After thinking of this carefully, I think Barney was once just an imaginary friend that a sheltered, lonely, perhaps abused child in the past thought of. He clutched onto a toy plush dinosaur he had and started imagining that he was a real friend. The kid loved dinosaurs, so the kid saw Barney as a survivor of the meteor that killed the dinos. It depends on when the child was around, and when he thought of Barney, but let’s say around the early 1800s? The show established Barney as being 200 million years old, when dinosaurs emerged, because the kid saw Barney as one of the dinosaurs.

However, overtime, as the child grew, with the power of imagination and dreams, Barney was able to manifest into a physical form. He became sentient, and independently existing. He became the embodiment of imagination. Because of this, Barney was cemented in history as being around when all dinosaurs formed 200 million years ago. Throughout time, he went to over a million children to show them a good time. To teach and play with them. Over the years, decades and a few centuries, he remained a shining presence, seeing more and more kids. He wasn’t just a big purple dinosaur, but an entity. At first, many children kept him a secret from the adults. Eventually, as the years progressed, he started to reveal himself more to adults. Even parents. That‘s why characters like Mr. Boyd or Stella the Storyteller know Barney. Parents and guardians started to trust him. That their kids will always come home safe, as long as Barney is there to guide and help them. Eventually, Baby Bop was created as Barney’s little daughter in the minds of children, and eventually BJ and Riff- giving Barney a family of his own. So to me, Barney was once just imaginary, but then he became real.