Greenland sharks can live for more than 400 years — meaning some of the ones swimming the North Atlantic today were alive when Isaac Newton was — and almost all of them spend those centuries functionally blind, navigating the deep ocean with parasites per

Greenland sharks can live for more than 400 years — meaning some of the ones swimming the North Atlantic today were alive when Isaac Newton was — and almost all of them spend those centuries functionally blind, navigating the deep ocean with parasites per

The Greenland shark has become a fixture of popular science writing in the way of a small number of charismatic creatures: the immortal jellyfish, the deep-sea tube worm, the bristlecone pine. The story arrives in roughly the same shape each time it is told. The shark lives for centuries. Some of the largest individuals alive in the North Atlantic today may have been born before or during Isaac Newton’s lifetime. Across those centuries, a parasi…