Greenland Shark Research Paper

reenland sharks are among nature’s least elegant inventions. Lumpish, with stunted pectoral fins that they use for ponderously slow swimming in cold and dark Arctic waters, they have blunt snouts and gaping mouths that give them an unfortunate, dull-witted appearance. Many live with worm-like parasites that dangle repulsively from their corneas. They belong, appropriately enough, to the family Squalidae, and appear as willing to gorge on fresh halibut as on rotting polar-bear carcasses. Once widely hunted for their liver oil, today they are considered bycatch. For some fishermen, a biologist recently told me, netting a Greenland shark is about as welcome as stepping in dog poop.

And yet the species has an undeniable magnetism. It is among the world’s largest predatory sharks, growing up to eighteen feet in length, but also among its most elusive. Its life history is a black box, one that

He and his co-authors did note, however, that their lens technique might be useful in the field of forensics. Not long after the study was published, Heinemeier received a request from police in Germany. They needed his help cracking an unusual case. In the city of Wenden, near Cologne, a teen-ager had opened his family’s freezer in search of a snack and discovered the bodies of three infant girls, wrapped in plastic. The investigators suspected the boy’s mother of having killed the children, but she denied it. While the victims’ ages were obvious—all were clearly newborns—the police had no way of knowing when the murders had taken place. Heinemeir analyzed the infants’ lenses and came up with remarkably precise estimates. Two, he found, had been born in the second half of the nineteen-eighties, the third between 2003 and 2007. Although one of the murders fell outside Germany’s two-decade statute of limitations on manslaughter, the others were prosecutable. The mother was ultimately sentenced to four years in