Intelligent Alien Dinosaurs?

58 Replies to “Intelligent Alien Dinosaurs?”

1. Uh-uh. Crocodilotarses and marsupials, neanderthals and opabinia tell us. We are exquisite products of chance and luck. On other planets, there won’t be beings we could classify as “dinosaurs” “human beings” or “Aardvarks”.

   1. depends if evolution has a baseline. chasing prey or munching gras tends to lead to similarities beyond luck. the way food is devowered, mobility etc will all add to forced baseline evolution.
      So maybe expect a tusk using earthdigger with a flattend nose to smell the hidden food at least on multiple planets.
      Or maybe expect sensitivity to electrical signals to be better developed than smell on a waterplanet.

      1. I agree with Zoutsteen.

         For example I don’t see animals evolving helicopter rotors to obtain flight. Even if they did I can not see those being more popular than flapping wings.

         If somethings possible then chances there is already some life form on earth that already does it.

         I do think that if you wanted to know what an alien might be like then considering the body shapes of dinosaurs and kangaroos etc would be a good place to start.

2. Evolutionary biologists are fond of saying that evolution does not follow a linear path toward complexity and intelligence, but when we look at evolution on earth, at least when viewed from the perspective of the most advanced creatures on earth at the time, it seems too; when went from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multicelled organisms to animals to vertebrates to ever smarter vertebrates to primates to archaic humans all the way up to humans. Now, of course, not every creature becomes more intelligent, evolution just wouldn’t work if every creature occupied that niche, but throughout earth’s history I think it’s fair to say that the most complex and intelligent creatures have continued to be surpassed by ever more complex and intelligent creatures and that the pace of this change has been increasing exponentially.

   By the way, I don’t understand what this article has to do with dinsoaurs.

   1. “but throughout earth’s history I think it’s fair to say that the most complex and intelligent creatures have continued to be surpassed by ever more complex and intelligent creatures and that the pace of this change has been increasing exponentially.”

      I think environmental conditions shape all of this. I think that when conditions are ‘tough’, we see less survivors thus less innovation on exhibit; perhaps tough conditions were conducive to intelligence developing though life cannot make predictions regarding future conditions anymore than any of us can. Life apppears to be not a predictor of what is to come but more of an expression of what has happened. Perhaps intelligence marks a change because it does appear to help life prepare for future’s unknown conditions.

      On the other hand, I think when conditions ‘relax’ or become ‘easy’ or are easy to begin with, we get more survivors thus much more innovation on exhibit; we get these ‘blooms’ of life on Earth such as those shown in the fossil record.

   2. That would be the more interesting exploration, how inevitable, in an environment with the variations of Earth , is the development of vertebra? Four limbs? Five digits per limb? Were these just the result of random paths taken a long time ago or are they the ordered domains of a chaotic system. If they could be shown t0 be the most probable outcome of RNA/DNA based evolution then we could expect the same on other goldilocks worlds.

   3. I think it’s fair to say that the most complex and intelligent creatures have continued to be surpassed by ever more complex and intelligent creatures and that the pace of this change has been increasing exponentially.

      That is not fair at all.

      – I don’t know how and why you define complexity, but biologists looks at either food webs, species diversity or trait diversity of species.

      Already the Cambrian era surpassed ours in trait diversity, in fact we lost a lot of interesting body plans. It’s food webs were much simpler, but its species diversity was not terribly smaller and you certainly can’t show exponential increase in any of this.

      – Intelligence, how is that defined and compared? There is but a gradual difference between animals including us. Some have noted an increase over time, but then again you started out without brains.

      This, the initial condition, is how biologists have explained this generally. I think it was Gould that proposed it: starting with simple cells, where else could a random process diffuse to but spread over simple cells and multicellulars both?

      Now comes the biological coup de grace. All the complex multicellulars are a) relatively rare and unsuccessful – most biomass is still unicellular – but more importantly b) contingent a long series of evolutionary “accidents”.

      If not cyanobacteria had started to make oxygen garbage, there could be no mitochondrion endosymbiosis that made the sufficiently energy efficient but oxygen dependent eukaryotic cell. It happened only once over ~ 2 Ga, so is supposedly exceedingly rare. (Compare with how life appeared immediately as soon as conditions allowed.)

      [Or there is a lock in effect, since it has already happened the new attempts tend to loose the evolution competition for some reason or other.]

      They have the same argument on brains (intelligence), but I find it less appealing. Neural systems are not a very complex achievement, and have different (but related) embodiments in vertebrates, cephalopods and arthropods.

      However, when they reuse it a third time to note that language capable brains only emerged once, like how the Elephantidae trunk only appeared once, they have another good point IMHO.

      We won’t see humans elsewhere. Worse, we won’t see elephants either. Or even kittehs (*snif*). But we will see biospheres containing other wondrous forms, not often but often enough.

      1. By complexity I was referring to the complexity of the most intelligent creature living at any one time, not the complexity, or perhaps better put, the diversity of species throughout time. From this point of view complexity has most certainly increased. Also I am not disputing that simpler life dominates by sheer numbers, but I think you are being disingenuous in saying that all complex multicellulars are unsuccessful, surely you do not think that we are unsuccessful from a number of perspectives: we have increased our numbers from perhaps as few as a 1000 breeding pairs to around 7 billion in 100,000 years. We have increased our average lifespan from around 20 to nearly 80 in the western world. And we are perhaps on the verge of spreading our species to other worlds.
         I would also dispute that language capable brains have only developed once as well. It is very likely that Neanderthals had language and perhaps a few other species such as the Denisovans and Homo Heidelbergensis possessed a primitive form of language. Now I realize that all these species are very closely related to us, but they did probably develop language independently.
         You also state that multicellular life was contingent on a long series of evolutionary accidents, which is a logical fallacy. By the same logic it is almost impossible to believe that we are the exact distance from sun that we find ourselves, why not one centimeter more or 2000 kilometers less? and it is also almost inconceivable that you are alive today, everyone of your ancestors survived long enough to reproduce, perhaps a trillion in a row, what an improbable accident! Of course things could have been different all along the way, but that would not have perhaps changed the overall picture.
         Now I do not know how common life is or whether it necessarily leads to intelligence very often, but I do not think we are merely an improbable accident, looking at the history of evolution on our planet it certainly seems to me that given the right conditions evolution leads to more intelligent and complex creatures.

      2. thanks for your thoughts. i’ve found the whole thread interesting.

      3. nice story Larsson,

         2 things i want to add:
         – Oxygen was a poisenous! byproduct
         – Endosymbiosis is a given. Symbiosis on cellular level is normal enough that at one point any accidental fusion could turn into a permanent endosymbiosis.

         And 1 speculation: If there is an Endosymbiosis that is more favorable than we current have, it might have to start from the bottom. As such, there might have been different Endosymbiosii which couldn’t compete within rising oxygen levels.

      4. quoting:
         —
         We won’t see humans elsewhere. Worse, we won’t see elephants either. Or even kittehs (*sob*).
         — end quote

         I have come to realise TL has a soft side. It turns out our resident scientist has been misunderstood by many here (myself included at times)…

         Wezley

         ps. I feel you on the kittehs thing brother…

3. Evolutionary biologists are fond of saying that evolution does not follow a linear path toward complexity and intelligence, but when we look at evolution on earth, at least when viewed from the perspective of the most advanced creatures on earth at the time, it seems too; when went from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multicelled organisms to animals to vertebrates to ever smarter vertebrates to primates to archaic humans all the way up to humans. Now, of course, not every creature becomes more intelligent, evolution just wouldn’t work if every creature occupied that niche, but throughout earth’s history I think it’s fair to say that the most complex and intelligent creatures have continued to be surpassed by ever more complex and intelligent creatures and that the pace of this change has been increasing exponentially.

   By the way, I don’t understand what this article has to do with dinsoaurs.

4. For all we know dinosaurs might return. In fact they never left, they just down sized into birds. If there is some mass extinction of mammals birds might evolve in an upsized direction, so 50 million years from now is “the age of dinosaurs; the sequel.”

   LC

   1. Yasss…. live and learn! Life is like spinning an evolutionary wheel – and where it stops, nobody knows. We just happen to have been very very lucky! i.e. the ‘right time’ the ‘right space’…

      SciFi short story subject: 550 million years ago an intelligent species of dinosaur evolved. Relying on ‘hive consciousness’ these creatures evolve into an extremely advanced society. Attempts are made to increase the brain capacity of other species of dinosaur, none of which works. Competition for resources becomes crucial as climatic flux becomes relentless and many species, unable to adapt, go extinct.

      The ‘eintelligent’ dinosaurs come to the realization that Earth is not big enough to sustain the radially exploding population of species. They decide to leave. They build a HUGE spaceship/Ark and set out for a nearby star they’d received radio transmissions from. They arrive, only to find that this star has become unstable and has wiped out life there. Half the ‘hive’ decides to continue exploring.. the other half choses to return to Earth… knock – knock~

      1. A few facts to quibble with here. 550 million years ago was about the start of the Cambrian period. This was the time period which brought about the trilobite. It was the start of complex life forms, and where life began to colonize the land. Dinosaurs emerged in the Triassic after the Permian extinction about 220 mya.

         I do suspect that dinosaurs had behaviors somewhat similar to birds, or at least this is maybe the case with the dienychus (sp?) line of raptors. The brain of a T-rex was about the size of a baseball, and this brain managed an animal that weighed several tons. Even the Troodons or raptors had golfball to baseball sized brains. This is better, but not close to hominids. The brontosaur types must have been the dumbest of them all, with a wallnut sized brain to control a 10+ ton animal.

         Some birds are a bit clever. Birds such as crows and parrots can count, add and subtract and remember a set of commands. They are maybe at the borderline of being semi-intelligent. I doubt dinosaurs ever evolved brain power much beyond maybe this level. However, if mammals lose their dominance here and birds take the dominant role and evolve into large animals, maybe there will in 1 or 2 hundred million years come some intelligent form of what we might call a dinosaur.

         LC

      2. Corvids of various types (crows, ravens, etc) have been observed making, using and keeping tools, and in some cases showing their offspring how to make those same tools. e.g., http://www.google.com/search?q=crow+tool or http://www.google.com/search?q=crow+sledding.

         The brain is not well enough understood to say for sure that size is all that matters.

      3. ‘What if’ scenarios are part and parcel to SciFi, but so is accuracy! Thanks! You are right about the dating of course but since all was done for fun and grins, I hope no harm done… I will pay attention in future…. ~@; )

5. Evolution at its core is random. The thing about life on other planets is the most we might expect is they have the same generic make up with DNA, polypeptides and lipids and metabolize sugars or carbohydrates. Beyond that things could be wildly different. The organization of cells, where I am presuming they are so organized (and there are some reasons for this), could be completely different. They could use polypeptides that are completely different from those on Earth, and have radically different biochemical pathways. As one goes up the chain of complexity the diversity of forms only becomes vaster. If there are complex life forms they are likely to be almost impossible to imagine. It does make sense that evolution might select for mobility, so there might be life forms similar to animals in some generic way. Yet they might have body plans completely different from animals, where maybe they roll, or maybe they produce hydrogen that inflates a bladder so they float like balloons, or maybe … .

   LC

   1. Looking at life is like looking back in time. Life is an expression of what previous conditions were like. Thus ET life (should be) will be in whatever body form that survived whatever conditions on whatever planet at whatever time. If conditions warrant there could certainly be life forms that survive to make use of the less than most efficient biochemical pathways; this is assuming, of course without proof, that life has multiple origins derived from multiple conditions at its onset. Perhaps that is a rather long bow to draw.

      1. The other way around is much more difficult to envision. The universe is large, transpermia has lousy survival rates if it works at all beyond perhaps the local system.

      2. “The universe is large, transpermia has lousy survival rates if it works at all beyond perhaps the local system.”

         Yes, it would appear so, from where we sit relatively distant to other stars at present. Perhaps transpermia could work over billions of years, stirred amongst some of the stars in our galaxy in the form of large ice chunks trailing their detritus. It’s possible there could be millions of lost planets in interstellar space; perhaps a large oceanic planet teaming with life that found itself ejected from it’s system due to interaction with a second body or star. Frozen, then broken up by tidal forces or collisions that caused ejective spray of large pieces of microbe containing ice into interstellar space.
         Perhaps life exists only in our galaxy and no where else, perhaps perhaps, perhaps..

6. I suspect you’d still have an evolutionary path to mammals occur on some continents, though it would have been slower, and resulting in different mammals (and not necessarily including any kind of primate) from those we know…

   1. Right. The original mammal clade is older than dinosaurs. Much older, the synapsid split occured ~ 300 Ma bp.

      – Dinosaurs appeared ~ 230 Ma bp, but got dominant ~ 200 Ma bp.

      – Mammals appeared ~ 210 Ma bp. We were the contenders, presumably.

7. Our Earth dinosaurs did not have the advantage of mammalian brains, which led to cooperative hunting and tool use for us. They did, however, have the advantage of a more efficient respiratory system (currently exhibited by modern birds)–which probably gave them the initial and stronger advantage in a lower oxygen Triassic world and led to dinosaur dominance for 150 my or so.

   On a hypothetical alien world, the mammalian brain and the dual air sac respiratory system of the dinosaurs may have evolved in the same evolutionary line. If that happened, intelligent, tool using dinosaurs could have resulted. These creatures would be quite something.

   But without the evolution of the mammalian brain it is doubtful that dinosaurs would become intelligent tool users. They had 150 my to develop intelligence prior to the Chicxulub impact, but there is no evidence that increased brain size gave them any advantage. Perhaps another 150 my would have made a difference, but dinosaurs seemed to be competing, evolutionarily speaking, using size rather than intelligence and social cooperation.

   1. Though as I remember it the evidence of air sacks in the bones et cetera is suggestive but not conclusive. I.e. showing the evolution of the system but not the timing.

      Someone (Switek? Lane?) mentioned recently that dinosaurs won the evolutionary crap shot in that mammals can never be as large on land but would top (have topped re mass, I think) at about half the size.

      This is because dinosaurs choose the bird stomach/reptile dentistry and didn’t slow feeding with chewing. The long necked dinosaur in the image illustrates that, a small head so could have a long neck, the food being processed in the neck going down but also in the large stomach. Similarly T. rex would have chomped down his meat.

      Half the time to feed the same mass = twice the feeding rate = twice the maximum body size.

      Mammals are the “stupid” ones here. Except for cetaceans, as the large filter eaters figured out how to “dinosaurize” their dinner.

   2. Though as I remember it the evidence of air sacks in the bones et cetera is suggestive but not conclusive. I.e. showing the evolution of the system but not the timing.

      Someone (Switek? Lane?) mentioned recently that dinosaurs won the evolutionary crap shot in that mammals can never be as large on land but would top (have topped re mass, I think) at about half the size.

      This is because dinosaurs choose the bird stomach/reptile dentistry and didn’t slow feeding with chewing. The long necked dinosaur in the image illustrates that, a small head so could have a long neck, the food being processed in the neck going down but also in the large stomach. Similarly T. rex would have chomped down his meat.

      Half the time to feed the same mass = twice the feeding rate = twice the maximum body size.

      Mammals are the “stupid” ones here. Except for cetaceans, as the large filter eaters figured out how to “dinosaurize” their dinner.

   3. Though as I remember it the evidence of air sacks in the bones et cetera is suggestive but not conclusive. I.e. showing the evolution of the system but not the timing.

      Someone (Switek? Lane?) mentioned recently that dinosaurs won the evolutionary crap shot in that mammals can never be as large on land but would top (have topped re mass, I think) at about half the size.

      This is because dinosaurs choose the bird stomach/reptile dentistry and didn’t slow feeding with chewing. The long necked dinosaur in the image illustrates that, a small head so could have a long neck, the food being processed in the neck going down but also in the large stomach. Similarly T. rex would have chomped down his meat.

      Half the time to feed the same mass = twice the feeding rate = twice the maximum body size.

      Mammals are the “stupid” ones here. Except for cetaceans, as the large filter eaters figured out how to “dinosaurize” their dinner.

   4. Though as I remember it the evidence of air sacks in the bones et cetera is suggestive but not conclusive. I.e. showing the evolution of the system but not the timing.

      Someone (Switek? Lane?) mentioned recently that dinosaurs won the evolutionary crap shot in that mammals can never be as large on land but would top (have topped re mass, I think) at about half the size.

      This is because dinosaurs choose the bird stomach/reptile dentistry and didn’t slow feeding with chewing. The long necked dinosaur in the image illustrates that, a small head so could have a long neck, the food being processed in the neck going down but also in the large stomach. Similarly T. rex would have chomped down his meat.

      Half the time to feed the same mass = twice the feeding rate = twice the maximum body size.

      Mammals are the “stupid” ones here. Except for cetaceans, as the large filter eaters figured out how to “dinosaurize” their dinner.

8. Hmmm… The Gorns?

9. Any English person (probably man actually in those days!) born in WWII, will remember a boys’ comic called Eagle. On the front and inside page ran a series strip cartoon in colour featuring Dane Dare (Pilot of the Future). Landing on Venus he found an high-tech civilisation of advanced intelligent green humanoids called Treens led by a large headed dwarf called the Mekon. I cannot recall if it was ever suggested that they were evolved dinosaurs, probably not.
   Try Googling Dan Dare for details.
   I have an idea that possibly a Sunday colour supplement in the 1960s ran an illustrated science fact article speculating how dinosaurs could progressively evolve to an intelligent anthropoid species.
   Interesting the projected result strongly resembled a Treen! Nothing new under the stars eh?

10. If the eminent Switek has brain ache from Breslow, the astrobiological part is making my brain hurt as well:

    – Molecules has at least 2 different kinds of rotational symmetry breakings, from chiral centers (R/L) over interaction with EM (d/l, DL).

    Breslow is, as most people, referring to D/L. Which suggests the most common explanation, how small differences in enantiomer (the molecule of some chirality) concentrations can be selected for.

    The suggestion that asteroids seeded Earth with an initial excess is an old and arguable hypothesis. It isn’t really needed, but the small AA L excess in our planetary system is suggestive. The problem is how to test it.

    – It is the groups that are D/L chiral. For example, famously the amino acid glycine is achiral.

    Group chirality is likely because a) enzymes most often have a D/L preference b) so then metabolism becomes simpler.

    – And it is simply not true that only a few bacteria has molecules of different chirality. We _all_ have them! Since chirality confers chemical different activities, evolution has made cells both handle and take advantage of them.

    The area of chiral active enzymes AFAIK exploded in the 00’s, since it has medical effects. Examples of compounds of different chirality comes from cell machinery and hormones, mostly in the brain I think.

    A recent example with deep evolutionary relevance comes from the garbage breakdown vacuoles called lysosomes that eukaryotes form and mature in stages. Later stages are internally clad with molecules of the reverse chirality to prevent them from the breakdown process.

    Similar to how the bacteria tries to keep their cell walls/membranes from being recognized/easily broken down.

    At every moment likely a few percent of our bodies consists of these different chirality compounds; made, used and broken down on own purpose or by bacterial production et cetera.

    – And what Switek said on the idea of predestined biology. There is no evolution mechanism for it!

11. What is your opinion on some of the archaeological finds that proves intelligent life forms on earth as far back as 2,8 Billion years? In the bigger picture of earth, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods were mere moments in time. Humanoids as far as I can gather showed no development for more than 55M years. Alien interference on this planet is a given without a doubt but why fearsome lizards?

    1. My opinion? “-Prrrttttbbbhhh!”

       Which I say to all claims without presented evidence, trying to make the level of response fit the childishness of such proposals.

       1. Torbjorn is one of the worst posters here. He either writes 56,789 word responses trying to show everyone how intelligent he is, or highly condescending remarks such as this one. He should be happy people still respond to him at this point.

       2. TL is right here. Ancient astronaut theories about our evolution or development of culture are pure buncomb ideas.

          LC

       3. Actually, the people promoting the theories do far more research into the matter than the people dismissing them. There is a significant amount of compelling evidence that human history is much more complex than originally assumed.

       4. It is rather obvious and boring that human history is more complex than we know, because many traces of what happened in previous times have been destroyed by nature and by humans, and historians know and regret this. So, your statement is a little bit over the top, I think.

       5. I would go and ask an archeologist about ancient astronaut ideas. I think you will not find your ideas supported very well.

          LC

       6. Are you referring to the same archeologists that continue to turn a blind eye to things like water damage on the Sphinx, only possible far older than 3,000 BC when they say it was built? Or their continued belief that the Great Pyramids were the burial plots for pharaohs, despite never finding a single one inside, or (if you’d like to argue tomb robbers), not a single hieroglyphic inside any of them explaining their purpose, despite the commonality of hieroglyphics throughout Egypt?

          Archaeologists fall victim to the same peer pressure that befalls other scientific disciplines: They’ll outright ignore the scientific method when its results do not adhere to their previous assumptions.

       7. I can’t comment a whole lot about Egyptology. I can say that in general the idea of ancient astronauts fits within the same sort of stuff as Velikovsky, the planet Nibiru, moon hoax conspiracies, Loch Ness monsters, creation science and the rest. Archeology is not very close to my scientfic area of study, but I have a loose sense of what people in the field are doing and saying. I think what you are arguing is hokum and bull twaddle.

          LC

       8. Sorry, Mr. Crowell, but I have to call you out on a very obvious straw man fallacy. Nobody is talking about Nibiru or the Loch Ness Monster, but you’ve made that comparison to make the initial argument seem ridiculous. We can agree to disagree, but I would encourage you to investigate some areas that mainstream archaeology cannot explain. Thanks.

       9. It’s amusing to have pointed, intelligent remarks referred to as “condescending.” I appreciate the depth of Torbjörn’s knowledge and his willingness to take time to explain things that may not be apparent to many readers, including myself.

          The original article is a a piece of fluff and seems to have little scientific basis or use. You could substitute almost any past dominant species in place of “Dinosaurs” and the article would read the same. And the conclusion is the same in almost any scenario: in the staggeringly unlikely event we will ever meet a more intelligent alien species (or any intelligent alien species), evolutionary logic makes it unlikely they will give a fig about us!

          I apologize for going on, but a sci-fi comic I read as a young teenager came to mind: the earth was being invaded by a powerful alien green-frog-like species and the earth was putting up a fight–and losing badly. At the end, the aliens pulled out and the earthlings were all happy and cheering, but the final frames showed the aliens saying something like: we could have beat them easily, but that would have destroyed the ‘only other intelligent beings in the galaxy!’ I remember that being a “whoa” moment for my young mind.

          Aside: coincidentally, it agrees with a conservative Drake calculation I heard recently: two advanced civilizations in a galaxy of our size.

          The article in question is of the same level as the 50’s sci-fi comic book in producing a reaction: “Whoa, smart dinosaurs! Bummer!”

          🙂

       10. How in the world can you consider it a “piece of fluff?” The author didn’t say there ARE “dinosaur aliens” or whatever out there; he merely pointed out that, due to the flexibility of evolution, if life evolved elsewhere with an opposite ammino acid preference, it could be very different than what it is on Earth.

           Until other life is found out there, I think brushing off a premise like this is rather ignorant.

       11. I apologize for using the term “piece of fluff”; it was uncalled for. I think I was just getting weary of the dinosaur analogies in discussions of evolution. To me, it’s like watching yet another TV show on the Titanic. 🙂

       12. I beg your pardon! Could it be the case, that you don’t know anything about the motivation of Torbjörn Larsson?

12. In a Universe of infinite possibilities, it’s equally possible that dinosaurs evolved to the point where they saw the asteroid coming and left the Earth by their own means.

13. Harry Harrison’s “West of Eden” is a what-if novel about a world where the Chicxulub Impactor never happened.

14. One could conceive of a numerous what-if scenarios… However the nuanced and unpredictable interplay of timing, geology, and cosmological events… just name a few… place such thought squarely in the realm of science fiction.

15. Hey. I saw this before. Only instead of an article, it was THE WORST EPISODE of ST:Voyager.

    1. That’s a bold statement, considering how many there are to choose from.

    2. I thought it was great! Especially how the earth-alien dinosaurs ended up 70,000 ly from earth… But then again I ascribe to the philosophy that bad sci-fi is better than no sci-fi 😉

16. It’s nice to know that everyone is so willing to plaster pictures of dinosaurs in their articles about how this story is not really about dinosaurs. Even PZ pimped the story with a dino-graphic on his blog.

    Dinos = web hits, so no one should be indignant that the original story had a silly reference to dinos when everyone else is following suit for the same reason.

17. This reason and very much others: only think, here on Earth, between the differences, essentially technical, but not only, which exist between… Say, 19th Century and 20th Century… And, at a certain point, this becomes exponential… So, we can easily think that seeking to meet an other civilisation is a way to open a sort of Pandore Box, in which we can be the Poor… or the meat!

18. I’m starting to imagine how a donkey would play his version of Xbox? 😀

19. Really love the idea. Never though about it.
    My question is one and only – how many species are up (or down there in the Universe), really? I am very curios and wishing to see one of these species, even dinosaurs, even if they eat me. I love the idea of meeting alien species to see how they look, how their cities are made, or made of.

    What if inteligent dinosaurs (or some of them) got out from the planet before the big event. What if they are watching us? How does it sound?

20. Dinosaurs actually are the dominant form of vertebrate life – right here on Earth. There are about 9,000 species of birds in the present day, as compared to about 5400 types of mammals.

21. Good grief. It must have bee a slow at the office. Astronomers detect the hint of a possibility of nitrogen/oxygen in a thick atmosphere surrounding a ‘super-Earth’ and we’ve suddenly got Jurassic Park in Outer Space! This isn’t a story from the Sun in Britain is it? I’m all for speculative thinking but why bloody dinosaurs? It’s the same damned story when UT discuses the origin of life on Earth. The usual suspects invoke comets and meteorites and leave it at that never deigning to say where the life on the comets bodies came from originally. Oh, are those fairies at the bottom of my garden I spy? No, just my imagination set afire by imported lager. Phooey!

22. This is a crazy idea. To think that evolution is on such a rigid track that exactly the same species could exist on two planets many light years apart and that removing one catastrophic event would give rise to intelligence! Wouldn’t this mean that the evolutionary track that future species will take will be predictable? Does this guy assume that the alien/intelligent dinosaurs developed from the same DNA as Earth-bound dinosaurs? What about the many other mass extinctions that happened before the dinos were wiped out? Didn’t they change the course of evolution too? Are we assuming that those previous catastrophic events occurred, but the dinosaur extinction did not? And where does this intelligence originate from? The dinos were on the planet for 165,000,000 years (approx) and did not develop into an intelligent species by human standards. How much time would it take? Birds evolved from dinos, but did not develop intelligence until well after the rest of the dinos were gone and even then it was not up to human standards. It is possible that the post-catastrophe world that we live in resulted in the rise of intelligent species because of the unique evolutionary pressures that arose. Maybe intelligence couldn’t have arisen otherwise. We developed our level of intelligence in only a few million years. Intelligence isn’t necessarily an advantage in terms of evolution (think of the tremendously successful beetles, not the brightest bunch).

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