Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has become pop culture's go-to guy for fact-checking science fiction. He's delivered his takes on the authenticity or probability of such movies as Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian. Now, in a video for Gizmodo, he's got something to say about The Good Dinosaur. Here's what we learned:
What would have happened if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct?
The new Pixar animated feature poses the question, what if the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs missed? Its answer has the giant lizards still dominating the planet, and maybe some of them would've taken in human children as pets. According to deGrasse Tyson, "our mammal ancestors that were running underfoot, avoiding becoming hors d'oeuvres by T.rex probably would have stayed just that way."
Would we really not have evolved with the dinosaurs around?
Had mammals gotten much bigger, deGrasse Tyson points out that they would have become a better meal for carnivorous dinos. Without those beasts around, he says that opened "an ecological niche, enabling our mammal ancestors to aspire to become something more than just the rodents that they were, of the day."
What if dinosaurs and humans were able to dominate different parts of the Earth?
DeGrasse Tyson asks this question and claims that it could have been possible for dinos to live on one land mass and our mammal ancestors to evolve and become humans on another, and then eventually one would cross the waters separating them and they would meet. "And the dinosaurs eat us," he says, laughing. "That's probably exactly how that would play out."
I guess we don't have to ask him about the ultimate plausibility of the Jurassic Park movies. Watch the full video below.
