Also worth considering that humans became the dominant species after developing civilization or maybe by developing civilization.

Even pre-civilisation humans were having substantial impacts on local landscapes and ecosystems, particularly in terms of out-competing other top predators.

"Civilisation" defined as "having established cities". Arguably much of North America and Australia would be pre-civilisation by this definition. There are some exceptions among Native Americans in North America, but most cultures seem to have been tribal and reasonably nomadic or based in small villages lacking the complex social and economic structures, as well as trade and diplomatic relations associated with cities. Pueblo culture would be the obvious exception, possibly also mound culture (Illinois / Mississippi Valley). This is not an area of expertise for me.

And my point remains that even without signifificant cities or intensive capital, these cultures had profound iimpacts on their landscapes and were clearly an apex species.

I thought dinosaurs were not adapted to aquatic environments? Marine reptiles like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were not dinosaurs. Spinosaurus, though, was semiaquatic.

I mean, Dinosaurs weren't a species.

This is a pedantic dismissal of the comment above. We all understood what he meant.

If your intent is to educate HN on the difference between species, genus, family, order, ..., perhaps do so more constructively?

I guess I just felt that there was quite a large number of dinosaur species for civilization to arise in, not to mention they were on land, so it might be weird to say sharks didn't develop civilization over a long period of time given the differences compared.

But I suppose you didn't understand what I meant.

I don't think any of that was conveyed by the phrase "Dinosaurs weren't a species" :)

I guess I do have a tendency to not specify everything but to just leave some things as implied, that said I think the amount of dinosaur species vs. the amount of shark species is strongly implied when saying dinosaurs is not a species in context.

The land thing was not as strongly implied but again one might consider it when thinking yeah dinosaurs aren't a species, neither are sharks but the numbers don't align...hmm,hmm oh yeah and also the dinosaur species covered many more possible environments.

Haha I do that too sometimes. But for perspective, it's quite a leap for me (and it seems most others reading this too), and not at all "strongly implied" by your statement, even in context. I'm sure that chain of inference might be natural and automatic with your style of thinking, but my mind naturally goes down a completely different path when confronted with your initial statement, so it's probably best to elaborate what you're actually implying to avoid miscommunication :)

To be entirely fair, neither is "shark" a single species...

But yes -- my point was that no shark species formed a civilization over that vast period, so it's hard to say whether any dinosaur species would have.

ok, fair enough.

But the plural of "species" is "species". When you are talking about one species, you say "species". When you are talking about multiple species, like all the species of dinosaurs, you say "species". "Dinosaurs were the dominant species" is correct, talking about multiple species. "Humans are the dominant species" is correct, talking about one species.

ok well I had to upvote that, despite it pointing out I'm an idiot.