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A Speculative Dinosaur Project; What if dinos never died out?
Topic Started: Nov 8 2009, 11:28 AM (3,385 Views)
T.rex09
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What if all non-avian dinosaurs didn't die out? After Dougal Dixon's famous book The New Dinosaurs: An Alternate Evolution many different people have asked that question. I will try to answer it.

Anybody who wants to is welcome to join. I'm a pretty crappy artist so I will probably need the assistance of 1 or 2 artists.
Timelines will be available if you guys request.
"Church if I die you can have my orange juice."-Red vs Blue
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T.rex09
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"Anyway, is Trex09 keeping anklyosaurs?"

yep.
"Church if I die you can have my orange juice."-Red vs Blue
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Holben
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Alright. Well, i suppose without much predation, they'd be breathing space for them to genetically drift.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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Tamara LH
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I agree with JohnFaa that almost all dinosaur books and web pages are terribly outdated. I used to frequent dinosauria.com but that hasn't been updated in years. if anyone knows some decent sites (other than Tet zoo, which I love) i would like to know.

Also we now know that pterosaurs were a lot more diverse than in the past and I am glad that the new Speculative Dinosaur project is going to include them. On the bad side I don't understand why they are dismissing all the hypsilophodont-like ornithopods. While true "hypsies" died out in the early creataceous dinosaurs of this ecological type persisted to the end of the Creataceous and I can easily see some small hadrosaur or similar group could take the niche. Spec is even replacing the Singers (a group of small hadrosaurs) with crocs! I just don't see it. Herbivourous crocs could not compete with herbivorous mammals so I don't see them outcompeting both mammals and surviving dinosaurs, especially in cold areas like the America prairies inhabited by Singers. Oh Well.

On a more productive note instead of sauropods how about a new clade of sauropod mimics? They could be decended from Therazinosaurs or even hadrosaurs. Spec had something similar with their pseudosauropods. I see this as more likely than survival of true sauropods which were reduced to a single family (Titanosauridae = Saltasauridae) by the end of the Creataceous.
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Carlos
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On the ornithopod subject, please note small ornithopods weren't doing very well, at least in Laurasia; here, large multies, ceratopsians and various theropods such as ornithomimids were evolving to replace them. We eventually do have ornithopods on Spec, such as duckgongs, hadrosaurs, malagasy ornithopods and vanguards, though the "fluffypods" as we call them might end up as marginocephalians. However, the decision to make singers crocodillians isn't very far fetched, because there were already cursorial omnivorous notosuchians in the late Cretaceous of South America, though we could make them ornithopods again just for kicks; its certain however that viriosaurs and hypsies will be noasaurids (thanks to our friend Limusaurus) and that dendrosaurs will be re-used as "treeguanas".

Sauropodish therizinosaurs (in the sense of using their front limbs to walk, knuckle style) have already been thought of, but true sauropods haven't been rejected. Why? Because titanosaurs in the late Cretaceous were appearently mostly highland dweeling animals; this means that little material was preserved thanks to their habitat which allowed little fossilazation. In fact, they were pretty much cosmopolitian as the fossil record shows, and even if now extremely common they were still there
Lemuria:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/

Terra Alternativa:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/

My Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/Carliro

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Holben
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Well, since most were in patagonia, that may have been important. It was a highland, wasn't it? And there may have been a delta, if in remember correctly.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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Carlos
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IIRC the late Cretaceous fossil sites in Patagonia were indeed once highlands; I don't know if the delta connected to the sea or if it ended in the highlands (as the modern Okavango ends in a desert), but whatever
Lemuria:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5724950/

Terra Alternativa:
http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/forum/460637/

My Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/Carliro

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Holben
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Yeah, whatever. These were 12m sauropods, or sumthing, so they could live on small landmasses... well, quite small ones.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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