In continuation of our activity “F.I.N.D.ing answers!” we explored the following question:
How would life on Earth be if the giant meteorite had not struck us 64 million years ago?
It turned out that our question was quite difficult to answer! Even scientists who have dealt with the subject do not agree on a commonly accepted answer. We discovered that there are three different answers supported by the scientific community.
Scenario 1: The dinosaurs are spared by the meteorite collision but eventually disappear due to other causes such as the decrease of global temperature or the competition from mammals, for which dinosaur eggs are an easy and rich food source. In this case though the disappearance of the dinosaurs would happen quite later. This would lead to a delay to human evolution and culture development. For this reason we have chosen to present in our film a world very similar to ancient Greece.
Scenario 2: Dinosaurs evolve! Their form and characteristics are changed to adapt to the new conditions on the planet. In this case study our source of inspiration was the amazing book “The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution” by Dougal Dixon. The evolved dinosaurs that “dino-students” present in our movie are inspired by this book.
Scenario 3: Proponents of this case, base their assumption to the fact that dinosaurs already prevailed for millions of years without major evolutionary changes up to the fall of the meteorite. Thus, in their opinion, if the meteorite did not hit the Earth then probably dinosaurs would continue to exist while maintaining approximately the same forms.
We studied our findings, we discussed how we could present them, we wrote the script for the movie, we constructed our evolved dinosaurs, we decided the casting of the roles and then we shot our movie! You can see it here: