At One Place

Which came first, pizza or sharks?

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

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

Side by side

pizza sharks
Year 1780 450 million years ago
Category food nature
What happened Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.

pizza

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza in the sense people mean — wheat base, tomato, baked in a wood oven — dates from Naples in the late 1700s, and could not have existed earlier because tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were widely thought poisonous for two hundred years. The Margherita story, in which a Naples pizzaiolo created a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, rests on a single document now widely believed to be a forgery. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi's in New York, was licensed in 1905.

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, pizza or sharks?
sharks, by 450.002 million years — 450 million years ago against 1780.
When did pizza start?
1780. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.
When did sharks start?
450 million years ago. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place
  2. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution

How these figures are compiled and checked