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What Would Dinosaurs Look Like Today If They Never Went Extinct? - ScienceAlert

What Would Dinosaurs Look Like Today If They Never Went Extinct? - ScienceAlert

What Would Dinosaurs Look Like Today If They Never Went Extinct? - ScienceAlert
Nov 25, 2022 1 min, 10 secs

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution.

Dinosaur scientists, discovering relativity, or discussing a hypothetical world in which, incredibly, mammals took over the Earth.

This might sound like bad science fiction, but it gets at some deep, philosophical questions about evolution.

Likewise, the carnivorous dinosaurs repeatedly evolved huge, ten-meter, multi-tonne predators.

Over 100 million years, megalosaurids, allosaurids, carcharodontosaurids, neovenatorids, and finally tyrannosaurs evolved giant apex predators.

Jurassic dinosaurs like Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Brachiosaurus had small brains.

By the late Cretaceous, 80 million years later, tyrannosaurs and duckbills had evolved larger brains.

There's little about 100 million years of dinosaur history to hint they'd have done anything radically different if the asteroid hadn't intervened.

But they repeatedly evolved big brains.

Massive brains (as large or larger than ours) evolved in orcas, sperm whales, baleen whales, elephants, leopard seals, and apes.

Today, a few dinosaur descendants – birds like crows and parrots – have complex brains.

But it's mammals like apes, elephants, and dolphins that evolved the biggest brains and most complex behaviors.

In Africa, primates did evolve into big-brained apes and, over 7 million years, produced modern humans.

But elsewhere primate evolution took very different paths.

When monkeys reached South America 35 million years ago they just evolved into more monkey species.

Something about Africa's fauna, flora or geography drove the evolution of apes: terrestrial, big-bodied, big-brained, tool-using primates.

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