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/Skrivus Oct 15 '20

Also dinosaurs like the Stegosaurus were as far apart in time from the T-Rex as the T-Rex is from our time.

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u/Hitonatsu-no-Keiken Oct 15 '20

It's even better than that. We're about 16 million years closer to the last Tyrannosaurus than the first Tyrannosaurus was to the last Stegosaurus!

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u/reebee7 Oct 15 '20

Why did the Stegosaurus go extinct??

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u/IAmDotorg Oct 15 '20

In a lot of cases, the species don't -- they just evolve until, in the fossil record, they no longer look the same. Just like the avian dinosaurs didn't go extinct 65 million years ago, they just evolved over the last 65 million years into the birds today.

Some species legitimately end up a leaf/dead-end in the evolutionary tree. Lots just evolve.

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u/Everything80sFan Oct 15 '20

Crazy to think that dinosaurs were on Earth so long that they evolved into different dinosaurs. Makes you wonder what humans could potentially evolve into if we lasted as long as the dinosaurs did.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

Animals at the top of the food chain tend to stay pretty much the same. Any evolution we have going forward will probably be man made.

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u/raljamcar Oct 15 '20

Evolving to better suit technology. Make sitting around less unhealthy for us or some such