The dinosaur era is one of the longest reigns in Earth’s history. Dinosaurs first appeared around 230 million years ago, and the last non-bird dinosaurs disappeared about 66 million years ago. That’s roughly 165 million years of dinosaur domination.
To put that in perspective, modern humans have existed for about 300,000 years. So dinosaurs ruled Earth for around 550 times longer than humans have. Even if you go back to the very first member of the human family, we’ve only been around for about 7 million years - barely 4% of the dinosaur era.
The dinosaur era was so vast that the dinosaurs at the start and the dinosaurs at the end weren’t really neighbors. Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago. T. rex lived about 66 million years ago. There’s more time between them than between T. rex and us.
