Another author of the study, Prof Christopher Ramsey, director of Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford, said that radiocarbon dating could be used to determine the ages of other animals, but was not likely to be chosen as the primary method.
"For many animals we have other methods to determine age," he said.
"Also, the radiocarbon method is not very precise, and so is only really relevant for very long-lived species."
He added that the statistical method used to determine the sharks' ages was Bayesian statistics.
"Bayesian statistics were first worked out by the Rev Bayes in the 18th Century. This means he will have been working on this when some of these oldest sharks were young."