It’s such a shame that all of human knowledge isnt readily available to this person. Oh it is, on the very device he’s using to post this, how embarrassing
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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To be fair, the entire thing could be made up. This post is likely to get far more likes and comments than just stating sharks are older than trees.
Maybe it feels counter-intuitive to some that sharks were there before trees...
But I hope it is intuitive that there was water long before there was soil? Then it's just a small step to realize life in water has had a much longer time to develop.
Mosses were likely already there though
I'm pretty sure they've never thought about what soil actually is and think it's just been around forever since it's just dirt.
Who are these people?
Or at least lichens.
That's debatable, most sources estimate mosses to have been there before lichens.
Mosses are true plants and have leaves with chlorophyll though! Way more interesting in the context of there being trees or not. Lichens are just scabs on a rock.
Um say what? Lichens are a complex composite life form that is a symbiotic partnership of two separate organisms, a fungus and an algae or cyanobacterium. Scabs on a rock! The disrespect!
Obnoxious creatures they are, always trying to take the shine from mosses. Mosses don't need symbiosis because they're perfectly able to survive harsh conditions by themselves. There's been hardly a need to change their perfect designs for millions of years.
Lichens are just the result of symbiotic relationships formed whenever fungi and algae or cyanobacteria feel like doing it. They're a promiscuous lot. Promiscuous scabs on a rock.
TIL humans are technically lichens.
We are more of a symbiont than we like to admit with more than half of our cells being non-human.
Next step is to find a suitable photobiont and go find a rock to lie on
Trees aren’t basic just because they don’t move.
This is the cope I say about myself every day.
I knew someone who utterly refused to believe that dinosaurs weren't the first organisms in existence. He literally thought it was dinosaurs, then there was an asteroid impact and then basically humans arrived about 10 minutes later.
People have absolutely no understanding of the immense amount of time that has existed before we came along.
Mind he also gave me that whole if earth was 1 cm closer to the sun, we would all burn up malarkey, so maybe he's just an idiot.
I wonder if they would ever understand this, or just think it's a cool fact.
There are the same number of hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water as there is stars in the entire solar system.
We living in a binary star system that I didn't know about?
I guess it's possible, there is a hypothesis that the solar system has a second faint red or brown dwarf star orbiting in the furthest outskirts of the solar system. I'm not sure I buy this hypothesis though, there is so little evidence. And it would be one of the more strange binary systems out there (binary stars are usually close together).
Thank you for the acknowledgement, always nice to meet a fan.
Sharks are older than the rings of Saturn.
Sharks are older than the current rings of Saturn, and I'll bet that the e-ring (the one which is primarily made of ice spewed out of enceladus) has been around for significantly longer than we give it credit for.
Sharks are ^possibly^ older than the north star
According to claims on social media platforms such as Reddit and X
I fucking hate modern media.
I always thought that this was because Polaris wasn't aligned with the Earth's axis until fairly recently.
Its because Polaris is actually three stars in a trenchcoat, two of which are older than sharks with one of them being younger. Polaris Aa, the brightest star and what we call the North Star, is probably younger than sharks, while Polaris Ab is probably older than sharks. Polaris B is almost certainly significantly older than sharks.
Ahh fuck
This is fuckin metal
"If a tree is so basic, then why aren't there trees growing in the middle of the ocean?" seems like the sort of argument that would impress Ray.
Bull kelp:
The oldest shark teeth are from the Early Devonian, about 410 million years old. These are without a doubt sharks, although different species than exist currently. The earliest fossil of a plant engaging in this evolutionary strategy is a 12 meter tall palm-like plant from China. It dates back, again, to the Early Devonian, but less than 400 million years ago.
Which means the first toothed sharks predate the first plant which could be called a tree by 10 million years.
Sharks are older than the rings of Saturn!
Can blow some MFers mind when you tell them trees took Earth by surprise and were so new that they didn't rot. Trees just fell over and stayed there forever, well ... until they got turned into oil.
☝️🤓 Trees turned to coal. Oil came from plankton and marine life.
So coal is just charcoal very well aged?
The first trees also caused climate change by absorbing a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere. And now the burning of those same trees is causing a second round.
Who the fuck has a basic question like this and posts it on Twitter rather than just looking the answer up
Hey grok, get a load of this guy 👉
Sharks have existed for so long that they have made almost TWO orbits around the milky way.
The species has existed for longer than Pleiades
The species has existed for longer than Pleiades
Now that blows my mind. I often think of astrological timescales to be so much longer than anything on earth.
Not to continue to blow your mind but their species is old enough to have witnessed the first light from the birth of the North star (if they weren't busy being absolutely magnificent apex predators)
For anyone wondering (numbers in million years ago (mya))
- 538: cambrian explosion
- 419: sharks
- 385: tree ferns, horsetail trees & co. (also, Ginkgo)
- 245: conifers (lignin)
- 230: lignin decomposing
- 130: flowering plants (like, maple)
- 65: forests covering the globe
- 1.5 to recently: four glacial periods
Huh. Yeah I never knew. Never really thought about it but knew not nonetheless.
Ask that dude if he ever saw a tree under the ocean.
This whole drowned forests off the coast of the UK and I also believe New Zealand has something similar. That whole region is basically just a drowned continent with a few mountains sticking up, forming islands.