A doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, opened a shipping box and found a baseball-sized eyeball on dry ice, from a Greenland shark caught in Arctic water off Disko Island.
What her lab found inside upends a long-standing assumption. Greenland sharks are the longest-lived vertebrates known, with lifespan estimates reaching 400 years. Their eyes look clouded, and parasitic copepods frequently attach to the cornea. Scientists reasonably concluded the animals were functionally blind.
