When did they really live? Prepare to have your mind blown.
We imagine dinosaurs as one big family living together. In reality, more time separated Stegosaurus from T-Rex than separates T-Rex from you reading this sentence.
Each bar shows when a species roamed the Earth. The scale spans 252 million years to present day.
Dinosaurs ruled for 165 million years. Humans have existed for 0.3 million. If dinosaur history were 24 hours, humans show up at 11:59:57 PM.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first iPhone (2007) than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (~2560 BC). The ancient world was ancient to ancients.
Stegosaurus fossils were as ancient to T-Rex as T-Rex fossils are to us. T-Rex could have dug up Stegosaurus bones and put them in a museum.
When Stegosaurus was alive, the Moon was about 50 meters closer to Earth. Ring-shaped Saturn hadn't fully formed its rings yet. Deep time is deep.
Grass didn't evolve until near the end of the Cretaceous. Most dinosaurs never saw a blade of grass. Every movie with dinosaurs on grassy plains is wrong.
The solar system orbits the galaxy every ~225 million years. Since Stegosaurus, the entire solar system has completed almost one full lap around the Milky Way.
The word "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard," but dinosaurs weren't lizards at all. And they didn't go fully extinct — birds are dinosaurs. Literally. Every chicken nugget is dinosaur meat. That parrot judging you from its perch? Direct descendant of theropod dinosaurs, cousin to Velociraptor. Show some respect.
Data sourced from paleontological consensus estimates. Dates are approximate midpoints of known ranges.
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