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The notion that non-avian dinosaurs and humans actually coexisted at some time in the past or still coexist in the present is a pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical belief common among Young Earth creationists, cryptozoologists, and some other groups. This belief often contradicts the scientific understanding of the fossil record and known ...
Jun 30, 2023 · New evidence suggests human ancestors and dinosaurs may have briefly lived at the same time on Earth. ... causing the mass extinction of non avian dinosaurs. ... were found to have co-existed with ...
- 1 min
Jun 30, 2023 · New evidence suggests human ancestors and dinosaurs may have briefly lived at the same time on Earth. ... mass extinction of non avian dinosaurs. ... the Cretaceous period and therefore co-existed ...
- Overview
- Dino DNA
- Life Finds a Way
- Related: Pictures of the Jurassic Period
- Don't Eat the Tourists
- Welcome to Jurassic World
“The dinosaurs would be aliens in our world.”
In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, humans are faced with a moral dilemma: Do we save the dinosaurs brought back to life by science when they are threatened by volcanic annihilation? Or do we let the dangerous beasts perish again?
In the Jurassic Park movies, scientists extract dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber. In the real world, paleontologists have found huge numbers of insects and other invertebrates in amber, including blood-sucking ticks from the Cretaceous period.
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Dinosaurs 101
Over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed the Earth. Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as surprising facts about their extinction.
But science has actually gone one better than fiction since the first Jurassic Park film came out in 1993: In late 2016, paleontologists announced the discovery of most of a dinosaur tail in amber, with well-preserved feathers and skin.
But even with fossilized bits of dinosaur in amber and other excellently preserved dinosaurs that retain traces of their original organic material, the chances of finding intact dinosaur DNA remains, sadly, almost nonexistent.
Several U.S. teams are trying very hard right now to use gene editing technology and ancient DNA sequences to resurrect lost species. Bringing back animals that became extinct even 20 years ago is a challenge that is beyond us for now, Benton says.
However, gene editing technology using a technique called CRISPR is advancing at lightning speed. Already scientists have been able to stitch together genetic pieces from various animals, as the fictional teams do in the Jurassic Park films.
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The Jurassic period (199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago) was characterized by a warm, wet climate that gave rise to lush vegetation and abundant life. Many new dinosaurs emerged—in great numbers. Among them were stegosaurs, brachiosaurs, allosaurs, and many others.
The Jurassic period (199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago) was characterized by a warm, wet climate that gave rise to lush vegetation and abundant life. Many new dinosaurs emerged—in great numbers. Among them were stegosaurs, brachiosaurs, allosaurs, and many others.
Artwork by Publiphoto/Photo Researchers Inc.
In the first movie, geneticists use frog DNA to fill in the missing pieces in the dinosaur DNA found in amber. In a similar real-world case, researchers led by geneticist George Church at Harvard University are attempting to insert mammoth genes recovered from ancient DNA into the modern Asian elephant genome as part of their mammoth de-extinction project.
So, assuming we have created and genetically perfected our modern-day dinosaurs using technologies that don’t yet exist, could they survive and thrive alongside people?
Based on our modern relationships with large carnivores such as lions, wolves, and bears, it’s clear that people and predators rarely get along. And in most cases, people prevail while the animals dwindle.
Arbour says she’d love to live in a world where Ankylosaurus are roaming around in the wild, but it’s hard even for large plant-eating animals to coexist with humans, as we use up enormous amounts of space for growing food and building our homes and settlements.
“We don’t like large animals to encroach on those spaces,” she says. “I can’t imagine we’d coexist with a colossal predator like Tyrannosaurus rex. We couldn’t tolerate wolves in most of North America and did a pretty good job of nearly wiping them out completely—how could we live with a predator more than 70 times larger than a wolf?”
In addition, dinosaurs lived in ecosystems that have no modern analogues, Maidment says. Grass and grasslands hadn’t even evolved in the Cretaceous, and large mammals had yet to make their entrance.
“What would dinosaurs eat, and how would their digestive systems cope? How would they deal with mammalian predators? Where would we keep them? And what rights would they have? I think the ethical issues around cloning a dinosaur would be almost as difficult as the scientific ones,” she says.
But, Brusatte says, we should remember a simple but powerful truth: Dinosaurs already coexist with us in the form of birds. Today’s avian animals are the descendants of primitive ground-dwelling birds that survived when all the world’s forests were destroyed 66 million years ago.
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Are Birds Modern-Day Dinosaurs?
Modern birds consist of 247 families and 10,731 species, more than any other vertebrate group except fish. An asteroid strike 66 million years ago devastated the dinosaurs. But today’s birds are proof there were a few survivors.
“Turkeys, ostriches, and eagles are not really that different in their looks or behaviors than extinct dinosaurs such as Velociraptor. So obviously humans and dinosaurs can live together,” notes Brusatte. “We keep dinosaurs as pets, eat them, enjoy looking at them in nature and in zoos, and treat them as mascots for some of our favorite sports teams.”
Arbour says that while she loves the ongoing research into resurrecting extinct species, she hopes that our focus will remain on conserving the species that are still here.
- 4 min
- John Pickrell
Sep 27, 2023 · Until recently, the available evidence overwhelmingly supported the idea that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist at the same time and place. Some claim that the fossil record shows no direct evidence of humans living alongside dinosaurs. But since birds are descendants of dinosaurs, some argue that they technically live alongside us today.
- Nathaniel Scharping
Sep 25, 2023 · Experts have proposed an “explosive” model in which mammalian evolution waits patiently for dinosaurs to exit the stage and then explodes. The “short fuse” model assumes that the process began deep in the Cretaceous, whereas the “long fuse” and “soft explosive” versions conclude it began later in the period. The paper says its ...
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Jun 8, 2022 · So people who study ancient humans do look at DNA, but once they get past that 2 million point, there's just, they've never been able to find anything that still preserve the structure that you could actually sequence. So, you know, the oldest or the youngest, sorry, non-avian dinosaurs are 66 million years old. Right. Perry Roth-Johnson (09:58 ...
