Decided to keep this here vs GD, mostly cause I'm more genuinely curious vs a GD answer.    So the wife was watching something on the Earth when I got home from work and it was on the Triassic-Jurassic periods which later evolved to what we have now.  

The thing that had always blown my mind (literally)  is just the span of time they talk about.    They will "speed" through 50 million years from each era like its just a small page in a gigantic book.  Considering man-kind (in all its forms) has only been on Earth for about 250k years, yet SOMEHOW, dinosaurs and other life had lasted 500 million years.  

So my question is, and I understand no one was alive to see/document it, but besides the changes in weather,  volcanoes, plate tectonics,  ect... what all happened during that time? Or did life just live and magically survive abd thats it for 3 billion years.  Also, just cause I'm genuinely interested,  can anyone point me in the direction of some literature or videos that may go more in depth on this?

Not sure why you would compare the presence of homo sapiens to the presence of dinosaurs .......... different species.

Anyway, the honest answer is that the evidence (so far) indicates _________ happened.

There is a lot written about all that and as new evidence emerges through improved analysis tools the theories improve.

That's just good science.

Evolution, evolution happened.

From the start no animals remained static, they are always changing, going extinct, new one taking their places. It’s still going on it’s just that the process is slow we don’t see it.

I, like OP, watch a lot of documentaries. It amazes me that we don’t know what we don’t know.

I don't have any answers, but have considered the same questions, especially when the often-mentioned tidbit that chronologically T-Rex lived closer to the first humans than it did to Stegasaurus, with which it frequently depicted.

"What happened in the Triassic-Jurassic periods stayed in the Triassic-Jurassic periods."

Aliens visited. Lost a couple pet monkeys and that’s how we got started.

Was answered in Star Trek.  Q was screwing around doing things he should not and got them all killed.  So he was assigned to look over this planet since then.

I should have known Q was behind it.