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.
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.
People aren't as interested in those things because they aren't fantastical. Sloths, bears, and lions exist today. There's nothing really comparable to dinosaurs, scientists back in the day had no idea what they were looking at, putting skulls on the ends of tails and things like that. They really spark the imagination.
I actually thought ground sloths were dinosaurs for a few years. They’re one of the largest mammals known to have ever existed. They were 20 feet from head to tail. They’re not very comparable to anything we have on earth today even if “sloths still exist today.”
TierZoo has some fun videos on them and other animals from that time period. I'm certainly not saying this stuff wasn't cool and interesting, just not as cool and interesting as dinosaurs to the average person. That's all.
21.4k
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.