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What was the longest living dinosaur?
Question Date: 2017-07-02
Answer 1:

The longest living wild dinosaur that we know of was an albatross (a seabird) who lived to be 66 years old. Several other types of large birds (parrots, vultures, eagles) in captivity can live for longer, however.

Of the non-bird dinosaurs, I'm pretty sure we have no idea of how long they could have lived. I don't think the fossils give us a clear idea of how long they lived usually, though they do show signs of aging. Among mammals, larger body size generally means a longer life, although there are some mammals that break the rule (humans live longer than you would think based on their size, for example). I notice that all of the really long-lived dinosaurs in today's world are large birds, so I suspect that the larger size helps cause longer life in dinosaurs as well.

As you know, there were extinct dinosaurs that were much, much larger than any living bird. There are reasons to think that their lifespans might have more mammal-like lifespans, however, because they lived more like how today's mammals do than like today's dinosaurs (which are of course birds). For example, crocodiles are the closet living relative of dinosaurs that aren't birds, and they can live 100-ish years, much shorter than what you would think if you simply took the ages of large, long-lived birds and continued the line of thought.



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