Life Finds a Way - Or does it? (Part 1)

Who doesn't love dinosaurs? I mean really. Those of you who've seen Jurassic Park may have already guessed from the post title that this was inspired by the upcoming movie, and of course the fact that everyone loves the surreal idea of a prehistoric world full of dragon-like creatures that were all wiped out by an enormous astronomical event 65 million years ago!

But anyway down to the science.

It occurs to me that I haven't yet explained what this post is about so today I will be exploring if Jurassic Park would work as we all know that the Earth was very very different 65 million years ago, but would a fully grown dinosaur simply be able to cope with the conditions nowadays?

In order to answer this we must firstly think, what was the Earth actually like 65 million years ago? And what has changes today that would hamper me from being able to ride a triceratops around?


First of all lets tackle what today is seen as our future doom hanging over us all.... climate change!


Many famous dinosaurs that we know and love (Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops etc) are from the Triassic period, the final of the three periods in which dinosaurs mainly lived (Cretaceous, Jurassic and then Triassic in order). The conditions at this time were in general hot and dry, which suited the dinosaurs pretty well as they were cold blooded and therefore rely largely on heat from their surroundings.

There are actually a surprising amount of areas in which a dinosaur could survive and in fact thrive under these conditions, in fact pretty much anywhere around the equator would get enough heat and sunlight to heat the blood of our reptilian friends.


Secondly - and this is a big one - food and water.


So dinosaurs either eat plants, or meat, or both, allowing us to organise them into 3 classes: Herbivore, Carnivore or Omnivore.

So we'll begin with our vegetarians, herbivores range from what were thought to be grazing creatures e.g. stegosaurus all the way to the long necked creatures akin to reptilian giraffes that munch on the tops of trees, but is there enough vegetation to support them all?

We can safely say yes to that question, however there are some problems still, many herbivores were adapted to a diet of particular plants, many of which are extinct today, so without a carefully thought out diet or the return of some prehistoric ferns we could most likely not keep our dinosaurs satisfied with the weedy plants that are about today.

The next type of dinosaurs are carnivores, meat eaters. Carnivores tend to have to eat less mass and their bodies generally process the food more efficiently meaning that it would take less food to satisfy them.

This being said I think personally that we eat so many animals that we could definitely spare a few for a dinosaur or two to eat. We wouldn't really have any trouble feeding these beasts as they aren't too picky about what the meat is either.

The final class of dinosaurs is omnivores, and although we would have no trouble supplying food for this generally medium sized, not very picky group of dinosaurs, to keep them healthy we would be faced with the challenge of balancing their diet in such a way to keep them healthy, as their diet is such a mixture that we could not overfeed them on one section at risk of imbalancing their diet.




So that's it for this post, sorry I haven't uploaded much recently but I've been completely swamped and I assure that regular uploads will resume soon. I will continue this is a second part (mainly because this is beginning to get a bit too long for my liking) so goodbye until then, as always I appreciate you all and thanks for reading :) .