There is nothing about being ancient beyond all proper comprehension that makes something less scary

Sharks have been around since before Polaris (yes the North star) was born which, personally, I think is cooler than being older than trees

Another fun tree fact I heard, the reason why coal exists was because trees existed on land for a long time before decomposers existed to digest their fibers. They just died and were buried intact. This actually caused a problem with sequestering so much CO2 that the earth went into an ice age.

Edit for clarification: decomposers did exist but they couldn't decompose tree lignin specifically so it just stayed around.

Sharks have existed long enough that their species (and our Sun) has circled around the entire Milky Way Galaxy - twice.

They existed before fire (before the oxygen levels sustained fire on the surface)

What about people afraid of jellyfish? They're older than bones

A lot of things are older than furniture. Furniture dates to the pleistocene at the earliest.

I'm not scared

I'm even more scared now

That's a good one. Although at the same time, we almost certainly discovered trees well before sharks.

And for no particular reason, a fun fact from an earlier thread-- eggs came over 500million years before chickens did!

TIL that this thing about trees pre-existing decomposers doesn't mean that there weren't things before trees. Like, I thought we had a planet of trees and plants and nothing else, no fish, insects or whatever.

I always find this very funny. It's as if the sharks today are venerable million year old entities. As if the species sharks today have anything in common with the shark species 100 million years ago.

The horseshoe crab fits much better in this sentiment, as they haven't physically changed at all this whole time.