Jurassic World

I can see bring back extinct species as a way to repair ecological damage. One example I can think of would be bring back Australia's extinct predatory megafauna. The country is currently dealing with multiple invasive species, including large herbivores like feral horses, camels, water buffalo and pigs that are breeding out of control because none of the native predators (save for crocodiles that are restricted to watery areas) are large enough to bring them down. Bring in jaguar sized marsupials, 20 foot monitor lizards and terrestrial crocodiles and the large invasive herbivores will go down right quick.

So Hammond should’ve cloned a bunch of Cryolophosaurus and Australovenator and unleashed them all in Australia to solve overpopulation. They were native to Australia once, it’s totally safe.

The animals I was talking only went extinct several thousand years ago and despite their looks and reputation, wouldn't have been much different from modern large animals like lions or bears. Dinosaurs would be in an entirely different weight class.

Australia can heal a bit by bringing back a species that used to live there but no longer does.

The goddamn Komodo dragon. Shame most of the stuff it'd eat is missing tho, but, the species was originally part of the Australian megafauna, but went extinct there, like its larger sister species.

Still, Australia's ecosystem is not what it used to be; dingos are now the apex predator, and removing them would be harmful. Rabbits, foxes and cats, on the other hand, need to go ASAP.

And "breeding back" is not the same as cloning something; it is not the same thing. While, say, wild type aurochs being bred from cattle (which ARE domestic aurochs) is one thing, making something resembling a passenger pigeon from distant relatives isn't; that species was the earlier diverging member of the New World pigeons, and all of those living species are closer to each other than to their recently extinct odd relative.

Or, in other words, Basilosaurus was not a bred-back Tylosaurus, which by itself wasn't a bred back Cymbospondylus. If the lineage is broken, it is broken.

Komodo Dragons actually do hunt feral horses, pigs and water buffalo on the island they live on. Plus, the thing with the dingos is that they're only really able to hunt comparatively small animals like kangaroo and emu due to physical and behavioral traits, they're simply not cut out to go after animals as big as camels or feral pigs.

The thing is, red kangaroos are the largest land animal in Australia, yet a tad smaller than the stuff Komodos will readily hunt. Dingoes, well, are like most temperate region wolves; smaller than the big boreal boys.

And the only reason dingos are the apex predators in Australia is because humans brought them there, and wiped out the original ones. Whether we treat them as one or not, they are technically an invasive species.

In hopes of bringing this thread back on topic, it looks like Yangchuanosaurus will be appearing in Dominion.

You cannot treat those as if they are the same as colonists 200 years ago. What's next, deem the great American exchange as invasive species wrecking South America's endemic fauna?

No. The American Interchange was the something humans had no role in. But if humans had never colonized Australia, the species inhabiting it today would be the same as those 50,000 years ago. The megafauna of Australia became extinct as a result of human activity, and the Australian ecosystem we see today— including its apex predator, the dingo— is essentially a human product.

Therefore, any effort to "preserve" Australia's ecology must begin with restoring it, as closely as possible, to its pre-human state. Otherwise we are at best preserving a man-made ecosystem.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 3rd 2022 at 5:38:06 AM

Treating paleolithic humans as if they were the world-altering civilization we are now, rather than just another species good at spreading, like bears, wolves or lions, is folly.

It's been abundantly proven that humans do not need industrial-level, or even agricultural-level, technology to cause irreparable damage to an ecosystem. The Polynesians, when they colonized the islands of the Pacific, are estimated to have caused the extinction of over 1000 bird species alone. The only island group in the Pacific that experienced no extinctions during this time was the Galapagos, which they never reached. In total, a culture armed with nothing more advanced than fire, spears, and clubs annihilated a tenth of the world's bird species.

And if one were to look at the extinction rates of megafauna on continents, one inevitably finds that the ones with longest periods of human habitation— Africa and Eurasia— have the greatest number of surviving animals weighing over 100 kg. Conversely, such animals became extinct in larger numbers in regions where humans settled later, such as Madagascar and New Zealand, and the largest surviving terrestrial animals in those areas are smaller.

So we know that humans are capable of wiping out large numbers of species without advanced technology. And we know the distribution patterns of megafauna match the spread of humanity out of Africa, with more megafauna species surviving in areas where humans have lived for longer. This plainly illustrates that humans have been altering the planet on an ecological level for tens of thousands of years; it is not a new or recent phenomenon.

If humans had never arrived in Australia, under whatever circumstances, the fact remains that the continent would look very different than it does in reality. There would definitely be no dingos, and the large marsupial predators would still be in existence.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 3rd 2022 at 6:08:41 AM

Except one thing is civilization, and another is a species being part of a faunal turnover.

To anyone who is serious about ecology and humanity's impact on it, "civilization" is a meaningless term. There's no dividing line between "humans as a part of nature" and "humans as something unnatural". Most of the things humans are doing to the planet now — causing species to go extinct, altering the landscapes where we live— are things we've been doing for tens of thousands of years. Not necessarily at the same magnitude they're happening at now, of course, but there wasn't some magical cutoff point where we, as a species, suddenly stopped being part of the natural world.

Also, the fossil record gives us a very good idea of what faunal turnovers typically look like. The American Interchange, as you yourself pointed out, is a good example. When South America collided with North America, it resulted in an influx of animals from North America making their way south, followed by the extinction of many South American animals, and their subsequent replacement by the newcomers. This is how faunal turnovers normally happen. What happened to the megafauna of the world during the end of the Pleistocene was not a typical faunal turnover.

There were no factors in play, such as continental drift or climate change, that would have ordinarily led to one. It is true that the most recent ice age was ending around that time, but do recall that there was more than one ice age, and many of the Pleistocene megafauna easily managed to survive the warm interglacial periods. Recall, too, that not all of the species that went extinct around this time were necessarily adapted to an ice age climate. Some, like the ground sloths of South America, lived in the tropics, but they became extinct all the same.

The issue with the idea that climate change was responsible for the Pleistocene extinction is that many of the extinct species had either survived similarly warm periods before, or lived in tropical areas where the end of the ice age would not have been so noticeable.

So if climate change alone cannot explain the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, what other answer is there? Each time our ancestors set foot in new places, the fossil record shows that large-bodied species started going extinct within a few thousand years, at most. Such rapid extinction timescales simply do not happen at any other point in the fossil record, not even at times when other large predators were widespread. It's even been suggested that the domestication of the dog, about 12,000 years ago, was a deciding factor in the extinction of the megafauna. Dogs allowed human hunters to kill large animals more efficiently and outcompete other predators (one frozen dog from that time period had woolly rhino meat preserved in its stomach).

TL;DR version— saying the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna was "just another faunal turnover" really undersells how unique that extinction was, from a geological perspective.

A species became widespread and caused ecological collapses, and the ongoing extinction (because both Holocene and even Anthropocene are laughable concepts geologically speaking, they are just the ongoing Pleistocene extinction) is related to our species.

Just like the extinction of plenty of SA endemic fauna was related to NA fauna moving. You can't go around pretending pleistocene humans weren't part of nature and treating it with such a subjective "guilt".

In addition, the Australian extinction is more complex than "people came and killed everything", because stuff seemed to be going out in waves even before people arrived.

And, again, seriously, one thing is hunters-gatherers being a sucessful species that molds its ecosystem, and another is the behemoth we have turned into. Civilizations, specially industrial ones, are orders of magnitude more influential, and yet far more ephemeral, than any influential species.

And, after all, megafauna in Africa and tropical Asia, places where the human lineage has thrived for millions of years, remained quite stable until civilization got heavy; mainlaind tigers used to have a continuous range.

As for species in Pacific islands, well, let's be frank; I am a biologist specialized in zoology and with a master's in biodiversity, and, insular endemisms are, for the most part, doomed. They are unique and not "wastes", but, they fade away fast. The dodo wouldn't have been a sucessful branch of the pigeon family in 5 million years, it was an experiment that would last just as long as Mauritius remained as it was. Pacific Islands? They'd fade away. Species is all in all an arbitrary concept, and, number of species ends up not meaning much. Let's not pull out an "shame on my species" and do something with what is actually accelerating the extinction rate.

But yeah, I think we agree and are trying to argue against our respective strawmen. My bad.

Edited by Eriorguez on Feb 3rd 2022 at 2:39:35 PM

I never said anything like that. Quite the opposite. My point was that, while humans are, and have always been, part of nature, our destructive effects have existed from the very beginning. By that metric, the extinctions of the Pleistocene absolutely should be held in the same regard as more recent human-caused extinctions.

This only supports my point further. Africa and Eurasia were able to hold onto their megafauna until relatively recently because these animals, more than those elsewhere, managed to adapt to the presence of humans. The megafauna of the Americas and Australia had not evolved alongside humans for anywhere near the same length of time, and hence are no longer with us.

The Pleistocene mass extinction has been ongoing ever since humans left Africa. It was not a separate event from the so-called "Anthropocene mass extinction". Likewise, the extinction of species at the hands of humanity we see today actually goes back to the Pleistocene; it is not something new and recent.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 3rd 2022 at 9:11:06 AM

I can't say I'm not glad to hear you take a different hobby like these sort of conversations, El Squibbo.

What do you mean?

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Feb 3rd 2022 at 10:57:31 AM

I've never seen you outside of the "U.S Politics" thread so I'm glad to see you out and about, talking up a storm like a proper troper.

In hopes of bringing this back to Jurassic World, I've seen a number of toy leaks suggesting that Yangchuanosaurus and Kosmoceratops will be in Dominion.

Styracosaurus keeps getting the shaft, YET ANOTHER large theropod that won't look like itself...

Goddammit.

And let's be frank here, 90-95% (or more) of the audience will neither know nor care about what each of these big predator dinosaurs are called. Nor will they give a shit about Achillobator vs Pyroraptor vs Deinonychus or any of the variant ceratopsians etc etc.

Most of the "casual" fans will come for the Rex herself, or Blue. They might recognise stuff like stegosaurus or Triceratops but those are most likely to appear purely to get eaten by one of the endless list of theropods that no-one (in relative terms) cares about.

New trailer dropped:

Feathers confirmed and accurate Quetzy as well.

And also Grant and Sattler are back. I hope this isn't a retread of Ian's much-hyped cameo.

Man about time we had feathered raptors. This I think is one of the last big dinosaur works to not have had them till now.

Feathered Therizinosaurus and Pyroraptor my beloved