2. We Could Have Been Lizard People
We may be at the top of the food chain now, but not so long ago (okay,
quite a long time ago),
the earth was ruled by reptiles. Now, these guys didn't die out because mammals rose up out of the undergrowth and thwarted their reptilian overlords. No, it took a rock 10km wide to come screaming out of the sky and boil the Earth's atmosphere to knock them on the head. If the dinosaur apocalypse had never happened, the Earth might still be dominated by reptilian overlords (well, it already is if you listen to some of the more unbalanced sections of the internet). Before you start imagining T-rexes in business meetings, they would probably have evolved to a sort of human equivalent by now. The
Troodons are probably a good candidate for this, with their big brains and their bipedalism. Their brains had actually already begun evolving into a more advance avian brain, and was six times bigger than any other other dino brain, when it all went a bit Boomtown So what would this humanoid reptilian race look like? In 1982,
Dale A. Russell, set about figuring out what evolution could do to them. Amongst other things, they would look largely like humans, but would probably still lay eggs and feed their young through regurgitation (yum), which would mean they wouldn't have breasts (boo). He also speculated that their language might sound similar to birdsong, which is horrifically creepy for some reason. Thank the lord for that asteroid.