As a group, sharks emerged roughly 450 million years ago in the Late Ordovician, back when Earth was covered by a vast ocean known as Panthalassa.
This not only makes sharks older than trees, which first appeared 385 million years ago, but older than the North Star, the Atlantic Ocean and even Saturn’s Rings!
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Not a lot is known about the earliest sharks. So far, palaeontologists have only found a few isolated scales of these enigmatic predators; but we know they belong to sharks – or at least shark-like fish – because they look very similar to the scales of living sharks.
Even after 450 million years of evolution, sharks have seldom changed. The first confirmed shark, Cladoselache, lived at the same time as the first trees and looks just like today’s sharks.
The same can’t be said for trees, though: they’ve changed a lot since they took root in the Middle Devonian, evolving from 8m-tall, fern-like trees known as Wattieza into towering redwoods that exceed heights of 115m.
While sharks may have emerged before trees, it’s the latter that holds the title of the longest-living organisms. The oldest-known, still-living, individual tree is a 4,857-year-old Californian bristlecone pine known as Methuselah.
