this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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The only way we'll 100% know what dinosaurs looked like, is if we start cloning some of em.
Everything else is just best educated guess.
I read somewhere that the oxygen concentration was much higher back then to a point where dinosaurs would not be viable in today’s atmosphere. They would have to stay in air tight enclosures. In a way that makes me feel safer about bringing them back. OH NO THE RAPTORS ESCAPED…. aaaand they suffocated. They’re dead now.
Dinosaurs should still be fine. The oxygen concentration really applied to animals with passive breathing systems like insects. Insects don’t actually breathe, they sort of just let the air directly oxygenate their blood. They can’t regulate breathing faster when they need more oxygen.
Dinosaurs have forced breathing through lungs. The blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived including even the most massive dinosaurs, and blue whales still breathe air.
There’s not much difference between a velociraptor and a modern bird of prey either, other than the teeth.
They do need extra oxygen to do anything, though. They might be able to walk around, but they'll tire quickly if they have to do any exertion.
Whales don't have to run on land, and the biggest ones have no predators besides humans.
No that’s absolutely false too. Atmospheric oxygen was lower during the Jurassic and Cretaceous than it is today.
It peaked during the Carboniferous period, and then started declining in the Triassic and bottomed out right around the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event 200MYA, then rapidly increased again. Dinosaurs became the dominant terrestrial species after this, and all of the huge dinosaurs lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131118081043.htm
Studies of air bubbles trapped in amber revealed atmospheric oxygen levels of 10-15% during the time the largest dinosaurs existed. We have 21% today.
Great, so they'd hyperventilate and keep getting dizzy. A bunch of hyper oxygenated, dizzy velociraptors. What could go wrong.
That’s very likely true for insects and other creatures that don’t actually have lungs, and dubiously true for things with lungs. It certainly may have influenced their size to some extent but scientists far smarter than me have no reason to suspect they wouldn’t be able to breathe today.
Let's get to cloning
.... I just did a Jurassic Park/world binge. Let's not.
Even though you saw the movies again and not me, just thinking about those movies makes me more excited for cloning dinosaurs.
I honestly wonder why we haven't at this point cloned more extinct animals yet.
I looked into it, apparently we are not good enough at it yet.
Yeah I thought for sure that we'd have mammoths back by now
Just put em on some island. Just don’t clone flying monsters or swimming monsters
I'd love to, but the half-life of environmental DNA is too short to fully reconstruct their genomes with our current technology. The most promising route would probably be to tinker with the genomes of extant crocodiles and birds to come up with a "close guess" of what dinosaur genomes may have looked like.
You'd love to? Are you a cloner?
Guys, this dinosaur is giving me a raging cloner
Haha, probably not me personally, as I have neither the facilities nor the expertise. I should have said "I'd love us to", referring to humanity in general. Dinosaurs will be close to impossible to clone. Woolly Mammoths should be theoretically possible, but still very difficult. Some easier (though less charismatic) targets would be something like the Christmas Island rat or the Gastric Brooding Frog.
There are so many tar pits. Let's get to dredging(humanity, not me).
Depends on how deep your.....pocketbook is
Clever girl
I saw a documentary where they did that. Didn't work out very well for Newman 🤷
Owner spared every expense despite what he said to the contrary. So, just like most business owners IRL.
Absolutely.