Scientists are now claiming that rare bowhead whales can outlive humans by generations. According to Jeffrey Bada, a marine chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California about 5 percent of the population is over a hundred years old and in some cases 160 to 180 years old.

Bowheads, also known as Greenland right whales, are baleen whales, meaning that instead of teeth they have bonelike plates that they use to strain food from gulps of water. The whales live in the Arctic, adults can reach 60 feet long and weigh more than a hundred tons. In the 1990s Craig George, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Wildlife Management in Barrow, was involved in a bowhead whale survey program for the International Whaling Commission. The regulatory body banned commercial whaling of bowheads in 1946. Inupiat Eskimos, however, have traditionally hunted the whales and are allowed to kill a certain number each year for food and oil. George examined several whales killed during an annual Inupiat hunt and found stone harpoons imbedded in their flesh.

George contacted Bada, who had done pioneering research a decade earlier showing that bowheads can reach a hundred years or older. At the time, Bada's work had been dismissed as nonsense.

source: National Geographic