Methuselah Whales?
New research suggests Arctic bowhead whales may live beyond 150 years,
making them the longest-lived mammals on Earth, writes Ben Spiess in USA
Today. Since 1981, Inuit whalers have found six harpoon heads in bowhead
whales that were made of stone or ivory. "The types of points they've
found in these whales were gone by the 1890s," said archeologist Glenn
Sheehan. "It's likely these points are from before that - perhaps the
mid-1800s." In a study of amino-acid aging in bowhead eyes, marine
chemist Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography found that
four samples out of 42 were more than 100 years old and one whale was
estimated to be 180 years old. (His technique, "aspartic acid
racemization," has a range of error of 12 to 50 years.)