What would you do in the event of dinosaurs?

[Vultur]

We've had threads on what would you do if zombies and xenomorph Aliens appeared in modern-day earth.

What about dinosaurs? Let's say that, like in James F. David's "Footprints of Thunder" large areas of our world were replaced with dino-age areas. Let's also assume that this has pretty much disrupted the "grid" and technological civilization (we have to assume this because any sort of military vehicle could slaughter hordes of dinosaurs easily).

Where would you go (assuming you could get to anywhere within a few hundred miles of your home)? What would you do?

I'd probably head for some rural town in a forested area. It would be easier to survive off the grid than in a city, which would immediately become chaos even without dinos. People would be likely to have lots of guns, and even T-Rex would be vulnerable to bullets. Hopefully, dense forests would impede the biggest dinosaurs, though I wouldn't count on that (the earth was pretty wet and forested in their time).

[Flagg]

I'd stay where I was turn on the TV to watch the military, assorted rednecks, and big game hunters cull them to manageable levels.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

Get funding for a dino meat company and start choosing the meatiest, most docile creatures and begin a new industry.

[Zor]

Is this going back in time to the Cretaceous period or did the dinosaurs and such just get dumped onto the existing continents. If it is the former, a good lot of us would be either underwater or (if you are not a total asshole) on litteral islands of civilization due to plate techtonics and flooding.

I wonder how many rednecks and such get eaten by Rexes and Raptors before they get put under control? Are not dinosaurs supossed to be more durrable than contemporary creatures of the same size. Besides the Theropods Ankylosaurs would be a bitch and a half to deal with, as would migrating herds of ceratopsians.

Still, i wonder which species of Hadrosaur would taste the best?

Zor

[Marko Dash]

AP ammo becomes legal.

[Flagg]

AP ammo becomes required.

Fixed that for you.

But really, a .50 rifle should be able to deal with literally any fucking species.

[Vultur]

Is this going back in time to the Cretaceous period or did the dinosaurs and such just get dumped onto the existing continents. If it is the former, a good lot of us would be either underwater or (if you are not a total asshole) on litteral islands of civilization due to plate techtonics and flooding.

I wonder how many rednecks and such get eaten by Rexes and Raptors before they get put under control? Are not dinosaurs supossed to be more durrable than contemporary creatures of the same size. Besides the Theropods Ankylosaurs would be a bitch and a half to deal with, as would migrating herds of ceratopsians.

Still, i wonder which species of Hadrosaur would taste the best?

Zor

Continents stay same place and elevation; big chunks of Cretaceous ecosystem replace modern-day city/farm/forest/whatever.

The rednecks probably lose some people at first, but eventually kill and eat the dinosaurs. I don't think dinos would be any tougher than modern animals. The theropods weren't even armored like modern crocs. (The man-sized raptors are probably comparable to a modern cassowary, emu, or ostrich in toughness - similar size, raptors are essentially hyper-aggressive flightless birds). T-rex would be trouble, but anything that kills a bull African elephant would kill it (it's longer and thinner, so vital organs are nearer the surface).

Ankylo's would be so slow, and wouldn't attack humans unless attacked themselves.

[Vultur]

AP ammo becomes required.

Fixed that for you.

But really, a .50 rifle should be able to deal with literally any fucking species.

Definitely it would kill any aggressive species.

I'm not sure about the 50-100 ton supersauropods; would a .50 rifle kill a large whale?

I don't think AP would be necessary; armored dinos were herbivores. Some carnivores were feathered, some were scaled, but the scales weren't like crocodile armor.

[Molyneux]

AP ammo becomes required.

Fixed that for you.

But really, a .50 rifle should be able to deal with literally any fucking species.

Definitely it would kill any aggressive species.

I'm not sure about the 50-100 ton supersauropods; would a .50 rifle kill a large whale?

I don't think AP would be necessary; armored dinos were herbivores. Some carnivores were feathered, some were scaled, but the scales weren't like crocodile armor.

Herbivores can be pretty damn dangerous, though. Especially herd animals, like the larger sauropods and ceratopsians...I wonder what a brontosaurus steak would taste like? Probably chicken-esque, but I'd have to try it anyway.

[Anarchist Bunny]

As someone that knows a bit about falconry, my first instinct is to get some jesses and try to man down some of the smaller ones.

[Sea Skimmer]

Realistically we would all die because large dinosaurs can’t exist without significantly higher oxygen levels, something rather toxic to humans.

Ignoring that, I’d just get organized with my friends, family and other people in the community I know. We wont run out of food since we can just eat the giant dinosaurs, and with a number of people working together it would be very easy to make traps for the things. Even the fiercest largest predator is probably going to be pretty easy to stampede off a cliff using fire and barriers of fallen trees.

[Flagg]

AP ammo becomes required.

Fixed that for you.

But really, a .50 rifle should be able to deal with literally any fucking species.

Definitely it would kill any aggressive species.

I'm not sure about the 50-100 ton supersauropods; would a .50 rifle kill a large whale?

Yes. In fact, they use them for that.

[Flagg]

Realistically we would all die because large dinosaurs can’t exist without significantly higher oxygen levels, something rather toxic to humans.

Ignoring that, I’d just get organized with my friends, family and other people in the community I know. We wont run out of food since we can just eat the giant dinosaurs, and with a number of people working together it would be very easy to make traps for the things. Even the fiercest largest predator is probably going to be pretty easy to stampede off a cliff using fire and barriers of fallen trees.

They're fucking stupid, too. The smartest dinosaurs were supposedly only as smart as chickens.

[Rye]

They're fucking stupid, too. The smartest dinosaurs were supposedly only as smart as chickens.

I'm not too sure about that. Weren't there some that hunted in packs and had quite large brains relative to their body size? I'm thinking of Utahraptors, it strikes me as stretching credulity that something with that size brain was as dumb as the average chicken.

[hongi]

I feel for the Africans. There were some truly ginormous carnivorous dinosaurs there. I guess we'll see how a Spinosaurus likes an RPG in its face...

[Gustav32Vasa]

I wonder what a brontosaurus steak would taste like?

There are no Brontosaurus. Have never existed.

[Molyneux]

I wonder what a brontosaurus steak would taste like?

There are no Brontosaurus. Have never existed.

...technically they have, they were just named Apatosaurus.
I meant Brachiosaurus anyhow; not the biggest sauropod, but think of the brisket you could get from them.

[Vultur]

Fixed that for you.

But really, a .50 rifle should be able to deal with literally any fucking species.

Definitely it would kill any aggressive species.

I'm not sure about the 50-100 ton supersauropods; would a .50 rifle kill a large whale?

Yes. In fact, they use them for that.

Really? Wow.

[Vultur]

I don't think the hypothesis of higher oxygen levels in dinosaur times is still accepted.

[Vendetta]

Buy shares in Holland & Holland.

[gizmojumpjet]

Fire up the grill and eat them back into extinction.

[Darth Raptor]

There are no Brontosaurus. Have never existed.

...technically they have, they were just named Apatosaurus.

Nope, Brontosaurus was the body of an apatosaur with the skull of a camarasaur. It never existed outside of human cultural imagination.

[KlavoHunter]

I find out if they really DO taste like chicken.

[Sikon]

I don't think the hypothesis of higher oxygen levels in dinosaur times is still accepted.

Actually, higher oxygen levels were no doubt the case, especially with such being important for giant flying insects to function, with their respiratory system of breathing through their skin and the limits of gas diffusion.

For the giant insects that roamed Earth 300 million years ago, there was something special in the air.

A higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere let dragonflies sometimes grow to the size of hawks, and some millipede-like bugs reached some six feet (two meters) in length, a new study suggests. (Related: "Dragonflies Migrate Like Birds, Study Says" [May 10, 2006].)

Now that the proportion of oxygen has decreased, however, bugs can't grow much larger than they do now, the authors write.

The reason: The bigger an insect, the bigger the proportion of its body devoted to its tracheal system, which functions like a lung but is far less efficient at large sizes. [...]

The x-ray scans revealed that as beetles become larger, tracheae take up proportionally more room in their bodies because they need to be longer and wider to deliver enough oxygen. This, in turn, inhibits growth by crowding other organs. [...]

In the smallest beetle, tracheae take up 2 percent of the region, compared with 18 percent in the largest.

Using that information, Harrison estimated that the maximum beetle size under current oxygen levels would be about six inches (15 centimeters).

That coincides roughly with the largest known living beetle, the Titanic longhorn. [...]

During the late Carboniferous period (354 to 290 million years ago), however, oxygen levels were much higher than they are now, partly because coal swamps that leaked the gas into the air were very common.

"Back then, there was 31 to 35 percent oxygen in the air," study lead author Kaiser said. "Now we have about 21 percent."

That meant insects needed smaller quantities of air to meet their oxygen demands, allowing the creatures to grow much larger. [...]

The scientists have already experimented with fruit flies in a lab at Arizona State, raising them in tanks with different levels of oxygen.

Under higher concentrations of oxygen the fruit flies definitely get bigger, Harrison said.

From here

The largest flying creature alive today is the Andean condor Vultur gryphus. At maximum size it weighs about 22 pounds and has a wingspread of about 10 feet. But 65 million years ago in the late cretaceous period, the last age of dinosaurs, there was another larger flying animal, the giant pterosaur Quetzalcotalus. It had a wingspread of over 40 feet, the size of a small airplane. [...]

This presents a puzzle: how is it that the largest flying animals of the cretaceous were able to attain so much greater size than modern birds? [...]

There are indications that the cretaceous atmosphere may have been much richer in oxygen. [...]

Samples of 80 million year old air have been analyzed. You well might ask how there could be samples of air trapped and preserved for 80 million years. One might say that nature has provided the sample bottle.

Great forests of the extinct pine species Pinus succinifer once covered large areas of the world. Like modern pine trees the Pinus succinifer when injured by storms or boring insects had a tendency to drip pitch. This sticky resin would fall to the ground, accumulate, and eventually be buried. Over a multi-million year time span solidified pitch is fossilized into the hard resin amber. Amber in jewelry-grade specimens is almost clear, with a characteristic pale yellow color. Sometimes one finds ancient insects encased in amber. These were originally trapped in the sticky pitch and fossilized along with it, and they now provide an important base of knowledge about the insect life of past geologic eras.

As lumps of pine pitch fall to the ground and aggregate, pockets of air are sometimes enclosed, becoming tiny bubbles of air trapped in amber. The amber thus forms a natural "sample bottle", trapping air samples from millions of years in the past and preserving it for present analysis. [...]

Brenner and Landis found that for all gas samples taken from amber 80 million years old the oxygen content ranged between 25% to 35% and averaged about 30% oxygen. Cretaceous air was supercharged with oxygen. [...]

From here

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Realistically we would all die because large dinosaurs can’t exist without significantly higher oxygen levels, something rather toxic to humans.

Oxygen levels were higher then, and excessive oxygen is toxic. But the partial pressure involved here is not nearly in the lethal range.

While breathing of pure oxygen has to be limited in duration in hospitals, with oxygen toxicity effects, a more moderate elevated partial pressure of oxygen can be handled even in prolonged exposure. For long-term exposure, around 0.35 to 0.5 bar of oxygen partial pressure is the acceptable limit, compared to 0.2 bar for the natural atmosphere.

Since oxygen concentrations in the time of the dinosaurs were less than that, they would not be too much for humans.

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Humans have always been good at using their intellect and cooperation to eliminate large animals, back from the time of the mammoths, from traps and poison to ranged weapons. I should hope we would save some dinos in ecological preserves. However, short of almost 100% of the world being replaced, there would still be many millions if not billions of people, bullets, etc. to reduce the number of dangerous predators to acceptable levels.

Frequently people imagine surviving by hunting and the like within rural areas in a doomsday-type scenario. But, unless not only a large portion but literally around 99% of everyone died in this scenario, survival would actually still depend more on agriculture. Like large wild animals, the carrying capacity for humans living primarily as hunter-gatherers rather than primarily through agriculture is very low, such as:

A radius of 6 miles brings 100 square miles within the area of exploitation so that it is again typical of such groups that the population of a single camp [village] is rarely more than 100 people and typically closer to one-half or one-quarter of that figure (Lee and DeVore 1968: 11). Depending upon local conditions, the group may be required to move once or more during the year to exploit new areas. [...]

Increased population threatened the group with a decline in the quality or quantity of food available, an increased work load, or both. [...]

From here

In the above example, the carrying capacity for the hunter-gatherers was roughly on the order of a 100-person village per 6 mile radius area, around 1 person per square mile. Other sources also support the carrying capacity for hunting being typically no more than around 1 person per square mile.

For perspective, U.S. agriculture today is around 8 tons per hectare corn yield, around 2100 tons per square mile annually. That's like the capability to provide 2000 daily calories per person to around 11000 people per square mile. Of course, diet is actually more varied, including other food and with much production fed to animals for meat, but the preceding illustrates the general idea.

Much less modernized on average than the U.S. and providing a more varied diet than the preceding simplified example, world agriculture doesn't support so high as 11000 people per square mile of cropland on average, but, even in 1980, it was 800+ people per square mile of cropland (supplemented with larger areas of pasture for animals).

A rough order-of-magnitude estimate for earth's carrying capacity if everybody tried to become rural hunter-gatherers is 1 person per square mile, over earth's land area of 60 million square miles.

Such is a carrying capacity on the order of 60 million people. Even that may actually be an overestimate, though. Although there are some areas where more than 1 person per square mile of hunter-gatherers could be supported, huge areas of earth's 60 million square mile land area could support even fewer, such as deserts and arctic regions.

At most merely 1% of the world's current population of 7 billion people could survive as rural hunter-gatherers. Regarding the OP, if destruction really did somehow collapse modern civilization, the situation could be desperate people eating almost every last dinosaur, as there would be no more than at most millions of dinos* versus up to billions of hungry humans.

* Requiring 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more food per individual than humans, the ecological carrying capacity for the largest predators like Tyrannosaurus Rex must be really low, e.g. probably only some number of thousands of T. Rex worldwide, not even millions.

So unless not only many people but almost everyone died, I wouldn't expect to find enough remaining wild animals for long in rural areas to survive as a hunter.

Rather, I'd cast my lot with civilization and hope we succeed in keeping enough agriculture functioning. That should be the case in the U.S. unless nearly all of the land area was replaced, as current production per capita is around an order of magnitude higher than that strictly needed, without inefficiencies of feeding most of it to animals for meat, without surplus calories, etc. Besides, only several percent of the U.S. labor force are currently farmers, and large areas of land are unused.

[Vultur]

I wasn't thinking of pure hunting and gathering - I was thinking of largely self-sufficient rural farming communities that supplement their diet with dino meat. The larger dinosaurs' hide could probably make very tough leather.