MicroFactzzz#0046 · 🐙 Animal Chaos
Sharks showed up on Earth before trees did
Sharks evolved around 450 million years ago — a solid few tens of millions of years before the first trees existed.
The first sharks appear in the fossil record around 450 million years ago, before life on land had really gotten going.
The first trees (or rather their earliest ancestors, like Archaeopteris) don't show up until roughly 385 million years ago — meaning sharks already had tens of millions of years of evolution behind them before the first bark-covered trunk grew on Earth.
Along the way, sharks survived all five major mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs — making them one of the most persistent evolutionary lineages in the planet's history.
Geological time can flip your intuition on its head like that: what feels "ancient" (a forest) can actually be younger than what feels "modern" (a predatory fish).
Sources
- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
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Krulicza Nora
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