Sharks feel ancient—and they are. But trees feel like they've been here forever too. So which came first? The answer might surprise you: sharks predate trees by roughly 100 million years.

The earliest shark-like creatures appeared in the fossil record about 450 million years ago during the Silurian period. The first trees—primitive species like Archaeopteris—didn't show up until about 350 million years ago in the Devonian period. For a hundred million years, sharks were swimming through oceans on a planet that had no forests. They survived five mass extinctions, including the one that killed the dinosaurs. Sharks have been around 2.5 times longer than dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and over 1,000 times longer than modern humans have existed. When you see a shark, you're looking at a design so successful that evolution barely needed to change it.