The longest-lived animal on the planet swims under the ice

There is a shark that lives in the frozen waters of the Arctic and can pass the age of 250. It is the longest-lived vertebrate we know of.

It is called the Greenland shark. It grows barely a centimetre a year and does not reach sexual maturity until it is over a century and a half old. Dating its age became possible thanks to a technique that measures the carbon stored in the lens of its eyes.

Which means that some of the ones swimming under the ice today were already alive before the French Revolution. They move so slowly that, for them, perhaps time too runs another way.