What If Dinosaurs Were Still Alive? | Unveiled

What if Dinosaurs Were Still Alive?

Sixty-six million years ago, the largest creatures ever known to walk the Earth were eradicated by a deadly extinction event. Seventy-five percent of life on this planet died, including the dinosaurs. But what would this world look like now if none of that had happened?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if the dinosaurs were still alive?

The K-Pg extinction event was so violent and devastating that the point of impact where the asteroid landed, the Chicxulub Crater in Central America, is still there to this day - like a massive, miles-wide scar on the planet’s surface. However, although it’s considered the last great extinction event, K-Pg didn’t completely put an end to the existence of megafauna on Earth. In the millions of years since then, we’ve seen plenty of giant, non-dinosaur animals thrive, including the biggest snake ever discovered, the Titanoboa, and the biggest shark, the megalodon. This means that post-K-Pg, Earth didn’t suddenly become just unable to support creatures of huge sizes… and, had the asteroid missed, there’s the distinct possibility that the dinosaurs would have lived on for much, much longer.

It’s not as though their extinction is a perfect sliding doors moment, though - a simple fork in the road for evolution, where they either did or didn’t survive. Because, realistically, if dinosaurs really were still alive today, they’d almost certainly struggle with today’s world - with the climate, for example. In general, dinosaurs were able to grow to and survive at such incredible sizes in the ancient past thanks to there being just the right balance (for them) between the oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air they breathed. Higher temperatures also generated ecosystems with food enough for them to eat. But, if one just magically re-appeared today, the much-changed twenty-first century environment on Earth probably wouldn’t agree with it. There’s also the issue that, in the real world, if the dinosaurs hadn’t have died off, then the rise of the mammals probably wouldn’t have played out in the same way either. So, the idea of the dinosaurs surviving until now and everything else developing in the same way as it has done is, well, awkward. But let’s, for the sake of argument, imagine that problems like these get ironed out, and that the world remains as we know it. Only this time… with dinosaurs. What then?

The good news from the perspective of humans is that we have always lived alongside large and dangerous predators that could and would kill us. We know that, generally speaking, the best way to avoid getting attacked by a wild animal is to respect it and leave it alone… but there certainly have been past cases of predators developing a taste for human meat. After this video, check out the terrifying story of Gustave, a notorious Nile crocodile alleged to have killed more than three hundred people! If the dinosaurs were still alive, they could certainly do just as much, if not more, damage… becoming fear-inducing creatures for any nearby human settlements. And it would only take one particularly hungry or bloodthirsty dinosaur to cause the deaths of many hundreds of people. However, it’s still unlikely that even the most frightening of them would forever spend their time rampantly hunting down humans. Just as not all Nile crocodiles are hell-bent, insatiable man-eaters, not every t-rex would be targeting us with some kind of untapped dino rage.

For a little more by way of good news, it’s also the case that the biggest modern reptiles – crocodiles and anacondas – can go for months (or even a year or more) without eating. They’ve evolved to go a long time without food if needed, so given that they also don’t often prey on humans… they’re actually not a constant danger to us, statistically speaking. If dinosaurs were still alive, perhaps they’d be the same. And, in a world where humans and dinosaurs had evolved alongside each other, by now we’d be well-versed enough in dinosaur behaviour to know how to avoid the worst-case scenario.

By now, we’d also more than likely have dinosaur zoos. Humans would be exerting some sort of control over their dino counterparts. Unlike in the Hollywood blockbuster movies like “Jurassic Park”, in this scenario the zoos wouldn’t involve scientists playing with genetics and trying to recreate extinct ecosystems; the dinosaurs would still exist in the wild, so the dino zoos would be more a bid to study and protect the various species - as real-world zoos do with other animals. Unfortunately, if trophy hunting and poaching large animals exists today, then it would undoubtedly exist in a world where dinosaurs roamed in the wild, too… as well as a black market for dinosaur meat and where smaller dinosaurs were traded as exotic pets… so we’d need an ongoing effort to combat that, and massive conservation parks could be one way to do so.

There are many real-world species that our current conservation efforts have not saved, however… so it’s not as though, based on our record to this point, humans wouldn’t have a negative impact on dinosaur populations, too. Today, the largest land animals, African elephants, are evolving without tusks, reportedly just so that they’re not targeted by poachers… while the largest sea creatures, whales, are also continually threatened by hunters. It’s difficult to imagine that living, breathing dinosaurs wouldn’t face a similar fate. And, if not over-hunting, then they’d have other problems to contend with. Put dinosaurs in the modern world, and human action would still be levelling forests, polluting oceans and destroying habitats… leaving the dinosaurs, like many other creatures, with fewer and fewer places to live.

But all of this is only if dinosaurs remain relatively static in the sixty-six million years between when they now didn’t go extinct and today. In all likelihood, though, this wouldn’t be the case. Dinosaurs will’ve changed in that time, along with everything else, so the creatures still alive for this alternate reality would likely be very different to the ones we now see in textbooks.

The million-dollar question is could dinosaurs have developed intelligence just like mammals have? And the million-dollar answer is, well, probably not. We know that birds are among the closest living creatures to the dinosaurs of the past, and while some species of bird are highly intelligent, it’s mammals that are the smartest creatures of all. And it’s not just modern-human homo sapiens, but also the various, other, now extinct human species, other primates, whales, dolphins, wolves, dogs, the list goes on. It’s not that modern reptiles are stupid, studies increasingly show that many of them aren’t… But it is difficult for reptiles to achieve the same level of intelligence as mammals, mostly because they’re cold-blooded… and cold-blooded animals tend to have smaller brains.

However, we can only say that dinosaurs “probably” wouldn’t have developed mammal-like intelligence. One reason being that, bizarrely, they may not have been completely cold-blooded. According to a 2014 study, they might have had somewhere in between warm and cold blood - making them mesothermic, rather than endothermic or ectothermic. Weird as this sounds, there are living creatures that share the trait, including leatherback turtles, great white sharks, and naked mole rats.

The other major nail in the coffin for dino-intelligence is the fact that dinosaurs did roam the Earth for a huge amount of time before their extinction – for about 165 million years. That’s far longer than the time since they went extinct so, if dinosaurs were capable of developing human levels of intelligence, they probably could have done so long before they died off. But they didn’t. If they were still alive today, and if humans had still relatively raced through our own evolution to this point, then, while dinosaurs would undoubtedly be stronger than us and capable of killing us at a moment’s notice… humans would still have the upper hand.

Of course, regardless of how humans may or may not have co-existed with t-rex, velociraptors and the rest, the often-cited alternative answer to today’s question is that dinosaurs are still alive and well. And to some extent it’s true. The K-Pg extinction event didn’t wipe out one hundred percent of life on earth, just seventy-five. It wasn’t total annihilation, and twenty-five percent of the species around then, survived… and actually have continued evolving to this day. So, where are they? Well, the land-loving super-lizards most often pictured when we think of dinosaurs are long gone (besides a few crocodile species here and there)… but many dinosaurs share many traits with modern birds - including having hollow bones, feathers, and beaks. We know that some avian species lived past the K-Pg event, and now modern birds actually have more in common with dinosaurs than most of today’s reptiles do. And, while birds don’t perhaps rank all that highly on your list of dangerous animals, some of them can be… and large birds like ostriches, emus and cassowaries have been known to attack and kill people.

Generally speaking, though, birds are everywhere, they’re abundant all around the globe, and we live alongside them very easily. We also live alongside various other, post-dinosaur but still potentially dangerous animal species… and mostly without any problems. If dinosaurs were still alive, we’d probably adapt and settle into a similarly safe and everyday arrangement - with most of them, anyway. Some would roam free, others would be in conservation parks; some could pose a threat to us, and some could certainly kill us, but others would be no danger at all. And that’s what would happen if dinosaurs were still alive.