Question: How long were dinosaurs on earth compared to humans?
Answer: Dinosaurs were already extinct 65 million years ago and existed for 165 million years, while we humans have been here for about seven million years.
How long were dinosaurs on earth compared to humans?
Dinosaurs were already extinct 65 million years ago and existed for 165 million years, while we humans have been here for about seven million years. Safe to say that dinosaurs have been here for quite a while and had a whole era to themselves, called the Mesozoic era. The Mesozoic era started about 250 million years ago after the Permian extinction, which wiped out a lot of life on the earth, but creatures started to evolve, and among them were the dinosaurs, who were the dominant species of the era; thus, it is also called “age of the dinosaurs.”
The Mesozoic era was composed of three periods: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Dinosaurs appeared halfway through the Triassic period and were the dominant species from the Jurassic period. Dinosaurs developed from a group of reptiles called Archosaurs.
According to USGS, if we were to take the time that dinosaurs started to exist on the earth till today and put it into 365 days, the dinosaurs would have appeared on the first of January and became extinct by the third week of September. Using this same time scale would mean that the earth was created 18.5 years ago. And if we use the same scale again for people, that would mean that people have been on the earth since 31st December.
So, we can’t compare the time humans spent on the earth to dinosaurs because there is a considerable gap. Our long lineage led to humans separating from apes 7 million years ago, the genus Homo has existed for 2.5 million years now, and modern humans emerged only 200 000 years ago. We can, however, compare the time between the existence of dinosaurs versus mammals as dinosaurs, as mentioned, have been here for 165 million years while mammals have been around for 150 million years before the dinosaurs.
