I think the outcome would be largely affected by the details of your premise. For example, if a T. rex suddenly appeared outside my bedroom window and he/she was hungry, I probably wouldn’t stand a chance. But if I knew what was coming, I would invest in a few claymores, pistols, shotguns, lawn darts, and more, and that same T. rex would be garden fertilizer.
Remember, what made the dinosaurs extinct wasn’t the lack of ability to find food or fend off enemies under ordinary circumstances, but extraordinary situations that could not have been anticipated by them (at least according to current theories).
Fine, so there’s no such thing at all as a “species”. In fact, there’s no such thing as a “type” of anything. Everything is in the eye of the beholder.
Oh, don’t be like that. No one’s saying “everything is in the eye of the beholder”, just that A) there aren’t clear-cut boundaries between individuals of different “types” (am I of the same type as my father? And he of the same type as his father? And so on? There’s clearly a continuity of differences between individuals, rather than demarcations between distinct types). And B) there aren’t generally grounds for labelling any particular point on this continuum of individuals as more transitional than any other point.
Really, if you think these “transitional” individuals were so much worse at survival than the ancestors they sprang from, then why did their particular deviations ever get to be popular? Wouldn’t natural selection have prevented those very initial changes if they only led (in the long “transitional” period) to a decreased ability to flourish?
Just who the hell do you think you are calling paranoid ???
Are we lacking certain parameters? Is the OP’er suggesting that one fine morning we all awaken to find the sum total of animal population that has ever existed living at once on the planet? If so, i suspect that most life would not last more than a few days. Between environmental shock, overcrowding and lack of food supply and predatory behavior, there wouldn’t be much left standing after say, a week?
Are we talking massive herds representing each species and sub-species? Are we talking one representational animal? If it is the former, the planet would be quite crowded for a while, THEN the billions of pounds of dead and decaying flesh would pose their own health issues for the species still standing.
If it is the latter, then any species that survived by herd or group behavior would be doomed.
I am most curious about the reaction by proto-humans to all of it, and by we homo sapiens to the sudden appearance of groups of proto-humans, all fighting for survival.
On the upside, now with the creation of the t.v. show “Caveman”, at least those guys would have some entertainment geared towards them.
An alternative to rolling your eyes and giving up would be to take this opportunity to learn something.
The only reason we are able to do a reasonably good job of putting extant organisms into distinct boxes called “species” is that most populations around today have been breeding independently of other populations for some length of time. When you resurrect older population, you blur the lines between the boxes, and you start seeing even more of a continuum than you have today.
Let’s take one example: We say that wolves and coyotes are distinct species because they don’t usually breed in the wild. But they can breed and they can produce fertile offspring. Now, if we were to go back 1-2M years and resurrect the common ancestor of coyotes and wolves, it’s likely that that population would breed with both coyotes and wolves, and we would then have one continuous species of coyote/wolf/common-ancestor.
The same would be true with every population out there, including humans. As someone has already mentioned, the process of resurrecting these older “species” would allow gene flow between humans and chimps. In fact, it could theoretically allow gene flow between humans and pretty much any other population out there, given enough time.
You can’t just propose a hypothetical and then choose to ignore the laws of nature just so that your hypothetical can make sense. It’s like saying: What would happen if the sun disappeared, but I don’t want to consider that the planets would change their orbits.
