Are Sharks Really Older Than the North Star?

I always thought that whole "sharks are older than the North Star" was simply in the sense of sharks are so old that Polaris wasn't the North Star back then, it was another star.

The fact that sharks are older than trees and mountain ranges is just amazing imo. Such ancient, yet fascinating creature

Don't forget there are Greenland sharks swimming around that are 300+ years old!! So some living sharks were born before humanity entered the industrial age 🤯

"and then theres that infamous 'when are you going to explode already' betelgeuse" 😂

Once you said, "we have to pivot from biology to astronomy," I was fully expecting the intro music to replay and the SciShow Space animation 😂

This is legitimately one of my favourite SciShow videos I've ever watched. I love when different areas of study intersect or are compared on a timescale or in a geographical way that is surprising.

All of the folks at SciShow are stars, and they are definitely younger than me.

This whole video might be the best fun fact I've heard about Polaris: that it's not just in a cool spot in the night sky, but it's also very weird and could be weirder than we know

Shark: 'Y'all dinosaurs settle down. Lord, young'uns these days.'

The last common ancestor of all living sharks was in the Jurassic period, 160-200 million years ago. The Devonian "sharks" pre-dated the split between rays and modern sharks. This means that they aren't phylogenetically sharks: they're outside the crown group, Selachimorpha. They're informally referred to as "sharks" partly because it's a tradition that pre-dates the discovery that all living sharks are more closely related to each other than to rays, and partly because these fossils were cartilaginous predatory fish (and on the ancestral line to true sharks). So, "sharks are older than trees/polaris/dinosaurs" is one of the most widely-spread scientific inaccuracies. The crown group of sharks is younger than dinosaurs, and possibly younger than mammals (certainly younger than mammaliaforms).

07:49 It's like one of my favorite jokes from "Rick & Morty", in the "Snake Jazz" episode: Morty: "There are snakes in Space?!" Rick: "There's literally everything is in Space!"

When Polaris punched you "Omae wa mō shindeiru"

Seems most likely that Polaris B got gravity captured by the Original Binary of Polaris A and Ab, leeching energy from the system and degrading their respective orbits. That would help explain the proximity of the two stars , while also explaining the distance of a much older star. The gravitational inspiral and eventual merger of another star by Polaris A seems likely to tear another body apart at that relative distance

1:13 shark survived 4 out of 5 mass extinctions before shark didn't existed yet during Ordovician-silurian mass extinctions probably will survived 5 out of 6 mass extinctions that caused by humans

I think "It came from another system and is now in orbit" is the most likely, as a layman. Stars are traveling all over the place all the time. It's not that crazy of a thought that one would just... wind up in orbit with a much larger star.

Whew, being reminded that there's at least one star out there younger than me made me feel very connected to the cosmos for a minute there :D

Well, the Minnesota North Stars didn't even exist until 1967 and then that NHL franchise folded in 1993, 🤔... ...so yeah, not exactly hard to believe sharks are more than 26 years old! 😏

This is such a great episode! 💜

A timeline that amazes me is T Rex lived far closer to our time than it did to Stegosaurus' time.

Every human was once the youngest object in the universe.