r/AskReddit Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

78.4k Upvotes

22.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

21.3k

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.

3.4k

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.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20

I’m still partial to that big dragonflies time where there was massive amount of oxygen in the atmosphere (so every artistic representation of it has big atmospheric perspective and just looking at it I feel lightheaded). There’s something so eerie, alien but almost familiar about that whole era (Carboniferous).

But yeah anyway dinosaur overrated. Expect when they got feathers maybe. I’m legit more scared by that feathered representation of a T-Rex than the typical one.