They had to fit on a spaceship, and that spaceship had to fit on a sound stage.
Nah but really, in canon, all lifeforms gravitate towards being human shaped because an ancient progenitor race thought that bilateral symmetry and upright walking was super rad. Also in canon, Earth has barely any dilithium on it (if any) so the evidence you're after might be the lack of the magical super-energy space crystals. The dinosaurs used them all to fly to the Delta Quadrant.
I bet these dinosaurs lived in the Cretaceous period in Antarctica, where it was temperate. When the icecaps melt we'll discover vast cities, monuments and technology from the dinosapiens.
Some Star Trek episodes require more suspension of belief than others. :)
Distant Origin is a fun episode because of the callbacks to earlier episodes, along with the bizarre idea that intelligent life evolved and left Earth tens of millions of years before humans. I love it, though, specifically because it is weird and, of course, because the Voth have such a hierarchical, rigid, dogmatic civilisation despite being very technologically advanced.
It’s also a great reminder that those in power will often abuse their power in order to retain their power.
Google tells me it takes between 10 and 60 million years for petroleum to form, so wouldn't there have already been deposits before dinosaurs went extinct? They were around for over 85 million years themselves.
They're supposed to be hadrosaurs which puts them around 60-70 million years ago. That's plenty of time for any evidence to be buried - we could've lost their entire landmass to continental drift, volcanoes, natural disasters of all sorts. Fossilisation is also probably less likely for creatures smart enough to avoid getting trapped in mud.
It's plausible that we wouldn't have stumbled across any evidence if we didn't know to look for it, but once Voyager gets home and we start looking tech should be good enough to track it down. I wonder what the Voth do when we come back with their ancestor's fossilised bones?
Dymethidretic alloys are indistinguishable from ferrosilicates without the use of an electron microscope and form a strong boundary layer between the mesomorphic granites of the pre-cretaceous and the limestone rich concretions of the cretaceous era giving us a firm indication of their widespread constructive use over several millennia approximately 62 million years ago. Were it not for Voyager's scans of Voth technology we would have no idea these were anything other than the result of fundamental geologic processes.
I'm talking about a sci-fi universe where every plot hole can be filled with sufficiently plausible sounding techno-babble. You want to have a serious discussion about whether or not a technological species would leave sufficient evidence of their existence for us to detect it.
I don't really care one way or the other, I just like Star Trek.
If you want to have a serious discussion about it, maybe try the Daystrom Institute sub, or do a search for any of the many posts about the Silurian Hypothesis; it's unsurprisingly inconclusive, but interesting nonetheless.
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u/[deleted] May 19 '26
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