---
title: "Which came first, pizza or Tyrannosaurus rex?"
description: "pizza vs Tyrannosaurus rex: Tyrannosaurus rex came first, by 68.002 million years — 68 million years ago against 1780. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/pizza-vs-t-rex/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, pizza or Tyrannosaurus rex?

**Which came first, pizza or Tyrannosaurus rex?: Tyrannosaurus rex**

68 million years ago — 68.002 million years before pizza

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

|  | pizza | Tyrannosaurus rex |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1780 | 68 million years ago |
| Category | food | nature |
| What happened | Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples. | T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs. |

## pizza

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza in the sense people mean — wheat base, tomato, baked in a wood oven — dates from Naples in the late 1700s, and could not have existed earlier because tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were widely thought poisonous for two hundred years. The Margherita story, in which a Naples pizzaiolo created a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, rests on a single document now widely believed to be a forgery. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi's in New York, was licensed in 1905.

## 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, pizza or Tyrannosaurus rex?

Tyrannosaurus rex, by 68.002 million years — 68 million years ago against 1780.

### When did pizza start?

1780. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

### 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

- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/)