Imagine a world in which an asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs. What would it be? How roaming the earth dinosaurs could determine the past, present and future of mammals like us? About that cataclysm we can only have a vague idea significantly backed up by the imagination. When an asteroid with a width of 15 km struck the Earth about 66 million years ago, it hit with a force equivalent to 10 billion bombs dropped on Hiroshima. Radioactive fireball consumed everything for hundreds of miles around in all directions and raised a tsunami that spread around the globe. The atmosphere itself began to burn, and no land animal weighing more than 25 kilograms survived, then died out 75% of all species. The so-called naticia dinosaurs had no chance to survive, only feathered dinosaurs, which we know today as birds.
But what if history had taken a different path? What if the asteroid would not fall or come a few minutes early? Such a scenario was proposed by scientists in a recent documentary film of BBC “The Day The Dinosaurs Died” (the Day the dinosaurs died). These scientists, including Sean Galik of the University of Texas, claim that if the asteroid had arrived a little earlier or a little later, but not hit the muddy waters of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, it would fall in the deep Pacific or Atlantic ocean, he would have absorbed part of the shock and reduced emission of sulfur-rich sediments that choked the atmosphere for months or years.
If it was so, catastrophe and extinction are all also happened to be, but the largest dinosaurs would have survived. Thinking about this alternative timeline – an intriguing thought experiment, which paleontologists love to talk deliriously. Would still be dinosaurs today? What new species could emerge? I got to make dinosaurs with the intelligence of the human level? Would have remained mammals on the planet and still in the shadows, as if the dinosaurs? There would be people? Evolved? Would have found a way to coexist with dinosaurs?
Some scholars argue that even without asteroids the reign of the dinosaurs may already be over. “I’ll take a slightly unorthodox point of view that dinosaurs were doomed anyway due to the cooling climate,” says Mike Benton, a paleontologist at Bristol University in the UK. “They would have lasted until the end of the Cretaceous period, but we know that mammals evolved, and the population of dinosaurs decreased in the past 40 million years.” Benton believes that the mammals still would replace the dinosaurs. In 2016, he wrote a paper in which he suggested that dinosaurs were slower than mammals, and that would be the reason for the replacement species.
Other experts believe otherwise. The researcher carnivorous dinosaur Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland agree that the extinction of 66 million years ago still would have occurred because of the eruption and massive lava flows, but “as soon as you enter the Paleocene and Eocene, there is nothing that would affect the General biology of dinosaurs. In this world of carnivorous dinosaurs still thrive.”
Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, adds that the dinosaurs survived perfectly, encountering a wild variety of conditions, in a constantly changing climate over the course of 160 million years. “Dinosaurs are still well adapted to the end of the Cretaceous period, this is unlikely to talk about what group of animals is going to die, they just waited for the asteroid. This group was a huge evolutionary potential.”
If we assume that dinosaurs survived, what factors might shape their evolution? Perhaps climate change would be a first major obstacle. The event known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum that occurred 55 million years ago, led to the fact that global temperatures have risen 8 degrees above today’s level, and tropical forests covered much of the planet.
In this hothouse world with abundant vegetation could be that the sauropods with a long neck would have developed faster, would breed into a more tender age; “dwarf” sauropods (a little more than cows) were already on the European Islands during the late Cretaceous period. The largest titanosaurs srednemirovoj South America – a 40-metre creatures weighing several jet aircraft – have long rested.
Another trend of the late Cretaceous period was the heyday of the flowering plants, or angiosperms. During the Jurassic period most of the plants were ferns and gymnosperms (including Ginkgo, cicadas and conifers). They tend to be less nutritious than angiosperms, and the huge size of sauropods may be due to the processing time and the size of the gut, necessary for effective digestion of such food.
“If the evolution of plants continued in the same way as in our modern world, herbivorous dinosaurs almost certainly would have been the diet of flowering plants,” says Matt Bonnan, a paleontologist at the University of Stockton in new Jersey. “Given that they are easier to digest, perhaps, one would expect the overall reduction in body size… the giant Mesozoic dinosaurs could disappear.”
Along with the flowering plants fruits appeared, which have evolved along with mammals and birds, helping the plant to scatter the seeds. Could such conditions appear similar to monkeys, dinosaurs to take advantage of this resource, as do the apes in our time? “Many birds eat fruit. It turns out, naticia dinosaurs could adapt to a fruit diet,” says Bonnan.
Brusatte agrees that some of the “little feathered dinosaurs could go the way of the primates” because some of them have already split off in the branches. Others may be addicted to the nectar, transferring pollen from flower to flower in the process of absorption of food.
Another important event that happened about 34 million years ago on the border of the Eocene and Oligocene, was the separation of South America and Antarctica. This has led to the emergence of the circumpolar currents that led to the formation of the ice caps of Antarctica and cooling and dehumidification of the world. During the Oligocene and in the Miocene for large areas of the planet spread meadows.
“Lean, fast running, herbivorous mammals have become commonplace – in the past it was possible to hop away and hide, but on the open grasslands you can’t hide,” says Holtz. It was then that our story saw a surge in development of hoofed grazing animals and predators that are stalking them.
Darren Naish, vertebrate paleontologist in Southampton, UK, says that maybe in our alternate universe fast, equivalent to the grazing equivalents of dinosaurs animals would be descendants and relatives of Triceratops, or bipedal, herbivorous beak, similar to hypsilophodon.
“Dinosaurs have come with a huge set of evolutionary advantages, the development of which mammal it took a long time,” he adds, so the adaptation to the meadows would go with a high start. Gorosaurus similar to the ducks was “battery” out of thousands of teeth, while our horses – 40 teeth, so chewing the grass for them would not be especially challenging.
Dinosaurs also had a better sight than in mammals, expanded color range, and perhaps they are better noticed danger. Horses and cows have a tapered muzzle, suitable for chewing low-lying vegetation, so the platypus and the sauropods might have tapered noses and the necks of sauropods could be reduced to allow them to find food under the feet.
Closer to the present day, the dinosaurs had to deal with different glacial periods over the last 2.6 million years. But we know that the Cretaceous dinosaurs lived above the Arctic circle. “Maybe in cooler places you could see the dense and thick skin covered with fluff and feathers, right down to the tips of the toes and tails,” says Naish.
“The dromaeosaurs, or even velociraptors would be easy to evolve to a woolly tyrannosaurs,” adds the expert on armored dinosaurs Victoria arbour from the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. “Maybe we could even be hairy and woolly ceratopsians, ankylosaurs or hadrosaurs”.
There are other adaptation, that is common now, but rare in dinosaurs. For example, the creation of burrows, says Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the natural history Museum in London. “It is strange that the dinosaurs actually didn’t do it, because it is an ordinary way of life among lizards and snakes”. With more time, some dinosaurs could be underground specialists, scaly or feathered equivalents zemleroek mammals.
Oceans is another Kingdom, a poorly studied dinosaurs. Species like spinosaurus was related to the estuarine and river environment, and armored ankylosaurs were often fossilized in marine sediments and lived along the coastlines. Could the spinosaurus or ankylosaurs go all the way mammals whales and completely move to live in the sea? They could even return to land to lay eggs or produce young in the sea, as did the ichthyosaurs and the plesiosaurs.
What would happen to the mammals and birds in the world, in which dinosaurs roam the land, in the sky flying pterosaurs, and sea are inhabited by ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs?
During the late Cretaceous period birds were too much. “The diversity of pterosaurs is really on the wane,” says Holtz, probably because of this. Were massive toothless azhdarchid, some of which were the size of a biplane with a wingspan of 12 meters. Was considered even that some azhdarchid does not fly, and even easier to imagine a world in which on the Islands such as Madagascar, Mauritius and New Zealand is dominated by the pterosaurs strange land, in the same way as at the time our world saw the elegant Dodo and giant MoA.
Naish argues that in the world of the dinosaurs would still be a large variety of birds. But mammals — that’s another story. Although they existed for maybe even 160 million years when the asteroid hit, they were “marginalized, living in the shadow creatures,” says Brusatte, varied but little, and tied to particular niches. “And only the shock of the impact of the asteroids that destroyed the power of the dinosaurs freed them,” he says.
Not everyone agrees with this point of view. They believe that although the big megafauna could not be chance, bats, rodents and primates had to evolve and flourish. If monkeys, langurs and Gibbons were jumping on the branches, and dinosaurs roamed among them, perhaps there would be something akin to hominids?
“Some pedigrees of mammals has evolved to the point of extinction,” says Naish. “In this regard, you likely will still get primates and some version of humanity, which is also possible. Given that we evolved in a world full of giant mammals, it is plausible”.
Holtz agrees that this is possible: “Could be some tree-climbing primates, which, together with the expansion of the meadows, would pass in this environment and became pseudoliodini this alternate universe. And just as our ancestors had to deal with saber-toothed cats and large antelope, and these guys had to deal with dromaeosaurs and abelisaurus”.
People would have to create protected places, according to Nisa, the creation of which “would have gone a million years of evolution”, but because our ancestors lived near a large dangerous animals and learn to survive. “People think that the world of the Mesozoic is a constant bloody battle where you tear to shreds in a few seconds, but for the most part, predators are highly distributed in the terrain, and the world is relatively safe.”
Given that intelligent mammals are possible, would also appear reasonable dinosaurs? In 1982, Dale Russell, who worked at the Canadian Museum of nature in Ottawa, has published a document outlining that one day could appear reasonable and “dinosauroid”. He even created a model in natural size, which by today’s standards will seem quite alien, with green skin and big eyes. His theory was based on the fact that the carnivorous dinosaur troodon had an unusually large brain and it could be the beginning of the pedigree brainy dinosaurs.
“There could be dinosaurs, similar to the habits of crows, parrots, or primates, with complex brains and the ability to solve some problems,” Holtz agrees, but does not believe that dinosaurs ever would. “The way of the people was very strange and began with trees and vines, and dinosaurs were bipedal for other reasons”.
“Wouldn’t be something that is close in intelligence to humans,” says Naish. “Could be intelligent dinosaurs with large brains, but they would still be dinosaurs… Anthropomorphic to assume that could develop other types of human intelligence.”
Assuming that dinosaurs still lived during the last hundred thousand years and even met with people, whether it is possible to assume that they have lived until today? It seems that Yes. But as people have exterminated the mammoths and other megafauna, as they inevitably would start to hunt dinosaurs. “Extinction could occur in the Pleistocene, as people spread to all corners of the globe,” says Holtz.
Currently in this alternate timeline, perhaps a few species of large herbivorous sauropod, and even carnivores like T. rex, could exist in protected deserts and national parks that are suitable for them to live. Perhaps the most naticia small dinosaurs would have adapted to the urban environment and would flourish with the people in the cities, along with pigeons, rats and seagulls.
What would happen to dinosaurs if they hadn’t died?
Ilya Hel