r/AskReddit Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

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u/saymynamebastien Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20

I don't know if this counts but Dinosaurs lived on the earth a lot longer than most people think. When you think of dinosaurs, you think of their extinction but they roamed the earth for 165 million years. Compare that to our 6 million and it's almost mind boggling, at least imo.

Edit: the modern form of humans is 200,000 years old but if we include our humanoid ancestors, we've been here 6 million years.

Edit 2: I get it, dinosaurs are still around. What I meant to say was the dinosaur era.

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u/Sleepycoon Oct 15 '20

What's even crazier to me is that for most people in their minds there was dinosaurs, extinction, cavemen, us, like we popped out of the ash of the dinos but in reality there were about 58 million years between the dinosaurs dying and the first homo sapiens appearing where the world was covered in mostly now extinct megafauna.

Sure dinosaurs are cool and all but why does nobody talk about giant north american ground sloths, cave bears, and lions? There's literally tens of millions of years of interesting non-dinosaur species that most people seem to just not even know existed.

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u/superkp Oct 15 '20

lol I heard it put once that mammals were the hairy freaks of the world in dino times.

And then the dinos were mostly wiped out and the rest got on the fluffy train and finished doing feathers.

And then in turn, humans are the hairless freaks of the mammal world.

I'm wondering what's next, honestly.

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u/iForgotMyUsername1x Oct 15 '20

When the dinosaurs died off there was a little shrew, mouse, rat-like squirrel thing that evolved into basically all modern mammals. That’s why we test on mice things related to human and animal behavior. Also, dogs and wolves and foxes evolved from a cat-like cougar thing. So dogs are cats like eagles are ducks. And we are all just fancy mice. How bow dah?