I was looking up stuff about GotG and saw this.
http://www.hitfix.com/news/marvel-disney-slate-guardians-of-the-galaxy-movie-for-aug-1-2014-release
I never read GotG but I’d for sure watch a movie about them.
Also found this. So it sounds official.
Coming back around, the granddaddy of 'em all might be KEEP OUT, where Earth seeks to colonize Mars with an adapt-to-the-environment drug that lets children thrive under slowly changing conditions: the kids have grown up with gradually-thinning air that provoked superhuman lung capacity, have sprouted thick fur in response to ever-cooler temperatures, have adjusted to Martian gravity, and so on, and so on; they will, they’re told, be the first Martians.
The ending, in all its public-domain glory:
You never know what you will find when you read these threads.
Gosh, I really love this place!
[QUOTE=Drunky Smurf]
I was looking up stuff about GotG and saw this.
http://www.hitfix.com/news/marvel-disney-slate-guardians-of-the-galaxy-movie-for-aug-1-2014-release
I never read GotG but I’d for sure watch a movie about them.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, should be fun. Though now I feel like I should point out that Vance Astro, the guy I mentioned, is from a different team than the one in the film. Those comics publishers and reusing trademark names!
I can’t remember the name, but there was a story or novel where the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they left for space, and came back once humans had evolved. I think it might have been a short story in a dino-related anthology.
Robert Sawyer wrote a trilogy with that idea (Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy - Wikipedia)
They used a similar plot on Doctor Who, though the dinosaurs went underground, not into space.
Star Trek Voyager had a similar episode: Distant Origin (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Another series with a similar theme would be the Dragonstar series. In it, before the dinosaurs went extinct some aliens had built an enormous space habitat, and placed in it an entire Cretaceous ecosystem big enough to survive and evolve until the present day. And as it happens, a species of intelligent dinosaur had evolved by the time humans found this habitat and reached it.
There was also a Star Trek novel called First Frontier; in that one, the dino-aliens in question used the Guardian of Forever to go back to prehistoric Earth and divert the Dinosaur Killer comet.
David Brin uses exactly the Banks’/OP’s scenario in the Uplift War series. The people raised by the alien Rothen are mislead into thinking they were Humanity’s Patrons in Upliftment. The human followers were called Daniks. 
Barry B. Longyear wrote “The Homecoming” with this theme back in 1979. He then expanded it into a novel.
Star Trek: Voyager did an episode like this, The 37’s. Voyager’s crew goes down to a planet to find a bunch of humans from the 1930’s in a cryosleep ship, including Amelia Earhart. They eventually discover that a race had visited Earth in the '30’s and kidnapped a bunch of people to use as slaves. The ship with Earhart had malfunctioned so those people stayed in cryo, but the other kidnapped humans became a slave population. Eventually they revolted and destroyed the alien masters, and now they had established a free society on the planet – although they were technologically inferior to humans on Earth.
Marvel Comics did something similar but not precisely the same a few times. The Inhumans, first introduced in the '60’s, were an offshoot race of humans who had been experimented on by the alien Kree back in pre-history. They were small in number, but essentially all of them had super powers, and they were often shown operating high-tech machinery. This wasn’t central to the concept, but Jack Kirby drew most of their early appearances, and he did awesome, crazy high-tech designs (seriously, imagesearch “kirbytech”) by nature, so the Inhumans had 'em.
A decade later, Kirby used a similar concept in his series The Eternals, positing two offshoot races (the genetically perfect Eternals and the genetically chaotic Deviants) who’d been created by the genetic manipulations of the Celestials, half-mile tall silent aliens in kirbytech suits that visit various planets every millennium or so and decide whether they need blowin’ up. While this stuff wasn’t originally part of the Marvel Universe, being set in its own continuity, it was soon incorporated, and Celestial meddling was introduced into the backstory of the Kree and other alien races such as the Skrulls. Both the Eternals and the Deviants, like the Inhumans before them, were small, hidden populations who had kirbytech devices at their disposal, although they mostly (the Eternals especially) used their superpowers instead of their technology.
I pause here to mention that Kirby’s creation of the Celestials was the pinnacle of human achievement. It’s been all downhill since.
–Cliffy