---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Tyrannosaurus rex?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs Tyrannosaurus rex: Tyrannosaurus rex came first, by 68.002 million years — 68 million years ago against 1969. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-t-rex/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Tyrannosaurus rex?

**Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Tyrannosaurus rex?: Tyrannosaurus rex**

68 million years ago — 68.002 million years before the internet (ARPANET)

Tyrannosaurus rex came first, by 68.002 million years. T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | Tyrannosaurus rex |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 68 million years ago |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | — |
| Category | technology | nature |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs. |

## the internet (ARPANET)

On 29 October 1969 a team at UCLA tried to send the word "login" to Stanford. The system crashed after two characters, so the first message ever sent over the internet's ancestor was "lo". By the end of that year the network had four nodes. The internet is twenty years older than the Web, and confusing the two is the single most common error in this whole subject.

## Tyrannosaurus rex

Tyrannosaurus rex lived from about 68 to 66 million years ago, right at the end of the Cretaceous. Stegosaurus died out around 150 million years ago. That means T. rex is closer in time to us — 66 million years — than it is to Stegosaurus, by more than 20 million years. The two are routinely drawn in the same picture and never met.

> Deep-time date, approximate to within a million years or so.

## Common questions

### Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Tyrannosaurus rex?

Tyrannosaurus rex, by 68.002 million years — 68 million years ago against 1969.

### When did the internet (ARPANET) start?

1969. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

### When did Tyrannosaurus rex start?

68 million years ago. T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/)