Todd Honeycutt, age 10, of Mt. Holly, N.C., for his question:

WERE DINOSAURS HERE BEFORE PEOPLE?

It's very exciting to think that our ancestors coped with the whopping dinosaurs. But this really could not have happened. Those huge reptiles departed ages before the first human family arrived on the earth. However, there is a new twist to this old story. Scientists now suspect that at least some of the smaller dinosaurs survived right up to modern times.

Scientists are able to trace the long story of life on earth by digging up fossils, which naturally reveal more and more about the distant past. Sometimes they find new evidence and have to change their minds. A few years ago some old bones were found that suggest our ancestors arrived here earlier than we had thought. And later, some experts came up with the idea that perhaps the dinosaurs, too, survived longer than we thought.

Most scientists now think the human family has been here at least a million years and maybe longer. This seems like a very long time  until we remember that the earth is older than 4 billion years and that there were smallish sea creatures at least 500 million years ago. Some 300 million years ago, insects and giant salamanders began living on the land.

The first dinosaurs were small reptiles that arrived about 100 million years later. Through the ages they grew bigger and branched out in all sorts of fantastic shapes and sizes. This group included the giant reptiles we usually think of as dinosaurs. These whopping lizards all died out about 60 million years before our human ancestors arrived.

However, scientists now think the original dinosaurs did more branching out than we thought. Most people used to think of them as cold blooded reptiles with scaly skins. And this is generally true. But it seems that there were other types, also.

Some had hairy or feathery scales. Others may have been warm blooded animals, able to survive severe changes of climate. At least some of these odd dinosaur relatives were here to greet our ancestors  and their children survived to modern times. This story is quite new and still unfolding. We still agree that the big scaly monsters died out long before our ancestors arrived. But some of the odd dinosaur relatives took to the air as the first birds. And their feathery descendants are with us still.