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Which came first, Nintendo or sharks?

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

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

Side by side

Nintendo sharks
Year 1889 450 million years ago
Date 1889-09-23
Category company nature
What happened Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.

Nintendo

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make handmade hanafuda cards, and it was a playing-card company for about eighty years. It is older than the Ford Motor Company (1903), older than the aeroplane, older than the Eiffel Tower by five months, and older than the modern Olympic Games. Before settling on video games in the 1970s it tried taxis, instant rice and a chain of love hotels.

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, Nintendo or sharks?
sharks, by 450.002 million years — 450 million years ago against 1889.
When did Nintendo start?
1889. Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto.
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