…how do you think things would shake out? Which would survive and which would lose the survival of the fittest race? My guesses are:
(1). Transitional forms would fare very badly. That is, creatures that were half-adapted to a new way of life and didn’t have any better adapted competators at the time. The earliest proto-amphibians, proto-birds, etc.
(2). Dinosaurs, which formed an entire ecology of large vertebrates, would strongly compete with and in many cases supplant modern mammals. For example, elephants have nearly no predators today other than humans; throw tyrannosaurs into the picture and suddenly being an elephant (especially when competing for browsing range with sauropods) doesn’t look like a winning proposition anymore.
The idea of species makes more sense when limited to a snapshot in time. The process of speciation is always happening and there would be millions of “intermediate” species that are neither their common ancestor or either daughter species. You would have to set some arbitrary limit to what species you would “bring back”.
That said, yes to (2), I think. There are several specialist species that were extinct by circumstances and would make a killing if given a second chance.
That that said, these specialist species would also be finding a very different environment form what they had before their extinction, so it might not be such a wash.
I’m not sure there would room on earth for a viable population of every species that ever existed. And assuming you include every species of microbe, many (most?) larger species would be wiped out by diseases they are not immune to.
And think of all the global warming that would ensue due to the increase in methane gas.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding: there is no real correlation between something being transitional and something being extremely well adapted in its particular niche. Transitional forms are basically defined only in retrospect: in the here and now, they are simply creatures like any other making do in their particular environmental niche. They may be experts at what they do, or they may be clumsy at it, but lucking out at the moment that they do not face much competition.
In fact, the very fact that some form is NOT transitional is probably a good reason to think that it wasn’t very well adapted to its environment in the first place. Well adapted forms tend to leave lots of progeny, and the more progeny you leave, the more likely you are to have a LONG progeny, some of which will evolve to the point where you might end up calling their progenitor a transitional form. Vice versa for the forms that were not transitional: they were not largely because they quickly went extinct and thus had no chance to be anointed transitional in retrospect.
We’d come out on top. AFAIK, we are the only species that will not only go after any direct threats to our survival, but will also go after any potential threats, real or imagined.
I wonder just how well a tyrannasaur would do when trying to take on a herd of elephants, I don’t believe there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the former were cooperative animals, wheres a load of charging elephants is going to hurt, even if you are twice as big.
I wonder how those huge prehistoric sharks would get on, were they bigger than Orcas ? Again, this might well come down to group working, but ultimately it would have to be competition for resources rather than one species taking on another, in which case the main competitor for the elephant would not be a tyrannasaur, but something like a Sauropod or other herbivore.
I seem to remember that there were huge crocodiles too, again it would amount to competition for food, maybe animals of such great size lost out because the size actually worked against being predatory.
Male Orcas can grow to about 30 feet and weigh in excess of 6 tons. Megalodons are thought to have been as large as 50 feet and weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 tons.
Yup. Nothing beats the big brain. If we weren’t around I’d say dinosaurs. Cause, like, they were totally awesome.
There’s been some theorizing the the atmosphere during the dinosaurian era was more rich in oxygen; in that case most or all of the animals from that era either suffocate or are too weakened to compete and get eaten/starve.
If you’re going to include micro-organisms in your argument, I’d say we stood a less than 30% chance of surviving EVERY species of bacteria and virus.
It’s the big brain coupled with massive amounts of paranoia, I think.
Dawkins makes the very interesting point, in The Ancestors Tale, that our idea of species as separate things, and of humanity as very different from other primates, is the result of the ring species in time having died out. If all human and humanoid species existed, we might be able to mate with our ancestors, and so on down the line, until some member of the primate set of species could mate with our common ancestor with the chimps. So much for the uniqueness of man!
But this indicates a very serious problem with the premise - species exist independently only because the transitional individuals have died out. How do you even define species when they are all still around? Where is the distinction made between the gradually changing members of one species, and then the other?
There is no such thing as a “transitional form”, except in the context between one post hoc taxonomically defined species and another. All species are in constant transition.
Large primary predators are very sensitive to alterations in local prey populations, and are highly adapted to survive dependant upon an equilibrium between prey and predator (though the equilibrium may be and in fact typically is dynamic). It’s hard to say how dinosaurs would fare against modern placental mammals–we can only make inferences to their dietary and predatory habits–but I suspect modern animals in quantity would hold up reasonable well for the same reason that they exist at all; because they’ve adapted well to their environment in fevrent competition with both predators and adjacent species.
In terms of evolutionary “success”, I think single celled organisms have it on both bulk mass and timescale. Homo sapiens is a mere mote in the eye of Father Time, worth only a footnote for the large hivelike structures they build in dangerously unstable areas, a propensity for emulating the evolved climate amelioration capabilities of other animals by slaughtering them and preserving their hides for use, and the wheel and axle, which allows clowns and Harvey Mudd students to balance themselves on unicycles. Intelligence, to this point, has yet to establish itself as an evolutionarily competitive long-term strategy outside of certain niche applications.
Stranger
We could blow the shit out of dinos but a 1 ft mosquito might give us problems.
Fine. Except that today there are feathered creatures we call “birds” that are highly suited to ecological niches that involve flying. Back in the Jurassic there were feathered dinosaurs that perhaps could clumsily flap around for a bit. Put the two in competition for the same food and living space, and have them try to avoid the same predators, and see what happens.
I believe “transitional form” is a valid term when speaking of adaptations that allow the exploitation of a previously empty econiche.
What you’re missing, though, is that what you call a “transitional form” was already adapted to its particular niche. The feathered dinosaur that you say could “clumsily flap around for a bit” lived in a different niche than do modern birds. If two species live in different niches, they probably aren’t going to be competing against each other.
This is how the blue jays drove the flying squirrels to extinction!
Oh, wait … .
They would need a very different planet to live on – bigger than Earth, but with the same surface gravity.
Paging Philip Jose Farmer!
Nah, we just keep the populations small.
Thing is, life on Earth appears to have evolved through some pretty radical changes in magnetic field, solar radiation profile, & atmosphere. So it’s not clear that dinosaurs, let alone some of the much earlier non-aquatic life forms, would have any place to go.
Or maybe Robert Silverberg.