Dinosaur Apocolypse!

This article is one of many shorter pieces, pondering what would happen in hypothetical situations. These are inspired by an article called “Everybody Jump” by Randall Munroe.

What would have happened if the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hadn’t hit Earth? 

Millions of years ago, an asteroid hit Earth. This was the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

When the asteroid crashed, some animals survived by digging holes. The animals that survived became the animals we see today. If the dinosaurs survived, they would roam the Earth destroying homes and buildings. We would probably have to make fences or walls around homes and the smaller dinosaurs would become livestock or pets, like a dog or horse, or even an annoyance. 

 Larger dinosaurs would be too large to roam our communities, so we may have built walls to protect us. It would be harder to travel from place to place, and they would have affected many things that we do. When people started migrating and moved around the Earth, the dinosaurs would have killed some of them, and the population would be a lot lower. Like sharks, they probably would not hunt us, but our livestock and animals. This means that the amount of people and animals would be much much lower. 

Not only dinosaurs died when the asteroid hit, other large animals died out. If the asteroid never hit, those animals would have lived and evolved. It’s hard to figure out what other animals died, because it was so long ago. However these animals could have evolved into many things that could live in oceans, lakes, or become more dangerous than a dinosaur. If these other animals lived in fresh or salt water, they could be at the top of the food chain and make it too dangerous to go swimming. These animals may also have turned into  smaller animals like  dogs, cats, fish, or even another type of livestock that would become just as important as cows. 

All of these ideas involve humans, but if the asteroid had never hit, we probably wouldn’t even be here. Mammals only evolved and survived because the dinosaurs died out. Dinosaurs were the main predators and killed many other animals, so if they had stayed alive, mammals wouldn’t have been able to evolve and thrive. If that had happened, humans wouldn’t exist today.