Question: are dino real

Michael Schubert answered on 11 Jul 2024:

They absolutely were! The earliest dinosaurs emerged about 240–245 million years ago and the latest ones died out about 65 million years ago. In between, they took all kinds of forms and roamed widely across most of the Earth (which, of course, looked very different at the time).

There are no true dinosaurs still alive today, although we have lots of fossils and other evidence of their existence. That includes bones, but also footprints, skin imprints, and even biomolecules like DNA and blood proteins.

Nowadays, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs are birds, but other living animals (like crocodiles and turtles) are more distantly related. But there are also plenty of animals alive today that have changed very little since the time of the dinosaurs: sharks, bees, small mammals (like the platypus), some fish (like the coelacanth), and a unique type of lizard called the tuatara.