The thing I’ve heard against drinking from mountain streams was that you could catch Beaver Fever whatever that is caused by… Clear running water is not necessarily clean.
Rats would be an interesting addition. Any escaped rodents would do a serious number on the egg-laying population, and any young chicks(?) sitting in unattended nests. Famously in the 1800’s, ships would put in at the remote rock isles on the east coast and Newfoundland to scavenge eggs for the Boston market and such. It wa not unusual that some rates would make it ashore from the ships, and the next year the island would be devoid of bird life. IIRC they are still fighting this battle against a rat infestation on the South Georgia Islands due to rats from whaler ships over a century ago.
(IIRC, rats and cats are blamed for the decimation of flightless birds like NZ’s iconic kiwi.)
70M years ago, no cats, no owls…
I wonder how rats would do against a recently hatched Tyrannosaurus chick?
But those are island birds with nothing like a rat on the island for them to deal with. There were plenty of tiny omnivorous mammals running around in the late Cretaceous.
Modern rats might outcompete some of those critters in some situations, but I doubt dinosaurs would be completely updated for that scenario.
This is the obvious solution. Bring a wide variety of seeds, bring chickens or small animals of both sexes, and set up a farm in your enclosure. If you also bring enough food to last a couple of years then there’s no need to worry about finding edible plants, or determining what is poisonous.
Here is a video Youtube recently decided I should watch. The guy shoots a simulated T-rex skull with a variety of guns. Unfortunately it is less Mythbusters and more just drooling over ultra-rare elephant guns.
Bottom line is hand guns do pretty much nothing—“it’s just a flesh wound”. Instead of moving up to common hunting rifles and such, he plays with his extremely large caliber specialty rifles. Those would be lethal, but doesn’t answer if a .30-30 would be effective. So something bigger than an M1911 and smaller than a GAU-8/A.
I assume the key to taking out tyrannosaurus and its ilk would be someting that takes out one of the legs. I suppose if you are a good shot, take out an eye (with possible brain damage too). If you can hit the eye you are a very good shot or too close for comfort. Is there an equivalent of a dumdum bullet for extremely large caliber weapons? (And what do old stories of elephant hunters have to say about the effectiveness of guns on large animals?)
Standing on the same piece of ground as when I departed, or on the nearest land if that’s underwater? Or at the same lat/long, the latter determined from the piece of ground where the Greenwich Observatory is located, again shifted laterally to dry ground if necessary?
20,000 years ago, pretty much evey place that’s land today was also land then. Plus a whole lot more, since sea level was some 100 meters lower than today. What you really have to worry about is if the place you’re at was under a few kilometers of ice.
I have no idea why that came out as a reply to John DiFool’s comment on 20k years back – it was supposed to be questions about the 70M scenario. North America was still a lot closer to Europe than it is now. Details aren’t precise, of course, but based on the map I was looking at, distance from Greenwich might drop me into the Western Interior Seaway.
I was almost entirely concerned with safety from predators, now vs. the Pleistocene vs. the Cretaceous, tho I’m not worried too much about talk about what to bring, what to eat, and whether you’ll materialize on dry land or in a seaway.
Here’s the unique thing about the Mesozoic Era: for reasons that are still debated today, the megafauna of the day included a niche of both herbivores and predators an entire order of magnitude larger and heavier than anything that’s existed before or since. A land of giants as it were.
Humans who average perhaps 90-150 lbs average as adults are actually among the larger animals of the Quaternary Period: there are far more mammal species below that size than above it, and even more so if you include all land vertebrates. So humans quickly became among the top tier of predators and eventually apex predators; whereas humans would be demoted an order of magnitude in the Mesozoic– imagine if in paleolithic times humans were only two feet tall to get an idea. This means that humans in the Mesozoic would be facing entirely different circumstances.
Dinosaurs probably mostly pursued a reproductive strategy known as r-selection: spawn a lot of small offspring, most don’t make it, the ones that do live to grow large. Animals that were “only” 200 kilograms would be up-and-coming newbies. I think it would have been a fabulously rich game environment for humans, possibly one that even humans couldn’t have overhunted: we would simply be picking off the ones that probably wouldn’t have made it anyway. It would also have been a fabulously dangerous predator environment.
Consider the difference between wolves and coyotes. In North America humans came close to driving wolves to extinction in the lower 48 United States; coyotes were a different matter. Smaller, more eclectic about their food, opportunistic and faster breeding, coyotes have strongly resisted human extermination efforts. Imagine how dangerous coyotes would be if as posited earlier humans were only two feet tall. That’s effectively what humans in the Mesozoic would be facing. One peculiarity of the time was that there were very few medium-sized adult theropods: juveniles of the larger species apparently filled that ecological roll. The ones that were the right size to consider a human being a meal were only second-tier predators. Humans could kill or fight off any number of them and there would always be more.
In the hands of a good marksman who knows the anatomy .303 british (roughly equivalent to US .30-06) is considered adequate for Elephant. cite An African bull elephant is about the same size as a T-rex. Any modern big game rifle should be up to the job. Expanding bullets are available in any of the popular calibers (and recommended/required by hunting regulations). A bigger/more powerful gun would allow for less skill on the part of the shooter.
The “knows the anatomy” part is harder. Having only the bones to work with we can only speculate about heart/lung/veins. Brain shots are usually a smaller target, dinosaurs aren’t known for having big brains.
The cartridges for large African game hunting rifles typically use fairly blunt bullets.
These provide about the right balance of penetration vs. expansion for large thick-skinned animals. Possibly for something as large as a full-grown dinosaur you’d want more emphasis on penetration.
Friction fire methods are so you can start a fire and prepare charred tinder that will take a spark such as from striking flint and pyrite, thereby never having to resort to friction methods ever again.
But it is good to not be dependent on irreplaceable products of an industrial civilization. There are YouTube videos of people doing the hardcore caveman survival challenge: starting with absolutely nothing but what they can find in their surroundings, make a stone knife and start a fire. Extra points if you’re doing this in the rain when it’s 2°C.
