The Day I Learned Sharks Are Older Than Trees

was not trying to learn anything serious that day.

I was in that familiar state of half‑bored scrolling, jumping from one short video to another, letting the algorithm decide what my brain would consume next. I wasn’t looking for meaning or knowledge. I just wanted noise.

Then a random post flashed by with a simple sentence:

“Sharks are older than trees.”

I almost kept scrolling.

It sounded like one of those dramatic “Did you know?” lines that people throw around to farm likes. But something in my brain snagged on the idea. Older than trees? As in… sharks were already there, just vibing in the ocean, before a single tree existed on land?

That sounded wrong enough that I had to check.

So I did what we all do when the internet tells us something wild: I opened a new tab and started typing. A couple of searches later, I found the same fact over and over again. Sharks have existed for around 400 million years, while the earliest trees appeared roughly 50 million years later.

For a moment, I just stared at the screen.

I’ve seen trees my entire life. I’ve climbed them, walked under them, watched them lose their leaves and grow them back again. Trees feel permanent, solid, ancient. Sharks, on the other hand, live in documentaries and horror posters. They feel modern, almost cinematic.

Yet the timeline says the opposite.

Long before forests, before leaves casting shade on the ground, before people carving hearts into bark, there were sharks moving through prehistoric oceans. While the land was still figuring itself out—plants creeping, evolving, testing new shapes—sharks were already there, doing what sharks do: swimming, hunting, surviving.

I imagined a version of Earth with no trees at all.

No forests, no wood, no tree rings recording years in quiet circles. Just bare landscapes and strange plants, while beneath the surface of the water, these early sharks glided through a world that would have looked completely alien to us. Somehow, that image felt more like science fiction than half the movies I’ve watched.

What really got to me wasn’t just the fact itself—it was what it said about time.

We live in such a narrow slice of history that we automatically assume the things around us are the default. Trees are everywhere, so of course they must have been here forever. Sharks are in movies from the 70s, so they feel new. Our brains compress millions of years into a vague “long ago” and leave it at that.

The internet has a funny way of cracking that illusion.

Most of the time, it bombards us with trivial drama, clickbait outrage, and endless opinions. But every now and then, in between a meme and a cat video, it drops a small piece of information that quietly rearranges how you see the world. That day, it was sharks and trees.

I started thinking about how many things I take for granted just because they’re common in my daily life.

Electricity, Wi‑Fi, glass windows, even the shape of cities. If someone in the far future looked back at our time, they might be just as shocked by what we consider “normal” as I was by the idea of sharks predating forests. To them, maybe even our entire civilization would be just another weird, brief configuration in the long story of the planet.

The more I sat with it, the more this random fact felt oddly comforting.

If sharks have survived multiple mass extinctions, changing oceans, shifting continents, and who knows what else, then maybe everything falling apart in my inbox today isn’t the end of the world. The planet has been through worse. Life keeps reinventing itself, adapting, moving forward.

Of course, there’s another side to that thought.

Sharks have made it through hundreds of millions of years of natural changes, but now they’re threatened by something that appeared extremely recently: us. Overfishing, climate change, ocean pollution—our modern problems sit on top of a timeline that stretches far beyond us. That contrast is hard to ignore once you start thinking in millions of years instead of days and deadlines.

All of that started because I didn’t scroll past one sentence.

“Sharks are older than trees.”

It could have been just another piece of trivia to forget five minutes later. Instead, it became a mental doorway into deep time, into imagining Earth not as a static backdrop but as a story with absurd plot twists.

I didn’t become a paleontologist overnight.

I didn’t read five academic articles or watch a full documentary series. I just fell down a small rabbit hole, long enough to feel my sense of scale stretch a little. Long enough to remember that the world is bigger, stranger, and older than whatever is stressing me out this week.

The last thing I did before closing my laptop was look out the window at the nearest tree.

It looked completely ordinary, standing there with its branches bare or full, depending on the season where you are as you read this. But in my head, it was suddenly part of a much longer story—one that started in ancient oceans, with sharks cutting through the water long before any leaf ever caught the sun.

The internet taught me that on a random day, without a class, without a lesson plan, without an exam at the end.

Just one surprising fact, dropped into my feed, that made the world feel a little more mysterious—and somehow, a little more beautiful.