 to 512 years.

The researchers concluded that Greenland sharks could be the longest-lived vertebrates known to science.

The findings were reported in the original research paper, “Eye lens radiocarbon reveals centuries of longevity in the Greenland shark,” published in Science in August 2016.

Source: Nielsen et al., Science (2016), read the original scientific study.

The implications were extraordinary. A shark born centuries ago might still be alive today, moving through the ocean almost entirely unnoticed.

How Scientists Estimated a Shark's Age

Determining the age of a fish is often more difficult than determining the age of a tree.