Mesozoic

I always found it fascinating how dinosaurs have lived for so long compared to us humans. It’s amazing to me that these creatures once inhabited the very same planet we call home today. More on reddit.com

The earliest dinosaurs lived at least 233 million years ago, in the Triassic. Non-avian dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, and avian dinosaurs are still alive today. More on reddit.com

In an alternate timeline, the Age of the Dinosaurs may end with a whimper instead of a bang. The Meteor missed, but the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum came and went. Now it is the early Pleistocene and the glaciers are plowing further and further into the land every year. An old hen, a descendent of basal Therizinosaurs feeds on the pine trees in the forest where the broad leafed trees are dying off one by one every winter. She is accompanied by her only surviving chick from both last year and this year. This dinosaur is different from its ancestors in that it is a much more invested parent. They build nests that incorporate their own feathers and incubate them. Though for such a large animal, this is a clumsy affair. Oftentimes older chicks will stick around to help raise these eggs, often being better at manipulating and incubating the eggs. But this year that was not enough. Only a few eggs hatched this year, and they didn’t have enough time to feed before the winter hit. The lone surviving chick feebly open its mouth in attempt to be fed, even though it is too old for this. Even it has trouble digesting the course pine needles at this age. Parent will often vomit into the young chicks mouth from their crop in order for the young to quickly gain the necessary stomach bacteria. It mother keeps feeding. It has been a lean year, and the summers, the time for incubating but also the best time to feed, have been getting shorter. The Possumwolves wait on the periphery. They are not tied to the temperature of the ground. They will wait, and soon they will eat. Many dinosaurs will still live in the tropics, and expand once the glaciers retreat again, but this will be a world they now share with mammalian megafauna. More on reddit.com

Debes heavily on: would dinosaurs consider humans prey. Many animals do not eat what they don’t consider prey, even if they could, see orcas and humans, for instance. Humans smell like mammals and t-Rex, for instance, wouldn’t have eaten mammals when it was full grown because they were too small. Likewise, these huge predators could well decide humans aren’t worth it because they’re too small. So it seems the more dangerous dinosaurs are the mid sized ones. Would they eat humans? We simply don’t know. There’s also the matter of surviving. If you die in the wilderness in the modern world, it’s most likely due to exposure or dehydration. Do these humans know how to make a shelter? How are they purifying water? Seems likely water that long ago has bacteria in it humans are not immune to, so your humans might die of a stomach bug after puking their guts out for three days and never even meet a dinosaur. What are they eating? There’s no domesticated plants in this time period, and no grasses, which means even if they found plants used to agriculture, they aren’t going to produce much food. Are they eating meat for a year? What’s preventing them from getting scurvy? And there are the herbivores. Most dangerous mammal in Africa is the hippo (most dangerous animal in the world is the mosquito), not the lion or leopard. Predators hunt when they’re hungry. I once saw a warthog rustle about in the grass next to a lion for ten minutes and the lion never attacked because it wasn’t hungry. Herbivores can and will kill at any time of day or night. Surprise a herbivore, it might kill you. Humans have no real defenses against something like a kentosaurus. They’re also hard to hunt as they’re quite big. So I don’t have high hopes for our humans, sadly. I’m guessing one gets eaten, one gets trampled by a herbivore, and the others starve or dehydrate within a few months. More on reddit.com