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Greenland sharks can live more than 400 years, which means some of the ones cruising the North Atlantic today were already swimming when Isaac Newton was writing the Principia, Somewhere between 200 and 2,600 metres beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, a shark the length of a small car is moving at roughly the pace of a person walking through knee-deep snow. It is grey, blunt-nosed, and probably older than the United States. Two milky tendrils may trail from its eyeballs — a parasitic copepod called Ommatokoita elongata, latched onto the cornea and slowly clouding the surface. The animal can lose much of its vision and still keep moving through the dark. The Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, is the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth. A 2016 study led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen and published in Science put the species’ lifespan at a minimum of 272 years, with the oldest individual in the study estimated at 392 years, plus or minus 120 years. The two largest sharks in that study, measuring 493 and 502 centimetres, were estimated to be 335 and 392 years old respectively. The larger of the two may have been a pup when Isaac Newton was still drafting the Principia Mathematica in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the mid-1680s. How to date a shark that has no bones to count Sharks have... https://scienceblog.com/sb-greenland-sharks-can-live-more-than-400-years-which-means-some-of-the-ones-cruising-the-north-atlantic-today-were-already-swimming-when-isaac-newton-was-writing-the-principia-and-almost-all-of-them/