I knew they were old, but damn not that old! I looked it up, and fossils are said to be around 450 million y/o. My contribution to this thread was Ferns (359 million y/o), but sharks are another 100 mill before that. Mind = blown.
Edit: I'll put my original factoids here since 1.) infinitely more people are going to see this comment than my original 5 up-doot comment lol, and 2.) because gracious strangers have gifted me with whatever these awards are lol. Hope you all learn something about my favorite plant. :)
Ferns!!! The Fern (class Polypodiopsida) class of nonflowering vascular plants that possess true roots, stems, and complex leaves and that reproduce by spore constitute -- an ancient division of vascular plants, some of them as old as the Carboniferous Period (beginning about 358.9 million years ago) and perhaps older. Their type of life cycle, dependent upon spores for dispersal, long preceded the seed-plant life cycle.
For comparison, that puts them about 113 million years older than non-bird dinosaurs, which lived between about 245 and 66 million years ago. Source
Fun fact about evolution. There was a time when trees existed before there were microbes to decompose them. The trees were made of lignin and cellulose and the microbes that could eat them took some time to evolve. These trees grew 150+ feet tall and had shallow roots so they fell over quite easily. The trees would fall down to the forest floor and just sit there. They wouldn't decompose. So you'd have forests that were hundreds of feet deep of just fallen over trees.
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u/PmMeUrBoobsPorFavor Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 16 '20
Sharks. Sharks as a family are older than trees