Messier 106: 21 Million Light Years
21 million years ago puts us early in the Miocene epoch, the Tertiary period of the Cenozoic era. When the light we see today left M106, the Andes, Sierra Nevadas and the Cascade mountain ranges were just being formed. Florida and parts of Asia were still submerged; giant sharks swam around in what is now Maryland. One of our ancestors, Dryopithecus, an anthropoid ape, put in a brief appearance. There was no land bridge between North & South America, and no bipedal hominid existed who could have walked across it, had it been there.
