9 "What Ifs..." That Would Change Everything

4. What If The Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Missed?

Since the birth of the solar system, that asteroid was set on a collision course with the Earth, but if it had somehow missed us, what would the world look like today? Whilst it wasn't just the famous meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs, as dinosaur population was already going through a slump, the chances are that it's pretty much what did it for them in the end.

Although the dinos were having a pretty rough time with environmental changes when the big rock hit, they were a resilient bunch, having previously survived the break-up of pangea and massive climate change, so they probably would have pulled through. One of the major differences, at least from our perspective, is that humans would probably never have evolved. Mammals and dinosaurs coexisted all those years ago, but with mammals mainly fulfilling the role of "lunch". Without any major upheaval, there's no reason why this wouldn't continue.

So, if dinosaurs had survived that extra 65.5 million years, what would they have evolved into? There are those who reckon they might have turned into the reptilian version of humans - intelligent, bipedal and technologically advanced - however, that's a pretty anthropocentric way of thinking, and probably not what would have happened.

They would have continued to diversify, becoming weirder and more varied as time went on, some may have even become warm-blooded, like birds, to deal with the ice age. They may have evolved higher levels of intelligence, like the big-brained Troodontidae that emerged towards the end of the age of the dinosaurs. All the time, humans would still be stuck in the "scurrying around in burrows" stage.