Alien Dinosaurs

okay, just wondering about this:-

the dinosaurs are the most sucessful species that as ever lived on the earth, when i say 'SUCESSFUL' i mean ^longest living^ - we humans would be just a dot on a piece of paper compared to the timeframe the dinosaurs ruled the earth!

now every documentry i watch on how alien life might look (non intelligent), theres always bird like creatures which look like ostridges!

ive never watched a program YET which says there could now be dino like creatures (maybe even bigger) walking on another planet.

that would fascinate me more to be honest, whats everyone elses views on this?

[edit on 12-9-2006 by st3ve_o]

Probably because they're going with the "dinos became birds" idea....
There certainly seems to be a lot of evidence to support the above...so those speculating on alien wildlife are likely simply taking the dinos a step further....

The problem I have with the evolution of dino-like creatures on other planets is this:


It took us what, lets round up, like, 1 million years? The Dinosaurs where around for hundreds of millions.... what the hell was wrong with them?

Too big.

Regardless of what theory you go with, it's obvious some kind of ELE (Extinction Level Event) took place (most go with the killer asteroid theory, coupled with environmental change)....and this event killed off everything over a certain size and body weight (unless underwater, and even there we see mass extinction). Only smaller creatures (especially warm-blooded mammals) were able to cope and adapt quickly enough to be around...

Something like 80% of the world's life went bye-bye...and this wasn't the first ELE the Earth has seen either... Assuming it's somewhat cyclic (around every 120 million years I think...VERY roughly - maybe a rogue comet?), we've at least got a few dozen million years to go.... (if we don't cause it ourselves).

too big?, so are you saying they can't exist on another planet because dinosaurs are too big?? i'm sorry mate but i don't get that!

if these creatures once existed on the ONLY planet we actually know for a fact exists life (ours) then why can't these monstrous creatures/or creatures like them evolve on others?

yes a comet wiped them out on OUR planet, but a comet may not have wiped creatures like this on another planet.

maybe dinosaurs were unlucky, if it wasn't for that comet (if it was a comet that wiped them out) they'd still be here today and not us.


[edit on 12-9-2006 by st3ve_o]

I was answering this question...sorry...

It took us what, lets round up, like, 1 million years? The Dinosaurs where around for hundreds of millions.... what the hell was wrong with them?

Even answering my question... There were dinosaurs of ALL shapes and sizes. Being "Too Big" can't rule them out for evolution. That being said, 150 million years is alot of time, especially for evolution (as we can see within our own species)

The T-Rex and Raptors and other dinosaurs walked up-right.
Raptors worked in teams and made noises to communicate.
We can only assume that Raptors were on the verge of developing into conscious beings. I guess the idea of reptilian humanoids isn't that far out. I wonder if a world of raptors with nukes is better off than a world of monkeys with nukes. Who knows.

Well, if the environmental conditions were right, than a dinosaur
equivalent could evolve on another planet.

However, I don't think they'd be very Terrestrial looking.

I mean yes you'd have the basics, but they'd look, well, alien.

But than again some of our dinosaurs looked very alien compared
to what is currently around today as well.

Many scientists speculate that if whatever scenario happened that wiped out the dinosaurs didn't occur then primates would be far behind in evolution compared to say Raptors, so maybe we'd be a bunch of raptor looking people trying on this board instead.

haha funny to think about.

Originally posted by Techsnow
We can only assume that Raptors were on the verge of developing into conscious beings.

what makes you think animals aren't conscious beings?

Originally posted by SteveR

Originally posted by Techsnow
We can only assume that Raptors were on the verge of developing into conscious beings.

what makes you think animals aren't conscious beings?

Fully agree, i don't understend why so many people see animals like soulness uncoscious "things>"

[edit on 15-9-2006 by Umbra Sideralis]

[edit on 15-9-2006 by Umbra Sideralis]

I think in the vast majority of cases alien life would be more akin to Dinosaurs than to us in fact I doubt alien life will even get as intelligent as the dinosaurs if it exists at all.

Not even in the case of the Raptor which doesnt deserve the reputation Jurrasic Park gave it most experts say the raptor was more of an oversized chicken like creature with feathers and lets face it birds arent really that smart.

The lesson of the Dinosaurs on Earth as far as it comes to alien lifeforms is life can be around for millions of years and not evolve to what we would call intelligence. It's quite possible we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy through sheer dumb luck.

If there is Life out there it could well be similar in size to dinosaurs or maybe even far larger.

Originally posted by Shamanator
Not even in the case of the Raptor which doesnt deserve the reputation Jurrasic Park gave it most experts say the raptor was more of an oversized chicken like creature with feathers and lets face it birds arent really that smart.

Hey, parrots can talk!
Not many animals can do the same. Have you ever seen an alligator talk?

Originally posted by Shamanator
I think in the vast majority of cases alien life would be more akin to Dinosaurs than to us in fact I doubt alien life will even get as intelligent as the dinosaurs if it exists at all.

Not even in the case of the Raptor which doesnt deserve the reputation Jurrasic Park gave it most experts say the raptor was more of an oversized chicken like creature with feathers and lets face it birds arent really that smart.

The lesson of the Dinosaurs on Earth as far as it comes to alien lifeforms is life can be around for millions of years and not evolve to what we would call intelligence. It's quite possible we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy through sheer dumb luck.

If there is Life out there it could well be similar in size to dinosaurs or maybe even far larger.

True..... I have no problems in thinking there are reptilian like aliens floating around. However you can't rule out how intelligent they might get, just because you haven't found them yet...... and don't know enough either. It's impossible to make any decisive comment from the basis of only having one example to deal with. You can only make very broad guesstimates.

But as for your raptors....... they came in many different shapes and sizes. Those raptors pictured in Jurassic Park aren't Velociraptors, as they were called. Velociraptor was about the weight of a large dog (about 30- 50kg) and 2.5-3 feet high. Those pictured in Jurassic Park are more like a species intermediate between Deinonychus and Utahraptor......between 5-8 feet high and 150-800kgs in weight. By the looks of them, they're closer to Deinonychus, so that's what I'd call them, for the sake of expediency.

It's true that life can be around for many millions of years and not develop too much in the way of intelligence, but it's also equally true that it can be around for only a short while and produce a number of intelligent species, with one or more being exceptionally intelligent........ whales and humans for example. The chances of their development depend entirely on the conditions they find themselves in and the capacity (potential) for a species to adapt to any change and grow with that change. At some point a species will begin to outpace that change and start to develop beyond just surviving...... as it seems has happened to us, and possibly whales. In most cases it probably won't happen, but the chance of it happening is always there. The likelyhood of intelligence is probably good, in the Galaxy. And probably not too bad for technically adept species either.




[edit on 16-9-2006 by GhostITM]

The raptor family (not just the raptor itself) was the most advanced predator of its time.
It was capable of advanced, yet still primitive, communication, it was able to coordinate attacks, traps and ambushes, and unlike most other preadtors it had the same type of vision as humans which meant it wasn't reliant on prey moving and also that it had a high degree of depth perception.

If the cataclysm hadn't wiped them out, it is extremely likely that Raptors would have become the dominant lifeforms on this planet, and we would be second fiddle.

As for the depiction of aliens mostly as badly spelt ostriches, you need to look around more!
Threre are Greys, Reptilians, Nordics, the large humanoids, the Goblins from the Kentucky invasion, and the list goes on and on. Once you've been on ATS for a while and done a decent amount of personal research you will find a whole lot more types of alien!

If there is Life out there it could well be similar in size to dinosaurs or maybe even far larger.

Yes and no.

On a world with Earth standard gravity, the dinosaurs were the largest
you could goo, primarily because of space, and there is a limit to how
big life can get vertically.

However, on a world with half Earths gravity, ther could be things twice
as large as the biggest dinosaur, assuming they had enogh space to live.

Originally posted by iori_komei

Yes and no.

On a world with Earth standard gravity, the dinosaurs were the largest
you could goo, primarily because of space, and there is a limit to how
big life can get vertically.

However, on a world with half Earths gravity, ther could be things twice
as large as the biggest dinosaur, assuming they had enogh space to live.

Wrong on both counts. It has nothing to do with the space the animals have to live in, vertically or otherwise. It has to do with the physiological limitations set by the gravity of the respective planets as far as mass of the animals versus body structure, goes.

On Earth, the largest any terrestrial animal could become whilst walking on four legs, given the structural integrity of bone, is about 400 tons. After that limit is reached, the body of the animal would collpase under its own weight. The number of legs is actually not that important except for the fact that the more legs it had, the more they'd get in the way of one another. Then you have other physiological limitations like the size of the heart and how much blood it had to pump....... could cause heart failure due to massive blood pressure requirements, and also heat generation and exchange requirements between the animals and their environment, musculo-skeletal problems etc etc.

On a planet where the gravity was 0.5g, the animal wouldn't be that much larger, simply because there is an upper limit to the strength of bone and the organs of the animal have similar stress tolerance factors....especially with the circulatory system. You may get the animal growing to 600 or even 800 ton but no larger, given that it had the equivalent of Earth physiology.

The sauropod dinosaurs here on Earth were as large as they were ever going to get, given that they'd stay within the limits of their design. You may have gotten a species pushing the very limit of this, but there'd be no evolutionary reasons as to why it would want to do so. Being so large would incur even more disadvantages than they'd need, or already had for being as large as they were.


[edit on 16-9-2006 by GhostITM]

I saw some program on Discovery Channel where the Human Race is actually supposed to evolve into some kind of dino-reptile looking creature . This would come about because of globalwarming and evolution. The narrator made a very convincing argument for the fact that evolution would definetly take us down that road. In about another 6 million years or so. They had a picture of what we are going to look like and we look like the aliens that we see on the x-files.

That's what I was saying, if something was bigger than the
largest dinosaurs, it would weigh more, and as you said,
there's a limit to how much/big an animal can be.

As with the half gravity thing, I was thinking more along the
lines of how theoretically large an animal could be created
to be, though I do realise I did'nt say that.