The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, which occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago, is widely known as the K–T extinction event where K is the traditional abbreviation for the Cretaceous Period derived from the German name "Kreidezeit", and T is the abbreviation for the Tertiary Period (a period of time now covered by the Paleogene and Neogene periods). Whatever the name, this event saw the large-scale mass extinction of approximately half of all animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. It famously ended the "Age of Reptiles" because many of the archosaurs, a group of reptiles including the birds, crocodiles, pterosaurs and most notably, the dinosaurs, suddenly vanished from the fossil record. There have been hundreds of theories as to its cause with the most notable being those of an impact event or events, catastrophic volcanic activity, falling sea level or a combination of events.

But what if the K-T extinction event had not occurred? How might dinosaurs and their allies have evolved? Below, in the best tradition of Dinosaur Central magpie-ing, we have cherry-picked the Internet and elsewhere for a collection of web and other material that explore this notion. These resources range from rational to the surrealistic; from the sober to the whimsical.

 

Contents

Non-fiction

Novels

Short fiction

Television

Other

Interlude 1: What is it with dinosaurs and the Wild West?

The Dinosauroid

Articles

A gallery of dinosauroids

Interlude 2: A checklist of dinosauroids and their kin in fiction

Interlude 3: "Dinosauroids" from filmed fiction

The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution
A book written by geologist and palaeontologist Dougal Dixon. While Dixon's earlier book After Man is set fifty million years in the future, The New Dinosaurs speculates on how the dinosaurs would have evolved over the last 65 million years had the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event not taken place.

Wikipedia article

Critic on The New Dinosaurs

If Dinosaurs Were Alive Today
Dinosaurs, the first and only real-life giant reptiles of our world, never cease to amaze. We obsess about them as children and continue to be fascinated even as adults. This book gives shape to a dream every dinosaur lover has whimsically had: what if dinosaurs were alive today? What would our world be like? Using extensive research, dinosaur experts have put together an amazing range of dinosaur interaction scenarios. Images of photo-realistic dinosaurs are blended with distinctive photography, and fact-packed pages explore aspects of dinosaur research, from their extinction to the latest fossil discoveries. Even children who may think they're outgrowing dinosaurs won't be able to resist this engaging journey across oceans, skies, and land to find out if dinosaurs could live in our world.

The Speculative Dinosaur Project
A no-longer-maintained but still large and comprehensive website that catalogues the life of an alternative Earth where the KT extinction did not occur.

The Bestiary: An Illustrated Guide to the Beasts of Skull Island
Part of the website created for Peter Jackson's 2005 version of King Kong. Select "The Bestiary" from Special Features to see a selection from the vast menagerie of animals created by the film makers.

Kong: King Of Skull Island
Joe DeVito (Author, Artist), Brad Strickland (Author)
In a way similar to Jackson's Kong, the dinosaurs of this lavishly illustrated novel have continued to evolve. These include the dromaeosaur "Slashers", the intelligent mega-theropod "Gaw" and a race of sentient dinosaurs, the Deathrunners.

Eden Trilogy
Harry Harrison
In a world where dinosaurs never went extinct, hunter-gatherer clans of humans live among the great beasts in North America, meanwhile, the Yilane, a race of intelligent, evolved mesosaurs, thrive in Africa an Europe. But when an oncoming ice age forces the cold-blooded Yilane to explore westward, they discover the humans and take a young boy named Kerrick back to Africa with them as their slave. The series chronicles the adventures of Kerrick who escapes his captors and comes to lead his people against the saurian threat from across the sea.

Wikipedia article

Review in Prehistoric Pulp

West of Eden: An Interview with Harry Harrison

Second Summer: The Turnback Time
Amelia Walsh and James Stambaugh
Planet Earth, reduced by global warming to an apocalyptic wilderness, finds its inhabitants decimated by a reawakened Mesozoic plague. Then, rising from millions of years of hibernation, a breed of reasoning dinosaurs, Troodons, enter what is left of a world devastated by the human species and plague.

Destroyermen Saga
Tayor Anderson
Anderson’s outstanding first novel combines alternate history and seafaring. Two U.S. four-stacker destroyers on the run from the Japanese in the spring of 1942 sail into a mysterious squall. The USS Walker emerges upon an alternate earth, where the dinosaurs were never wiped out. One savage sapient race, the Grik, has evolved from the raptors; another, from lemurs. The latter becomes the allies of the castaways in parallel time, and together they prepare to fight the Grik, solve some of the mysteries of this world, and find the missing second destroyer.

Titles in the series included: Into the Storm: Destroyermen, Book I, Crusade: Destroyermen and Maelstrom: Destroyermen, Book III.

The Rex series
Eric Garcia
In Eric Garcia's wild but winning first mystery, dinosaurs never did get wiped out--they evolved secretly and now make up about 5 percent of the world's population. There are dinosaur doctors, lawyers, even detectives like Rubio--although he's hit a low point in his own career because of the suspicious death of his beloved partner. This series comprises three titles: Anonymous Rex (1999), Casual Rex (2001) and Hot and Sweaty Rex (2004)

Fallen Cloud Saga
Kurt R.A. Giambastian
A series of four books, including The Year the Cloud Fell, The Spirit of Thunder, Shadow of the Storm, and From the Heart of the Storm chronicling an alternative world in which North American geography includes a large gulf where Texas should be, and some species of dinosaurs surviving to modern time.

The Homecoming
Barry B. Longyear
Evolved dinosaurs return to Earth to reclaim it as their own.

Dinosaur Wars
Thomas P. Hopp
Dinosaurs are not extinct. Wildlife biologist Chase Armstrong and rancher’s daughter Kit Daniels are swept into an epic struggle when a species of intelligent, human-sized dinosaur returns from outer space to reclaim its home world —our world! The invaders bring with them all the great beasts of the Cretaceous Era. A sequel, Dinosaur Wars: Counterattack followed.

"Dinosaur on a Bicycle"
Tim Sullivan
In an alternate universe where intelligent dinosaurs dominate the earth, a 19th-century dinosaur scientist sends his assistant back to the Cretaceous Era to visit their relatives. He meets up with a couple of time-traveling humans from another alternate universe and has some interesting adventures with the female after the man is eaten by a T-rex. They eventually discover a Nexus of Realities where they meet up with intelligent, time-traveling monkeys, raccoons, dogs, cats, lobsters, fish, cockroaches, rats, etc. A short story found in the anthology Dinosaurs! edited by Brian W. Aldiss.

And from the same anthology:

"The Runners"
Bob Buckley
An expedition into the Cretaceous that discovers intelligent tool-using dinosaurs set out to save the species from an impeding supernova explosion. A short story found in the anthology Dinosaurs! edited by Brian W. Aldiss.

Complete text

"Foster Mother"
Carol Emshwiller
A woman in an isolated mountain region raises an infant dinosauroid to be a weapon, but forms an emotional bond with it that leads her to question whether or not she'll be able to give up custody of her foster child. A short story found in Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories.

"Trembling Earth"
Allen Steele
A presidential candidate's visit to the dinosaur-inhabited Okafenokee wildlife refuge goes terribly wrong, and the details are revealed as the survivors explain their harrowing experience to a committee. Included in the anthology Dinosaurs II edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

Dinosapien
A British/Canadian children's television program that focuses on what would happen if dinosaurs had continued to exist and evolve into more intelligent beings.

Dino-Rampage
The Dino-rampage series is a 3D animated series depicting the coexistence of dinosaurs with human beings in future time.

Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex
Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex is a science fiction world setting. The basic premise is that the Civil War did not end as we know it, but resulted in separate Federal and Confederate nations. This state continued into the space age. In the year 2202, an alien planet full of dinosaurs was discovered, opening new mysteries and establishing the world of Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex.

And in a similar vein...

Interlude 1: What is it with dinosaurs and the Wild West?

Anthroposaurus Sapiens
The article argues the case that some dinosaurs may have got to be really brainy – to the point of hominid intelligence.

Dinos on the Moon
Report on a presentation by NASA scientist Chris McKay who suggests that we dig for dinosaur relics on the moon at a recent SETI conference.

DeviantArtist: Dinosauroids
DeviantART artists explore the dinosauroid: nemo-ramjet and povorot (Simon Roy)

Dinosauroids revisited
A blog entry by Darren Naish examining the "dinosauroid" or humanoid dinosaur idea.

Forget K-T
Some visual musings by Simon Roy on speculative dinosaurs: what would have happened evolutionarily had the Cretaceous extinction not happened... or rather, that Chicxulub had never struck Mexico.

How intelligent dinosaurs conquered the world
Another blog entry by Darren Naish drawing attention to the smart theropods invented by John McLoughlin and Mike Magee.

Dinosauroid cave art discovered
Darren Naish's notion of what a "real" dinosauroid might look like has inspired blogger Nemo Ramjet to produce Avisapiens saurotheos, a post-Cretaceous big-brained maniraptoran. On a parallel Earth where theropod dinosaurs have followed a similar evolutionary path to hominids, this is the result.

Smartasaurus
An article in Cosmos magazine considering the question that if they hadn't been wiped out in a global catastrophe 65 million years ago, could dinosaurs have evolved intelligence?

Troodon sapiens?: Thoughts on the "Dinosauroid"
By Brian Switek, an ecology and evolution student at Rutgers University.

Interlude 3: "Dinosauroids" from filmed fiction