A lot of things are older than furniture. Furniture dates to the pleistocene at the earliest.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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Better yet: sharks existed before our notion of FIRE.
Sharks have been around since before Polaris (yes the North star) was born which, personally, I think is cooler than being older than trees
Was born, or it’s light reached earth?
it’s light
Aye, it is light.
At around 1.7 million times the weight of the Earth, it's not all that light.
It’s only ~466ly away, so both
There is nothing about being ancient beyond all proper comprehension that makes something less scary
Yeah well I couldn’t beat a shark to death with a chair before trees existed, that’s my primary means of shark defense!
Another fun tree fact I heard, the reason why coal exists was because trees existed on land for a long time before decomposers existed to digest their fibers. They just died and were buried intact. This actually caused a problem with sequestering so much CO2 that the earth went into an ice age.
Edit for clarification: decomposers did exist but they couldn't decompose tree lignin specifically so it just stayed around.
Too bad we don’t have that problem now.
You can still make coal, it just involves bogs hostile to decomposers these days
I guess I meant the locking away co2 and ice age part.
They existed before fire (before the oxygen levels sustained fire on the surface)
Wuuuut??!
Edit: 420MY ago: https://presearch.com/search?q=when+did+surface+fires+became+possible+on+earth%3F
Sharks have existed long enough that their species (and our Sun) has circled around the entire Milky Way Galaxy - twice.
I've heard all these shark existence analogies, but this was a new one and blew my mind again. Sharks are so OLD.
That's a good one. Although at the same time, we almost certainly discovered trees well before sharks.
And for no particular reason, a fun fact from an earlier thread-- eggs came over 500million years before chickens did!
So, the chicken and egg problem is solved then! Isn’t it?
Something I learned just now is that the problem / paradox evidently goes back to Ancient Greece! [WP]
But yeah, I think we could consider it solved (among rational people) with the development of the Theory of Evolution, combined with a better understanding of zoology and various other fields. So, maybe by 1900? And I suspect that the ancient-ness of the problem is a big reason people still use the expression, even though it's been shown to be a faulty question for over 125yrs.
Btw, internal eggs to my understanding are as old as sexual reproduction, over 600M years ago. External, shelled eggs go back over 300M years ago. Galliformes (chickens and relatives) go back about 85Myrs.
TIL that this thing about trees pre-existing decomposers doesn't mean that there weren't things before trees. Like, I thought we had a planet of trees and plants and nothing else, no fish, insects or whatever.
Otherlands by thomas halliday takes you along the story of our past biomass. Very cool read
What about people afraid of jellyfish? They're older than bones
how bout germophobes; bacteria and other microbes had already been around for 2.5 billion years before any multicellular life evolved. for over 70% of the history of life, they were the only thing that existed
I'm even more scared now
Meanwhile the tardigrade, "Who brought the sharks?'
I always find this very funny. It's as if the sharks today are venerable million year old entities. As if the species sharks today have anything in common with the shark species 100 million years ago.
The horseshoe crab fits much better in this sentiment, as they haven't physically changed at all this whole time.
The current species of sharks evolved around 200 million years ago, so yeah the species of sharks today have everything in common with the species of sharks 100 million years ago. Sharks are famously also remarkably stable in their evolution. They do evolve and branch out with specializations, but physically the basic shark form has been the same for a very long time. The sharks that were around 400 million years ago when trees first evolved would have been very similar to the sharks we have today.
Not so sure about that, considering one of the shark fossils discovered had teeth like tombstones, and another had a weird sawblade for a lower jaw.
Those were just rare special edition sharks. The rest of the sharks were just normal ones.