In the movies, Godzilla fought King Kong and Alien took on Predator, and if you've ever dreamed of a prehistoric prizefight between the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Stegosaurus, you'd have to rely on some fabricating filmmakers to make it look real, as well. The two gigantic dinosaurs could never have battled it out in the real world. That's because the T. rex and the Stegosaurus were separated by nearly 100 million years. In fact, the T. rex dominated the late Cretaceous period of about 67–65 million years ago, meaning it lived closer to the present day than to the time of the Stegosaurus, which roamed the Earth in the late Jurassic period, between 156 and 144 million years ago. As startling as that might be to anyone who gets most of their dinosaur data from comic books and movies, the real shocker might be this: Dinosaurs existed for approximately 165 million years, living on all seven continents and existing in at least 700 species. Meanwhile, modern humans have only been around for about 200,000 years. In other words, dinosaurs lasted 865 times longer than we have so far.
Digging into dinosaurs:
- Some herbivorous dinosaurs could eat around one ton of vegetables every day; that's the weight of a small bus.
- The majority of dinosaurs were not huge, but rather about the size of people; it is believed that the bones of larger creatures just fossilized more easily.
- Most dinosaurs had very small brains relative to their size, and even the smartest among them was only on par with a modern ostrich in terms of intelligence.