TV shows such as The Flintstones depict humans and dinosaurs living together in harmony. But that’s just fiction, right? Actually, not quite. The dinosaurs the earliest humans lived among were not the huge lumbering lizards we most commonly think of when we see the word. Those had been extinct for almost 66 million years before the first humans began to make their mark. The dinosaurs that comingled with our ancient ancestors were modern birds—the closest natural relatives to the extinct dinosaurs—which means that we live with dinosaurs too.
Dinosaurs were the dominant species for nearly 165 million years, during a period known as the Mesozoic Era. Growing evidence suggests that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded, bore colorful feathers, and engaged in behaviors similar to those of contemporary birds. Their reign concluded at the end of the Cretaceous Period, when an asteroid the size of a mountain slammed into Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula with the force of 100 trillion tons of TNT. The impact created a crater 115 miles across and several miles deep and sent tons of rock, dust, and debris into the atmosphere. A darkness descended across the planet that, along with other related catastrophes, wiped out an estimated 80 percent of life on Earth.
Small mammals are known to have lived with dinosaurs during the mammoth beasts’ final reign. Many of these warm-blooded creatures survived the cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs and much of the other life on Earth at the time and eventually evolved into a wide range of animals. Millions of years later, humans do live together in domestic bliss with dinosaurs. We just call them chickens and parakeets. Life, uh, finds a way.