Let's start with the fact that dinosaurs are not actually lizards.
I know, your mind is blown already.
In reality, they represent a separate group of reptiles who did not exhibit your typical reptilian characteristics. Dinosaurs were all terrestrial creatures, with characteristically upright legs, not splayed postures like crocodiles. This also means that your beloved aquatic reptiles (like Plesiosaurus) and pterosaurs (for example, Pteranodon...otherwise known as Pterodactyl) are not considered dinosaurs. While they all belong to the group known as archosaurs, they are about as related to dinosaurs as we are to kangaroos.
The taxon Dinosauria is made of two groups: Ornithischia ("bird-hipped", which are your horned, armored, and duck-billed dinosaurs) and Saurischia ("lizard-hipped", which are your sauropod and theropod dinos). You wanna guess which group modern birds evolved from? If you said ornithischians, you'd be super fucking wrong. Birds descended from theropods, which includes such favorites as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor. You know what else this means? That T-Rex and its theropod buddies were almost all covered with feathers at some stage in their life cycles. That's right...big, scary T-Rex likely sported luscious, bright-colored feathers as it chomped on its dinner. This gives a whole new meaning to the word "fierce".
Dinosaurs were also not the first reptiles to inhabit the Earth. The first reptiles evolved in the late Carboniferous Period, more than 300 million years ago. True dinosaurs didn't pop into the picture until well into the Triassic, some 230 million years ago. Between this period, various forms of archosaurs and synapsids dominated the planet. Where archosaurs eventually split into pterosaurs, crocodilians, and dinosaurs, synapsids are the ancestors of mammals. You read right, mammals lived alongside dinosaurs, and did so for more than 150 million years. Synapsids were small, nocturnal creatures, weighing as little as two grams (freaking adorable, right?) and they remained small until the death of the "Great Lizards" 65 million years ago. Once the mighty, brooding beasts perished, they left a mass of larger niches for animals to fill, thus allowing synapsids to grow in size and in number.
Wait, you thought dinosaurs were so huge because of different gravity or higher levels of oxygen? You'd be dead fucking wrong...again. Gravity hasn't changed since the time of the dinosaurs, so stop blaming it for things it didn't do! And, despite what you may have heard, the oxygen levels may have actually been lower during the Mesozoic than they are now. So how did so many dinos become so incredibly large? If you read my post on sauropods, you'd know the answer already, ya jerk. Their awesome size is due to special air sacs, which made their skeletons lighter without sacrificing strength. Dinosaurs were also able to reproduce by laying small clutches of eggs all over, which allowed them to avoid the constraints that prevented other land-dwelling animals from getting larger.
Is there still something left of your brain? Well, hold onto your butts...
Did you know that Tyrannosaurus Rex did not, in actuality, live alongside Apatosaurus (known by his stage name, The Dinosaur Formally Known as Brontosaurus)? Not only did these two great beasts live in different regions, they lived in completely different time periods. Apatosaurus lived from about 154-150 million years ago, during the Late-Jurassic, whereas T-Rex lived 67-66 million years ago, during the Late-Cretaceous. This leaves a gap of more than 80 million years between the two, which is 15 million years LONGER than the gap between us and dinosaurs altogether. How in the hell did we ever get the idea that these two frolicked in the fields together in the first place? Probably because "The Land Before Time" wouldn't have been as intense, yet heart-warming, of a story without it.
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