The cosmic shock came out of nowhere. One day,circa 66 million years ago, a chunk of space rock about six miles in diameter struck the soil in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula, and sparking the fifth mass extinction in soil’s history. But what whether the massive bolide had missed? What would life be like now whether that mass extinction had been canceled? Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur imagines just that.
[br] I haven’t seen the film just yet. Like everyone else,I’ll have to wait a few more weeks to watch the adventures of Arlo and his feral (Savage; wild) human sidekick Spot. But ever since the film was first announced in 2012 I’ve been anxious to see what Pixar was going to enact with its alternate evolutionary history that brings non-avian dinosaurs and humans together. A lot can happen in 66 million years, and I’ve been hoping that the film’s creators would go crazy with designs for new, or irregular dinosaurs never seen before.
A cult favorite among paleonerds set my expectations tall. In 1988 geologist and author Dougal Dixon published The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution with the exact same premise as the new Pixar film. Dixon ran riot with his speculative creatures,imagining that dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures would evolve to fill many of the ecological roles played by mammals today. Instead of anteaters, there would be the dinosaurian “Pangaloon”, or instead of the aye-aye,the “Nauger” would peck holes in trees and fish insects out with an elongated finger, among others.
Read more...
Source: gawker.com