dantheman931 said:
Glerken said:
"I for one welcome our [dinosaur] overlords!" [/kent brockman voice]
I don't think dinosaurs would survive long anyway. The atmosphere today isn't nearly as oxygen-rich as it was 65 million years ago, so unless we could engineer their bodies somehow to be less reliant on oxygen (in which case you don't really have dinosaurs anymore, at least not real ones), they'd all be dead an hour after being hatched. *climbs down off of high horse*
Actually it is possible for scientists to create velociraptors the sixe of the ones in Jurrasic Park, after all the creatures in that movie are perhaps the size of a man and there are birds now a day that reach that size on small things like berries so it is possible for scientists to have a stable population of velociraptors regardless of oxygen requirements. Through the real velociraptor was the size of a wolf there was a dinosaur called Achillobator which while shaped like velociraptor, was about 17 feet long I believe.
Not sure if big dinosaurs could be created though.
It's not a matter of size, it's a matter of what the body is capable of doing with the materials it's given to work with. Your small size wouldn't save you if you were suddenly teleported to Mars; you'd suffocate all the same, because there's not enough oxygen to sustain you. (I'm ignoring the fact that the low oxygen would in fact be almost neck-and-neck with the way-the-hell-below-zero temperatures in the race to horribly end you.) The difference between Earth and Mars may not be as big as the difference between 65 million years ago and today, but it's the same basic principle; the dinosaurs would still suffocate eventually, because their bodies just wouldn't be used to the comparatively low-oxygen environment. They would have to be adapted at the genetic level, which would probably alter them to the point that you wouldn't really have dinosaurs anymore. And before anyone calls me out on this, the reason we have animals so much bigger than us that still thrive in this atmosphere is because their bodies are adapted to their particular ecological niche to use the available oxygen more efficiently; an elephant or a mouse would suffocate on Mars just like we would.
(Then again, it's late, so I might have my science screwed up right now and be pulling all of this directly out of my ass. If so, please don't bash me too hard.)
Also, to which birds are you referring? All the large birds that I know of are omnivorous.