One study examined Greenland sharks that were bycatch in fishermen’s nets. Scientists discovered that they could determine the age of the sharks by carbon-dating these proteins. Inside the shark’s eyes, there are proteins that are formed before birth and do not degrade with age, like a fossil preserved in amber. Scientists could only guess that the sharks lived a long time based on what they knew - the sharks grow at a very slow rate (less than 1 cm per year) and they can reach over 6 meters in size.īut recent breakthroughs allowed scientists to use carbon dating to estimate the age of Greenland sharks.
Their vertebrae are too soft to form the growth bands seen in other sharks. Greenland sharks, however, have no fin spines and no hard tissues in their bodies.
The age of other shark species can be estimated by counting growth bands on fin spines or on the shark’s vertebrae, much like rings on a tree. Scientists have suspected for a while that Greenland sharks lived extremely long lives, but they didn’t have a way to determine how long.
Photo credit - Hemming1952 | Wikimedia Commons | Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International | Modifications: size Close-up image of a greenland shark taken at the floe edge of the Admiralty Inlet, Nunavut.
0 kommentar(er)
