Most sharks live fast lives - fast in the water, and not very long. Greenland sharks are the exact opposite. They cruise slowly through near-freezing Arctic water, barely moving, and they live longer than any other vertebrate animal on Earth.
In 2016, scientists used a careful test on the lenses of dead Greenland sharks’ eyes - the protein in the lens never gets replaced once an animal is born - to figure out their ages. The oldest shark in the study was around 392 years old, give or take 120 years. That means there are Greenland sharks alive today that hatched before the United States existed.
They take their time about everything else too. They don’t even become adults until they’re roughly 150 years old. Whatever they do - eat slowly, grow slowly, age slowly - it works: they keep going, century after century, in the cold and the dark.
