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  • 2018-12-11 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Researchers Discover a 512-Year-Old Shark? (en)
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  • Just how old is the oldest living Greenland shark? It depends on whom you ask. The results of a study published in the journal Science< in August 2016 about the ages of some very long-lived Greenland sharks appeared to vary wildly from one headline to the next as media outlets latched on to different aspects of the findings. National Geographic, for example, titled their article about the study 272-Year-Old Shark Is Longest-Lived Vertebrate on Earth, while the BBC ran with 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate.' A year later, in December 2017, tabloid outlets such as The Sun picked up on this study and reported that researchers had actually found a Greenland shark born before Shakespeare that was 512 years old. So really, just how old was the oldest Greenland shark? Well, it's probably best to ask the people who were actually behind the study. Julius Nielsen, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen, led a team of researchers who used radiocarbon dating to measure carbon isotopes absorbed by the eye tissue of 28 Greenland sharks that had perished during the Greenland Institute for Natural Resources’ commercial fish-monitoring program. Nielsen and his team found that the Greenland shark had a life span of at least 272 years, and that the oldest specimen examined was approximately 400 years old. Nielsen told Live Science that there was some room for error, and so hypothetically a living specimen of Greenland shark could be as old as 512 years: An abstract from the study provides a some more details about the findings: When the claim that researchers had actually found a 512-year-old shark first started circulating in December 2017, Nielsen took to his Instagram to explain why this assertion was misleading: The claim that researchers discovered a 512-year-old Greenland Shark is based on a real study from August 2016, but that figure was a highest-possible estimate and not the actual determined age of living shark. (en)
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