What was the lifespan of the dinosaurs ?

Question

They were here for millions of years, so I would think they had pretty long life span. Do they know how long a t rex lived or the larger dino's?

Answer 1

Any answer to this question would be pure speculation. Nobody knows and there's not really a way to find out. Also, looking to modern reptiles like crocodiles or Komodo Dragons isn't terribly accurate. Crocodilians are like dinosaur uncles and birds are direct lineage. Dinosaurs were their own group, not ancient versions of modern reptiles.

Anyway, lifespans among dinosaurs were probably as varied as they are among modern birds and mammals.

Answer 2

They must have had pretty short life-spans, because insurance companies wouldn't write policies on them.

In general, carnivores have shorter lifespans than herbivores.

Back in the 1940s, there was a hypothesis posited that stated that for all animals except mankind, the number of heartbeats in the lifespan was roughly the same. A mouse's heart races, and it dies young, while an elephant's heart beats slowly, and it lives a long time.

Generally speaking carnivores have bigger brains than herbivores. After all, it doesn't take much intelligence to sneak up on a blade of grass. The brain takes a lot of energy. (It's the largest single item on the human body's energy budget.) Consequently, a carnivore may have a heart that beats faster than an herbivore. Consequently, a T-rex probably lived a shorter life than what we called a brontosaurus back in the 1960s, or is called an apatosaurus today.

Answer 3

Your question is ambigous. Do you want to know how long a certain individual of a certain species was expected to live or how long the species was on earth? There is guesswork for both questions; a given dinosaur could, with a little bit of luck, live about 30 years. The species lifetime is more hazy, since species found in one area at in a certain era did not necessarily give rise to species that lived in another area at a later time. Also, we don't know every species in a life-line of a dinosaur genus or order. I would guess that some species were around for the order of 10^7 years, perhaps somewhat longer.

Answer 4

First of all, when you say "they were here for millions of years" it sounds like you are meaning that an individual dinosaur may have lived for millions of years. No individual organism can live for millions of years. Dinosaurs as different species survived for millions of years. Like if your last name is Smith, you could say the Smiths have been around for hundreds of years. Of course no single Smith has been around that long, but the Smith family may have existed that long. No one can truly know how long dinosaurs lived, but we can make educated guesses. I think it is safe to say that the larger dinosaurs lived longer than the smaller ones. I do not think it would be too much of a stretch to say that Brontosaurus and other large saurapods could live for more than 100 years.

Answer 5

different species had different life spans. some of
the largest dinosaurs, plant eaters, lived up to 100yrs.
the t-rex is believed to have had a maximum life span
of 30yrs. (assuming they weren't eaten first).

Answer 6

no-one knows, but we can infer from crocs and Komodo dragons that they grew rapidly and lived about 40 - 120 years