Dave Hone

Yeah, I mean, there were probably primates around in the Cretaceous.

Some of the molecular clock stuff suggests that primates were around alongside the dinosaurs that we've never found before.

any osteological evidence of that.

But yeah, there's been a backwards and forwards about were dinosaurs already on their way out or were they a bit limited by the very end Cretaceous?

I think the more recent analyses have shown that's probably not the case.

In other words, they were basically doing fine right up to the extinction event.

And so, yeah, if the asteroid hadn't hit, there's no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline.

Something else may have hit.

There may have been

You know, some other environmental disaster or something may have happened or maybe they're more vulnerable to stuff than we know of.

But there's no I don't think there's any really good reason to think.

they wouldn't have carried on relatively well.

I mean, even post-dinosaur extinction, you had a window where the mammals and the birds were pretty competing.

There was a lot of big birds getting going and various big carnivorous terrestrial kind of hyper-predatory ostrich-like things, like the forsythia.

So there's no guarantee that mammals would have even taken over post the dinosaur extinction, since initially they were in a bit of a...

A fair bit of competition.

I mean, that's the thing.

You look through, yeah, the Mesozoic, the late Triassic...

dinosaurs are there alongside a whole bunch of other big and unusual and interesting reptiles and and some other early pre-mammal like things that closer to mammals than than the reptiles but once you've gone into the jurassic you've now got a solid like 120 130 million years where almost anywhere on earth if you saw an animal bigger than like a raccoon it was probably a dinosaur

That's how incredibly dominant, you know, as dominant, if not more dominant than modern mammals.