In my roaming around on different websites and the newsletters that I receive, once in a while something really pops out. In an article on the decline of the dinosaurs, I was amazed that less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus than separates Tyrannosaurus from another dinosaur family!

The focus on the extinction event also obscures the breathtakingly long nature of the dinosaurs’ reign. It invites us to think that all the dinosaurs we’re familiar with were around at the same time, and then suddenly they weren’t. That’s not true: as Brian Switek says, less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus than separated Tyrannosaurus from Stegosaurus. If anything, Sakomoto’s study, in revealing the dinosaurs’ slow decline, reminds us about just how long they ruled for—a period of 180 million years, during which many species came and went.