An image that has been circulating online for years shows a Greenland shark accompanied by a hard-to-believe claim: it is supposedly 392 years old and has been swimming through the ocean since 1627.
The photograph is real and does show this species, considered one of the longest-lived known vertebrates. However, there is one important detail: it has not been proven that this specific specimen is 392 years old.
The figure comes from scientific research that used radiocarbon dating of proteins in the lenses of these sharks’ eyes. One study estimated that a specimen could be up to 392 years old, although this is an estimate, and subsequent research has questioned some of those calculations.
Even so, the reality behind the image is astonishing. Greenland sharks can live for several centuries, grow at an extremely slow rate, and inhabit the cold waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic.
That means a very long-lived specimen could have been born long before the Industrial Revolution, when much of the world was completely different.
So, although we cannot claim that the shark in the photograph is exactly 392 years old, science does support something extraordinary: in the depths of the ocean, there are sharks that may have lived for centuries, practically spanning human generations without anyone ever seeing them.