I tend to be a skeptic, especially about online items.
When I read the heading “Dinosaurs Lived On the Other Side Of the Galaxy,” I assumed it was clickbait nonsense. But then I noticed that it was sent by IFLScience!, so I delved deeper. This heading is both true and misleading, which I suppose is why it works.
Dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy because it takes the Earth 230 million years to orbit our galaxy center. During the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy from where it is now.
That is very cool and also very normal. If I go back 115 million years ago from today (when the Earth was opposite where it is now), we end up in the Early Cretaceous, during the age of the dinosaurs. If we go back another 230 million years, another time when the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy, we reach the Carboniferous. We could say that two-foot-long dragonflies lived on the other side of the galaxy.
If we do another rotation, we end up in the Cambrian, when trilobites lived on the other side of the galaxy.
So you see, dinosaurs were not the point of this article, just a sneaky way to get us to learn something. We now know that the Earth (and our entire solar system) rotates the galaxy center in around 230 million years. That’s really cool, but then so are giant dragonflies and trilobites.