Is it something in the water?

Are there a bunch of sharks that are more than 500 years old? Possibly

WHO ARE THESE SHARKS?

We don’t know a whole lot about the Greenland shark, which spends its days in deep, icy waters, eating fish and seals and occasionally a polar bear. Inuit people named the shark “skalugsuak,” Discover magazine once reported — a mythical beast that was said to live for centuries and destroy human flesh with its skin. Which actually isn’t far from the truth, as a team of researchers laid out in a paper published in Science last year. The shark’s meat is toxic if eaten, as fishermen have discovered when they tried to make the best of a skalugsuak tangled up in their net.

HOW OLD ARE THEY?

“272-Year-Old Shark Is Longest-Lived Vertebrate on Earth” was National Geographic’s headline in August 2016 after researchers estimated the age of a particularly long-in-the-tooth Greenland shark. But for some reason, the British tabloids dug up the same study this week and advanced the shark’s age to 512 years — “meaning it was born before SHAKESPEARE,” as the Sun explained. Before long, Newsweek was getting in on the ancient shark frenzy, and Live Science was patiently trying to explain that, no, no known shark has been swimming around for half a millennium — probably. Probably, that shark isn’t much older than the Taj Mahal (completed around 1643.)

HOW DID THEY FIND OUT THE AGE?

Scientists had to use creative methods to estimate the ages of 28 Greenland sharks they’d captured. They used radiocarbon dating to determine that most of the specimens predated nuclear bomb tests, which began in the 1950s. Then they extrapolated from the shark’s extremely slow growth rate that the largest was likely just shy of four centuries old.

SO OLDER THAN 272 YEARS?

Given the margins of error, the shark could have been as young as 272 or as old as 512 — thus, Britain’s Daily Star’s screaming headline about “Ancient LIVING shark born in 1500s.” It’s still unclear why the newspapers started recycling the study this week, although of course we’re now guilty of the same thing.

GETTY IMAGES The Greenland shark, which spends its days in deep, icy waters eating fish and seals and occasionally a polar bear, is associated with incredible longevity, with some reports suggesting it could live up to five centuries.