Sharks Are Older Than Trees — and 9 Other Mind-Bending Timeline Facts
Free A4 Poster • Science Adventures UK
Sharks are older than trees.
And 9 other facts that quietly destroy your sense of time. Print one A4 page. Stick it on the fridge. Watch your child point at it for a week.
Download the Poster (PDF) →A4 • print at home • no signup needed
Older Than You Think • A4 poster
How to use it
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Print it A4, black ink is fine. Colour is nicer. |
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Stick it on the fridge Eye level for the kids. Not the cereal cupboard. |
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Wait for the questions They will come. Often at breakfast. |
The 10 facts on the poster
In rough chronological order from “deep time” to “last century”.
80M yrs older
1. Sharks are older than trees.
Sharks have been around for roughly 450 million years. Trees only got going around 370 million. The oceans had sharks before the land had forests.
2,500 yrs closer
2. Cleopatra is closer in time to the moon landing than to the Pyramids.
Pyramids: ~2500 BC. Cleopatra: ~30 BC. Moon landing: 1969. She missed the Apollo programme by about 2,000 years — but she missed the Pyramids by 2,500.
Alive in 1650 BC
3. Mammoths were still alive when the Pyramids were built.
A small population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until ~1650 BC — well after the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished.
332 yrs older
4. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
Oxford has been teaching since around 1096. The Aztec Empire was founded in 1428. By the time Tenochtitlan rose, Oxford had been handing out essays for 300+ years.
80M yrs apart
5. T. rex and Stegosaurus never met.
They lived 80 million years apart. That’s a bigger gap than the one between us and T. rex (~67 million). The toy box is misleading.
Originally purple
6. Carrots used to be purple.
The orange carrot was bred in 17th-century Holland. Before that, most carrots were purple, yellow, or white. Today’s default carrot is a Dutch redesign.
33 yrs earlier
7. The fax machine is older than the telephone.
Fax: patented 1843. Telephone: patented 1876. Faxes have been quietly refusing to die ever since.
15 yrs earlier
8. Stainless steel is older than sliced bread.
Stainless steel: 1913. Sliced bread: 1928. “The greatest thing since sliced bread” was, on the timeline, a bit late.
Botanically a berry
9. Bananas are berries. Strawberries aren’t.
A strawberry is technically an “aggregate accessory fruit” — the seeds are on the outside, which disqualifies it. Bananas tick the berry box. Sorry.
Same year: 1929
10. Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born the same year.
Both 1929. History rarely lines up the way you expect — one childhood ended in a Dutch attic, the other on a podium in Washington.
Why this is the only science worth printing on your fridge
Comparison is the gateway drug to thinking like a scientist.
When a child notices that “sharks are older than trees,” something quietly happens. They’ve stopped accepting the world as a flat list of facts and started ranking them. That’s the muscle every scientist uses, every single day.
You don’t need to teach it. You just need to give them something weird enough to notice.
Science Adventures · Digest |
If your child loved fact #1… The comics that turn questions like these into stories.Every Science Adventures issue takes one big idea — deep time, light, the way bodies work — and tells it as a comic. Built for kids who’d rather read science than be quizzed on it. Built on Singapore’s gold-standard science curriculum — the system that consistently tops global rankings, now trusted by UK families. 3 back issues. £16. Digest (8–12) See the Digest Taster Pack → |