What came first: Viruses or their hosts?

Smallpox has been around forever; poxes generally even longer and they have infected everything from dolphins to grasshoppers with variations own individual strains.

Pox has such a massive DNA make-up at somepoint, could it have been the dominant species on the planet

As it can transmutate to just about any new host species, forever jumping to avoid eradication could it be that the pox actually predates everything else?

Could it be the reason for it's ability to jump so successfully is because it has in its' overall lifetime met everything further down the evolutionary order so it has a genetic memory making it easier to stick in the new host?

What came first: Viruses or their hosts?software

It is very quickly apparent from sequence studies that there can have been no single origin of viruses as organisms. For instance, there is no obvious way one can relate viruses of the size and complexity of the Poxviridae [double-stranded linear DNA,130-375 kb, 150-300 genes] with viruses like the tobamoviruses [ss linear RNA, 6-7 kb, 4 genes], or either of these with the Geminiviridae [ss circular DNA, 2.7 - 5.4 kb, 3-7 genes]. Thus, there can be no simple ''family tree'' for viruses; rather, their evolutionary descent must resemble a number of scattered ''bushes''. Viruses as a class of organism must be therefore be considered to be polyphyletic in origins: that is, having a number of independent origins, almost certainly at different times, usually from cellular organisms.