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Which came first, Tyrannosaurus rex or the United States?

Which came first, Tyrannosaurus rex or the United States?
Tyrannosaurus rex
68 million years ago — 68.002 million years before the United States

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

Tyrannosaurus rex the United States
Year 68 million years ago 1776
Date — 1776-07-04
Category nature country
What happened T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs. The Declaration of Independence was adopted.

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.

the United States

The date used here is the Declaration, 4 July 1776, which is the one people mean. Two others have equal claim: Britain recognised independence in 1783, and the Constitution took effect in 1789, so the current government is younger than the country by thirteen years. The United States is older as a state than Germany (1871), Italy (1861), Canada (1867) and modern Japan (1868).

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

Common questions

Which came first, Tyrannosaurus rex or the United States?
Tyrannosaurus rex, by 68.002 million years — 68 million years ago against 1776.
When did Tyrannosaurus rex start?
68 million years ago. T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs.
When did the United States start?
1776. The Declaration of Independence was adopted.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution
  2. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked