Dinosaur Files
Will dinosaurs return after humans are no more?
I was thinking that in order for humans to exist, dinosaurs had to die off. Even though humans were not responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs, we create conditions today where we have almost no animal predators that prey on us and control our numbers. We kill off any animal that would have killed us first. When humans die off I predict that other animals will evolve into something different. I imagine that Komodo Dragons, iguanas, and other reptiles will become larger without a human presence on the Earth, and that they will evolve into whole new species of dinosaurs that have never before walked the Earth.
Public Comments
- Evolutionary theory.... Deep stuff. We were all swimming creatures, once upon a time. Whos to say flies won't evolve and control the food-chain? Its all here-say, but your right in saying that reptiles have definatly stood the test of time, so by all means they could evolve into ANYTHING
- As Charles Darwin says, it's the survival of the fittest. It's going to take some kind of virus to take out the majority of the human population and even so, not all the humans are going to disappear. If we end up nuking each other, we will take almost all life forms with us and the radiation will kill the survivors. So it's hard to say, this may be the final step in evolution.
- Dinosaurs will not come back. The history of life on earth shows that what has gone extinct remains extinct. They don´t come back. If (when) humans go extinct something will take over. Exactly what is difficult to say. The reptiles that exist today aren´t dinosaurs and they aren´t really supressed by human activity so they are not likely to go giant. Komodo dragons and the marine iguanas of the Galapagos islands live quite sheltered lives today.
- Once a species is extinct, it is extinct forever. If something evolves like it, but not the same, that is convergence. I don't think that any animals will be as big as dinos again. Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals were able to get so big because the oxygen levels were higher. What would have to happen is an extinction event that wipes out most animal life, and lets plant life to take over. This would let animal life rebound, but they would look only vaguely similar like what they do now, or have before.
- We shall never know what will happen when humans will become extinct, we may never become extinct. It wouldn't be possible for the dead dinosaurs to rise from the dead but present creatures may evolve into bigger creatures. For instance, look at horses. They started out the size of a dog and gradually, they have got bigger. Hope I helped :)
- Once a species become extinct it is never come back again , but if there is any evolutionary changes occur than a new type of species may appear which might be the dinosaurs like.
- Others are correct. Once extinct, something does not come back. What will follow humans is difficult to predict. It is looking more and more likely that the extinction of humans will be self-induced ... the first species in the history of the planet to cause it's own extinction (which will add *huge* irony to the idea that we consider ourselves the "most intelligent" of species ... too bad there are no other creatures around that understand *irony*). But the problem is that humans will probably also take a lot of other species with it. So it's hard to predict which species will survive our human-induced mass-extinction, in order to take over. When the dinosaurs disappeared it was the lowly mammals (which were then represented by these small rodent-like things). Who knows what lowly branch of evolution will survive us, and take over. A second thing to keep in mind is that the size of the dinosaurs was a result of an over-abundance of oxygen. It is likely that humans will leave a rather oxygen-poor earth ... so the next dominant species will not likely be very large. As far as I'm concerned, it is most likely the insects. But the insects would most likely laugh at me (if they could laugh) and say (if they could say anything), that they have been dominating for more than half-a-billion years ... even before the dinosaurs. So impossible to say.
- That would be a violation of Dollo's Law of the Irreversibility of Evolution. I'd like to see it happen though but where would I publish my findings?
