It would be a world that Cretaceous dinosaurs would still be comfortable in.” Carnivorous dinosaur researcher Tom Holtz at the University of Maryland in College Park, US, agrees there would have been some extinctions 66 million years ago anyway, due to eruptions and massive lava flows at the Deccan Traps in India – but he says “there’s nothing otherwise, once you’re into the Palaeocene and Eocene, that would have affected general dinosaur biology. Other experts take a very different view.
Animal age 66 died movie#
Why movie dinosaurs are nothing like the real thing.Dinosaur asteroid hit ‘worst possible place’.He is an author of a 2016 paper suggesting dinosaurs were slower than mammals at replacing extinct species. “They had just about held their own to the end of the Cretaceous, but we know that mammals were diversifying… dinosaurs had already been declining for 40 million years.” Benton believes mammals would still have replaced the dinosaurs.
“I take a slightly unorthodox view that dinosaurs were doomed anyway because of cooling climates,” says Mike Benton, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol in the UK. Some researchers argue that, even without the asteroid, the reign of the dinosaurs may already have been ending. Would dinosaurs be here today? What new dinosaurs might have appeared? Would dinosaurs have developed human-like intelligence? Would mammals have remained in the shadows? Would humans have evolved and – as depicted in Disney’s 2015 film The Good Dinosaur – found a way to survive alongside them? Pondering the course of this alternative timeline is an intriguing thought experiment that dinosaur scientists are only too enthusiastic to speculate about. Had that been the case, there would still have been a catastrophe and extinctions, but some larger dinosaurs may have survived. These scientists – including geologist Sean Gulick of the University of Texas – argue that if the asteroid had arrived mere moments earlier or later, rather than hitting the shallow waters of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, it would have plunged into the deep sea of the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, absorbing some of the force and limiting the expulsion of sulphur-rich sediments that choked the atmosphere for the months or years ahead. But what if history had taken a different course? What if the asteroid had missed or arrived a few minutes earlier? That is the scenario suggested by researchers featured in The Day the Dinosaurs Died, a recent BBC documentary.
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