related:
sharks are also older than trees.

...kinda?

fossils of several of the earliest known elasmobranchii, like antarctilamna are dated to the early-mid Devonian period. the middle Devonian being when plants decided that they'd finally be trees, after like 70-something million years of just laying around doing nothing.

they weren't really all that shark-like yet, though. and the things that people are saying are "shark-like" from around that time, cladoselache, were holocephali which is what chimaeriformes are, not sharks.

Oh shit I actually wasn't aware of this tidbit. I mean, I was aware that the ancestors to sharks were old but not THAT old. I dunno about you but sometimes I wish we can bring all these extinct animals back to life just so we knew how they actually looked, and how they actually behaved. I read somewhere that the T-Rex may have been a lot more colorful. Sometimes I wonder, what if they were more bird-like in nature? Like, what if they did some funny little dance to attract a mate. I wonder if there were any animals from that time that were equally as intelligent as some birds are today. Which ones were they?