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An ancient creature of the deep has been prowling the world’s oceans for longer than the US has existed as a country.
In the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, Greenland sharks scour the ocean floor in the hunt for prey, something one specimen has been found to have been doing for 400 years.
This means it could have been born in around 1623. The US meanwhile, declared independence in 1776.
READ MORE: Surfer has 'foot ripped off' in gruesome 'sustained and prolonged' shark attack
Research done in 2016 used radiocarbon dating to find the ages of the beasts, with other sharks in the study found to be roughly between 272 and 393 years old, but an even older specimen could be found.
Researchers think the beasts could live for as long as 500 years, with one found dead in Newlyn Harbour near Penzance, Cornwall, thought to have been born during the reign of King Henry VIII.
Research into the ages of the sharks is carried out by looking at the levels of carbon-14 in the lenses of the shark’s eyes.
They are formed at birth and are not thought to regenerate, allowing scientists to work out when the sharks are born.
One was even spotted swimming 4,000 miles away from the Arctic in the balmy Caribbean.
Scientists were left scratching their heads in 2022 by the appearance of a Greenland shark in waters so far from where they usually crop up.
The Mirror reports researchers were out tagging tiger sharks when they came across the seemingly rather lost specimen, in Belize in Central America.
As they worked, a "rather sluggish creature" was spotted by Devanshi Kasana, a PhD student at Florida International University.
She said: "At first, I was sure it was something else, like a six-gill shark that are well known from deep waters off coral reefs.
"I knew it was something unusual and so did the fishers, who hadn’t ever seen anything quite like it in all their combined years of fishing.”
A photograph of the beast was later confirmed to be a Greenland by experts on the species.
Omar Faux, a fisherman on the boat, said: "I am always excited to set my deep water line because I know there is stuff down there that we haven’t seen yet in Belize, but I never thought I would be catching a Greenland shark."
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