Shark is still going strong…!
Great great great great great great Grandpa shark 🎶 do do do do do…
Grandpa Shark doodoodoodoodadoo 🎶
A couple of months ago, a group of scientists discovered an ancient shark in the North Atlantic ocean. While they knew that this shark had definitely reached senior age, they didn’t realize until recently that the animal is estimated to be a whopping 512 years old.
At 512 years, that would make this ancient shark the oldest living vertebrate in the world.
He’s cool!!! He looks thrilled and happy to be hanging out with that diver!!! He looks friendly! 😲😀😎👍
Even though over half a millennium seems like a crazy amount of time, Greenland sharks actually tend to outlive most other animals because they are a very slow-growing species. These sharks generally reach a mature age at 150 years old, and some reports have shown that some sharks have lived for almost 400 years. This new discovery of a 512-year-old definitely breaks a record.
512 years would put the birth date of this shark at 1505, older than Shakespeare.
Marine biologist Julius Nielsen and his team used a technique to measure the amount of radiocarbon in the eye lenses of Greenland sharks, revealing the possible age of this senior animal.
The biologist share: It definitely tells us that this creature is extraordinary and it should be considered among the absolute oldest animals in the world.
This research suggests that Greenland sharks can live much longer than professors and scientists initially thought.
No less than 28 Greenland sharks were studied and analyzed for this research. The new age determination method for these sharks definitely brings some much-needed accuracy to the field, as older methods have proven to be very unreliable.
“Previously, scientists used the size of the animal to determine their length.”
In further research, scientists now want to uncover why the Greenland shark lives so much longer than other vertebrates.
They hope that they can discover more about the shark’s long-life genes and will also try to make the link with life expectancy in several different species.
He said: This is the longest living vertebrate on the planet, Together with colleagues in Denmark, Greenland, USA, and China, we are currently sequencing its whole nuclear genome which will help us discover why the Greenland shark not only lives longer than other shark species but other vertebrates.
When the research scientist was asked how in the world this shark could possibly reach the age of over 500 years old, he guessed that the cold water combined with a slow metabolism would be responsible. He does admit right after, however, that further research is still needed and that this explanation is just a theory.
The life lived and experiencing more. We hope the shark gets to experience even more life without the of expense man’s interference.
How did they determine that age.? 👍👍
That’s awesome that a scientist somewhere was able to guess the age was approx 512 and then subtract that from 2023 and hypothesize it’s birth year as ‘around 1505’!!!! ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!!
Watch the precious video below:
