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What Was The Atmosphere Like During Dinosaur Times?

And what we can learn from it

Grant Piper
4 min readAug 12, 2023
(Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

Humans in the modern era have had a fixation on the state of the atmosphere. It started with monitoring particulate matter in post-Industrial Revolution England, migrated to evaluating the state of the ozone layer, and now is fixated on the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. The truth of the matter is that the Earth’s atmosphere is constantly changing. It is always in flux. One only has to take a look at what the atmosphere looked like when dinosaurs walked the Earth to know that the atmosphere can undergo some radical changes over time.

The question that people are grappling with now is whether or not these changes are natural or whether humans are driving them. (The majority believe humans have something to do with it.) Another thing that needs to be evaluated is whether these changes are bad, dangerous, or if they could even be desirable. (The majority believe that a warming atmosphere means catastrophe.) What can we learn about the future by looking into the past?

What was the makeup of the atmosphere during dinosaur times? The atmosphere during the time of the dinosaurs was vastly different than the one we have today.

CO2 Levels

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Grant Piper
Grant Piper

Written by Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.

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