Donna Fernstrom
Reptile keeper and breeder, wildlife observation and ecology hobbyist.Sep 18

What if, 65 million years ago, the asteroid didn't hit Earth and the
dinosaur extinction didn't happen?
The asteroid struck the Earth 66,038,000 years ago, plus or minus 11,000
years. Modern dating methods are awesome, aren’t they?

If the K-Pg Extinction Event had not occurred, dinosaurians would still
be the primary large land animals. There would probably be a diversity
of mammals, but it’s less likely any of them would have been
particularly large.

It is possible that under the right circumstances, a dinosaur would have
evolved sophonce (intelligence like ours), but there’s never been any
guarantee of that. Sophonce is the result of unlikely sets of
circumstances and adaptations.

In any case, there would have been no primates, no canines or felines.
Mammals would have have had a mass radiation into new forms. They might
have evolved other new branches, but not those.

Lovely speculative art of dinosauroid sophonts hunting a larger dinosaur.

Reptiles in general don’t typically use their forearms to manipulate
things. It’s just not an ability seen in these animals, and it doesn’t
really appear any of them ever evolved it. They may use their forelimbs
for locomotion or display, but always use their mouths and rear feet to
manipulate objects. So, this artist has speculated that sophont
dinosaurs would be the same way, and would utilize tools that could be
held firmly in their beaks. (His dinosauroids were beaked - beaked and
toothed dinosaurs existed). The trained hunting birds, like our dogs,
aid them in their hunt.
Art by C. M. Kosemen.

His depiction is the most compelling and realistic speculation on what
dinosaurs with human-level intelligence would be like. See more of this
incredible stuff here:

C. M. Kosemen - Dinosauroids
C. M. Kosemen Artist and Researcher *** A world of dinosauroids (with
Simon Roy ) There are two highly-popular, vexing questions about
dinosaurs: What would the world look like if these strange and majestic
animals had not gone extinct? And, would they ever evolve into
intelligent species comparable to humans? In 1982, palaeontologist Dale
Russell, after observing " ... a general trend toward larger relative
brain size in terrestrial vertebrates through geologic time, and the
energetic efficiency of an upright posture in slow-moving, bipedal
animals ", postulated the Dinosauroid , a humanoid, erect-gaited sophont
which may have evolved from Troodon -like dinosaurs had the
end-Cretaceous extinction not occurred. This question occupied the minds
of yours truly (seen here on the right), and world-building comic genius
Simon Roy (on the left), as well. We were unconvinced by Russell's
Dinosauroid. We thought that an erect, humanoid sophont was too
prejudiced towards humans to be realistic. We were instead inspired by
zoologist Darren Naish's writings on the evolution of intelligent,
bird-like dinosaurs: "No, post-Cretaceous maniraptorans wouldn’t end up
looking like scaly tridactyl plantigrade humanoids with erect tailless
bodies. They would be decked out with feathers and brightly coloured
skin ornaments; have nice normal horizontal bodies and digitigrade feet;
long, hard, powerful jaws; stride around on the savannah kicking the
shit out of little mammals; and in the evenings they would stand
together in the trees, booming out a duet of du du du-du, a deep noise
that would reverberate for miles around..." Towards the end of the '00s,
Simon Roy and I independently began to develop our concepts for
bird-like intelligent dinosaurs. Inspired by the ravens he saw around
his Canadian home, Simon drew the corvid-like dinosauroids seen above.
I, in turn, was inspired by ground hornbills, parrots, certain dinosaurs
and corvids, and came up with the speculative organism seen above. I
named it Avisapiens saurotheos . Simon and I soon got in touch with each
other; and started developing a world and a storyline for our
dinosauroids. Our collaborative efforts continued, on-and-off, until the
mid-2010s. Our aim was to develop the Dinosauroids story into an
illustrated story-book, which we naively hoped to sell to a major sci-fi
publisher. But we soon realised that we enjoyed world-building more than
writing a story, or putting a book together. We kept bouncing concepts
back and forth, but never had a chance to publish them, until now. Most
of the body of work you see on this page was drawn by Simon, based on
ideas we created together. I also contributed some of the "cave
drawings" and certain creature illustrations. This is the first time the
totality of our Dinosauroids-universe works has been displayed online.
Simon and I refined the design of my original Avisapiens dinosauroid...
And created a few more sentient races to accompany them. There was one
more, sl
http://www.cmkosemen.com/dinosauroids.html
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John Gwinner
· Sep 18
Fantastic concept - thank you.

Agreed, parallel evolution is a real thing, but there’s no real reason
to assume our shape is the preferred one.

Still, I think mouth tools would be a somewhat limiting form for
technological beings, but OTOH it did work for Larry Niven’s Puppeteers.

Pierson's Puppeteers - Wikipedia

Donna Fernstrom
· Sep 18
With a great brain, I think a beak and some feet are enough.