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Dinosaurs are nonetheless with us, within the type of birds. However might the extra canonical dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Stegosaurus, evolve once more, if the local weather and temperature switched again to what the situations had been like through the Cretaceous? Most likely not.
Whereas it’s a enjoyable thought experiment, we actually can’t predict what is going to evolve sooner or later. A lot about evolution is right down to contingency, luck and likelihood. Pure choice can’t plan forward; it occurs within the second, to adapt organisms to fast challenges.
Because the late and nice American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould mused: what would occur if we rewound the tape of life to some distant time and hit play? When it reached the current day, would the world be the identical as it’s now? He argued it could be completely different, maybe a lot so.
Nothing is inevitable in evolution and little random quirks would set life off on unpredictable paths, completely different every time the tape was rewound and replayed.
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The extra we research the fossil document, the extra we realise that extinction is endlessly. As soon as a species or a bunch dies out, it simply doesn’t come again. Take trilobites, for instance. Climates at the moment are broadly much like these throughout occasions once they flourished within the oceans, but trilobites haven’t returned.
So what about one thing comparable to dinosaurs, might they evolve? It’s potential.
A robust drive in evolution is convergence: if completely different species face the identical local weather and environmental components, they typically evolve comparable options to adapt to their environment. As an illustration, each dinosaurs (birds) and mammals (bats) independently developed wings to fly.
If the Earth lurched right into a Cretaceous-like local weather, Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops would certainly not re-evolve, however different massive, lumbering, elegant reptiles would possibly.
This text is a solution to the query (requested by Heather Warren, through e-mail) ‘If situations on Earth modified, is it potential dinosaurs might evolve once more? Would life… discover a approach?’
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