Nearly everything significant about the Greenland Shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is a superlative. It’s the largest living kind of shark, reaching 6.4 m in length and weighing over 1,000 kg. It doesn’t reach sexual maturity until it is 150 years old, and its pups take 8 to 18 years to gestate. Its flesh is poisonous unless carefully prepared. Whole seal and deer have been found in its stomach. Since it moves so slowly, there is some debate as to how it manages to catch such prey. It lives at great depths, at temperatures just above freezing. Its conservation status is vulnerable. There is no recorded instance of a person ever being attacked by this shark.

But its most notable feature is its advanced age: it can live for as long as 500 years, the longest lifespan of any vertebrate. Its genome has been recently sequenced which gives us a clue as to how it manages to live so long: it has sophisticated mechanisms for DNA repair.

In spite of us knowing virtually nothing about 70% of the planet’s surface, there are people who still believe that the Earth, with all its living creatures, was created for our benefit, to do with exactly as we choose. In practice we all behave as if that were the case.