Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

…Basically a rodent. Yeah, I mean there were probably primates around in the Cretaceous. Some of the molecular clock stuff suggests that primates were around alongside the dinosaurs, but we’ve never found any osteological evidence of that. But yeah, there’s been a back and forth about whether dinosaurs were already on their way out or were they a bit limited by the very end of the Cretaceous. I think the more recent analyses have shown that’s probably not the case, because in other words, they were basically doing fine right up to the extinction event. And so yeah, if the asteroid hadn’t hit, there’s no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline. Something else may have hit. There may have been, you know, some other environmental disaster or something may have happened, or maybe they’re more vulnerable to stuff than we know of, but there’s no… I don’t think there’s any really good reason to think they wouldn’t have carried on relatively well. I mean, even post-dinosaur extinction, you had a window where the mammals and the birds were pretty competing. There was a lot of big birds getting going and various big carnivorous terrestrial, kind of, hyper-predatory ostrich-like things, like the phorusrhacids. So there’s no guarantee that mammals would have even taken over post the dinosaur extinction, since initially they were in a fair bit of competition. So this is just going to… Based on current scientific understanding, human evolution would be highly improbable if dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct 66 million years ago because dinosaurs dominated ecological niches.…

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