I think not. Mammals and dinosaurs appeared the same time ( late Triassic). And where both pretty small. Go to the Cretaceous and dinosaurs had came in many DIFFERNT sizes varieties and basically filled every ecology niche. The mammals where still unchanged. All of them where about the size of a mouse and only ate insects. After the dinosaur wen t extinct that when we say mammals become DIFFERNT vartites and started to change size. I think if the dinosaurs never went extinct they would still be the apex organism.
Dinosaurs and ancie t reptiles filled every ecological niche mammals do now. (pilosaurs for dolphins and whales) ( raptors for wolfs and lions) ( small tree dwelling dinosaurs for squirrels and rodents) etc erc Not to mention no mammals has really reached the size of any dinosaurs. Short face bear the largest mammalian predator that ever existed was tiny compared to the 60 foot long spinosaurs. Basically what I’m trying to say if dinosaurs never gone extinct us humans and many other mammals would not had even evolved. And we still be the same size of a mouse.
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If The Dinosaurs Didn’t Go Extinct Would We Had Even Evolved?
Posted on October 21, 2012.
Your basic premise is probably correct however the largest animal to ever exist is a mammal not a dinosaur. The Blue Whale.
The dinosaurs were extinct due to climate change they couldn’t survive that but if the climate didn’t change and we evolved we probably wouldn’t last long but we probably wouldn’t evolve due to the temperature. The other dinosaurs that we see today survived because they could already adapt the climate change. Since we came after the climate change we probably wouldn’t be able to adapt to really hot temperature. And we have a low survival rate towards the dinosaurs since most on them were carnivorous and much bigger, quicker and/or stronger then us. So no unless we evolved differently.
Those are good points. The reptiles, not just dinosaurs, outcompeted the mammals because the Triassic was hot. When the weather is hot, ectotherms can evolve large size, but endotherms like mammals cannot do the same because large animals have more difficulty losing excess body heat. Since large ectotherms do not generate heat to stay warm, they have less heat to get rid of after exercising. At the end of the Jurassic, the climate cooled, and a large number of large dinosaurs (including Allosaurus and many sauropods) did become extinct, but enough of them survived to deny the mammals a chance of evolving large size. By the Cretaceous, the climate had warmed back up to the level seen during the rest of the Mesozoic, and large dinosaurs such as T. rex evolved. In fact the climate continued to be warm during the early Tertiary, after dinosaurs were wiped out by the giant meteor that struck the earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Had the meteor not strike, the dinosaurs would have persisted, perhaps all the way to the present. The climate did cool later in the Tertiary, and the largest dinosaurs might have become extinct due to global cooling, but the medium sized dinosaurs would no doubt have persisted, even during the ice ages, because temperatures were warm enough in Africa and South America, again giving the mammals virtually no chance to diversify. It took the giant meteor to wipe the earth clean of dinosaurs, and we indeed owe our existence to that catastrophic event.