Bizzare Facts

Movies like *Jurassic Park* often depict a prehistoric battle royale where the **Tyrannosaurus Rex** and the **Stegosaurus** fight to the death. It makes for thrilling cinema, but it is a chronological impossibility. The Stegosaurus lived during the Late Jurassic period, roaming the Earth approximately **150 million years ago**. It had been extinct for eons before the T-Rex even evolved. The Tyrannosaurus Rex didn't appear on the scene until the Late Cretaceous period, roughly **67 million years ago**.

This creates a mind-bending timeline gap. Approximately **83 million years** separated the last Stegosaurus from the first T-Rex. To put that vast chasm of time into perspective, consider our own place in history. The T-Rex went extinct about **66 million years ago** during the mass extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. This means that the time separating the T-Rex from **modern humans** (66 million years) is significantly shorter than the time separating the T-Rex from the Stegosaurus (83 million years).

So, when you see a T-Rex fighting a Stegosaurus in a movie, you aren't just watching a fight; you are watching a time-travel fantasy. The T-Rex is actually a relatively 'modern' dinosaur in the grand scheme of the Mesozoic Era, living closer to the invention of the iPad than to the days when the Stegosaurus grazed on ferns. The dinosaur age was so incredibly long that different species were ancient history to each other, just as they are to us.