At One Place

Which came first, the iPhone or sharks?

Which came first, the iPhone or sharks?
sharks
450 million years ago — 450.002 million years before the iPhone

sharks came first, by 450.002 million years. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.

Side by side

the iPhone sharks
Year 2007 450 million years ago
Date 2007-06-29
Category technology nature
What happened The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.

the iPhone

Announced on 9 January 2007 and on sale from 29 June, the first iPhone had no app store, no copy and paste, no 3G and no video recording. The App Store arrived over a year later in July 2008. Android Inc. had been founded in 2003, four years before the iPhone, but the first Android phone shipped fifteen months after it.

sharks

Scales from shark-like fish appear around 450 million years ago and unambiguous shark teeth by about 420 million years ago. The first trees appeared roughly 385 million years ago, so sharks predate trees by tens of millions of years. They also predate Saturn's rings on most current estimates, and they have survived all five mass extinctions.

Deep-time dates are approximate to within tens of millions of years and shift as new fossils are found.

Common questions

Which came first, the iPhone or sharks?
sharks, by 450.002 million years — 450 million years ago against 2007.
When did the iPhone start?
2007. The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement.
When did sharks start?
450 million years ago. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)
  2. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution

How these figures are compiled and checked