Animals
Are sharks older than trees?
The short answer
Yes. Sharks appear in the fossil record around 450 million years ago; the first true trees show up around 385 million years ago. Sharks predate forests by roughly 65 million years — about the same gap that separates us from the last dinosaurs.
The earliest evidence is small: scattered scales in Late Ordovician rock, roughly 450 million years old. Palaeontologists still argue about whether those particular scales belong to true sharks or to very close relatives, and the earliest undisputed shark scales are around 420 million years old. Either way, the answer to the question does not change.
Trees arrived much later. Around 385 million years ago, in the Late Devonian, Archaeopteris — woody trunk, fern-like foliage — became the first plant to build anything we would recognise as a forest.
The part worth sitting with is what the land looked like when sharks were already established. No trunks, no canopy, no forests. Just low mats of moss and liverwort, nothing taller than a few centimetres, on a planet that had not yet worked out how to grow upward.
Source
- This prehistoric apex predator is older than trees, the Atlantic Ocean and even the North StarDiscover Wildlife (BBC Wildlife Magazine)