How would the world be different if. . . dinosaurs never went extinct?

[Drake the Dragonheart]

Let's just for a moment kick around what this planet would look like if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out.

Well for starters, there would likely be less of us. ALOT less of us probably. Actually, I don't think we would be the dominant species anymore. That or we would all be velociraptors.

we might see the dinosaur humanoids from Journey to the Center of the Earth (the older one with Treat Williams, though I also like the newer one with Brendan Fraser).

Let's have a look at those velociraptors. Just the thought of them not being extinct alone is scary. From what we can examine, they were already clever SOB's. speed, stealth, agility, natural weaponry, pack tactics, and supposedly they could vocalize. Now give them 65 million years to evolve over. Say, apposable thumbs. sentience. tool use. Now I am imagining a raptor that shoots prey with a bow then closes in to kill with talons and teeth. That and they would probably not lose their pack mentality either. so a pack that peppers a target with arrows and then moves in and takes them down. Yeah ok I am very glad dinos aren't around!

Tyrannosaurus. Might evolve to have powerful muscular arms with grasping hands. Yikes!

How might the herbivores evolve though? what would happen to say the triceratops that has to now deal with the two afformentioned predators?

This sounds almost like an evolutionary arms race.

 

[Abomination]

I can't see dinosaurs developing any form of sentience given how long they were alive compared to how long apes were alive and finally evolved into humans.

I believe "par the course" would have been what happened with the dinosaurs had they not been made extinct. Running around eating plants, each other and generally leaving lots of big bones around.

 

[Clowndoe]

Ugh, so little understanding of evolution. Don't worry, I'm an amateur-paleontologist and I'm on the scene.

First, there would be none of us. Apes our size wouldn't last a minute in the trees, much less walking on the ground. Besides, considering that as little as a second's difference in the time where your parents conceived you is the difference between "your" sperm crossing the finish line and never leaving your dad's junk (you're welcome for the mental image) means there's just no chance of any species looking the same as they do now.

Velociraptors are unlikely to become much more intelligence over time I would think. There's just no need, they were already more than capable of hunting and reproducing. Not to mention their thumbs and feet were never opposable (the ability to flex a long distance is not opposability), that was not likely to develop (apes had a use for thumbs for climbing), and intelligence is not much use if you can't grasp the tools to make it show.

Tyrannosaurus' arms are thought to be vestigial, and so were unlikely to grow in strength.

I can't see dinosaurs developing any form of sentience given how long they were alive compared to how long apes were alive and finally evolved into humans.

That's not quite right. The timer doesn't start when dinosaurs became dinosaurs and we became apes, the timer started from our earliest ancestor single-celled lifeforms, or if you prefer, from the moment the lineages of mammals and dinosaurs split. That means that we actually got about 60 million years more than they did for flailing around, evolutionarily speaking.

If dinosaurs or reptiles were ever to achieve sapience, I can`t imagine it happening differently from us. It would have to come from smaller herbivorous or omnivorous species, they would have to be arboreal to prompt the development of thumbs, and they would have to have been forced from the trees where only those that could work together could survive.

 

[Little Woodsman]

Wait, dinosaurs went extinct? Why doesn't anybody ever TELL ME these things!?!?

 

[Abomination]

I can't see dinosaurs developing any form of sentience given how long they were alive compared to how long apes were alive and finally evolved into humans.

That's not quite right. The timer doesn't start when dinosaurs became dinosaurs and we became apes, the timer started from our earliest ancestor single-celled lifeforms, or if you prefer, from the moment the lineages of mammals and dinosaurs split. That means that we actually got about 60 million years more than they did for flailing around, evolutionarily speaking.

If dinosaurs or reptiles were ever to achieve sapience, I can`t imagine it happening differently from us. It would have to come from smaller herbivorous or omnivorous species, they would have to be arboreal to prompt the development of thumbs, and they would have to have been forced from the trees where only those that could work together could survive.

The evolutionary timer may have "started" during the single-cell stages but when apes started existing and when dinosaurs were knocked out of the race are millions of years apart... and the dinosaurs got to reign far longer than it took apes to evolve into humans.

I can't see the dinosaurs having cause to evolve as apes did... not to mention the lack of opposable thumbs...

 

[Clowndoe]

The evolutionary timer may have "started" during the single-cell stages but when apes started existing and when dinosaurs were knocked out of the race are millions of years apart... and the dinosaurs got to reign far longer than it took apes to evolve into humans.

I can't see the dinosaurs having cause to evolve as apes did... not to mention the lack of opposable thumbs...

But in that time some dinosaur population could have turned into dino-apes (hold on while I repress an erection) which could have turned into dino-cavemen. Saying that dinosaurs have shown their full potential just because an arbitrary slice of our lineage achieved "more" in less time is just that, arbitrary. Otherwise we could say that since Homo erectus was non-sentient and we are that we achieved our intelligence in 2 million years.

There's also the fact that evolution is completely aimless. I would postulate that if tectonic shifts hadn't wiped out the rain forests in West Africa and forced Australopithecus to the ground, then we would never have had the impetus to develop tools, become social like we did and cook meat. But that could have never happened, just like it apparently didn't happen to any suitable species from circa 125 million to 65 million B.C.

Oh and don't get me wrong, I never meant to imply I thought eventual dino-Socrates was likely.

A general note I'd like to add to the discussion: humans aren't the end-all be-all of lifeforms. Sapience isn't something inevitable all species that survive long enough inevitably achieve, it's just another type of fluke that can come out of selection, albeit infinitely times less likely than fins turning into feet when an order of fish have been spending time on land over millions of years. While having our ability to build and think might seem like a no-brainer, the increments that led to this aren't really all that useful most life forms.

 

[Muspelheim]

Wait, dinosaurs went extinct? Why doesn't anybody ever TELL ME these things!?!?

Well, those who survived became birds, instead.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Corvus_corax_%28Common_Raven%29%2C_Yosemite_NP%2C_CA%2C_US_-_Diliff.jpg

"Pip-pip, what-what?"

It's difficult getting used to, but it's a damn neat upgrade, I think.

 

[Remus]

Yes, flight, feathers for warmth, a whole new set of survival instincts in the form of migratory patterns, and for some, perhaps a mild increase in intelligence is a decent enough evolutionary path for the tools they were given. Dinosaur species differed in physiology so greatly it'd be difficult picking a singular specimen that might eventually develop sapience. For people who draw their knowledge from the Jurassic Park films, raptors would seem the obvious choice. but the reality is that raptors were equivalent to giant chickens. Vicious, vicious chickens. They were one of the few dinos to evolve a coat of feathers sure, which put them a small step ahead of the larger species, outside perhaps the tyrannosaurs recently found in China. But they weren't nearly so smart as expressed in the films. I suspect that if the larger dinosaurs had somehow survived the ice age we'd either give them an ever-shrinking girth of land to tread upon, much like the current batch of large predators - lions, tigers, bears, or hunted them to extinction well before the bronze age. They would only have survived so long as their wildlife preserves weren't viewed as prime real estate for a hotel/casino.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

Everything would taste like human.

 

[Strazdas]

two possible solutions: either dinosaurs continue to rule the world as they did, largely unchanged due to lack of competition or apes manage to survive and evovle into humans, possibly speeding it up even more as we got even larger predators to defend agast, which would likely mean we would have had less wars and more "dino hunts" in our history, and would have hunted them into extinction. Just like we did mammoths.

 

[R Man]

First of all Dinosaurs did not go extinct. Avian dinosaurs still exist, and their are actually more species of avian dinosaur than mammal species.

two possible solutions: either dinosaurs continue to rule the world as they did, largely unchanged due to lack of competition or apes manage to survive and evovle into humans, possibly speeding it up even more as we got even larger predators to defend agast, which would likely mean we would have had less wars and more "dino hunts" in our history, and would have hunted them into extinction. Just like we did mammoths.

Err... no. If non-avian dinosaurs did not go extinct, then there are no apes. At all. Therefore no humans. Archarosaur selection pressure would continue impact on mammal evolution as it had done for most of the Mesozoic.

 

[Schmeiser]

We would probably kill them all as soon as we establish dominance(if they don't eat us before that)

 

[Strazdas]

First of all Dinosaurs did not go extinct. Avian dinosaurs still exist, and their are actually more species of avian dinosaur than mammal species.

two possible solutions: either dinosaurs continue to rule the world as they did, largely unchanged due to lack of competition or apes manage to survive and evovle into humans, possibly speeding it up even more as we got even larger predators to defend agast, which would likely mean we would have had less wars and more "dino hunts" in our history, and would have hunted them into extinction. Just like we did mammoths.

Err... no. If non-avian dinosaurs did not go extinct, then there are no apes. At all. Therefore no humans. Archarosaur selection pressure would continue impact on mammal evolution as it had done for most of the Mesozoic.

Thats fair, dinosaurs would not allow apes to exist to begin with. but if by some chance apes did exist, like, say, on a seperate continent, then dino wars could happen, hurrr

 

[Thaluikhain]

First, there would be none of us. Apes our size wouldn't last a minute in the trees, much less walking on the ground. Besides, considering that as little as a second's difference in the time where your parents conceived you is the difference between "your" sperm crossing the finish line and never leaving your dad's junk (you're welcome for the mental image) means there's just no chance of any species looking the same as they do now.

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Not necessarily. Humans evolved on a planet full of other quite nasty predators, not inconceivable they could do so with large predatory dinosaurs around.

Also when the first humans came to Australia, it was inhabited by giant predatory reptiles. Shortly after they got there, not so much.

 

[Lieju]

two possible solutions: either dinosaurs continue to rule the world as they did, largely unchanged due to lack of competition or apes manage to survive and evovle into humans, possibly speeding it up even more as we got even larger predators to defend agast, which would likely mean we would have had less wars and more "dino hunts" in our history, and would have hunted them into extinction. Just like we did mammoths.

Dinosaurs existed for 135 million years, and they kept evolving all that time. They weren't some unchanged creatures, they had plenty of competition even amongst themselves and inhabited a large spectrum of ecolocigal niches. Some of those niches might have been lost to mammals and birds, but who knows how the dinosaurs would have kept adapting? The Mesozoic had several mass extinctions that some of the dinosaurs survived and continued evolving.

Are we assuming that the environment would have stayed the same for these 65 million years? Or would the glacial periods and stuff have happened as they did?

Because I doubt the largest herbivores would be around anyway.
But their time was kinda on the Jurassic anyway; the biggest sauropodes went extinct before the Triassic (when dinosaurs like T-rex or Triceratops lived.)

 

[DarklordKyo]

It would be like in Dragonball Z, but without all the saiyans, aliens, or other types of ki-using badasses.

 

[IndomitableSam]

I have nothing scientific to add.

... I just want to watch Cadillacs and Dinosaurs again.


Awesome.