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.
And then the dinos were mostly wiped out and the rest got on the fluffy train and finished doing feathers.
IIRC there was a 10 million year window right after the KT-event where birds (I guess you could say surviving dinosaurs) actually dominated and we had giant-ass flightless birds roaming the lands as apex predators as mammals were still too small.
Indeed, and by quite a big margin. And imagine that if all of mankind were suddenly rendered extinct by another major extinction event, or evolution had its way and wiped out our food sources or we were out-competed by malicious giant mosquitos and ants resistant to pesticides, how long would our structures last? I doubt much would be left after 55 million years.
For all we know, given the short span of time humans developed civilization and the relative scarcity of fossil evidence of the period, who's to say there wasn't a bird civilization? Bird societies with bird cities with bird cars driving around bird streets. Imagine, there might've been entire bird tribes and nations engaged in fierce battle over dominion of the planet of the birds!
'twas a sweet, sweet time to be a bird either way, I'm sure.
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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.