how many dinosaurs were roughly alive millions of years ago?

Question: how many dinosaurs were roughly alive millions of years ago?
- Keywords:
  dinosaur
Asked by fine to James_M on 21 Jun 2011.
- James M Monk answered on 21 Jun 2011:
  
  I have no idea really. Judging by the number of people alive today (6.6 billion) we can estimate that the Earth is able to support perhaps around 1 billion large animals, so I would guess (and it is a pure guess) between 1-10 billion dinosaurs in total.
  
  This illustrates an important point: there is no way of knowing the population of dinosaurs for certain (we cannot count them!), so we have to estimate it one way or another. Presumably palaeontologists and biologists have a model to estimate this, either based on the number of fossils found or the known parameters of the ecosystem at the time.

danm commented on 21 Jun 2011:

So if 1-10 billion dinosaurs were roughly alive millions of years ago, how many do you think were actually alive?

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Question: how many dinosaurs were roughly alive millions of years ago?