Dinosaurs existed for tens of millions of years without inventing the internet. Dinosaurs might have never gone extinct if they had NASA. Those are only two of the amusing but true statements that we’ve heard from famous scientists about the reign of dinosaurs on Earth.
What’s for sure is that a huge asteroid or comet known as the Chixculub impactor hit the Earth roughly 60 million years ago, leaving behind a crater that measures over 25,000 square kilometers beneath today’s territory of Mexico. That event marked the downfall of dinosaurs, as many died after the impact itself, while the others died over the course of hundreds of years due to the lack of sunlight. A huge blanket of dust and debris has risen in the atmosphere, blocking the Sun’s ability to warm up Earth and provide energy for plants to make oxygen.
Although we know about dinosaurs nowadays because of scientific research, toys, and movies/cartoons, we can’t help to ask ourselves what the world might have looked like if the dinosaurs had never gone extinct in the first place. Finding a sure answer to that conundrum can be challenging, which is why we’re here to present three wild hypotheses.
The rise of dino-civilization
Have you ever wondered that dinosaurs might have been able to develop high levels of intelligence similar to our own? Those age-old The Flintstones cartoons with dinosaurs talking to people might have become a reality. For this wild hypothesis, dinosaurs might have evolved to the point of building their own civilization. Just try to picture a world where a council of wise Triceratops governs over vast territories or where Velociraptors engage in complex social structures. If intelligent dinosaurs had coexisted with humans, that might have undoubtedly led to a unique inter-species relationship. As a result, conflicts or collaborations might have shaped the course of history in surprising ways.
Dinosaur dominance
If dinosaurs have never gone extinct, we need to take into account the scenario in which those giant creatures never stopped evolving and diversifying. A head start of millions of years could mean that dinosaurs can adapt to various ecosystems, possibly even outcompeting mammals for dominance. Tyrannosaurus or intelligent raptor-like creatures could have ruled the top of the food chain. As a result, the human experience would be dramatically different. We could have found ourselves sharing our planet with huge reptilian counterparts.
Dinosaur-human coexistence
In the best-case scenario, dinosaurs might have coexisted with us humans if those huge creatures had never gone extinct. In fact, there are some voices in the scientific world who claim that some species of dinosaurs were still around when the first humans populated the Earth, although those scenarios aren’t exactly reliable.
If dinosaurs had found a way to make it to nowadays, we humans might have had to adapt our societies and civilizations to accommodate those huge creatures. Maybe some dinosaurs could have been domesticated for labor or transportation, similar to horses or camels. Just try to imagine how our cities would look with towering Crachiosaurs and bustling markets that are surrounded by Triceratops-drawn carts. Such scenarios would indeed redefine our understanding of urban life!
Of course, the scenario of the Chicxulub impactor never colliding with Earth to cause the dinosaur extinction opens the door for many speculations. Some of those speculations even appear in movies, cartoons, and literature. You can read “West of Eden,” a novel by Harry Harrison from 1884, or Victor Milan’s “Diinosauropolis” novel that came out in 1997, for instance. These books offer the speculative scenario in which dinosaurs never went extinct from the face of the Earth.
