Where to Place the Civilization of the Dinosaurs in the Timeline

Have you heard about the lost civilization of the dinosaurs? It’s been a topic in science fiction and fantasy more than once. But there are also people who ask in all seriousness if there isn’t some way that dinosaurs could have evolved intelligence equivalent to our own millions of years ago. After all, what we know about dinosaurs comes from studying fossils and there are darned few of those lying around in our backyards.

If you have an interest in the paranormal, you may sometimes ask where the demonic presences come from. They are deemed to be something other than human — so were they always spiritual beings or are they perhaps remnants of a long lost species that evolved to a state of self-awareness and intelligence at least as advanced as we are today?

Time is a powerful force. So is gravity. So is the weathering process. Bring enough time, gravity, and weathering together and you can wipe clean the face of a planet. Add plate tectonics to that mix and you have all the ingredients for a chronological mystery that can never be fully investigated.

The Earth’s crust, being in continual movement, is constantly raising up new rock and burying old rock. In the space of only a few million years an entire section of land can crumble into the ocean. In another few million years that ocean floor can slide under a crustal plate thousands of miles out to sea.

Not all ocean floor vanishes back into the magma. Some of it slides up into land, forms new continents and mountains, and the process changes direction. The Indian subcontinent and the Himalayan mountains are the most well-known example of ocean floor rising up over time. The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is a place where ocean floor slides back into the mantle.

It seems unlikely that we’ll ever find traces of a lost civilization of the dinosaurs. Although we find increasingly complex information that leads us to believe that many late Mesozoic Era (248-65 million years ago) dinosaurs had social habits and highly specialized traits, there is nothing in the fossil record to show that any of them had evolved an intelligence equivalent to our own.

Still, humankind only emerged from the primate family about 4-7 million years ago. The most primate-like ancestors of primates may have arisen around 54 million years ago. It took another 20 million years or so for true primates to evolve. But during that same time the ancestors of cetaceans moved out into the oceans — and we are now convinced that cetaceans and related species possess considerable if not humanlike intelligence.

Some recent studies also suggest that a small part of the dinosaur ecosystem may have survived the so-called Extinction Event that occurred around 65 million years ago. These final dinosaurs died out in the space of a few million years and so far as we know they left no trace of any descendants. Some reptiles and of course birds survived the ages to live with us today. Some ancient fish species also still live. But today’s ecosystem largely evolved from less dominant species that coexisted with the dinosaurs and their contemporaries.

So if one wanted to speculate about a lost civilization that could have arisen near the end of the Mesozoic, what timeline would support that thesis? Some new climate research suggests an odd 20,000-year warming period that occurred almost 56 million years ago.

Modern humans are thought to have evolved around 200,000 years ago from earlier hominids. Recent studies suggest that Homo Sapiens could have appeared as much as 400,000 years ago. But human civilization (so far as we know) only arose during the current warm (interglacial) period, which has so far lasted about 12-15,000 years. At most we have another 5-10,000 years before the Earth cools again into another glacial period that will last 50-70,000 years.

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum period (aka PETM) is dated from 55.964 to 55.728 million years ago. Scientists believe that somewhere in that range of years there was an unusually warm 20,000 year period that cannot be attributed to known natural causes.

That only means we are looking for an unknown natural cause, but if you want to let your imagination wander, then imagine what the Earth might have been like if — out of the end of the Mesozoic a species advanced enough to evolve into a hominid-level intelligence survived. What if that species could have achieved civilization?

What would we be able to find of that civilization? Would it necessarily have left traces behind of artifacts similar to the artifacts we find from hominids over the past few million years? How likely is a 60 million-year-old stone tool to survive in a recognizable form? What if the Mesozoid intelligences didn’t use stone tools but rather worked with other materials (such as obsidian, bone, and shell) that our ancestors also learned to use?

We haven’t found any cemetaries — no remnants of cities. But what should we look for? If dinosaur communities were too primitive to be considered as intelligent as early hominids, could their descendants have nonetheless become more sophisticated? We have learned that some dinosaur species protected their young, migrated in groups, had long adolescences, and even lived as much as 60-70 years. We know that some dinosaur groups achieved huge numbers, and some of them survived into adulthood with horrific scars and bone damage.

All we need is to find an artificially flat surface and paleontologists will start suggesting that perhaps there were dinosaur rituals, religions, and societies.

According to available data, the PETM happened “on the falling limb of a cycle when warming by the sun would not have been at a maximum”. In other words, the PETM is not a normal interglacial period that comes at the peak of a 400,000 year cycle similar to our own interglacial period.

While science may one day suggest a purely natural cause for the 20,000 year-long warm period, science fiction writers have a candidate for mapping a lost civilization to an early period in mammalian development that might allow for the survival of a more ancient species.

In 20,000 years those intelligent creatures could have learned to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning plants, perhaps even producing cellulose-based fuels; and maybe, just maybe, they reached for the stars and left the Earth behind. Perhaps they were forced to leave the planet by the inevitable glacial period.

Their spirits could still be among us, offended at our humanity, humbled by our naivete, amused by our pride and our follies. They could, for all we know, be the angels and demons our ancestors knew and feared. They could be the sources of many “paranormal” experiences.

It’s something to think about — and maybe to write about.