Bizzare Facts

It sounds like a riddle or a mistake, but it is a geological fact: **sharks** are older than trees. The earliest fossil evidence of shark-like scales dates back to the Ordovician Period, approximately **450 million years ago**. At that time, the Earth was a very different place. The oceans were teeming with life, but the land was largely barren, hosted only by mosses, liverworts, and small primitive plants.

The first true trees—plants with wood and a vascular system, like the *Archaeopteris*—didn't evolve until the Devonian Period, roughly **350 million years ago**. This means that sharks had been swimming, hunting, and evolving in the oceans for a staggering **100 million years** before the first forest ever grew on Earth.

Sharks have survived four of the five major mass extinction events, including the one that killed the dinosaurs. They are one of nature's most perfect designs, remaining largely unchanged for hundreds of millions of years while the world on land completely transformed around them. They are living fossils in the truest sense of the word.