T-Rex Never Met a Stegosaurus ? They Missed Each Other by 80 Million Years
When you imagine a prehistoric showdown between T-Rex and Stegosaurus, you are picturing a meeting that never happened and could never have happened. Stegosaurus roamed the Earth during the Late Jurassic period, roughly 155 to 150 million years ago. T-Rex did not arrive until about 68 to 66 million years ago. The gap between them is around 83 million years.
For comparison, T-Rex went extinct approximately 66 million years ago. We exist today, roughly 66 million years after that. Which means T-Rex is actually closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus. Let that rearrange your mental timeline.
This kind of compressed-time confusion is surprisingly common with dinosaurs. Velociraptors and Triceratops were genuine contemporaries of T-Rex. Stegosaurus was not. Their iconic pairing in movies, toys, and children's books is a product of our collective failure to feel how long a million years actually is.
Stegosaurus was already ancient history by the time T-Rex was cutting its first teeth. Geologically speaking, T-Rex is practically your neighbor.
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