Dinosaur timeline

Dinosaurs lived on Earth from the Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous, for more than 180 million years, before going extinct 66 million years ago.

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

251.9 million years ago66 million years ago

The world in the age of dinosaurs

Continents don't stay put: tectonic plates drift a few centimeters a year. Over the age of dinosaurs, the supercontinent Pangaea slowly broke apart. The orange dot marks where northeastern Thailand was at each time.

220 million years ago · Late Triassic: nearly all land is joined in the supercontinent Pangaea.

220 million years ago
Late Triassic: nearly all land is joined in the supercontinent Pangaea.^[4][1]
170 million years ago
Middle Jurassic: Pangaea is splitting into Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south.^[4][1]
100 million years ago
Mid-Cretaceous: South America is pulling away from Africa as the South Atlantic opens.^[5][1]
66 million years ago
The day of the asteroid impact: the continents look much more like today.^[1]

Maps reconstructed from the plate-tectonic model of Müller et al. (2019) via the GPlates Web Service, used under CC BY 4.0. Land shapes are today's coastlines moved back in time, so they don't show the shallow seas that once flooded parts of the continents. This site simplified the coastlines and dropped small islands so the page loads quickly.^[1][2][3]