Humans and Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs were a diverse and successful group of animals whose remains have fascinated us and inspired myths that persist into modern times. Although the last dinosaur died 63 million years before the first human, some stories infer contemporaneous existence or defy the fact of their demise. Behind these narrative relationships may lie an innate interest in what ended the reign of such successful creatures, as realization grows that humans are not exempt from similar factors causing their own fate.

Dinosaurs beheld the world long before humans. They evolved 230 million years ago on the single continent that was then the land surface of the earth. As the pieces of Pangaea separated and slowly drifted apart, their descendants were carried across the surface of the globe to become a hugely diverse and successful force of terrestrial ecology. They left traces of their existence on every continent, fossilized as tracks or bones preserved by geological accident. After a 165-million-year reign on earth, they suffered an abrupt demise, leaving their feathered descendants to fly over a world that was now safe for mammals. It would be another 58 million years until the first hominids appeared in present-day Africa, and a further 6 million years before our genus Homo could gaze upon the fossilized traces, and wonder …

Dinosaurs have long held deep fascination for humans. Their large and strange bones, continuously being exposed naturally by erosion, were encountered with amazement by ancient peoples. With no concept that animals once alive may have become extinct, speculation on the obviously dangerous creature that must visit from somewhere over the horizon inspired imagination and fear, and thus were born mythological creatures such as dragons, griffins, and winged serpents. Noting the similarity of sharp teeth and long tails of some dinosaur skeletons to familiar animals, depictions of dragons carried heads like a lion and bodies of snakelike form. Commonly, these reconstructions had wings, a not-too-inaccurate reconstruction of some dinosaurs that share close ancestry with birds. The additional inference of flight explained how the mythological creature could travel between its unseen lair and the local environment where its mortal remains lay.

These mythological explanations were later supplanted by formal religious beliefs, as in the Genesis account of the creation. Rational thought on how organisms can develop, change, and end would precipitate only in the last three centuries of human evolution. Yet stories and myth about humans and dinosaurs coexisting persist in some countries.

In central Africa and South America, legends tell of “Mokele-mbembe,” alluding to a still-living sauropod dinosaur, while in Europe, local myths infer other creatures left over from the Mesozoic age of dinosaurs are still rearing their heads. The purveyors of these stories do not seem to consider that animals cannot live forever as individuals; a herd of dinosaurs large enough to form a sustainable breeding population this last 65 million years would be hard to miss even in the jungles of Congo, never mind around the tourist-tramped shores of Scottish Loch Ness.

In North America, supposedly human footprint traces are claimed to occur with those of dinosaurs at a small number of dinosaur track sites. Studies have revealed that the claimed human prints are in fact misidentified dinosaur tracks, natural erosions, or carvings by hoaxers and others with vested interests in myth. In some locales, there have arisen small industries to perpetuate and trade on such stories, sustaining fundraising from tourism and religious cultures.

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