What if the asteroid had missed Earth and dinosaurs still lived?

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It is widely believed that roughly 66 million years ago, an asteroid measuring between six and nine miles wide crashed into Earth just off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. This impact caused massive amounts of debris to be thrown into the atmosphere, triggering a “mega-earthquake” that lasted for months. As a result, around 75% of Earth’s species, including non-flying dinosaurs, suddenly went extinct.

Watch the video above as Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich explores what Earth would have been like if the giant asteroid had missed the planet and the dinosaurs‘ reign never ended.

The following is an excerpt from the above video:

First of all, we know that dinosaurs were very competitive and that mammals were not able to compete very well with them. So the largest mammals that we find in the age of the dinosaurs are really about the size of a small dog. There’s no big mammal that was able to exist, because the dinosaurs were simply better predators and better able to suppress them.

So you would have had birds which were being successful, and which basically are a branch of dinosaurs, would have continued to flourish. They had the huge advantage of flight, and they would have gradually spread more and more complexly. There are more bird species than there are mammal species. They have been remarkably successful. We don’t see them that way because we value walking around on ground, and we undervalue flying, even though a very substantial number of mammals or bats fly in a unique way, different than birds. So birds would have done all right.

Dinosaurs would have done all right. They would have dominated. And humans, in fact, probably wouldn’t have existed. The reason [is] simple, there was no evidence that the mammals could have ever grown into competing with the dinosaurs. And there’s a serious argument that the most effective of the hunting dinosaurs, animals called Troodons, were also the smartest dinosaurs, and that over another 20 or 30 million years, they might have evolved in ways that we can hardly imagine, but it would not have been humans, and it would not have been life as we’ve known it.