How do they know that animals evolved and climbed out of the oceans before plants grew out of the oceans?

Answer 1

They don't "know" which colonized land first, they just know which ones are in the older of the rocks we've found fossils in. Non-scientific idealism often makes claims that they know the ultimate Truth of what happened before all the evidence is in.... of course, then it is hard to modify what you've been claiming when new evidence comes along (like from radiometric dating, genetics, fossils, telescopes) that cannot be explained by your notions. That's why there are explanations out there for things that don't even fit what we knew as far back as 150 years ago; they rely mainly on being the ultimate authority when supporting their arguments so any admission of being wrong destroys all of their proofs. About the only other option they have is a false dichotomy. They pick out a seeming weakness, then claim if it isn't known with absolute certainty, then their notion is right. What they fail to do is support their case, therefore it is no more valid than saying life always existed without any beginning, or that timetravellers from next week went back 4 1/2 billion years and planted the first life. They would still have to disprove those notions with proofs that wouldn't eliminate theirs if they want to play dichotomy games.

Besides, last I knew the oldest terrestrial fossils were plants, but I may be behind on that.

Answer 2

Actually, there's a bit of an argument--and more work needs to be done:
Scientists pretty much agree there is evidence of fossilized land plants from Ordovician time. Here's a very nice site describing early land plant fossils with illustrations. http://www.xs4all.nl/~steurh/eng/old1.html
At least one group of researchers have argued, however,that their genetic research shows "that land plants and fungi evolved much earlier than previously thought--before the Snowball Earth and Cambrian Explosion events--suggesting their presence could have had a profound effect on the climate and the evolution of life on Earth," says Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist and leader of the Penn State research team that performed the study.
The researchers found that land plants had evolved on Earth by about 700 million years ago and land fungi by about 1,300 million years ago--much earlier than previous estimates of around 480 million years ago, which were based on the earliest fossils of those organisms.
But even this scientist agrees that "No undisputed fossils of the earliest land plants and fungi have been found in rocks formed during the Precambrian period, says Hedges, possibly because their primitive bodies were too soft to turn into fossils."http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-08/ps-flp080301.php

Answer 3

If you start studying all of the different methods of dating fossils and rocks and soil you quickly find that very few of them agree with each other. I tend to lean away from the religion of evolution for this reason. The pure absence of evidence for all of the evolving that would have had to happen to get humans from a single celled living protein in some primordial ooze is enough to convince me it didn't happen that way.
The problem is that if you don't have evolution you have to have a God and most folks don't want God anymore.

Answer 4

They can tell the ages of the first terrestrial animals. There are apparently no plants or spores in these layers.

Answer 5

They don't know it at all......it's all still related to Darwin's THEORY.....which has yet to be proven.