Correction to this video I posted earlier but seems to have vanished: the modern chicken isn't the most closely related species to the T-Rex more than any other bird is. This piece of misinformation comes from a common misinterpretation (which I am also guilty of) regarding a study of collagen in a T-Rex's leg bone.
The correction you posted was on an entirely seperate video just in case you didn't find out by now, i believe it was the video about what life would be like 50 million years from now if humans weren't around.
By the way curious archive dougal dixon's the new dinosaurs an alternative evolution was also an inspiration and basis for peter Jackson and the designers at weta workshop and weta digital on designing the dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals descendants in his remake of king kong
I wish Dixon had more thoroughly explained his reasoning rather than just looking at modern animals and forcing dinosaurs to fill their niches. Dinosaurs existed for more than 150 million years and never evolved into anything as crazy or hyperspecific as Dixon fantasized. Even if the absurdity of the new dinosaurs' designs was probable, what would have prompted them to wildly diversify after 150+ million years of relatively consistent design?
The thing is we can't KNOW for sure if animals never evolved into such strange forms at any point. We only have knowledge of 2% of all the animals that ever existed on earth, including the ones that currently exist. There could easily have been some wild looking dinosaurs and other animals that just never got properly fossilized, which is an incredibly rare process in and of itself.
Dinosaurs did not have a consistent design thru those 150 million years. Dinosaurs were way more diverse during the mesozoic than any modern day animal groups and if i had to guess the spread of grass is what made them diversify so much
i cant say i care for it too much. he slaps a dinosaur face on a flamingo or kangaroo and all of the sudden it’s a new animal when clearly it was based on animals that exist today. he could’ve gotten away with making much more wild depictions but he didn’t. kinda disappointing
I’m gonna be honest. I feel like most of these are too much like mammals and sometimes I just look at some and think “that just a [blank mammal]” or “that’s just a [blank bird]” I know I ain’t a scientist but I kinda doubt dinosaurs would change into anything like these considering how they evolved before the Cretaceous.
It's especially jarring considering that dinosaurs looked somewhat consistent for a long time...longer than the time after their extinction until now. Mammals changed very rapidly in that time simply because the demise of the dinosaurs gave them a helluva lot of new ecological niches to take advantage of. Without a mass extinction, life on earth has no real reason to change more than it has to. At most the dinosaurs would need to adapt to the spread of grassy plains and the ice age, but even then they wouldn't turn into rip-offs of today's mammals to do that.
@@Flufux i was about to say it could evolve like that, but then you made me remember mammals just evolved like what we have today most because of the "recent" mass extincion
Id argue that 1)not everything is fossilised and anything that's fossilised isn't necessarily 100% representative (eg feathers on certain dinosaurs, nanotyrannus actually not its own species but just a juvenile etc) 2)convergent evolution 3)we cant really imagine animals that don't exist so it will have some similarities to existing creatures
"if dinosaurs suddenly evolved to cover nowadays mammal's niches" the book. It would be more reasonable if they preserved their well established niches since they already had well structured ones
I think it's reasonable to think that dinosaurs would shrink in size and give rise to beings similar to today's mammals, since there is a thing called convergent evolution.
@@luiznunes1404 yeah changes in the atmosphere would mean they'd have to shrink, and changes to the general environment means new niches need to be covered. The rest of the book is sooo wrong tho lolol
I agree, except that changes in climate and plant species would have forced changes - for example, the ice ages and development of grasslands and flowering plants. Still, to your point, I think the author really didn't consider specific effects of environmental change on specific kinds of dinosaurs. And since the dinosaurs were already declining before the meteor event, dinosaurs would have found themselves increasingly competing for the same niches as birds and mammals. The whole subject is probably too complex to make any reliable extrapolations, but it's always fun to speculate.
The book appears to get several things wrong. Ichthyosaurs died around around 25 million years before the end of the Cretaceous. Likewise, birds were also replacing pterosaurs in most niches in the Cretaceous. Tyrannosaurus and triceratops are actually closer than us in time than they are to Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and other Jurassic dinosaurs. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the general dinosaur body plan would remain. For example, the deer equivalent would be a dinosaur-sized animal, probably generally hadrosaur-like, while the lion/wolf equivalent would be a stereotypical theropod, not some mammal wanna-be or something trying really hard to be bird.
Wrong birds and pterosaurs had about the same diversity in the late Cretaceous. Infact Pterosaurs were probably recovering until the asteroid hit. We know have more material and it seems pterosaurs weren’t declining because of birds they were stable at the end. They did decline due to climate change in the middle of the Cretaceous but they recovered
@@AquaticFlapper125 I tend to distrust scientific articles that contradict the scientific consensus. At any rate, birds were quite common in the late Cretaceous, so it seems reasonable that birds would have remained successful if the K-T extinction event didn't happen.
The book repeatedly states that ichthyosaurs became extinct before the end of the Cretaceous. The whulk is a pliosauroid (which also went extinct before the Maastrichtian, although that was not recognised when the book was written).
Actually, current studies suggested that pterosaur diversity were at its peak during Cretaceous. Long-tailed forms like Rhamphorhyncids are gone, replaced by short-tailed Pterodactyloids and its kin, and then their diversity (and size) went up significantly. Birds were still mostly small Enantiornithines exploring insectivorous niches left by small insectivorous pterosaurs like _Batrachognathus_ and _Anurognathus_ , plus several other clades. When bigger pterosaurs went away, these birds too their chances exploring bigger niches to become scavenger or even predator themselves.
I loved the dixon books but the problem is, evolution doesnt occur when you want, but when you need. There would be no need to evolve into a rhino when a triceratops is enough. It has only been 65 million years since dinosaurs went extinct. Yet sauropods and therapods have existed and used the same form for over a 100 million years. Theres a high chance the dinosaurs would simply use the similar body plants they have been using for eons.
While yes, most of the design in TND is outdated and unlikely to evolve. It's inaccurate to say that dinosaur stays the same throughout their reign. While the basic body plan stay the same, there has been many unique adaptation and body form that evolve in the various clade of dinosaurs. For instance, all theropod retain the basic body plan of bipedal long legged animal, but some have derived adaptation from herbivory (Ornithomimids, oviraptorid, Deinocheirus, therizinosaur) to flight (microraptor, birds), also just by comparing the dominant theropod of Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous, it's obvious that dinosaur composition doesn't stay the same, Allosaurid have large arms while Tyrannosaurid have small arms. There's also the fact that clade of animals change throughout the ages, ceratopsid in Jurassic only consist of small dinosaur and then they evolved to become large horned and crested animals in the Cretaceous. The same thing would definitely happen if the dinosaurs went extinct, especially when considering the climate changes and other events that happen in the Cenozoic.
@@azrielmoha6877 while there have been unique niche adaptations, most of these only come at the cost of necessity. For example, there would be no need for "giraffe" niches as sauropods easily occupy it. The problem with his books is that he tries too hard to make the reptiles mimic the modern day animals. The fundamentals like giving birth vs laying egss, metabolism, cold vs warm blooded, air sacs in bones all contribute to why the dinosaur body plant is the most perfect for their type. Sure dinosaurs might evolve to be smaller, faster and smarter but they cant escape these fundamentals that give them their distinctive looks
@@Meteo_sauce And i highly agreed, a giraffe-like azdarchid is unlikely when there's sauropod still around. But my point is that in an alternate reality where the K-Pg extinction didn't happen, the dinosaur composition would be different than during the late Cretaceous. Tyrannosaurid might no longer be the dominant carnivore, replaced with other theropod dinosaur as large predators, sauropos might be extinct if they can't survive the cooling plant during the Cenozoic and can't adapt to eat grasses that displaced many forests. If sauropods do extinct, it's very likely that another clade of animals, likely dinosaur like hadrosaurid or maybe even smaller dinosaur like parkosauridae takes their place. But that doesn't stop the fact that the possibility of herbivorous pterosaur to evolve, especially in isolated islands where there are no herbivorous dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean they won't start looking like giraffe.
@@Meteo_sauce Look at triassic animals compared to cretaceous ones. They are different in many ways. That is due to a little something called, in layman's terms, "TAKING UP NICHES TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL". Look at early mammals compared to modern day elephants, rhinos, humans, deer, wolves and more. The "theropod body plan" was never perfect, sure, it was useful, but it sure wasn't perfect by any means. It's very ignorant to think that dinosaurs wouldn't evolve into various different forms, like they did for millions of years. Sure, the books interpretations are inaccurate and downright nonsensical, they aren't that bad as examples. Look at plateosaurus. Looks just like a theropod, right? Look at bajadasaurus. Nothing like a theropod. Both are more closely related to eachother than they are to theropods. Besides, the climate of earth was shifting, so that would mean various new forms adapting to a colder environment.
@@cyber774 taking up niches only occurs when necessary, or when there are blatant advantages when compared to their current evolutionary state. Think of evolution traits like a bunch of valleys on a plane, and imagine the animals evolving as balls on the plane. The better the evolutionary trait, the deeper the valley, however, the balls can only roll down certain valleys but unable to roll upwards. This is called local maxima, where animals are trapped in a shallow valley despite a deep valley next to it. Sure there could be advantages to eat krills like the blue whale, but if eating fish is good enough, the evolution for krill consumption would never occur.
This is what the pixar movie "The Good Dinosaur" should have been, with a much more cartoony imaginative feeling of course. Imagine how cool it would be to see a zootopia-like dinosaur civilization in the future! But no everything exactly the same except some dinos farm -_-
Yeah, to be fair, it is like "What if the Dinossaurs were at the Agriculture Revolution" which was one, if not the biggest, Revolution of mankind. It may not be the most exciting one, but it is something. And, if you are a fan of Unified Pixar Universe Theory, you may have heard that Monsters Inc. is the future of Good Dinossaur. In Monsters Inc. where the Animals got themselves no human to make energy, so they time-travel to the past to get energy at the form of emotions. So Monsters Inc. Can be seen as a new Evolution starting after Wall-E recolonized Earth. Somewhere along the timeline the machines stopped and people got dumb untill extinction. And Dinossaurs evolved into all kinds of shapes like Monsters But that is just my theory
@@NoisqueVoaProduction thats interesting, but even then it kind of felt like the worldbuilding in The Good Dinosaur was kind of lazy? Like yeah, they're in the agriculture revolution, but they could explore that more. Why don't they wear any clothes? Why does the brachiosaur family live alone instead of in a village, I mean brachiosaurs lived in groups and people lived in villages in the agricultural revolution, why is it just his family? Why don't we see other dinosaurs farming? Are they less intelligent than the brachiosaurs, or do they think whatever way they live is better than agriculture? Idk things like that I have so much questions the movie doesn't answer
@@janibii_608 Yeah, the original script had more species that all took specific roles in the village, and a much more interesting story, where humans were also in their own agricultural revolution, sad to see it turn into a bootleg lion king.
@@in4mal_baker270 was their a reason that they scrapped the idea? It's so sad to hear about scrapped ideas. It'd be cool to see the clash between the dinos and the humans, maybe the story would have turned into almost a platonic romeo and juliet type story with Arlo and Spot being secret friends while their villages are in conflict
He slapped a dino face on existing animals that we all know. Dinoroo, dinoraffe, dinowhatever. Zero imagination involved, nor even a modest understanding how evolution works (it will not produce everything so completely identical to what we have in our world)
This certainly is one of Dixon's most controversial. It's interesting to see this with the knowledge that dinosaurs were already slowly going extinct before the meteor hit.
I dunno…I keep trying to get into this one but I always find myself a little underwhelmed by the new dinosaurs, especially as a life long dinosaur admirer. The most creative stand out un this new biome aren’t even dinosaurs while a lot of them sort of feel a bit too much like modern day mammals like some other folks have admitted. I know its quite possible they’d fill similar niches but it feels too on the nose. I’m probably spoiled by a lot of modern day speculative paleo art.
Yeah, this book was very criticised by paleontologysts and the general public because of their uncreative designs. Bruh in real life animals that have the same niche or inhabit similar places surely converge on a lot of stuff sometimes, but not at this extense!
@@clockworkpanda8 You mean convergent. And I highly doubt even filling similar niches they would look so strikingly similar to the animals of our timeline.
Dinosaurs had some 250 million years to evolve convergent structures to mammals and hadn't. The idea that over the next 65 million they would is questionable at best. Chances are they'd still look like dinosaurs, but maybe a bit fluffier and possibly a little stockier to deal with a colder climate.
Though uncreative and at first glance unlikely, it’s still quite interesting, as unbelievable and disappointing you may find these new dinosaurs looks like, i would guess that they’re actually adapting to the environment around them as time changes, while disappointingly boring these dinosaurs can look I personally feel it would be a somewhat realistic approach, because we all know that animals have certain unique patterns that can be used to survive in the wild, A dinosaur that developed tiger-like stripes wouldn’t be too far fetched considering tigers develop those stripes to blend in with it’s environment better, making it easier for them to hunt, so i would think that it’s entirely possible to see a tiger dinosaur walking around in another universe But at the end of the day, we agree that these new dinosaurs look boring and uncreative as hell
I think it's more so that convergent evolution makes organisms that fill the same niche end up with similar traits. After all, the more generations you have the more opportunities you'll get to fine tune for your niche.
@@flygawnebardoflight Animals can occupy a similar niche and not be that convergent. Rhinos and triceratops had a similar niece but did not look too convergent, but in his book the triceratops literaly evolves into a Rhino 2.0. He did the same with making a new monkey as opposed to a new idea of a tree dwelling dinosaur, he literaly made a flamingo down to the colour and stance. Dinosaurs already had answers to all of these birches and his idea of evolution was making literally all of them more similar to the modern version.
@Cauã de Souza Out of all of them the rhino was actually one of my favorites. specific examples are only used to critisise the consistency of his mammalian weighted predictions. My critisism would have little weight if it did not include his entire work.
As with After Man, I do wish Dixon had made a more polished second try with this one. It sounds like he focused too much on filling in niches with them.
ugh. hate the statement that the T-Rex's most closely related species is the modern chicken. I know that its slung arround as a joke, but still, misinformation bothers me. The most basal bird species existing today is the Hoatzin, a species that actually has remnants of claws on its wings. Most birds evolved them away but these interesting little birds kept them since they aid in climbing when young.
All birds are equally distant from T. rex, or any other dinosaur. This or that bird might have more basal traits, but in terms of evolutionary distance, they are all equally far from any given dinosaur.
Hoatzins are fairly derived birds, within the Passerea. Things like flamingos, grebes, pigeons, ducks and chickens hold a more basal position within the neoavian birds. Claws in hoatzin chicks is probably an example of atavism (a genetic trait reappearing after vanishing in earlier generations). but yeah, the T.rex - chicken thing is infuriating.
If Ravens are smart enough to use tools to aid in eating nuts and if Those Australian hawks are smart enough to use forest fires to hunt and even use them to spread them, I think we could of got something to replace humans.
@@trishapellis its because the comment is implying that its some kind of amazing and mind boggling feats what these certain animals can do. Its like saying a dog can do sone tricks and then saying dogs would eventually become as smart as humans. Same as how ants can build colonies, or fishes swimming as a group to protect themselves from predators. Animals are not completely moronic organisms but humans are way way more advance. Some animals cant just evolve the same way as are species did.
@@nomnom3019 ... Okay, at least this makes clear what you were thinking. I thought you meant the opposite - that animals are so intelligent that OP doubting about getting something humanlike was an insult to animals. I do agree that the hunting tactics of fire hawks are no more than a trick one of them found out through pure luck and the rest are imitating, and while I do believe crows have a true intelligence, it is still far from comparable to ours. Even among our closest relatives, those apes that were taught sign language in the '70s had no interest in having a conversation; they knew some signs but only ever used them to ask for food or toys. There is no human intelligence there. As for what I think is *possible*, it's a bit mixed. For starters, a hundred thousand years ago, there was no primate that was capable of doing more than these things that dogs and fire hawks can do now. Once upon a time, no creature as smart as humans existed, and then over the course of a hundred thousand years, evolution made one - in fact, it made several, as Neanderthals seem to have been in the same ballpark, and we just don't know enough about Denisovans to know where they were on the spectrum. I definitely think, letting evolution do its thing for as long as necessary, something as smart as humans would have arisen. However, (from the documentaries I've watched) there do seem to have been a few steps and requirements involved for us to evolve. For one, you need opposable thumbs to be able to do much more than drop nuts in front of cars in terms of toolmaking. Secondly, it is assumed that the rapid growth of brain capacity our ancestors went through hinged on both bipedalism and active hunting (because meat provides the high amounts of nutrients we need to grow those big brains over the course of a childhood). Of course, we literally don't know the limits of what evolution is capable of - it might not be that restricted - but if it turns out opposable thumbs and bipedalism are indeed required, then first off, it was always going to be a primate or something that gained primate traits through convergent evolution, and secondly it was always going to end up looking what we would call 'humanoid'. But if primates had not existed, who knows if for example the lineage of canids (dogs) might have gained bipedalism inside of the next 20 million years? Looking at reconstructions of creatures from 20 million years ago, some of which were still kind of freaky, it doesn't seem impossible to me. What they are or are not capable of right now does not seem to be a restriction, as primates 20 million years ago were tiny and no more intelligent than a rat and now they are us.
Did you know that in the book, it isn’t feathers or pycnofibers, they are hair. I actually own the book and have read it and noticed that it mentioned the scales modified into hair, not feathers. Back in those days, birds were further separated from dinosaurs than we know.
There is also the "Irritator Challengeri;" so named because the paleontologists realized that commercial fossil hunters had altered the skull of the animal in an attempt to make it more valuable. The paleontologists, of course were quite... "irritated!"
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in conducting speculative zoology, please bear in mind that evolution doesn't have any goals in sight. Like a super intelligent organism which comes to dominate or shape its environment - just to use the example the author gave. Evolution is not an intelligent creator with a will and motivations, it's more like rush hour - "if you see a gap, take it!" Organisms won't evolve to fill niches if those niches never arise in the first place. An example I can give is that of the phylum arthropoda. Arthropods have predated vertebrates by a loooong way and existed for longer than reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals. If evolution leads to intelligent, sentient creatures, they had ample opportunity. The closest we see are social insects. Many other types have done just fine making few changes over billions of years. Arthropods don't NEED intelligence to get by, they just keep evolving into crabs. Maybe they're onto something...
Interestingly this same critique has also been used against this book. Evolution doesn't have an end goal, but the book's end goal seems to be to perfectly recreate the modern ecosystem. We shouldn't assume that our ecosystems would evolve to be anything alike the ecosystems we see today when biological pressures also play a role in the shaping of ecosystems. How does a mid sized slow moving cow like animal cope if there's an apex predator the size of a T-Rex? The answer is it probably doesn't, and there's really no reason for the giant Tyrannosaur body plan to go away without a mass extinction, in fact colder temps probably favour it if anything. So this failed assumption is also made on the author's behalf, since there's an inherent assumption that evolution will progress basically as it did in out timeline despite a completely different set of pressures. It's why this book is my least favourite of this trilogy.
As much as you'd like to believe that. Literally everything in this world is so perfect like how the ecosystem operates There definitely is a goal for every animal's evolution and tests It's definitely God's work
@@dv9239 There's many ways how organisms are not optimised that would not make sense in the context of intelligent design. A fantastic example of this is the recurrent laryngeal nerve. A nerve which runs out from the brainstem, under the aorta and back up to the larynx. This is a suboptimal design in most species, but it's even more suboptimal when we look at giraffes, with their multi-metre long neck. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has to run from the brain, several metres down the neck, around the aorta and then several metres back up the neck. This is not how an intelligent designer would design the recurrent laryngeal. It does however make sense when we consider the ancient fish ancestry of the giraffe and the origin of the jaw and larynx as the from gill. The gill rack in fish is connected by the vagus nerves, a major set of nerves, the recurrent laryngeal is derived from one of these nerves. The vagus nerves connect the gill rack back to front wrapping under the aorta, an optimised design in fish where this structure first evolved due to the placement of the brain and gill rack in fish. Giraffes are just kind of stuck with the recurrent laryngeal wrapped around their aorta due to their ancient ancestry. The nerve moving to a different area isn't the space of possible mutations and it's only a minor inefficiency from a survival standpoint. It's just very inefficient from a design standpoint where the design in this fashion would make no sense to anyone.
The genre is incredibly difficult to do well. I know it's a fan favorite but I feel All Tomorrows is one of the few to do an incredible good job. In making creatures that feel mostly disconnected to things that we recognize being related to earth and humans.
@@apothecurio It’s so funny that people hate on Dixon and use as their argument the fact that “All Tomorrows” is more accurate when it’s CLEARLY an high fantasy- horror fiction with no intention of being realistic or plausible whatsoever. I mean they’re literally surreal naif drawings with a very child-like Lovecraft inspired narrative, what the fuck are we talking about? And I like the book too, but it’s ridiculous to use it as a standard for belivability.
@@heroiam4067 All tomorrows can just go crazy because of alien space science magic. Doing speculative biology while not pandering to magic is harder. But yeah, new dinosaurs is quite unimaginative imo.
quite strange why snakes and birds haven't been evolved similar way in this time line like in our real time lien. there were birds and snakes already when the asteroid struck.
Ikr, Birds, snakes, turtles, and crocodilians were all VERY well established by the time the dinosaurs had just began to take root there's no reason for the snake-dinosaurs to happen.
For point of reference, dinosaur has roamed the planet 100 time longer than human have existed. During all that time, their changes are minimal most just bigger version of the predecessor. My dude just dead-ass pick an animal and make it looks some what like a dinosaur. This consit in his other works as well. It's unimaginative and i have no idea why people love these so much
i'm not expert but when dinosours live on earth there was only one continent so they lived in one place where for long time nothing was changing. but later pangea split up so these species had to adapt to new invironment.
@@avatarxs9377 yeah but that was the mega continent that later splitted into those of today, so it's still a massive landmass with more than enough rooms for diversity
@@lordheadass8310 yes but for example let's take one species that is living on south then it's separated by moving land that is going to north, climate on this new continent changed what force this species to adapt and change.
@@avatarxs9377 yeah but the same can be said for a huge land mass, just look at the US, China or Russia to see how vastly diverse the environment is through out the whole country
"bigger than the predecessor" Bajadasaurus, spinosaurus, therozinosaurs, abelisaurs (especially majungasaurus and carnotaurus), scansoriopteryx, pegomastax, epidepteryx, mononykus, and microraptor. Outside of the dinosaurs, azdharchids, kunpengopterus, quetzalcoatlus, hatzegopteryx, arambourgiania, rhamphorynchus, nyctosaurus, aurognathids. Even more than I just listed out.
@@CuriousArchive Pssst, hey bud, I think either you made an Error, or Dixon might be a bit illiterate. Icthyosaurs died out in the early Cretaceous, so they would not live long enough to be in the book.
Not convinced. I am sure that birds would have filled a large number of the ecological niches described here. Avians are direct descendents of dinosaurs. So, ignoring them clearly portrays a flawed perception. Human like intelligence is a hard one, but the new xaledonian ravens are well know to reach intellectual levels of 5 to 7 year old children. To me that shows clearly that dinosaur brains can go in that way. What I am also wondering about are octopuses. They are clearly very intelligent, but suffer from short life spans and their inability to teach their young due to during off after the babies hatch into babies. I think octopuses could be a prime candidate for a marine civilization.
Interestingly enough, a lot of dino fossils show evidence that they did evolve into birds instead of a meteor wiping them out (though I'm sure meteors did come just like they occasionally do now in modern era)
If octopuses did evolve human like intelligence, they wouldn't be able to do much more with human intelligence than they can do now, octopuses today can use collected coconut shells to hide from predators, or even solve mazes and other complex problems, and plus they couldn't make fire or forge metals underwater, so human intelligence wouldn't be worth much to them if they couldn't spread onto land.
Honestly it's the one thing that made sense about this book. If any animal is going to have legs but no arms it'd be dinosaurs since many were and still are slowly gaining smaller and smaller arms. Many dinosaurs with small arms actually did use them, and we can tell because of how strong or specialized they seem (T. rex had too strong arms to be atrophied, meaning they used them, and carnotaurus had a specialized ball-bearing arm which allows for too much mobility to be functionless,) but many dinosaurs also just straight up didn't or don't need arms. Kiwis for example have almost no arm left. Eventually, if they don't go extinct, they might lose them entirely.
A dinosaur with human-like intelligence really isn't that unlikely since we've already got birds that get pretty dang close. There were some dinosaurs even before the extinction with similar intelligence to crows, so it really is possible they could've only gotten smarter from there.
Honestly I was really hoping for like some speculatives such as like (pulling up a random dinosaur with no care if it died out before the time period they are drawing from, as I'm just giving an example); if velociraptors survived and were able to evolve further. Perhaps there would be a species of them that evolved to be able to fly short distances, perhaps perching from trees to dive in flocks from above to kill herbavores much larger than themselves. Or perhaps they grew to become larger (as real velociraptors were about the size of dogs) and accomplished true flight, or perhaps they live on cliffs, having evolved to glide and then swoop down on prey in groups instead of solitary like birds of today. Idk. I just felt like there was so much you could think about but most of it just seemed to be changing dinosaurs into modern day animals
I think CM"s kosemans dinosauroid verse, despite a lack of extensive detail, just little snips, is far, far more realistic than this. I feel that this is just *modern animals but dinosaurs*
The penguin dinosaur is likely not that far removed from reality. There used to be a bird that lived in the Atlantic waters called an auk, which was black and white, and hydrodynamic. Early sailors even thought that penguins were just a southern species of auk, and named them after the auk's Latin name, Penguinis Impenis. However, if you don't know what an auk is, it's no surprise, because humans hunted them into extinction for auk pelt coats.....
It’s so funny that people hate on Dixon and use as their argument the fact that “All Tomorrows” is more accurate when it’s CLEARLY an high fantasy- horror fiction with no intention of being realistic or plausible whatsoever. I mean they are literally surreal naif drawings with a very child-like Lovecraft inspired narrative, what the fuck are we talking about? And I like the book too, but it’s ridiculous to use it as a standard for belivability.
sure dixon is not very creative. but all tomorrows really? shows those people are not creative with there counter arguments. it's almost as bad as the dragon ball "super" and "gt" fan wars.
Just finish watching the video, cant belive you have less than 200 subs with the quality of your content, i hope CZcams algorit makes you justice soon un the meantime you gained a new sub
As a young man this book actually hurt my brain. It is TRULY speculative. I still can't open it without thinking "WTF were you on when you wrote this?"
The dinos died out 65 million years ago (mya). The crocodile emerged 95 mya and has, relative to mammals, not changed much in 55 million years. In the above hypothetical, I don't think enough time would have passed for such fantastical creatures to emerge. Especially as no asteroid hits, the change in climate that drove the evolution of our current species would not occur. So the biological niches would not change as much. So I don't think that the dinos would change as much as shown here.
I really like the idea of the rhino being the descendent of the triceratops because the trike had its neck as a weakspot. Predators most likely took advantage of it so it explains why there are other types of ceratopsids with more efficient defense in the fossil record.
This is a cool little theory exercise, but very little of it is based off actual scientific speculation or niche adaptability. The guy just took an extinct animal and gave it the features of a currently existing species, going as far as Frankenstein-ing a lot of them.
Please read a PDF of the book at some point, there are in fact plenty of innovative ideas inside, like the Pelorus, the Jynx, the Springe, the Gourmand, the Taranter, and more.
So this book made modern animals into dinosaurs... why would a dinosaur evolve the same way a Kangaroo did? they are nothing alike, one is a reptile and the other one a mammal
I agree with you, Douglas only took existing mammals and created a dinosaur that could fill its niche, nothing scientific or realistic about it. But it could happen, its called convergent evolution. As long as there is a niche to be filled, its kinda likely that more than one species will develop the same features independently. Like flight in bats, fruit bats and flying squirrels or the quills of hedgehogs and porcupines. Actually happens all the time in nature
Well, i gave bad examples probably, since all of them are mammals, but Ichthyosaurus and dolphins are more comparable for dinosaur/mammal filling the same niche
So, rather than actually looking at known dinosaurs and pondering "how might this thing change after 65 million years?" this thing instead asks "what if this modern species were descended from dinosaurs instead of their actual mammal/bird/reptile ancestor. Not terrible, but could have been more thoughtful.
Well birds actually descend from a lineage of theropods which survived the cataclysm and evolved into an avian species So, yes, they are still amongst us
@@AthosJosue You mean there were birds like those of today 100 million years before the mass extinction event? Weren't there primitive birds like the Archeopterix? Birds with dinosaur features Half bird half dinosaur
The problem with this entire idea is that modern thought is that the dinosaurs were already on their way out due to changing climates before the asteroid came, and likely wouldn't have lasted that much longer anyhow. Additionally, most of these proposed new dinosaurs seem so biologically messed up that its almost insulting to consider them a possibility.
There's always something that baffles me with speculative evolution like the work of Dougal Dixon. For whatever reason, they really, *really* like taking things with flight capabilities and removing that aspect. Flight as an evolutionary process is an incredibly powerful tool for survival, and while it's true that there is a theory that animals such as azhdarchids (will check my spelling) may have been more terrestrial as time went on, studies show they were still very effective flyers. It especially gets on my nerves with any time bats are brought up in questions about speculative evolution. Bats are incredibly nimble and precise flying animals, yet every piece of futurist fiction I've seen has them pinned to be terrestrial creatures. If anyone knows for sure, let me know, but I'm just so confused, why lose flight?
@Mullerornis Yeah, bats are strictly arboreal/aerial in nature, they have no use for their legs except for hanging from, which requires no muscle strength because they can lock their legs into place. If they get trapped in a box with nothing to hang from, they simply can't/won't land, and will fly till exhaustion.
@@nvfury13 remarkably few predatory flightless birds, right? All these future bats are depicted as carnivores, and with the exception of terror birds which are thought have evolved from a flying ancestor, it just seems like flight is such a handy means of hunting. Proof of concept, we don't have any terror birds today, but there are plenty of birds of prey
@@elliotthartup4095 Except that our flightless birds are all omnivores or straight carnivores. Don’t let your position being completely wrong make you question it.
So what your saying is this guy accedentally predicted drepanosaurs, nice my personal favorite is the flamingo analog cribrum, something about sticking the filter feeder beak from a pterosaur onto an ornithimimid is really cool!
Nope, just nope. No way any of these would have existed. Just keeping in mind that the global cooling would still happen, and a lot of the bigger dinos would just die out at the first glacial maximum. Also birds would still be a thing, aswell as more mammals.
I'm actually working on a spec evo project about dinos if they weren't extinct as well. There's going to be a scansoropterygid called the Hemoraptor that drinks the blood of larger dinosaurs, just like a vampire bat.
I get convergent evolution, but there's no reason to just make something copy whats around today. I like the guys imagination in his work, but he's just to out there and I dont feel like there's any sentience behind his imagination.
A lot of these concepts look to be recycled from Dixon’s “After Man”. Some very similar looking creature ideas… I guess that’s convergent evolution for you though.
Even though the idea and book sound quite interesting but it was very outdated in a lot of reason List of inaccuracies in this book: 1.the wasp eater would most likely descents from bug eaters like mononykus who has a feather coat and large claws to break the hives of bees and wasps 2.azhdarchids can’t not become plant eater because their not specialized in fruits,nuts or leaves besides they would be outcompete by sauropods 3.if tree dinosaurs are going to evolve they must have the traits like microraptor 4.pterosaurs can’t go from 4 legs to 2 5.think mammals would still fill the nich of sand predators 6.snakes would easily outcompete those long body dinosaurs 7.think the descents of rapetosaurus,majungasaurus and masiakasurus would rule Madagascar alongside lots of land crocodile and descents of lemurs. 8.it can be true micropachycephalosaurus can evolve smaller but not smarter more accurate it would dig or build shelter for itself not for a calzone 9.chronosaurus would be a possibility descents but also shantungosaurus would be a likely descents for Asian hadrosaur 10. Hadrosaur would most likely evolve a thicker crust like the antlers of a deer and they would survive temperate to polar habitats 11.think the descents of borogovia would be the best predator in the temperate forests and polar lands 12.mammals would get larger just as big enough to hunt young dinosaurs example repenomamus 13.therizinosaurus would be a mostly descent for a temperate browser like the tromble 14.birds would still be visitor to the poles 15 most like descent of the taranter would be the tarchia 16.the new ice age dinosaurs would be descent from ceratopsian like packyrhinosaurs and hadrosaur like edmontosaurus 17.hadrosaur would still have long tails 18.think a dinosaur like the struthiomimus would be a better model for a flashing tail Dino 19.a raptor like the atriociraptor or Dakotaraptor would be a possible descent of the north claw and raptor claws are found only on their foot and are used for stabbing not desimboling 20.don’t think triceratops horns would fused together they would be divide and their qills would turn in hard spikes like rhino horn 21.thesosaurus would be more accurate then hypsilophodon due to it being extinct 22.troodon would be a better descent 23.woodpecker would this be alive 24.useless spinosaurs their no way dinosaurs can adapt to full aquatic habitats 25.armadillosuchus would still be alive and evolve into a large armor animal 26. While true many smaller sauropods would go extinct but some bigger sauropods would survive due to the tree’s of the Amazon and southern savanna 27.hummingbird and guiding lizards would survive and out complete them 28.saltosaurus would be a likely descent for a armor sauropod 29.dreadnoughts would be a likely descents for the lumber and should a inch similar to the elephants of the Congo 30.cutlasstooth shouldn’t event existed due to gignotosaurus,mapusaurus dying of before the Cretaceous extinction and carnotaurus and other abelisaurs except majungasaurus would die as tyrannosaurus toke the role of apex predator 31.T. rex wouldn’t lose his arms all together only fuse into one large claw and scavenging is still up for questioning until we find another large apex predator in hell creek,still think the v rex is the most likely T. rex ancestor 32.the dip would evolve from struthiomimus and evolve into a creature similar to the deinocehus 33.bat winged dinosaurs like yi qi have gone extinct 34.isisaurus would be a likely descents 35.pachycephalosaurus wouldn’t get smarter but it dome crust could evolve into a giant horn 36.either a type of pterosaurs or flamingo would do this inch of filler feeder 37.pterosaurs wouldn’t evolve into aquatic animals for their diving birds and marine reptiles roaming the ocean besides aquatic pterosaurs are outdated 38.the last iguanodon was found in Europe not Australia in short by the time Europe became a continent iguanodon was fully extinct 39.think for a decent for the dingum would be a thorny devil or some other species of lizard 40.think for descent for the crack beak and tubb would be leyllaosaurus a small orthinopod than has big eyes 41.think emu’s and moa’s would still evolve on New Zealand instead of kloons and wandles 42. Coconut crabs would still evolve instead of ammonites 43.small pterosaurs can fill niches of island scavenger’s 44.sea pterosaurs would continue to fill the role of dividing flyers 45.hesperoins would still fill the nich of aquatic birds 46.either a giant fish or a filler feeding mosasaurus would do the nich of whales 47. Ammoites would get large but they wouldn’t ride the current more they would share the giant squid as deep giant cephalopods 48. Elasmosaurus can catch pterosaurs so maybe evolve to fully hunt them 49.the small pliosaurs would get larger and become deep divers like beaked whales but they hopefully get big enough to prey deep sea cephalopods Well that maybe all inaccuracies in this book but what other things are inaccurate and could happen in a world of new dinosaurs
Well...some of my old biology professors were of the opinion that they DIDN'T go extinct...at least not completely. Basically birds are the only lineage of dinosaurs that survived.
@@x.r.d7744 lol, thats so funny, great joke. If it's not a joke tho, i can teach you why they are and the many proofs that make it a fact. Its also funny because i was talking to people without knowedge in this subject also
Dougal Dixon has said that he plans on officially republishing The New Dinosaurs with new artwork and updating the dinosaurs completely to fit with modern day paleontology.
"It's difficult to say a creature with human-like intelligence could ever evolve from a dinosaur" *looks at crows and ravens* *looks at parrots* *looks specifically at the african gray parrot* give em a few million years
I personaly dont like his art style or pretty much anything about his books, because they are just so crazy and inacurate, why would a pterosaur go to ground to turn into some giraffe hybrid, and why would the reptilian triceratops become a mammal?
Because Arambourgiania and emus are things? Because mammals, birds, and reptiles are basically a handful of mutations away from swapping classifications? Look at naked mole rats, pangolins, and platypus. Swap them together and you have a reptile with little in the way of mammalian characteristics.
@@zangatz Very accurate. If it mutates and survives to pass on that mutation, then congrats! New species get! It's amazingly straightforward. If it can, it might, and if it did, it is, regardless of sense or circumstance. I mean, is the mutant short-limbed cat just going to roll over and die because it can't run as fast? No, it will try to adapt its lifestyle to suit. If it succeeds then you have a new breed occupying a new niche. I feel a major reason why this isn't well understood is that too many teachers teach models and definitions as if they were realities rather than teaching them as the useful guidelines that they are.
Well, I would imagine since dinosaurs showed up about 230 million years ago and the KT extinction event only happened 66 million years ago, that dinosaurs probably wouldn't have evolved that much. I mean, we have crows and parrots? 230 million years of evolution got us crows and parrots? They had ~160 million years to evolve and the smartest organism for the time that we know of are Troodontids?
Recommended reading: West of Eden trilogy by Harry Harrison. Does the "what if dinosaurs didn't become extinct" scenario very well. Great channel, keep up the good work!
It would be really neat to see what would happen if Dougal Dixon decided to go back to this book's idea and give it another go with modern science and the 40 extra years of improvement.
Anyone else bothered when he says that it’s unlikely sapience would evolve in dinosaurs? It literally already has evolved in dinosaurs, just look at ravens and crows. If anything, dinosaurs are probably the best candidates for a sapient dominant species.
For a good read, I suggest West of Eden, a 1984 science fiction novel by American writer Harry Harrison, who explored the idea of dinosaurs evolving to become sentient and filling the role of humans. This is actually a trilogy. I have read the trilogy at least 3 times.
Yes, but don't forget that in Star Trek there was like that ancient race of aliens millions of years ago who altered the DNA of millions of life forms across the universe to basically turn them into humanoids.
If the ancestors of the t-rexs are stuff like albertosaurs them transforming into a crocodilian thing isn't really like realistic if anything the t-rex would've shrunk grow or maybe evolve into something Like a 3 fingered rex with bigger arms The numskull reminds me of the one of the concept art of the original godzilla
While also a bit dated, the trilogy "West of Eden" by Harry Harrison is based on the premise that the meteor never hit, and dinosaurs evolved and developed a complex society, with humanity never developing beyond a hunter/gatherer stage. I highly recommend this for fans of alternate history stories!
@@Ozraptor4 It's been some time since I've read the books, and I don't specifically remember what species the Yilane descended from, I don't think it's hugely important to the storyline, I was more into the idea of how they developed their science and technology organically. Absolutely mind blowing!
I appreciate you covering this but a tyrannosaurs closest relatives are probably the ratites. A little irrelevant since all birds are dinosaurs. And pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs lol
All living birds are equally as closely related to the T-Rex as each other. They share the same last common ancestor which had a set distance evolutionarily from the LCA of birds and the T-Rex. Ratites, chickens, penguins and pigeons are all about equally as closely related to the T-Rex as any of the other groups are.
I feel that the Dinosaurs could have evolved to human intellect but not in 66 million years. mammals had a head start as they already processed the trait of memory and problem solving. That just needed to develop. Even if Dinosaurs still roamed, we would probably still be flourishing, we would be much smaller and less in umbers, plus our technology may not be as far along (And we would probably see a drastic change in how houses are built, more for defense than just shelter) but we would probably still exist. Most outdoor sports would also not exist. a lot of science we have would not exist either, given that the dangers of being eaten on a casual stroll would keep most of us indoors and underground, but I still think humans would have evolved (Once again we would be smaller, not much larger than a chimp) That said, give dinosaurs another 60 million years after today to continue evolving and they too would probably reach the point of intellect. They would need it to continue progressing beyond their limitations, or they would still die off. Dogs are not nearly as smart as humans (Well tik tok is the exception) but they can still use problem solving. By time dinos made it to now, they could probably have those skills adapted. We however would still be ahead as we can plan, strategize. our highly developed brain puts us ahead. Dinosaurs, as large and numerous as they are, still lose to us. The forward thinking would have to evolve, they would need to get human like intellect quickly. chop that in half they would need it within 30 million. That would be nature evolving intelligence. in 10 million the would understand danger and then communication (Albeit basic) in 15-20 million. 30 million would be when their intelligence really starts to show. We are no longer dominant as nature took over and gave the dinosaurs our only advantage. We still have the upper hand, but it is not such a great advantage at this point. Basically take the raptors form Jurassic park, and up their intelligence.
60% of scientists are not really smart to realize not every animal in the world have to shape like us to be smart as hell. not only that but also not realizing not every animal have to be the same shape as modern animals. there's air changes, planet life and all that other stuff that could've changed and we could have got another shape all together. not only that but we could've got a different IQ if that was the case. and we could've ether be dumb or smarter. evolution can go in many ways. hell did they forget that once upon a time life look very alien and so did the creatures there were around before the dinos? why not be a bit creative that at lest a few animals look alien. I mean there at lest 30% of bugs still look alien to this day. I some of those books like the nose animals was just for fun. but come on.
Correction to this video I posted earlier but seems to have vanished: the modern chicken isn't the most closely related species to the T-Rex more than any other bird is. This piece of misinformation comes from a common misinterpretation (which I am also guilty of) regarding a study of collagen in a T-Rex's leg bone.
Always appreciate you posting these corrections! Thank you!
The correction you posted was on an entirely seperate video just in case you didn't find out by now, i believe it was the video about what life would be like 50 million years from now if humans weren't around.
By the way curious archive dougal dixon's the new dinosaurs an alternative evolution was also an inspiration and basis for peter Jackson and the designers at weta workshop and weta digital on designing the dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals descendants in his remake of king kong
Poor old T-Rex, they squashed him and pulled his bloody arms off.
Check out book "West of Eden," by Harry Harrison /written (1984) Great read 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I wish Dixon had more thoroughly explained his reasoning rather than just looking at modern animals and forcing dinosaurs to fill their niches. Dinosaurs existed for more than 150 million years and never evolved into anything as crazy or hyperspecific as Dixon fantasized. Even if the absurdity of the new dinosaurs' designs was probable, what would have prompted them to wildly diversify after 150+ million years of relatively consistent design?
Alvarezsaurs are super specialized though
The thing is we can't KNOW for sure if animals never evolved into such strange forms at any point. We only have knowledge of 2% of all the animals that ever existed on earth, including the ones that currently exist. There could easily have been some wild looking dinosaurs and other animals that just never got properly fossilized, which is an incredibly rare process in and of itself.
Dinosaurs did not have a consistent design thru those 150 million years. Dinosaurs were way more diverse during the mesozoic than any modern day animal groups and if i had to guess the spread of grass is what made them diversify so much
As always - climate change
@@arendellecitizen208 ??????????????????????????
The thing that bothers me the most is that ichthyosaurs died out before the meteor hit. Idk about anything else but this one stood out to me
There were mosasaurus after them.
@@ExtremeMadnessX but this book specifically says that they were ichthyosaurs
The book is reek in AU stuff, so let's just pretend that ichthyosaurs never went extinct in the book timeline though
@@ekosubandie2094 It's still works if you replace them with mosasaurus.
Was that known when it was written too?
This book is basically, “I’ll just force dinosaurs into convergent evolution with modern animals as much as possible”
It really is
fr
as all of dixons works are
i cant say i care for it too much. he slaps a dinosaur face on a flamingo or kangaroo and all of the sudden it’s a new animal when clearly it was based on animals that exist today. he could’ve gotten away with making much more wild depictions but he didn’t. kinda disappointing
@Danger gamer - I mean, by definition, that’s what convergent evolution is...
If there is an ecological niche, it’s going to be filled by something.
I’m gonna be honest. I feel like most of these are too much like mammals and sometimes I just look at some and think “that just a [blank mammal]” or “that’s just a [blank bird]” I know I ain’t a scientist but I kinda doubt dinosaurs would change into anything like these considering how they evolved before the Cretaceous.
This was one of the main criticisms on the book scientists had
true
It's especially jarring considering that dinosaurs looked somewhat consistent for a long time...longer than the time after their extinction until now. Mammals changed very rapidly in that time simply because the demise of the dinosaurs gave them a helluva lot of new ecological niches to take advantage of. Without a mass extinction, life on earth has no real reason to change more than it has to. At most the dinosaurs would need to adapt to the spread of grassy plains and the ice age, but even then they wouldn't turn into rip-offs of today's mammals to do that.
@@Flufux i was about to say it could evolve like that, but then you made me remember mammals just evolved like what we have today most because of the "recent" mass extincion
Id argue that
1)not everything is fossilised and anything that's fossilised isn't necessarily 100% representative (eg feathers on certain dinosaurs, nanotyrannus actually not its own species but just a juvenile etc)
2)convergent evolution
3)we cant really imagine animals that don't exist so it will have some similarities to existing creatures
"if dinosaurs suddenly evolved to cover nowadays mammal's niches" the book. It would be more reasonable if they preserved their well established niches since they already had well structured ones
I think it's reasonable to think that dinosaurs would shrink in size and give rise to beings similar to today's mammals, since there is a thing called convergent evolution.
@@luiznunes1404 yeah changes in the atmosphere would mean they'd have to shrink, and changes to the general environment means new niches need to be covered. The rest of the book is sooo wrong tho lolol
@@MiguelXTulio atmosphere doesn’t limit size the reason dinosaurs got so big was because they had air sacks like today’s birds.
I agree, except that changes in climate and plant species would have forced changes - for example, the ice ages and development of grasslands and flowering plants. Still, to your point, I think the author really didn't consider specific effects of environmental change on specific kinds of dinosaurs. And since the dinosaurs were already declining before the meteor event, dinosaurs would have found themselves increasingly competing for the same niches as birds and mammals. The whole subject is probably too complex to make any reliable extrapolations, but it's always fun to speculate.
@@luiznunes1404 All the good small animals would still exist though and be better than them at everything on that scale.
The book appears to get several things wrong. Ichthyosaurs died around around 25 million years before the end of the Cretaceous. Likewise, birds were also replacing pterosaurs in most niches in the Cretaceous.
Tyrannosaurus and triceratops are actually closer than us in time than they are to Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and other Jurassic dinosaurs. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the general dinosaur body plan would remain. For example, the deer equivalent would be a dinosaur-sized animal, probably generally hadrosaur-like, while the lion/wolf equivalent would be a stereotypical theropod, not some mammal wanna-be or something trying really hard to be bird.
Wrong birds and pterosaurs had about the same diversity in the late Cretaceous. Infact Pterosaurs were probably recovering until the asteroid hit. We know have more material and it seems pterosaurs weren’t declining because of birds they were stable at the end. They did decline due to climate change in the middle of the Cretaceous but they recovered
@@AquaticFlapper125 I tend to distrust scientific articles that contradict the scientific consensus. At any rate, birds were quite common in the late Cretaceous, so it seems reasonable that birds would have remained successful if the K-T extinction event didn't happen.
The book repeatedly states that ichthyosaurs became extinct before the end of the Cretaceous. The whulk is a pliosauroid (which also went extinct before the Maastrichtian, although that was not recognised when the book was written).
To be fair, around 0:59 the narrator did say the information the book had was outdated
Actually, current studies suggested that pterosaur diversity were at its peak during Cretaceous. Long-tailed forms like Rhamphorhyncids are gone, replaced by short-tailed Pterodactyloids and its kin, and then their diversity (and size) went up significantly. Birds were still mostly small Enantiornithines exploring insectivorous niches left by small insectivorous pterosaurs like _Batrachognathus_ and _Anurognathus_ , plus several other clades. When bigger pterosaurs went away, these birds too their chances exploring bigger niches to become scavenger or even predator themselves.
I loved the dixon books but the problem is, evolution doesnt occur when you want, but when you need. There would be no need to evolve into a rhino when a triceratops is enough. It has only been 65 million years since dinosaurs went extinct. Yet sauropods and therapods have existed and used the same form for over a 100 million years. Theres a high chance the dinosaurs would simply use the similar body plants they have been using for eons.
While yes, most of the design in TND is outdated and unlikely to evolve. It's inaccurate to say that dinosaur stays the same throughout their reign. While the basic body plan stay the same, there has been many unique adaptation and body form that evolve in the various clade of dinosaurs. For instance, all theropod retain the basic body plan of bipedal long legged animal, but some have derived adaptation from herbivory (Ornithomimids, oviraptorid, Deinocheirus, therizinosaur) to flight (microraptor, birds), also just by comparing the dominant theropod of Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous, it's obvious that dinosaur composition doesn't stay the same, Allosaurid have large arms while Tyrannosaurid have small arms. There's also the fact that clade of animals change throughout the ages, ceratopsid in Jurassic only consist of small dinosaur and then they evolved to become large horned and crested animals in the Cretaceous. The same thing would definitely happen if the dinosaurs went extinct, especially when considering the climate changes and other events that happen in the Cenozoic.
@@azrielmoha6877 while there have been unique niche adaptations, most of these only come at the cost of necessity. For example, there would be no need for "giraffe" niches as sauropods easily occupy it. The problem with his books is that he tries too hard to make the reptiles mimic the modern day animals. The fundamentals like giving birth vs laying egss, metabolism, cold vs warm blooded, air sacs in bones all contribute to why the dinosaur body plant is the most perfect for their type. Sure dinosaurs might evolve to be smaller, faster and smarter but they cant escape these fundamentals that give them their distinctive looks
@@Meteo_sauce And i highly agreed, a giraffe-like azdarchid is unlikely when there's sauropod still around. But my point is that in an alternate reality where the K-Pg extinction didn't happen, the dinosaur composition would be different than during the late Cretaceous. Tyrannosaurid might no longer be the dominant carnivore, replaced with other theropod dinosaur as large predators, sauropos might be extinct if they can't survive the cooling plant during the Cenozoic and can't adapt to eat grasses that displaced many forests. If sauropods do extinct, it's very likely that another clade of animals, likely dinosaur like hadrosaurid or maybe even smaller dinosaur like parkosauridae takes their place. But that doesn't stop the fact that the possibility of herbivorous pterosaur to evolve, especially in isolated islands where there are no herbivorous dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean they won't start looking like giraffe.
@@Meteo_sauce Look at triassic animals compared to cretaceous ones. They are different in many ways. That is due to a little something called, in layman's terms, "TAKING UP NICHES TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL". Look at early mammals compared to modern day elephants, rhinos, humans, deer, wolves and more. The "theropod body plan" was never perfect, sure, it was useful, but it sure wasn't perfect by any means. It's very ignorant to think that dinosaurs wouldn't evolve into various different forms, like they did for millions of years. Sure, the books interpretations are inaccurate and downright nonsensical, they aren't that bad as examples. Look at plateosaurus. Looks just like a theropod, right? Look at bajadasaurus. Nothing like a theropod. Both are more closely related to eachother than they are to theropods. Besides, the climate of earth was shifting, so that would mean various new forms adapting to a colder environment.
@@cyber774 taking up niches only occurs when necessary, or when there are blatant advantages when compared to their current evolutionary state. Think of evolution traits like a bunch of valleys on a plane, and imagine the animals evolving as balls on the plane. The better the evolutionary trait, the deeper the valley, however, the balls can only roll down certain valleys but unable to roll upwards. This is called local maxima, where animals are trapped in a shallow valley despite a deep valley next to it. Sure there could be advantages to eat krills like the blue whale, but if eating fish is good enough, the evolution for krill consumption would never occur.
This is what the pixar movie "The Good Dinosaur" should have been, with a much more cartoony imaginative feeling of course. Imagine how cool it would be to see a zootopia-like dinosaur civilization in the future! But no everything exactly the same except some dinos farm -_-
Everybody has their opinion
Yeah, to be fair, it is like "What if the Dinossaurs were at the Agriculture Revolution" which was one, if not the biggest, Revolution of mankind.
It may not be the most exciting one, but it is something.
And, if you are a fan of Unified Pixar Universe Theory, you may have heard that Monsters Inc. is the future of Good Dinossaur.
In Monsters Inc. where the Animals got themselves no human to make energy, so they time-travel to the past to get energy at the form of emotions.
So Monsters Inc. Can be seen as a new Evolution starting after Wall-E recolonized Earth. Somewhere along the timeline the machines stopped and people got dumb untill extinction. And Dinossaurs evolved into all kinds of shapes like Monsters
But that is just my theory
@@NoisqueVoaProduction thats interesting, but even then it kind of felt like the worldbuilding in The Good Dinosaur was kind of lazy? Like yeah, they're in the agriculture revolution, but they could explore that more. Why don't they wear any clothes? Why does the brachiosaur family live alone instead of in a village, I mean brachiosaurs lived in groups and people lived in villages in the agricultural revolution, why is it just his family? Why don't we see other dinosaurs farming? Are they less intelligent than the brachiosaurs, or do they think whatever way they live is better than agriculture? Idk things like that I have so much questions the movie doesn't answer
@@janibii_608 Yeah, the original script had more species that all took specific roles in the village, and a much more interesting story, where humans were also in their own agricultural revolution, sad to see it turn into a bootleg lion king.
@@in4mal_baker270 was their a reason that they scrapped the idea? It's so sad to hear about scrapped ideas. It'd be cool to see the clash between the dinos and the humans, maybe the story would have turned into almost a platonic romeo and juliet type story with Arlo and Spot being secret friends while their villages are in conflict
This is like stealing somebody's homework and slightly changing the answers.
Wtf bro?!
He slapped a dino face on existing animals that we all know. Dinoroo, dinoraffe, dinowhatever. Zero imagination involved, nor even a modest understanding how evolution works (it will not produce everything so completely identical to what we have in our world)
Underrated comment OP,
This certainly is one of Dixon's most controversial. It's interesting to see this with the knowledge that dinosaurs were already slowly going extinct before the meteor hit.
Yes, but they would have still lived on.
They would evolving
Since they were slowly going extinct, would today humans be more primitive after the dinos go extinct due to natural causes?
@@F.RO.H they weren't going extinct there were just less species than before lol
They weren't going extinct
I dunno…I keep trying to get into this one but I always find myself a little underwhelmed by the new dinosaurs, especially as a life long dinosaur admirer. The most creative stand out un this new biome aren’t even dinosaurs while a lot of them sort of feel a bit too much like modern day mammals like some other folks have admitted. I know its quite possible they’d fill similar niches but it feels too on the nose. I’m probably spoiled by a lot of modern day speculative paleo art.
Yeah, this book was very criticised by paleontologysts and the general public because of their uncreative designs. Bruh in real life animals that have the same niche or inhabit similar places surely converge on a lot of stuff sometimes, but not at this extense!
Look up congruent evolution. Its likely they could develop a similar path as ours.
@@clockworkpanda8 You mean convergent. And I highly doubt even filling similar niches they would look so strikingly similar to the animals of our timeline.
Dinosaurs had some 250 million years to evolve convergent structures to mammals and hadn't. The idea that over the next 65 million they would is questionable at best. Chances are they'd still look like dinosaurs, but maybe a bit fluffier and possibly a little stockier to deal with a colder climate.
Though uncreative and at first glance unlikely, it’s still quite interesting, as unbelievable and disappointing you may find these new dinosaurs looks like, i would guess that they’re actually adapting to the environment around them as time changes, while disappointingly boring these dinosaurs can look I personally feel it would be a somewhat realistic approach, because we all know that animals have certain unique patterns that can be used to survive in the wild,
A dinosaur that developed tiger-like stripes wouldn’t be too far fetched considering tigers develop those stripes to blend in with it’s environment better, making it easier for them to hunt, so i would think that it’s entirely possible to see a tiger dinosaur walking around in another universe
But at the end of the day, we agree that these new dinosaurs look boring and uncreative as hell
So does this guy just think that modern mammals are the inevitable perfect endpoint for life on earth?
I think it's more so that convergent evolution makes organisms that fill the same niche end up with similar traits. After all, the more generations you have the more opportunities you'll get to fine tune for your niche.
@@flygawnebardoflight Animals can occupy a similar niche and not be that convergent. Rhinos and triceratops had a similar niece but did not look too convergent, but in his book the triceratops literaly evolves into a Rhino 2.0. He did the same with making a new monkey as opposed to a new idea of a tree dwelling dinosaur, he literaly made a flamingo down to the colour and stance. Dinosaurs already had answers to all of these birches and his idea of evolution was making literally all of them more similar to the modern version.
@@Chameleon1616 This was made soooo long ago, where we still thought that intelligence was the end goal of evolution.
@Cauã de Souza Out of all of them the rhino was actually one of my favorites. specific examples are only used to critisise the consistency of his mammalian weighted predictions.
My critisism would have little weight if it did not include his entire work.
Evolution has no end goal
As with After Man, I do wish Dixon had made a more polished second try with this one. It sounds like he focused too much on filling in niches with them.
He actually is. He’s planning on re-releasing it and completely updating it for modern day.
ugh. hate the statement that the T-Rex's most closely related species is the modern chicken. I know that its slung arround as a joke, but still, misinformation bothers me. The most basal bird species existing today is the Hoatzin, a species that actually has remnants of claws on its wings. Most birds evolved them away but these interesting little birds kept them since they aid in climbing when young.
All birds are equally distant from T. rex, or any other dinosaur. This or that bird might have more basal traits, but in terms of evolutionary distance, they are all equally far from any given dinosaur.
@@blkgardner exactly, i said exactly this so many times, it bothers me too
Hoatzins are fairly derived birds, within the Passerea. Things like flamingos, grebes, pigeons, ducks and chickens hold a more basal position within the neoavian birds. Claws in hoatzin chicks is probably an example of atavism (a genetic trait reappearing after vanishing in earlier generations). but yeah, the T.rex - chicken thing is infuriating.
@@blkgardner birds are already themselves dinosaurs.
I thing ratites are most basal group of birds.
If Ravens are smart enough to use tools to aid in eating nuts and if Those Australian hawks are smart enough to use forest fires to hunt and even use them to spread them, I think we could of got something to replace humans.
Do you think animals are some kind of piece of meat that would just roam and bounce around?
@@nomnom3019 I don't understand what brought on this comment on this particular post. What about this post made you think to say this?
@@trishapellis its because the comment is implying that its some kind of amazing and mind boggling feats what these certain animals can do. Its like saying a dog can do sone tricks and then saying dogs would eventually become as smart as humans. Same as how ants can build colonies, or fishes swimming as a group to protect themselves from predators. Animals are not completely moronic organisms but humans are way way more advance. Some animals cant just evolve the same way as are species did.
@@nomnom3019 ... Okay, at least this makes clear what you were thinking. I thought you meant the opposite - that animals are so intelligent that OP doubting about getting something humanlike was an insult to animals. I do agree that the hunting tactics of fire hawks are no more than a trick one of them found out through pure luck and the rest are imitating, and while I do believe crows have a true intelligence, it is still far from comparable to ours. Even among our closest relatives, those apes that were taught sign language in the '70s had no interest in having a conversation; they knew some signs but only ever used them to ask for food or toys. There is no human intelligence there.
As for what I think is *possible*, it's a bit mixed. For starters, a hundred thousand years ago, there was no primate that was capable of doing more than these things that dogs and fire hawks can do now. Once upon a time, no creature as smart as humans existed, and then over the course of a hundred thousand years, evolution made one - in fact, it made several, as Neanderthals seem to have been in the same ballpark, and we just don't know enough about Denisovans to know where they were on the spectrum. I definitely think, letting evolution do its thing for as long as necessary, something as smart as humans would have arisen.
However, (from the documentaries I've watched) there do seem to have been a few steps and requirements involved for us to evolve. For one, you need opposable thumbs to be able to do much more than drop nuts in front of cars in terms of toolmaking. Secondly, it is assumed that the rapid growth of brain capacity our ancestors went through hinged on both bipedalism and active hunting (because meat provides the high amounts of nutrients we need to grow those big brains over the course of a childhood). Of course, we literally don't know the limits of what evolution is capable of - it might not be that restricted - but if it turns out opposable thumbs and bipedalism are indeed required, then first off, it was always going to be a primate or something that gained primate traits through convergent evolution, and secondly it was always going to end up looking what we would call 'humanoid'. But if primates had not existed, who knows if for example the lineage of canids (dogs) might have gained bipedalism inside of the next 20 million years? Looking at reconstructions of creatures from 20 million years ago, some of which were still kind of freaky, it doesn't seem impossible to me. What they are or are not capable of right now does not seem to be a restriction, as primates 20 million years ago were tiny and no more intelligent than a rat and now they are us.
@@trishapellis might be true might be not. Well, it still is a theory afterall.
Did you know that in the book, it isn’t feathers or pycnofibers, they are hair. I actually own the book and have read it and noticed that it mentioned the scales modified into hair, not feathers. Back in those days, birds were further separated from dinosaurs than we know.
still interesting he predicted feathers being a common thing for dinosaurs even if it was in another way
So this book really _is_ just all about turning dinosaurs into mammals
Real animals: *exist*
Dougal Dixon: ILL TAKE YOUR ENTIRE STOCK
I like how an insult turned into a present-day dinosaur name.
Imagine a dinosaur named Numskull 😂
There is also the "Irritator Challengeri;" so named because the paleontologists realized that commercial fossil hunters had altered the skull of the animal in an attempt to make it more valuable. The paleontologists, of course were quite... "irritated!"
You can tell this book is old by the lack of mammals since we now know mammals during the age of dinosaurs (while not being giant) where very diverse.
Dougal Dixon plans on updating the book and re-releasing it.
I'm posting this comment so a few years from now when you have a 100,000 subscribers special, I can look back and know I was here from the start.
You have great quality content! Keep at it, I know you'll make it big.
Thanks so much, that means a lot!
this aged like fine wine
He's gonna soon get a million.
This comment shows that Curious Archive is so good that it gained 700k subs in just 2 years.
Guys guys, fancy sciency terminogy is nice and all but lets call the genre what it really is.
Reality fanfiction
So.. fiction?
Did you come from Billiam's video(s)?
@@SirBlackReeds who?
After All Tomorrows became popular, people have been taking Speculative Evolution more seriously than just laughing and shrugging it off.
how is this underrated compared to the other books of the trilogy
ikr
This one seems the least outlandish out of the trilogy, too. I know evolution is weird but the other two books seemed to go a little too wild.
in conducting speculative zoology, please bear in mind that evolution doesn't have any goals in sight.
Like a super intelligent organism which comes to dominate or shape its environment - just to use the example the author gave.
Evolution is not an intelligent creator with a will and motivations, it's more like rush hour - "if you see a gap, take it!"
Organisms won't evolve to fill niches if those niches never arise in the first place.
An example I can give is that of the phylum arthropoda. Arthropods have predated vertebrates by a loooong way and existed for longer than reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals.
If evolution leads to intelligent, sentient creatures, they had ample opportunity.
The closest we see are social insects. Many other types have done just fine making few changes over billions of years.
Arthropods don't NEED intelligence to get by, they just keep evolving into crabs. Maybe they're onto something...
I'm pretty sure carcinization is evolution's end goal.
Interestingly this same critique has also been used against this book. Evolution doesn't have an end goal, but the book's end goal seems to be to perfectly recreate the modern ecosystem. We shouldn't assume that our ecosystems would evolve to be anything alike the ecosystems we see today when biological pressures also play a role in the shaping of ecosystems. How does a mid sized slow moving cow like animal cope if there's an apex predator the size of a T-Rex? The answer is it probably doesn't, and there's really no reason for the giant Tyrannosaur body plan to go away without a mass extinction, in fact colder temps probably favour it if anything.
So this failed assumption is also made on the author's behalf, since there's an inherent assumption that evolution will progress basically as it did in out timeline despite a completely different set of pressures. It's why this book is my least favourite of this trilogy.
i wanna be a crab
As much as you'd like to believe that. Literally everything in this world is so perfect like how the ecosystem operates
There definitely is a goal for every animal's evolution and tests
It's definitely God's work
@@dv9239 There's many ways how organisms are not optimised that would not make sense in the context of intelligent design. A fantastic example of this is the recurrent laryngeal nerve. A nerve which runs out from the brainstem, under the aorta and back up to the larynx.
This is a suboptimal design in most species, but it's even more suboptimal when we look at giraffes, with their multi-metre long neck. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has to run from the brain, several metres down the neck, around the aorta and then several metres back up the neck. This is not how an intelligent designer would design the recurrent laryngeal.
It does however make sense when we consider the ancient fish ancestry of the giraffe and the origin of the jaw and larynx as the from gill. The gill rack in fish is connected by the vagus nerves, a major set of nerves, the recurrent laryngeal is derived from one of these nerves. The vagus nerves connect the gill rack back to front wrapping under the aorta, an optimised design in fish where this structure first evolved due to the placement of the brain and gill rack in fish.
Giraffes are just kind of stuck with the recurrent laryngeal wrapped around their aorta due to their ancient ancestry. The nerve moving to a different area isn't the space of possible mutations and it's only a minor inefficiency from a survival standpoint. It's just very inefficient from a design standpoint where the design in this fashion would make no sense to anyone.
as an artist and a biology nerd, this pains me. so much.
The genre is incredibly difficult to do well. I know it's a fan favorite but I feel All Tomorrows is one of the few to do an incredible good job. In making creatures that feel mostly disconnected to things that we recognize being related to earth and humans.
@@apothecurio It’s so funny that people hate on Dixon and use as their argument the fact that “All Tomorrows” is more accurate when it’s CLEARLY an high fantasy- horror fiction with no intention of being realistic or plausible whatsoever.
I mean they’re literally surreal naif drawings with a very child-like Lovecraft inspired narrative, what the fuck are we talking about?
And I like the book too, but it’s ridiculous to use it as a standard for belivability.
@@heroiam4067 All tomorrows can just go crazy because of alien space science magic. Doing speculative biology while not pandering to magic is harder. But yeah, new dinosaurs is quite unimaginative imo.
quite strange why snakes and birds haven't been evolved similar way in this time line like in our real time lien. there were birds and snakes already when the asteroid struck.
yeah, half of these I'm going "didn't these guys already exist during this period?"
Ikr, Birds, snakes, turtles, and crocodilians were all VERY well established by the time the dinosaurs had just began to take root there's no reason for the snake-dinosaurs to happen.
Considering that there's more time between stegosaurus and T rex than between T rex and us I'm going to go with much closer to what we know of them
Would they really change much in 64 million years? They existed for like 200 million prior and seemed to generally be set in their niches.
For point of reference, dinosaur has roamed the planet 100 time longer than human have existed.
During all that time, their changes are minimal most just bigger version of the predecessor.
My dude just dead-ass pick an animal and make it looks some what like a dinosaur. This consit in his other works as well. It's unimaginative and i have no idea why people love these so much
i'm not expert but when dinosours live on earth there was only one continent so they lived in one place where for long time nothing was changing. but later pangea split up so these species had to adapt to new invironment.
@@avatarxs9377 yeah but that was the mega continent that later splitted into those of today, so it's still a massive landmass with more than enough rooms for diversity
@@lordheadass8310 yes but for example let's take one species that is living on south then it's separated by moving land that is going to north, climate on this new continent changed what force this species to adapt and change.
@@avatarxs9377 yeah but the same can be said for a huge land mass, just look at the US, China or Russia to see how vastly diverse the environment is through out the whole country
"bigger than the predecessor" Bajadasaurus, spinosaurus, therozinosaurs, abelisaurs (especially majungasaurus and carnotaurus), scansoriopteryx, pegomastax, epidepteryx, mononykus, and microraptor. Outside of the dinosaurs, azdharchids, kunpengopterus, quetzalcoatlus, hatzegopteryx, arambourgiania, rhamphorynchus, nyctosaurus, aurognathids. Even more than I just listed out.
Underrated channel you’re great man keep going
Thanks, will do!
@@CuriousArchive Pssst, hey bud, I think either you made an Error, or Dixon might be a bit illiterate. Icthyosaurs died out in the early Cretaceous, so they would not live long enough to be in the book.
@@stevenandersen6989 pssttt Dinosaurs lived with man. And the earth is not million or billion of years but only thousands.
Not convinced.
I am sure that birds would have filled a large number of the ecological niches described here. Avians are direct descendents of dinosaurs. So, ignoring them clearly portrays a flawed perception.
Human like intelligence is a hard one, but the new xaledonian ravens are well know to reach intellectual levels of 5 to 7 year old children. To me that shows clearly that dinosaur brains can go in that way.
What I am also wondering about are octopuses. They are clearly very intelligent, but suffer from short life spans and their inability to teach their young due to during off after the babies hatch into babies. I think octopuses could be a prime candidate for a marine civilization.
Interestingly enough, a lot of dino fossils show evidence that they did evolve into birds instead of a meteor wiping them out (though I'm sure meteors did come just like they occasionally do now in modern era)
If octopuses did evolve human like intelligence, they wouldn't be able to do much more with human intelligence than they can do now, octopuses today can use collected coconut shells to hide from predators, or even solve mazes and other complex problems, and plus they couldn't make fire or forge metals underwater, so human intelligence wouldn't be worth much to them if they couldn't spread onto land.
This channel will definately grow! Very underrated keep up the good work!
Thank you, I hope so!
Man this is a pretty accurate depiction of pokemons
Dougal Dixon really likes the idea of animals having hind legs but no front legs/arms
Honestly it's the one thing that made sense about this book. If any animal is going to have legs but no arms it'd be dinosaurs since many were and still are slowly gaining smaller and smaller arms. Many dinosaurs with small arms actually did use them, and we can tell because of how strong or specialized they seem (T. rex had too strong arms to be atrophied, meaning they used them, and carnotaurus had a specialized ball-bearing arm which allows for too much mobility to be functionless,) but many dinosaurs also just straight up didn't or don't need arms. Kiwis for example have almost no arm left. Eventually, if they don't go extinct, they might lose them entirely.
Birds: Am I a joke to you?
AGREED 100% ! Such a bullshit book imo
I wonder if there is an alternate reality where humans never evolved and birds got super intelligent and made societies instead
Dinosaurs would probably evolve into birds over time
@@yourmotherindisguise if alternate realities exist , everything can be possible , even magic of sorts
@@yourmotherindisguise that’d could probably happen
A dinosaur with human-like intelligence really isn't that unlikely since we've already got birds that get pretty dang close. There were some dinosaurs even before the extinction with similar intelligence to crows, so it really is possible they could've only gotten smarter from there.
Honestly I was really hoping for like some speculatives such as like (pulling up a random dinosaur with no care if it died out before the time period they are drawing from, as I'm just giving an example); if velociraptors survived and were able to evolve further. Perhaps there would be a species of them that evolved to be able to fly short distances, perhaps perching from trees to dive in flocks from above to kill herbavores much larger than themselves. Or perhaps they grew to become larger (as real velociraptors were about the size of dogs) and accomplished true flight, or perhaps they live on cliffs, having evolved to glide and then swoop down on prey in groups instead of solitary like birds of today.
Idk. I just felt like there was so much you could think about but most of it just seemed to be changing dinosaurs into modern day animals
I think CM"s kosemans dinosauroid verse, despite a lack of extensive detail, just little snips, is far, far more realistic than this. I feel that this is just *modern animals but dinosaurs*
The penguin dinosaur is likely not that far removed from reality. There used to be a bird that lived in the Atlantic waters called an auk, which was black and white, and hydrodynamic. Early sailors even thought that penguins were just a southern species of auk, and named them after the auk's Latin name, Penguinis Impenis. However, if you don't know what an auk is, it's no surprise, because humans hunted them into extinction for auk pelt coats.....
1. The plunger is a pterosaur
2. It's native to Antarctica
Auks are still alive. The Great Auk is extinct.
You so underrated man plss continue making theee videos the quality is great!! Just subscribed man and put notis on hahah
Thanks!
It’s so funny that people hate on Dixon and use as their argument the fact that “All Tomorrows” is more accurate when it’s CLEARLY an high fantasy- horror fiction with no intention of being realistic or plausible whatsoever.
I mean they are literally surreal naif drawings with a very child-like Lovecraft inspired narrative, what the fuck are we talking about?
And I like the book too, but it’s ridiculous to use it as a standard for belivability.
sure dixon is not very creative. but all tomorrows really? shows those people are not creative with there counter arguments. it's almost as bad as the dragon ball "super" and "gt" fan wars.
I’m just watching and waiting for you to get to 1,000 subs man great quality vids
Thanks!
Seeing this comment after he passed 740k subs is truly funny.
Honestly not that creative and quite predictable. Since he's just copying todays extant organisms and making a dinosaur version of them
I mean I thought the Jynx and The Pelorus were fairly creative. Predatory mimicry in large vertebrates is an interesting idea.
I took this book out when I was in my freshman year or highschool. Pretty interesting creatures I have to say.
damn,still awake at the middle of the night and find a video talking about real life pokemon is one of the best moment in my life
I have recently become so facinated with Dixon's work. It's so creative and fun to ponder about stuff like this. 👍
My dad had this when I was a kid; a classic, thanks for uploading.
Just finish watching the video, cant belive you have less than 200 subs with the quality of your content, i hope CZcams algorit makes you justice soon un the meantime you gained a new sub
Thank you, much appreciated
He grew fast
It great to see a video about this book. I used to check it out from my local library when I was a kid.
I really enjoy this channel and I hope you keep up the good work of this curious CZcams channel
Thank you!
As a young man this book actually hurt my brain. It is TRULY speculative. I still can't open it without thinking "WTF were you on when you wrote this?"
The dinos died out 65 million years ago (mya). The crocodile emerged 95 mya and has, relative to mammals, not changed much in 55 million years. In the above hypothetical, I don't think enough time would have passed for such fantastical creatures to emerge. Especially as no asteroid hits, the change in climate that drove the evolution of our current species would not occur. So the biological niches would not change as much. So I don't think that the dinos would change as much as shown here.
Depends on the species of crocodilian that you’re talking about because they have changed a lot for their evolutionary history
I really like the idea of the rhino being the descendent of the triceratops because the trike had its neck as a weakspot. Predators most likely took advantage of it so it explains why there are other types of ceratopsids with more efficient defense in the fossil record.
This is the first video I have watched on this channel and I really enjoyed it, I cant wait to see more!
This is a cool little theory exercise, but very little of it is based off actual scientific speculation or niche adaptability. The guy just took an extinct animal and gave it the features of a currently existing species, going as far as Frankenstein-ing a lot of them.
Please read a PDF of the book at some point, there are in fact plenty of innovative ideas inside, like the Pelorus, the Jynx, the Springe, the Gourmand, the Taranter, and more.
So this book made modern animals into dinosaurs... why would a dinosaur evolve the same way a Kangaroo did? they are nothing alike, one is a reptile and the other one a mammal
I agree with you, Douglas only took existing mammals and created a dinosaur that could fill its niche, nothing scientific or realistic about it. But it could happen, its called convergent evolution. As long as there is a niche to be filled, its kinda likely that more than one species will develop the same features independently. Like flight in bats, fruit bats and flying squirrels or the quills of hedgehogs and porcupines. Actually happens all the time in nature
Well, i gave bad examples probably, since all of them are mammals, but Ichthyosaurus and dolphins are more comparable for dinosaur/mammal filling the same niche
Dude how tf do you have 18 subs with such high quality content?
Edit: 19 now
Thank you! I just started making content pretty recently!
@@CuriousArchive oh gotcha! Well good sir you have yourself a fan from the beginning then. Can't wait to see your growth!
now he has 1K subscribers. he deserves more
@@makotopark7741 wowww dude that's epic!! I'm so happy for him.
17.6k now
So, rather than actually looking at known dinosaurs and pondering "how might this thing change after 65 million years?" this thing instead asks "what if this modern species were descended from dinosaurs instead of their actual mammal/bird/reptile ancestor. Not terrible, but could have been more thoughtful.
Well birds actually descend from a lineage of theropods which survived the cataclysm and evolved into an avian species
So, yes, they are still amongst us
Birds are still theropods
Thats extremely wrong, birds evolved like 100 million years before the extinction event 🤣
@@AthosJosue You mean there were birds like those of today 100 million years before the mass extinction event?
Weren't there primitive birds like the Archeopterix? Birds with dinosaur features
Half bird half dinosaur
The problem with this entire idea is that modern thought is that the dinosaurs were already on their way out due to changing climates before the asteroid came, and likely wouldn't have lasted that much longer anyhow.
Additionally, most of these proposed new dinosaurs seem so biologically messed up that its almost insulting to consider them a possibility.
There's always something that baffles me with speculative evolution like the work of Dougal Dixon. For whatever reason, they really, *really* like taking things with flight capabilities and removing that aspect. Flight as an evolutionary process is an incredibly powerful tool for survival, and while it's true that there is a theory that animals such as azhdarchids (will check my spelling) may have been more terrestrial as time went on, studies show they were still very effective flyers. It especially gets on my nerves with any time bats are brought up in questions about speculative evolution. Bats are incredibly nimble and precise flying animals, yet every piece of futurist fiction I've seen has them pinned to be terrestrial creatures. If anyone knows for sure, let me know, but I'm just so confused, why lose flight?
@Mullerornis Yeah, bats are strictly arboreal/aerial in nature, they have no use for their legs except for hanging from, which requires no muscle strength because they can lock their legs into place. If they get trapped in a box with nothing to hang from, they simply can't/won't land, and will fly till exhaustion.
The only reason i can think of for them to lose flying is if it takes up too much energy for them before getting benefits out of it.
Several bird species have evolved to lose flight, ask them.
@@nvfury13 remarkably few predatory flightless birds, right? All these future bats are depicted as carnivores, and with the exception of terror birds which are thought have evolved from a flying ancestor, it just seems like flight is such a handy means of hunting. Proof of concept, we don't have any terror birds today, but there are plenty of birds of prey
@@elliotthartup4095 Except that our flightless birds are all omnivores or straight carnivores. Don’t let your position being completely wrong make you question it.
I would always imagine Dinosaurs becoming more sapient as time goes on.
This should have gotten as popular ancient aliens, I love these "what if" scenarios
So what your saying is this guy accedentally predicted drepanosaurs, nice
my personal favorite is the flamingo analog cribrum, something about sticking the filter feeder beak from a pterosaur onto an ornithimimid is really cool!
Please cover the All tomorrow's biology, it's really fantastic.
This channel is amazing. Keep it up. Big fan
Thanks, will do!
I have a lot of fond memories of this book as a kid, and it's still on my book shelf to this day.
such underated content, it's so professional!
The lanker reminds me of Quetzalcoatlus, a giant pterosaur that was vaguely giraffe-shaped. Perhaps not so implausible after all?
i think the problem the people have is that it lost its wings
Nope, just nope. No way any of these would have existed. Just keeping in mind that the global cooling would still happen, and a lot of the bigger dinos would just die out at the first glacial maximum. Also birds would still be a thing, aswell as more mammals.
Me: Mum, I want some mammals
Mum: but we have mammals at home
Mammals at home:
People here complaining about the art and the biology
But I just wanna ride and pet somenof these things
I'm actually working on a spec evo project about dinos if they weren't extinct as well. There's going to be a scansoropterygid called the Hemoraptor that drinks the blood of larger dinosaurs, just like a vampire bat.
i like it
i will give you a sub, i would like if you could share something, sound wouldn’t be needed, but only if you want
I get convergent evolution, but there's no reason to just make something copy whats around today. I like the guys imagination in his work, but he's just to out there and I dont feel like there's any sentience behind his imagination.
This channel is one of the most underrated I ever seen
A lot of these concepts look to be recycled from Dixon’s “After Man”. Some very similar looking creature ideas… I guess that’s convergent evolution for you though.
Even though the idea and book sound quite interesting but it was very outdated in a lot of reason
List of inaccuracies in this book:
1.the wasp eater would most likely descents from bug eaters like mononykus who has a feather coat and large claws to break the hives of bees and wasps
2.azhdarchids can’t not become plant eater because their not specialized in fruits,nuts or leaves besides they would be outcompete by sauropods
3.if tree dinosaurs are going to evolve they must have the traits like microraptor
4.pterosaurs can’t go from 4 legs to 2
5.think mammals would still fill the nich of sand predators
6.snakes would easily outcompete those long body dinosaurs
7.think the descents of rapetosaurus,majungasaurus and masiakasurus would rule Madagascar alongside lots of land crocodile and descents of lemurs.
8.it can be true micropachycephalosaurus can evolve smaller but not smarter more accurate it would dig or build shelter for itself not for a calzone
9.chronosaurus would be a possibility descents but also shantungosaurus would be a likely descents for Asian hadrosaur
10. Hadrosaur would most likely evolve a thicker crust like the antlers of a deer and they would survive temperate to polar habitats
11.think the descents of borogovia would be the best predator in the temperate forests and polar lands
12.mammals would get larger just as big enough to hunt young dinosaurs example repenomamus
13.therizinosaurus would be a mostly descent for a temperate browser like the tromble
14.birds would still be visitor to the poles
15 most like descent of the taranter would be the tarchia
16.the new ice age dinosaurs would be descent from ceratopsian like packyrhinosaurs and hadrosaur like edmontosaurus
17.hadrosaur would still have long tails
18.think a dinosaur like the struthiomimus would be a better model for a flashing tail Dino
19.a raptor like the atriociraptor or Dakotaraptor would be a possible descent of the north claw and raptor claws are found only on their foot and are used for stabbing not desimboling
20.don’t think triceratops horns would fused together they would be divide and their qills would turn in hard spikes like rhino horn
21.thesosaurus would be more accurate then hypsilophodon due to it being extinct
22.troodon would be a better descent
23.woodpecker would this be alive
24.useless spinosaurs their no way dinosaurs can adapt to full aquatic habitats
25.armadillosuchus would still be alive and evolve into a large armor animal
26. While true many smaller sauropods would go extinct but some bigger sauropods would survive due to the tree’s of the Amazon and southern savanna
27.hummingbird and guiding lizards would survive and out complete them
28.saltosaurus would be a likely descent for a armor sauropod
29.dreadnoughts would be a likely descents for the lumber and should a inch similar to the elephants of the Congo
30.cutlasstooth shouldn’t event existed due to gignotosaurus,mapusaurus dying of before the Cretaceous extinction and carnotaurus and other abelisaurs except majungasaurus would die as tyrannosaurus toke the role of apex predator
31.T. rex wouldn’t lose his arms all together only fuse into one large claw and scavenging is still up for questioning until we find another large apex predator in hell creek,still think the v rex is the most likely T. rex ancestor
32.the dip would evolve from struthiomimus and evolve into a creature similar to the deinocehus
33.bat winged dinosaurs like yi qi have gone extinct
34.isisaurus would be a likely descents
35.pachycephalosaurus wouldn’t get smarter but it dome crust could evolve into a giant horn
36.either a type of pterosaurs or flamingo would do this inch of filler feeder
37.pterosaurs wouldn’t evolve into aquatic animals for their diving birds and marine reptiles roaming the ocean besides aquatic pterosaurs are outdated
38.the last iguanodon was found in Europe not Australia in short by the time Europe became a continent iguanodon was fully extinct
39.think for a decent for the dingum would be a thorny devil or some other species of lizard
40.think for descent for the crack beak and tubb would be leyllaosaurus a small orthinopod than has big eyes
41.think emu’s and moa’s would still evolve on New Zealand instead of kloons and wandles
42. Coconut crabs would still evolve instead of ammonites
43.small pterosaurs can fill niches of island scavenger’s
44.sea pterosaurs would continue to fill the role of dividing flyers
45.hesperoins would still fill the nich of aquatic birds
46.either a giant fish or a filler feeding mosasaurus would do the nich of whales
47. Ammoites would get large but they wouldn’t ride the current more they would share the giant squid as deep giant cephalopods
48. Elasmosaurus can catch pterosaurs so maybe evolve to fully hunt them
49.the small pliosaurs would get larger and become deep divers like beaked whales but they hopefully get big enough to prey deep sea cephalopods
Well that maybe all inaccuracies in this book but what other things are inaccurate and could happen in a world of new dinosaurs
good list, but there are also snake shaped animals that dont get outcompeted by snakes.
also its kinda also 65 000 000 years from the dinosaur perspective, so some things can change
Well...some of my old biology professors were of the opinion that they DIDN'T go extinct...at least not completely. Basically birds are the only lineage of dinosaurs that survived.
Its not an opinion tho, non-avian dinosaurs gone extinct, avian dinosaurs survived
Birds are not Dinosaurs
@@x.r.d7744 lol, thats so funny, great joke. If it's not a joke tho, i can teach you why they are and the many proofs that make it a fact.
Its also funny because i was talking to people without knowedge in this subject also
Dougal Dixon has said that he plans on officially republishing The New Dinosaurs with new artwork and updating the dinosaurs completely to fit with modern day paleontology.
"It's difficult to say a creature with human-like intelligence could ever evolve from a dinosaur"
*looks at crows and ravens*
*looks at parrots*
*looks specifically at the african gray parrot*
give em a few million years
There is something that makes primates special, our hands, so it's not possible for birds until they could grow developed fingers again
@@franchiszapata9037 Don't birds have the ability to use their claws to grab objects.
@@kade-qt1zu yeah, but hands are not used only to grab things, you know?
wait how do you have such a little amount of subscribers, you should have more because this content is relly good
I personaly dont like his art style or pretty much anything about his books, because they are just so crazy and inacurate, why would a pterosaur go to ground to turn into some giraffe hybrid, and why would the reptilian triceratops become a mammal?
Because Arambourgiania and emus are things? Because mammals, birds, and reptiles are basically a handful of mutations away from swapping classifications? Look at naked mole rats, pangolins, and platypus. Swap them together and you have a reptile with little in the way of mammalian characteristics.
In evolution you don't usually ask 'why', you ask 'how'
@@zangatz Very accurate. If it mutates and survives to pass on that mutation, then congrats! New species get!
It's amazingly straightforward. If it can, it might, and if it did, it is, regardless of sense or circumstance.
I mean, is the mutant short-limbed cat just going to roll over and die because it can't run as fast? No, it will try to adapt its lifestyle to suit. If it succeeds then you have a new breed occupying a new niche.
I feel a major reason why this isn't well understood is that too many teachers teach models and definitions as if they were realities rather than teaching them as the useful guidelines that they are.
@@flinfake I think too many of them are mammalian like, but it's simply impossible to predict evolution
@@acacia8261 The preponderance of fur does seem a bit unlikely.
8:13 the turtles in the background:
*fuud*
9:20 the vid got this part wrong. They're a descendant of the pliosaur or plesiosaurs.
“lol carno your arms are so small”
“at least I still have the couple of more years and you’ll literally have no arms”
Well, I would imagine since dinosaurs showed up about 230 million years ago and the KT extinction event only happened 66 million years ago, that dinosaurs probably wouldn't have evolved that much. I mean, we have crows and parrots? 230 million years of evolution got us crows and parrots? They had ~160 million years to evolve and the smartest organism for the time that we know of are Troodontids?
While cool, this kind of feels like “put a dinosaur spin on a modern animal” not “this is what dinosaurs evolved to this niche might look like.”
Recommended reading: West of Eden trilogy by Harry Harrison. Does the "what if dinosaurs didn't become extinct" scenario very well.
Great channel, keep up the good work!
It's mostly about intelligent lizards though, isn't it? Not dinosaurs?
It would be really neat to see what would happen if Dougal Dixon decided to go back to this book's idea and give it another go with modern science and the 40 extra years of improvement.
Anyone else bothered when he says that it’s unlikely sapience would evolve in dinosaurs? It literally already has evolved in dinosaurs, just look at ravens and crows. If anything, dinosaurs are probably the best candidates for a sapient dominant species.
For a good read, I suggest West of Eden, a 1984 science fiction novel by American writer Harry Harrison, who explored the idea of dinosaurs evolving to become sentient and filling the role of humans. This is actually a trilogy. I have read the trilogy at least 3 times.
They are too mamalian in form, not much dinosaur like
When I was a kid, I found this book at a goodwill and begged my mom to get it for me… and I still have it to this day😗
I watched Star Trek Voyager and dammit they did evolve into humanoid form.
Yes, but don't forget that in Star Trek there was like that ancient race of aliens millions of years ago who altered the DNA of millions of life forms across the universe to basically turn them into humanoids.
I recently purchased this book it’s full of amazing knowledge
If the ancestors of the t-rexs are stuff like albertosaurs them transforming into a crocodilian thing isn't really like realistic if anything the t-rex would've shrunk grow or maybe evolve into something Like a 3 fingered rex with bigger arms
The numskull reminds me of the one of the concept art of the original godzilla
While also a bit dated, the trilogy "West of Eden" by Harry Harrison is based on the premise that the meteor never hit, and dinosaurs evolved and developed a complex society, with humanity never developing beyond a hunter/gatherer stage. I highly recommend this for fans of alternate history stories!
Great series, although weird that the Yilane are sentient mosasaurs instead of dinosaurs.
@@Ozraptor4 It's been some time since I've read the books, and I don't specifically remember what species the Yilane descended from, I don't think it's hugely important to the storyline, I was more into the idea of how they developed their science and technology organically. Absolutely mind blowing!
@@isleofdog Yilane are descended from the mosasaur Tylosaurus. Yeah, regardless of evolutionary feasibility, Harrison's world-building is top notch.
I appreciate you covering this but a tyrannosaurs closest relatives are probably the ratites. A little irrelevant since all birds are dinosaurs. And pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs lol
No birds are dinosaurs
All living birds are equally as closely related to the T-Rex as each other. They share the same last common ancestor which had a set distance evolutionarily from the LCA of birds and the T-Rex.
Ratites, chickens, penguins and pigeons are all about equally as closely related to the T-Rex as any of the other groups are.
@@x.r.d7744 that’s what I said
@@Lankpants yea, but my point was ratites are the most basal group to what one would call a non avian dinosaur.
6:05 The "que" in macaque isn't silent. It sounds like "macack".
I feel that the Dinosaurs could have evolved to human intellect but not in 66 million years. mammals had a head start as they already processed the trait of memory and problem solving. That just needed to develop. Even if Dinosaurs still roamed, we would probably still be flourishing, we would be much smaller and less in umbers, plus our technology may not be as far along (And we would probably see a drastic change in how houses are built, more for defense than just shelter) but we would probably still exist. Most outdoor sports would also not exist.
a lot of science we have would not exist either, given that the dangers of being eaten on a casual stroll would keep most of us indoors and underground, but I still think humans would have evolved (Once again we would be smaller, not much larger than a chimp)
That said, give dinosaurs another 60 million years after today to continue evolving and they too would probably reach the point of intellect. They would need it to continue progressing beyond their limitations, or they would still die off. Dogs are not nearly as smart as humans (Well tik tok is the exception) but they can still use problem solving. By time dinos made it to now, they could probably have those skills adapted. We however would still be ahead as we can plan, strategize. our highly developed brain puts us ahead. Dinosaurs, as large and numerous as they are, still lose to us. The forward thinking would have to evolve, they would need to get human like intellect quickly. chop that in half they would need it within 30 million. That would be nature evolving intelligence. in 10 million the would understand danger and then communication (Albeit basic) in 15-20 million. 30 million would be when their intelligence really starts to show. We are no longer dominant as nature took over and gave the dinosaurs our only advantage. We still have the upper hand, but it is not such a great advantage at this point.
Basically take the raptors form Jurassic park, and up their intelligence.
60% of scientists are not really smart to realize not every animal in the world have to shape like us to be smart as hell. not only that but also not realizing not every animal have to be the same shape as modern animals. there's air changes, planet life and all that other stuff that could've changed and we could have got another shape all together. not only that but we could've got a different IQ if that was the case. and we could've ether be dumb or smarter. evolution can go in many ways. hell did they forget that once upon a time life look very alien and so did the creatures there were around before the dinos? why not be a bit creative that at lest a few animals look alien. I mean there at lest 30% of bugs still look alien to this day. I some of those books like the nose animals was just for fun. but come on.
I thought this channel had 100k subs the videos are so good