I hope to one day have the privilege of working on a dinosaur fossil excavation. I don't care what species, so long as it's relatively intact (it's no fun just collecting teeth and dinopoop - give me something I can pick at). It's not just the adventurous aspect of the task - although that's a huge part of it, combing the wild rugged landscapes of faraway war-torn countries while dodging sandstorms and petty bureaucracy - but the simple wonder of resurrecting a beast that disappeared unfathomably long eons ago, a creature for whom we have no frame of reference and only sketchy modern analogs. The very name, Dinosauros - "Terrible Lizard?" True, many of them were "terrible" in every sense of the word, but they're as close to "lizards" as elephants are to opposums: vastly different creatures that happen to occupy the same taxonomic Class.
The fact that we have no frame of reference for these creatures brings me to an interesting point: if dinosaurs were alive today - meaning they'd been around presumably through all of human history - what would we call them?
A choice that first comes to mind would be "dragons" - the term signifies a very large, dangerous, reptilian creature. But if actual "dragons" were walking (and in the case of pterosaurs, flying) around already, would we even have a word or concept of "dragon"? We'd have enough trouble navigating a world of behemoth monsters and needle-toothed fluffy things without imagining they'd breathe fire as well.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your Insipid Nostalgia Quotient), I'm pretty sure we'd fall into the Land Before Time trap of naming the creatures after their primary characteristics: "Three-Horn" (Triceratops); "Sharp-Tooth" (T-rex); "Longneck" (Sauropods); etc. Now don't get me wrong, I did like the original Land Before Time, mostly because it combines my love of dinosaurs and Don Bluth; but you've got to admit, their naming convention was pretty puerile. Describing the terror-beast Tyrannosaurus as "Sharp-Tooth" is a bit like calling a thermonuclear warhead a "Big-Boom" - unspecific, awkward to say, and more than a bit twee.
However, we'd have to consider whether or not the creatures we're used to would have evolved at all, considering the enormous biological pressure dinosaurs put on the mammals of their day: the largest dinosaur-coextant mammal we've found is about as big as a really fat possum. So then the question becomes, if dinosaurs are the only large mammals we know, would we simply have assigned our current animal nomenclature to their saurian analogs? Would we have herds of "cows" with three horns and tough, scaly hide? Would we hunt two-legged "tigers" for their orange-and-black plumage? Would stables of swift Gallimimus serve as our "horses"? Then of course there's the question of whether they could be bred for docility, meat, and servility. Would Troodon ever learn to fetch or roll over?
I assume that by our modern age, most of the largest and most dangerous dinosaurs would have been wiped out. But would human beings really try to bring down sauropods? Some of the smallest were the size of an elephant (though "dwarf" varieties were much smaller). Argentinasaurus, believed to be the largest dinosaur ever to walk the planet, is estimated at the short end to weight 55 tons and reach 98 feet in length - and some believe it could get twice as long and heavy. Now I imagine that a well-placed spear-thrust, through the eye perhaps, could dispatch such a beast - it did have a vulnerable brain like anything else - but this would require clambering up a very tall tree that the sauropod was possibly feeding on, and then being able to survive the thrashing and death-throes that commenced. Once the beast was felled, possibly after hours or days of slow brain-bleed, what the hell do you do with a carcass that big? Sawing through the hide would take hours, during which the body would start to rot - if whales are any indication, this happens within moments of death because of the heat the big body retains. After that, it'd be an enormous challenge to carve up the meat and try to cook it. You'd end up with one gigantic mess that'd render the immediate area uninhabitable due to the stench, and attract all kinds of nasty predators such as Giganotosaurus, a heavyweight in its own right and apparently a pack-hunter to boot. You might be able to accomplish something with an army, but on the whole, slaughtering a great sauropod would be highly inefficient. So the question remains: would we kill them?
I think the answer would be, yes. Simply because we humans have some kind of...weird need to kill things much larger than ourselves. Maybe it's an inferiority complex, brought about by a mighty brain in a puny frame. Maybe it's a sense of Hunter's Prestige, artificially and metaphorically rendering ourselves larger than the beast we've conquered. Or maybe it's just automatic. Look at blue whales: killing smaller ones makes sense - they're larger and therefore a greater cache of resources in one place; but killing the largest of them was too unprofitable for whalers at the height of their trade. With our modern boats we can harvest them more effectively, but now there's really no point. What do you get out of 200 tons of whale these days? A million cans of Fancy Feast? A great whopping pile of fertilizer? I can't believe there's even a profit to be made at the end of the day, and yet people keep doing it (Japanese people, at least). And I think it's simply because of our cooperative, pack-hunting, prestige-obsessed behavior: we have to kill that giant thing because it's there. It needs conquering. An Everest of flesh, if you will.
Unfortunately I think we'd crowd out all the really interesting dinosaurs - the biggest and baddest. The only reason we still have megafauna today is because they learned to either stomp on or avoid humans, and even that strategy backfired: without protection, I'm certain we would have zero elephants, big cats or whales. They're kept alive by artificial means. In a world of dinosaurs, we'd grow weary of the same penned-in billions of domestic Triceratops, or the raggedy Troodons tipping over our trash cans. It's mind-bending but also obvious that, had dinosaurs survived and lived alongside humans to this day, we'd probably sit around wondering what life would be like if we had a furry, four-legged cat instead of a feathery, two-legged Ornitholestes.
"A furry cat," he mused, stroking his feathered "cat's" plumage as it scratched its ear with a sickle-claw. "Wouldn't that be weird?"
Rick Out.
The fact that we have no frame of reference for these creatures brings me to an interesting point: if dinosaurs were alive today - meaning they'd been around presumably through all of human history - what would we call them?
A choice that first comes to mind would be "dragons" - the term signifies a very large, dangerous, reptilian creature. But if actual "dragons" were walking (and in the case of pterosaurs, flying) around already, would we even have a word or concept of "dragon"? We'd have enough trouble navigating a world of behemoth monsters and needle-toothed fluffy things without imagining they'd breathe fire as well.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your Insipid Nostalgia Quotient), I'm pretty sure we'd fall into the Land Before Time trap of naming the creatures after their primary characteristics: "Three-Horn" (Triceratops); "Sharp-Tooth" (T-rex); "Longneck" (Sauropods); etc. Now don't get me wrong, I did like the original Land Before Time, mostly because it combines my love of dinosaurs and Don Bluth; but you've got to admit, their naming convention was pretty puerile. Describing the terror-beast Tyrannosaurus as "Sharp-Tooth" is a bit like calling a thermonuclear warhead a "Big-Boom" - unspecific, awkward to say, and more than a bit twee.
However, we'd have to consider whether or not the creatures we're used to would have evolved at all, considering the enormous biological pressure dinosaurs put on the mammals of their day: the largest dinosaur-coextant mammal we've found is about as big as a really fat possum. So then the question becomes, if dinosaurs are the only large mammals we know, would we simply have assigned our current animal nomenclature to their saurian analogs? Would we have herds of "cows" with three horns and tough, scaly hide? Would we hunt two-legged "tigers" for their orange-and-black plumage? Would stables of swift Gallimimus serve as our "horses"? Then of course there's the question of whether they could be bred for docility, meat, and servility. Would Troodon ever learn to fetch or roll over?
I assume that by our modern age, most of the largest and most dangerous dinosaurs would have been wiped out. But would human beings really try to bring down sauropods? Some of the smallest were the size of an elephant (though "dwarf" varieties were much smaller). Argentinasaurus, believed to be the largest dinosaur ever to walk the planet, is estimated at the short end to weight 55 tons and reach 98 feet in length - and some believe it could get twice as long and heavy. Now I imagine that a well-placed spear-thrust, through the eye perhaps, could dispatch such a beast - it did have a vulnerable brain like anything else - but this would require clambering up a very tall tree that the sauropod was possibly feeding on, and then being able to survive the thrashing and death-throes that commenced. Once the beast was felled, possibly after hours or days of slow brain-bleed, what the hell do you do with a carcass that big? Sawing through the hide would take hours, during which the body would start to rot - if whales are any indication, this happens within moments of death because of the heat the big body retains. After that, it'd be an enormous challenge to carve up the meat and try to cook it. You'd end up with one gigantic mess that'd render the immediate area uninhabitable due to the stench, and attract all kinds of nasty predators such as Giganotosaurus, a heavyweight in its own right and apparently a pack-hunter to boot. You might be able to accomplish something with an army, but on the whole, slaughtering a great sauropod would be highly inefficient. So the question remains: would we kill them?
I think the answer would be, yes. Simply because we humans have some kind of...weird need to kill things much larger than ourselves. Maybe it's an inferiority complex, brought about by a mighty brain in a puny frame. Maybe it's a sense of Hunter's Prestige, artificially and metaphorically rendering ourselves larger than the beast we've conquered. Or maybe it's just automatic. Look at blue whales: killing smaller ones makes sense - they're larger and therefore a greater cache of resources in one place; but killing the largest of them was too unprofitable for whalers at the height of their trade. With our modern boats we can harvest them more effectively, but now there's really no point. What do you get out of 200 tons of whale these days? A million cans of Fancy Feast? A great whopping pile of fertilizer? I can't believe there's even a profit to be made at the end of the day, and yet people keep doing it (Japanese people, at least). And I think it's simply because of our cooperative, pack-hunting, prestige-obsessed behavior: we have to kill that giant thing because it's there. It needs conquering. An Everest of flesh, if you will.
Unfortunately I think we'd crowd out all the really interesting dinosaurs - the biggest and baddest. The only reason we still have megafauna today is because they learned to either stomp on or avoid humans, and even that strategy backfired: without protection, I'm certain we would have zero elephants, big cats or whales. They're kept alive by artificial means. In a world of dinosaurs, we'd grow weary of the same penned-in billions of domestic Triceratops, or the raggedy Troodons tipping over our trash cans. It's mind-bending but also obvious that, had dinosaurs survived and lived alongside humans to this day, we'd probably sit around wondering what life would be like if we had a furry, four-legged cat instead of a feathery, two-legged Ornitholestes.
"A furry cat," he mused, stroking his feathered "cat's" plumage as it scratched its ear with a sickle-claw. "Wouldn't that be weird?"
Rick Out.
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