About how much time are we talkin here?

Also makes you wonder what fossils they mean, of the same species or then already extinct ones.

Because according to a quick Wikipedia search the oldest hominid fossils (?) are something like 7 millions years old

That's much much shorter than dinosaurs where around but hey " hominins are around long enough to unearth hominin fossils"!

I said I'm sorry. But if you're going to let your T-Rex out at night you should at least put a reflective collar on it.

This is the comparison I was looking for. It’s great to explain that media shows them together but untrue, it is a totally different idea to explain the staggering time difference between the two.

How dare you suggest DinoTrux lied to us!!!

We live closer to the time of T-Rex than T-Rex lived to the time of Stegosaurus.

67 million years separate us from T-Rex.
83 million years separate T-Rex from Stegosaurus. (150 million years between us and Stegosaurus)

To be fair, things can fossilise very quickly given ideal conditions. Still dinosaurs reigned for a lot more time than mammals and frankly nature is still feeling the loss in certain ways.

https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/

Also, my favourite fact is we know almost nothing about dinosaurs from jungles and mountains. Most of our knowledge comes from wetland and oceanic creatures because of the way fossils are formed.

Forty-one?! You're practically a fossil!

That's what the XKCD that was posted says. Mostly.

There's always a relevant xkcd

guzzles water

Second relevant xkcd of the comments https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/

Corvids and psittacines display human child level intelligence. They use tools. They recognize other people. Hell the psittacines can mimic speech.

I personally suspect it's a matter of energy density. Birds have to use almost all of their available calories on flying. Doesn't leave a lot of energy left over for a massively hungry brain. No clue what's holding back penguins, emus, and cassowaries.

Evolution isn't aimed. A T-Rex needs to be good enough to hunt enough food.

Our ancient ancestors smashed the skulls of animals killed by African predators to eat the brains, smashed bones to eat the marrow.

Later as our ancestors became bigger and stronger they hunted and needed to communicate with each other to effectively track and take down an animal. Maybe they needed twenty words. Chickens have three words (or cluck patterns)

At the same time women collected stuff and needed to share how to identify this from that with younger women. They might have needed a hundred words.

Then those who could talk better were more attractive to the other sex than those who couldn't (even now being well spoken is attractive) then a few millions of years later we're making stone knives, hammers, axes; then ten minutes later aeroplanes and machine guns

In short: we had it hard enough we needed to share information. We later found communication sexy. T-Rex had no such trouble. We seem to be the only animal that solved "scavenging is dangerous" and "hunting is hard" with talking to each other rather than by getting bigger and getting claws or vicious teeth

I understand we selected for tall by fighting humans