Picture this: You’re walking down the steet on a sunny day when a large shadow falls over you. You look up and a winged dinosaur soars in the sky.
This is what the world would like if dinosaurs never died out, something experts often wonder about.
A new BBC documentary — called “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” — looks into what would have happened if dinosaurs survived the asteroid that struck Earth and doomed them.
Experts interviewed in the documentary argue that the creatures would still be alive if the asteroid hit just a few moments earlier or later, since 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,” BBC reported.
Other researchers take a darker approaching, saying dinosaurs were doomed from the get-go.
“I take a slightly unorthodox view that dinosaurs were doomed anyway because of cooling climates,” said Mike Benton, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “They had just about held their own to the end of the Cretaceous, but we know that mammals were diversifying … (and) dinosaurs had already been declining for 40 million years.”
But Stephen Brusatte, of the University of Edinburgh, said dinosaurs adapted well to changes in their environment, even toward the end of their run.
It’s likely they would have survived, and the world would be different than we know it.
“Dinosaurs were still very adaptable at the end of the Cretaceous, that’s not the sign of a group that’s wasting away to extinction, just waiting for some asteroid to knock them off,” he told BBC. “It’s the sign of a group that still has a lot of evolutionary potential.”
The Beehive State was a highly populated by dinosaurss. So much so that Utah still has venues that show off bones and fossils.
“Utah is such a popular place for dinosaurs because we have so many sites from all of the various ages … and we’re discovering new stuff all of the time, and that’s exciting,” Rick Hunter, a staff paleontologist at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, told the Deseret News.