But you’d have to travel forward forty million years to find an animal that strongly resembles you or me, and you could argue that we’re still living in a golden age of dinosaurs. Only about seven hundred dinosaur species have been identified from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods we regard as their finest hour, but more than ten thousand species of dinosaurs are alive today, outnumbering mammal species by more than two to one. The variety of their sizes, lives, and minds is so staggering that it’s tempting to wonder why the Cenozoic isn’t called the age of mammals and dinosaurs.
