The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.

The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.

Somewhere in the cold dark water below the Arctic ice, several individual Greenland sharks alive today were almost certainly already swimming when the first European settlers landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Many of them were born before the invention of the steam engine. Some were probably alive when the Manchu dynasty was founded in China, when the Mughal Empire was at its peak in India, and when Galileo was still doing the observations that w…