The popular imagination keeps dinosaurs in a single time period — a generic 'dinosaur era' where T-Rex, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Brontosaurus all wandered together. They didn't. The Mesozoic Era — the age of dinosaurs — lasted 186 million years. That's an immense expanse of deep time, with vastly different ecosystems at different points within it.

Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago, in the Late Jurassic period. Tyrannosaurus rex lived about 67 million years ago, at the very end of the Cretaceous. The gap between them is 83 million years.

The gap between T-Rex and the present day is 67 million years.

In other words, T-Rex is closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus. By a margin of 16 million years.

The same temporal weirdness applies elsewhere. Sharks evolved before trees did. Sharks evolved before Saturn had rings. The shark species that are alive today have outlived the dinosaurs.

The pyramids of Giza are about 4,500 years old. Cleopatra ruled Egypt only about 2,000 years ago — closer in time to the iPhone than to the construction of the pyramids she's so often associated with.

The mammoth went extinct around 4,000 years ago — meaning the last woolly mammoths were dying while Egyptians were building pyramids and writing in hieroglyphics.

Most of human civilization fits inside about 10,000 years. The Mesozoic was 18,000 times longer.

Our intuition for time is broken. We live in a tiny pinprick of the present, in a universe whose timeline most of our brains were never wired to grasp.