Nature
PUBLISHED
18
A poll once found that just over 40 percent of Americans believe humans and dinosaurs co-existed, living alongside each other like Fred Flintstone and Dino. And no, most of them probably weren’t making a clever point about modern birds technically being avian dinosaurs.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The 2015 poll by YouGov found that 27 percent of Americans thought that humans and dinosaurs “probably” lived on planet Earth at the same time, while a further 14 percent said they “definitely” thought this was the case.
Just 25 percent believed this “definitely” was not true and 18 percent said this idea “probably” wasn’t accurate. The remaining 16 percent were unsure.
Religious beliefs seem to be a major influence on these findings. Among “born-again” Christians, 56 percent believe that humans and dinosaurs once shared the planet at the same time, while only 22 percent think they did not. In contrast, most non-born-again Americans (51 percent) reject the idea of coexistence. This divide is likely influenced by religious beliefs, particularly Young Earth Creationism, which interprets the Bible literally and suggests the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old.
Taking a scientific view, there is overwhelming evidence that the planet is much older. Scientists have calculated that the Earth formed alongside the rest of the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago, approximately one-third the age of the universe (around 13.8 billion years).
It’s also clear that humans and dinosaurs didn’t co-exist thanks to abundant evidence from fossil records, geological stratigraphy, radiometric dating, evolutionary biology, climate data, and mass extinction events.
Non-avian dinosaurs were wiped from the Earth approximately 66 million years ago during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, triggered by the infamous asteroid impact that smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula.
By comparison, the genus Homo – the human genus – originated between 3 and 2.5 million years ago. It wasn’t until just 200,000 to 300,000 years ago that our species – Homo sapiens – evolved from other Homo species in Africa.
So, we can confidently say that humans and dinosaurs are separated by well over 60 million years of Earth's history. Then again, there is the awkward case of avian dinosaurs.
Most of the animals that we call “dinosaurs” were killed off during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, but one clade did stick around: Aves. These are essentially birds – from pigeon to hawk and chicken to emu – that are descended from feathered theropod dinosaurs that lived during the so-called Age of the Dinosaurs.
Since the Aves clade is still alive and kicking, you could argue that humans currently live alongside dinosaurs. However, let’s be honest – we can assume that most people who responded to the 2015 poll probably weren’t thinking of it that way.
