What would the world be like if dinosaurs still existed?

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"Get your hands off me, you damn, dirty dinosaur!"

In all likelihood, humans wouldn't exist if the dinosaurs never became extinct. In a way, the dinosaurs needed to be wiped out in order for the modern mammals, including humans, to evolve to their current form. Otherwise, natural selection would of prevented it because the carnivorous dinosaurs would of prayed on the small mammals that existed at that time, they wouldn't of gotten any larger.

The only mammals would be small nocturnal mammals.

ruveyn

consider the Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus, big name eh)
how did it die off, how come the big creatures today are so much smaller then the big creatures of older times?

there are many small reasons that together combine to direct nature to evolve into smaller creatures, even if the meteor landed and somehow the dinosaurs had a big biodome to keep them safe we'd still not see the sizes of that era today.

the meteor had a big impact on the enviorment, how big and what difference it would make for today's enviorment is the actual question, humans would probably not exist as they are today, maybe not even a sapient civilization, and nature would be different for sure, but probably not with any T-rexes roaming around.

Don't be so sure. The largest mammal around back then was about 25cm long and hunted dinosaurs, so what is there to rule out small primates emerging when dinosaurs were still around, in dense enough forests that the bigger dinosaurs wouldn't destroy their habitat? It's how the first mammals escaped predation, hiding in the trees. Perhaps we'd be a tree dwelling species of diminutive stature, but...

I'm a firm supporter of science bringing back the mammoth and brontosaur-type dinos.

They grow extremely fast and would outpace cows as the best source of meat in the planet.

Food for thought:

Gator is a reptile just like Dinosaurs...

Gator tastes like chicken (really it does..just different texture).

Chickens are dinosaurs. All birds are.

Therefore brontosaurus would taste like chicken..or maybe turkey..or duck... or gatorturducken.

Either way... YUM.

If the dinosaurs had not gone extinct then we would no be here to have them for dinner.

ruveyn

We've been in an ice age for the last two and a half million years.

I suspect that most dinosaurs would not have done well in this ice age.

1. Not all the dinosaurs went extinct. Birds still exist.
2. If the non-avian dinosaurs didn't die out, we probably would still have evolved, but maybe later. Assuming we still developed civilizations, we'd have domesticated dinos as livestock just like any other animal. Ostriches and emus are about the closest we've come to domesticating a large dromaeosaur or troodontid, let alone a small tyrannosaur.

There'd be no more prisons.

Criminals would be handcuffed, loaded onto barges, and dropped off at..... *Jaws theme music*

... Dinosaur Island.

Warm blood is highly advantageous for the evolution of intelligence. Maintaining a constant temperature is important for biochemical functions, and a high temperature allows reactions to happen more quickly.

If reptiles still dominated the planet, the chances are there wouldn't be anything like civilisation. The assumption made by some that we would have intelligent reptilians all over the Earth is because of the (mistaken) idea that evolution is directional, and that it has been building towards us.

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Now, to attempt to answer the question(s) that was probably trying to be asked - what would our civilisation be like if we still had dinosaurs around? Or if humans had somehow evolved whilst dinosaurs remained dominant?

If we'd evolved in Dinoland (and dinosaurs had somehow survived climate changes since then), the sad fact is that we'd have hunted (or persecuted) most of them to extinction. We couldn't tolerate predators, and the herbivores would also have been too delicious to avoid overhunting.

If that hadn't happened, chances are that our society would be much more nocturnal, because that's when dinosaurs would be less active. We'd also be even less inclined to live in tropical regions. We'd probably have domesticated a few species, and they'd be our main source of meat and our beasts of burden.

There would probably be no lawyers. And anything above ground would probably be trampled.

Such a civilisation sounds more like it would be something like the Voth from Star Trek Voyager than a human civilisation :

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjuptfaTqyo[/youtube]

I think that it may have been possible that the changes in the land masses that have happened tectonically since the cretaceous may have accommodated an opportunity for us to evolve and dinosaurs to remain. Assuming that the impact event never happened, most of the climactic changes that occurred would still probably have happened as they did, so the ice ages would have caused extinctions and evolutionary pressure on whatever species were around. Many of them would have never evolved because of the dinosaurs, and many of the dinos would still have died out even without the impact.

I am not sure that there would have been an intelligent dinosaur that might have taken our place. They HAD 130 million years yet never developed that kind of intelligence, whereas we went from trees to technology in much less than ten. Maybe they just don't have some of the basic biological hardware needed such as opposable thumbs or maybe their tooth and claw lifestyle did not accommodate an opportunity to consider what taming fire could do for them.

I do think it possible that some place on Earth such as Australia or India (then an island) could have found itself with mammals but no dinosaurs so maybe something could have evolved into us. I know we began in Africa but that does not mean that the pocket of apes that became us could not have had cousins in another area. We did affect the course of evolution everywhere we went so something else might have had a chance. Alternatively, maybe the ice ages could have left us in Africa and isolated some dinos elsewhere.

I think if they had survived, that we would have killed them off just like everything else. I think some of our races might not be here, and it might have required for us to develop bigger tools first, but we have always taken pride in killing things, especially challenging things.
What can I say, we are a species of destruction.

It is also possible that some other species from the dino world might have been part of our domesticated stock - besides chickens, I mean. Maybe trained guard velociraptors? Maybe bloodthirsty males would bet on raptor fights? Maybe joy rides on pterodactyls?
Sounds like an episode of Dinotopia.

The "assumption" that dinosaurs MIGHT have evolved into inteligent humanoids is not an assumption at all. Your assertion that its based on a 'mistaken idea about evolution" is based upon your own lack of understanding of paleontology, and on your simplistic outdated ideas about dinosaurs being analogous to modern day reptiles.

And even the term 'reptile' is a makeshift term for lumping unrelated vertabrates together.

Modern day lizards are closer kin to modern day birds than thay are to modern turtles. But turtles and lizards are lumped together under the rubric of 'reptile' that excludes birds.


To make a long complicated story short: The land was dominated by large animals known as "therapsids" (aka 'mammal-like reptiles') that were probably intermediate between warmblooded and coldblooded. And not quite like any modern repitle, or modern mammal, metabolically.

After fifty million years of rule they were overthrown by the rising dinosaurs ( who evolved from a totally different bunch of 'reptiles'), and almost driven to extinction. The therapsids that survived were the ones who crossed the line into becoming fully warmblooded mammals (and they did that in order to survive as minaturized nocternal creatures who needed insulation for their small bodies-hense fur). From this point (200 million years ago) on the dinosaurs rule, and the mammals survive-but remain small nocternal bug hunters like shrews for the nex 140 million years).

Then the dinosaurs themselves experimented with semi-warmbloodedness (much as the therapsids had done previously). And were also not really analogous to modern lizards. Then around 150 million years ago one lineage of dinos evolved feathers for insulation and also became fully endothermic. Some of this latter group also happened to stumble upon flight.

Then the asteroid hit at 63 millions years ago and wiped the big dinos out. But the small flying ones still thrive to this day.

Had the dinos somehow dodged the bullet all of the large animal niches would still be occupied by dinosaurs today. And mammals would be checkmated, and would still all only exist as shrews and hedghogs.

But some dinos were already upright and bipedal. So its easy to imagine a feathered warmblooded bipedal dinosaur evolving into a kind of intelligent groundbound man-sized birdlike creature- but a bird with forearms - perhaps with forearms that eventually evolve opposable thumbs.

I agree. Plus, there wouldn't be many large mammals. I'm fond of mammals, not just because I'm one of them.

Although, you know, the Galapagos Islands sometimes makes me think like it's going through Earth's history. There aren't huge dinosaurs, but there are giant tortoises. You could consider them modern dinosaurs, I think.