WI Marine Dinos Never Became Extinct?

jacobus

What if the fearsome mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs (Nessies) of prehistoric times had survived, and still inhabited the world's oceans, making sea travel impossible (these Mesozoic monsters were technically not dinosaurs, although they share some traits).
How much sooner might manned flight have been achieved?
With such dangerous oceans separating the continents, would mankind have been restricted to only a small part of the world? I guess the coasts and islands would be uninhabitable, if the nessies could emerge at any time without warning, to stretch out their long necks and snatch human victims from the shore.
Might humanity have come to revere the sea monsters, and worship them as gods? Would the faithful have left human victims chained at the shore as a sacrifice, like Andromeda was left for Cetus? Or would we execrate them as some kind of demons?

 
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Dave Howery

I doubt they'd have that much affect on human history... and for one thing, the reptiles with the long necks had small heads, and most probably couldn't grab and snatch a human... and to get to humans, they'd have to practically beach themselves in the process. They might be a hazard to small boats, but that would most likely prompt humans into building bigger boats early on. They'd likely be limited to shallow warm seas, and be predators of mostly fish, jellyfish, etc. The biggest effect they'd have on human history would probably be in myth and legend...
 
Hapsburg

Hapsburg

Banned
They wouldn't be something that would prohibit human migration across seas; after all, Orcas didn't, and they fill much the same role as most marine reptiles.

The biggest effect, IMO, is that whaling industry expands into hunting marine reptiles for meat, and as a result is still a huge sector of the economy
 

Weaver

Hmmm, if the big marine reptiles were still extent I think the knock on effect on sea transport would be fairly massive. The big mosasaurs could have made anything smaller than a caravel rather hazardous.

Certainly forget colonising the Pacific and Caribean using dug-outs as in OTL. Forget also most Classical and pre-classical trade using light galleys.

Fishing as a coastal industry would be a non-starter, using small boats.

I don't think you'd get an Age of the Vikings either.

The biggest other effect would be on the cetacious animals...whales and dolphins would never evolve.
 

Dave Howery

boating would be perfectly feasible in the colder oceans of the world, where these big reptiles couldn't go (they evolved in a world covered with shallow warm seas). I think they'd live mostly in areas like the Caribbean and east Indies, basically the warmest seas on the planet. I doubt they'd take on boats as a normal thing, since they would have evolved to prey on fish and squid; it's not as if sharks, orcas, and sperm whales attack boats relentlessly... to be sure, one might occasionally smash a boat out of curiousity more than anything else, and then happily gobble up the swimmers, but most boat traffic would go about unmolested. And, being reptiles, they would act more on instinct than anything else, and instinct won't be telling them to attack shipping...
 

TMOT1955

I'm not sure they really did become extinct. My personal belief is that The Loch Ness Monster (Nessie) isn't just one individual but is instead a small community or group of individuals. The same with Chessie and Champie supposedly spotted in The Chesapeake Bay and in Lake Champlain.

I think in fairly large but isolated bodies of water like Loch Ness, it may be possible for a small number of such dinosaurs to have adapted and survived and their offspring are still with us a species little changed in say 100 million years. Their number in population are small, they may be fairly wary of humans, and so are rarely seen.

Yes, I know. It sounds like ASB. But as we often find, reality can turn out to be stranger than fiction.
 

Weaver

Dave, the big Mesozoic marine animals were found all over the world, even in the Polar seas.

As to Nessie, TMOT, there can't possibly be a population of these creatures in Loch Ness as there simply isn't enough biomass in the water to support them. Also there have never been any remains found on the loch bed.

The really big killer of Nessie being a living fossil, though is that as recently as 10,000 years ago the Loch, indeed all the Northern parts of what is now Great Britain, was under Icesheets up to 2 kilometers thick. The same is true of the North American Nessies.

I used to be a fan myself, even spent time by the Loch observing, until the truth came to me.

A shame really.
 
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Emperor Qianlong

"WI Marine Dinos Never Became Extinct?"

Marine reptiles were no dinosaurs! Actually, one of the peculiar features about dinosaurs is that none* of them were aquatic.

*No non-avian ones, at least. Penguins are aquatic dinosaurs! :D
 

carlton_bach

The fundamental problem with the causality chain is that marine saurians are big predators, and big predators are by definition rare. Our seas have orcas, great white sharks and giant squid, and humanity still ventured out on the sea. there is no reason to assdume that an encounter with a mosasaur or plesiosaur would be either more commonplace or more disastrous than one with these species. It's not like they are just waiting to snatch the first naked ape to come out of an inlet.
 

Weaver

The problem is that reptiles are not mammals. Whilst lions and orcas are relatively rare, crocodiles and other predator reptiles are not.

There is a very basic difference between mammalian and reptile predators...reptiles are very numerous. Whilst I have in the past travelled for days in Southern Africa seeing never a lion or any other predator, I would not be game to attempt to swim across any of our estuarine rivers in Northern Australia...there are literally dozens in every stretch of river just waiting for a chance.

Strange to say a modern time traveller would be very likely to be able to dodge the odd T-Rex on land (warm-blood), he would be foolish in the extreme to swim across a stretch of ocean.

The Mesozoic oceans teemed with predators, big ones....orcas and sperm whales would not have lasted a day.
 
Northstar

Northstar

I think it would be quite cool. By 2000 I think that people would probably go on cruises to watch them, like dolphin/whale watching in OTL.
I know that I definately would love to see a great, big sea monster swimming about.
Also, would they be hunted like the whales of OTL, would the Japanese hunt them because that would be pretty cool!

:)
 

8Deer

Yeah I agree that the butterflies from this would be huge and that it would be unrealistic for humans to have evolved exactly as we are today.

I mean, we are talking about 65 million years worth of evolution...
 

Finn

Ignoring butterflies for the moment, which I am loathe to do, there would be a greater fear of the water. The sea animals currently feared the most are sharks, but in the past even docile manta rays were considered demonic. The Sea Monster mythos would be greatly expanded, even if the danger was only heightened for swimmers and not mariners. Less scuba diving perhaps?
 

Tocomocho

Well, let's go for the beginning first. Yep, they were not dinosaurs. Icthyosaurs, by the way, went extinct at the beginning of the Cretaceous, either displaced by new marine reptiles (mosasaurs) or victims of climatic change, or both. Plesiosaurs were on the decline and reduced to highly specialized forms by the end of the Cretaceous, so it's in doubt if they could manage to pass the Terciary. Mosasaurs would be the only ones to make it (taking away the fact that marine ecosistems are more vulnerable than terrestrial ones and that as top predators they were doomed to extinction in the K/T event but. for sake of it, let's say ASB lets them pass intact).

Now comes the first major evolutionary perturbation: whales, simply, will not exist. If you look at the fossils of the first sea-going cetaceans of the late Eocene, they are long, snake like predators with tiny heads and long lines of triangular teeth. They could be described as nature's sloppy attempt to replace suddenly vanished mosasaurs, as much as the land predatory birds and running crocodiles of the Paleogene were poor attempts of fake theropod dinosaurs. It's not untill the sea currents change decisively in the Miocene that OTL cetaceans started to resemble whales and dolphins.

The question now is, will mosasaurs be able to adapt to the new conditions, develop isolating fat for the increasing colding currents, and maybe gradually take the shape of dolphins (or, more exactly, icthyosaurs)? That's the way they took in The Speculative Dinosaur Project, that golden website master of alternate evolution. Providing mosasaurs make it to the present day, most of them will look nothing like they did in the Age of Reptiles. Anything else is a guess.

Finally, will they make sea travel impossible? I say no. Most of them would hunt fish and other animals under water, and a boat does not look, taste or smell like one. But well, there is allways "accidents". Anyway, crocodiles never stopped river navigation.
 
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