Dinosaurs; Rulers of Earth for 150 million years

Okay, let me start by saying that Dinosaurs are freakin’ awesome.  I’m just going to rant a little bit about dinosaurs and why I love them.  Lately I’ve really been into dinosaurs, I haven’t had this much of an interest in them since my childhood days.  A thread on reddit rekindled my interest a few weeks ago, and since then I have been reading up on dinosaurs in my spare time.

One of my favorite quotes from the thread is:

The biggest misconception of all, I suppose, is that dinosaurs are exinct. Not so: one branch of the dinosaur family-tree made it past the end of the Cretaceous, and is still with us today. We call them birds.

How awesome is that? When you look at a turkey, try to imagine a velociraptor, because birds are the direct descendents of dinosaurs.  Birds are more closely related to extinct dinosaurs than crocodilians and turtles.  What’s more is that scientists have proven from fossils that many dinosaurs had feathers or proto-feathers all along their body.  Even more recently some scientists have been able to find out the color of these feathers from fossil remains.   The picture to the left is a dinosaur by the name of Anchiornis huxleyi, the scientists used the aforementioned technique to figure out the colors of the dinosaurs feathers.  This dinosaur is non-avian, meaning that it does not fly.  These feathers could be used in a number of different ways, not for flight but for other purposes

“This means a color-patterning function — for example, camouflage or display — must have had a key role in the early evolution of feathers in dinosaurs, and was just as important as evolving flight or improved aerodynamic function,” Clarke said.

The colorful display of patterns in the feathers could have been used for mating, or for communication.  Our best way to find out would to be look at various bird species today.

What happened to the Dinos?

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for nearly 150 million years, until most of them were wiped out some 65 milion years ago in an event known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T mass extinction.  The most accepted theory for this mass extinction is that a massive asteroid hit the earth near the gulf of mexico.  The impact would have spread all kinds of bad dust and debris into the atmosphere.  The dust and debris would have blocked out the atmosphere, blocking the sun and changing global temperatures.  The huge asteroid would have also caused catastrophic events (such as hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc).  The tree of biodiversity would have been shaken, with many branches falling off as a result from this asteroid.  When one branch is affected, the whole tree shifts, you can’t have predators without herbivores, and herbivores can’t feed without plants, etc.  The whole tree of life was shaken; most animals over 55 pounds became extinct as a result of this event.

Ironically what resulted from the demise of the dinosaurs, created us; Homo sapiens sapiens.  With all of the big scary reptiles gone, the little furry shrew-like mammals were free to roam around and evolve into all different kinds of mammals.  Some became massive, and others evolved their cranium.  Eventually we came along, and now here we are.

What is also interesting is that humans really have not been around all that long. Civilization has only been around for 8000 years.   Before that humans and its ancestors (lets group them all together under homo) have been around for 2.5 million years. Currently we’re approaching seven billion souls on a planet we are making uninhabitable through our own intelligent actions. Personally, I don’t see the comparable dinosaur 150 million time in the sun for humans.

Some scientists have proposed a ‘cosmic road-block’ which speculates that any species intelligent enough to reach for the stars will destroy itself completely before it actually gets there. Some people use the idea to explain why we have never had contact from extra-terrestrials: they’re all wiping themselves out, like us.

Will we succumb the same fate of the massive dinosaurs that used to rule the land; Extinction?  Who knows, but just maybe (more than likely) we are not the epitome of evolution;  long after we have wiped ourselves out (or a huge asteroid hits us) some sentient species will dig up the billions of fossils of homo sapiens sapiens, as well as our massive infrastructures and speculate what it was like when humans ruled the earth.