Animals evolved long before plants. What's crazy is that plants were arguably evolved by fungi using alga to farm sunlight

> Animals evolved long before plants

No

underwater: algae 3500MY vs sponges, worms, shells 800MY-485MY

out of water: plants 4705MY vs millipedes, tetrapod 420MY-400MY

quora says animals https://www.quora.com/Which-evolved-first-plants-or-animals

It would be good to confront this UCL professor with the fact algae existed long before animals

And even on land, he seems to be wrong (or at least not up to date): https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/plant-life..., https://www.science.org/content/article/land-plants-arose-ea...

This is precisely my point - algae are not plants, they evolved a long time before

reversed evolution theory

You probably know, but the process was natural selection and random mutations, plants with tasty seeds developped more

What about underwater plants? Life started in the water first didn't it?

> What about underwater plants? Life started in the water first didn't it?

They played the long game?

...except we didn't evolve from plants.

While animals and plants share mitochondria, they do not share plastids (chloroplast, chromoplast, etc.).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid

"Invented by plants" does not necessitate "evolved from plants". Your TV doesn't contain mitochondria :)

Well i think invented is probably the wrong word moulded is probably better when you consider the fact that trees could be hundreds of years old before humanity proliferated and destroyed so many forests in last 1-200 years. It is not out of the question that animals could have evolved to serve trees as a 2-300 year old tree could see 100 generations of an animal

An interesting fact that I learned from the book Metazoa is that biological diversity was greater in the seas than on land, until about 130 million years ago, and then the explosion of diversity on land, at that time and still now, was because of a feedback loop that developed between plants and insects, with the insects allowing greater specialization among the plants, and the greater diversity among plants allowing greater diversity among insects. This was a true feedback loop, in that it would be impossible to say what the starting point was, the insects or the plants.

https://www.amazon.com/Metazoa-Animal-Minds-Birth-Consciousn...

until trees with their wood laid waste to this balance?

at least until fungi figured hoe to break lingin?

Your dates are off by 100 million years. You're confusing the late Paleozoic for the late Mesozoic. Trees came first, the explosion of land-based bio-diversity happened more than 100 million years later.

Life is just is a way for water to transport itself.

Life is, after all, what happens when you put together a bunch of hydrogen and wait a while.