The Lost Continent

What if dinosaurs survived and flourished on both North and South America, perhaps replacing normal American fauna? Is this even remotely plausible? Would the Native American be able to domesticate them? Would dinosaur diseases perhaps give the Native Americans some resistance to the European diseases? What kinds of crazy cultures would result? Is there anything cooler than a Lakota Brave riding around on the back of the raptor?
The answer for the last one is no, by the way.
 
I don't think it's possible. Isn't it thought that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs landed somewhere near the Yucatan Peninsula? They would be the first ones to die if that's the case. And I doubt that no matter how ingenious the natives were that they could bring down a T-Rex, or a Brontosaurus.
 
I don't think it's possible. Isn't it thought that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs landed somewhere near the Yucatan Peninsula? They would be the first ones to die if that's the case. And I doubt that no matter how ingenious the natives were that they could bring down a T-Rex, or a Brontosaurus.

You just need spears, as long as a man....... Sorry, had to go there:D
 
What if dinosaurs survived and flourished on both North and South America, perhaps replacing normal American fauna? Is this even remotely plausible?

Like Fuzzy said; the meteor/comet that wiped out the dinosaurs struck in the area of the Yucatan Peninsula,
and there indeed is strong fossil evidence that especially the North American fauna was hit hardest.

So, no, dinosaur survival in the America's is not quite plausible.

Would the Native American be able to domesticate them? Would dinosaur diseases perhaps give the Native Americans some resistance to the European diseases?

Highly unlikely, because that would require these dinosaur diseases to be almost identical to typically human diseases like measles and smallpox. And on top of that, dinosaur diseases would be adapted to the somewhat reptillian physiology of one or a few specific dinosaur species, which makes it quite unlikely that these diseases would be able to adapt to a human or any other mammalian physiology.

What kinds of crazy cultures would result? Is there anything cooler than a Lakota Brave riding around on the back of the raptor?
The answer for the last one is no, by the way.

Depends on wether these dino's would be succesfully domesticated,
or just wiped out, like what happened to the OTL American megafauna.

I'm really not sure on wether dinosaurs could be succesfully domesticated, hence there's simply not nearly enough known about their instincts and behaviour to determine how suitable they would be for that.

However, the attempts to domesticate mammalian predators and birds of prey have shown that predators are generally hard to domesticate, because of their naturally agressive instincts.

Pack predators (which a number of raptors were) are generally a little easier to domesticate than solitairy predators (that can never be fully domesticated) because domestication will appeal to their natural instincts of group behaviour and rank within the group.

So as for the Lakota raptor-rider, I'd say it might be possible,
and then I'm still being an optimist here.

But it would be really cool nonetheless, I'll give you that!
 

Hendryk

Banned
You may have a better chance with Australia, which, when the earliest human settlers arrived, still hosted some interesting megafauna, in particular the megalania, a kind of giant lizard.
 
In OTL we believe that the comet, meteor whatever his Yukatan and that this was what made the Americas a particularly poor candidate for their survival.

Assume it hit some other place and that some dinosaurs surve on an island which eventually gets moved by tectonics to the Americas.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Assume it hit some other place and that some dinosaurs surve on an island which eventually gets moved by tectonics to the Americas.
The butterflies of a different Cretaceous extinction would be so huge, we may not even be able to assume the eventual emergence of primates, let alone homo sapiens.
 
Well, a few things.

The Amerinds would wipe 90% of them out, including all the ones of impressive size. It's not a matter of weapons, though it's worth remembering that the first immigrants from Siberia were already big game hunters. Humans have fire, and that is enough. They could drive almost anything away from the choicest watering holes and food sources, and would burn out the thick woods deliberately to give them better hunting grounds. It might even be easier to get dinosaurs to stampede of a cliff than it was for bison. They'd outcompete pretty much everything, and outcompetition kills you just as dead as hunting.

You might have smaller Triceratops instead of Buffalo, but they'd still be nearly annihilated and end up trapped in the bounds of Yellowstone and on specialty farms. I'm not sure how thickly feathered Struthiomimus and Gallimimus types could get, but if they got total cover, they might have a shot at the niches of deer, elk, or moose. I somewhat doubt it, though. There's also a distant shot that you'd have something like a Hypselophodon or small Pachycephalosaur surviving in the Rockies or South America, instead of llamas or taipirs or deer. The last groundsloths died out around the time of Columbus' arrival, so if you are very lucky, you might get a few European witnesses to the last of the medium size Dinosaurs.

Domesticated animals just aren't in the cards here. In fact, if dinos are filling the llama/alpaca niche, there will be even fewer domesticateds. And if there could have been any domesticated dinos, I promise you that they would not be carnivores. And if we handwave it so there are domesticated, carnivorous dinosaurs, you still could not ride them. Apologies.

It would be pretty awesome.
 
And then there still is the issue of how the dino's would respond to the ice ages, and not to mention the introduction of land mammals in North America during these ice ages, when North America and Asia were connected due to dropping sealevels. I assure you, that will cause some MAJOR evolutionairy butterflies.

And then I'm not even talking about the facts that dogs and camels (and possibly modern horses) evolved in North America, hence an absense of a dominant mammalian fauna in specifically North America will result into some major evolutionairy butterflies that affect the whole world and humanity as well...
 

MrP

Banned
Plus, we're talking 65 million years of evolution getting in the way. Only by coincidence are these critters going to look a lot like their ancient forebears.
 
Here's a zany idea. You remember Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's the Lost World, right? What if the dinos that lived plateu were found by say, the Tawatinsu (Inca), or actually Moche, or another ancient civilization, would better because it would earlier, when a landslide caused the plateu to collapse, and the dinos were spread across North America.
That's definetly ASB though.
Oh well. Aztecs riding brontosaurs, feeding hearts to caged tyranosaurs, Lakota riding around on raptors, and all the Amerinds wearing dinoskin cloakes and tooth and claw topped spears just really captured my imagination. Might do a few stories on in anyway, truth be damned!
 
More power to you. I suspect it would be very common for the feathers of a given predatory dinosaur to be arranged into a headdress as part of gaining it's power / worshipping it.

If you are going to do them, a bit of plausibility can be forced by "scaling up" the animals that survived the amerinds in OTL. Tyrannosaurids about twice the size of Kodiak Bears, Ceratopsians half again the size of buffalo, Raptors in place of wolves, that sort of thing. Not technically plausible, but close enough to be taken seriously.
 
The long heavy reptilian tail would be a problem when harnessing a plant-eater to pull a cart or a plough. See Prrhistoric Park episode 5 where a titanosaur pulls a jeep out of mud: the tow rope had to be very long to reach past the end of the titanosaur's tail.
 
And if we handwave it so there are domesticated, carnivorous dinosaurs, you still could not ride them. Apologies.

It would be pretty awesome.

0671318268.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
 
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Oh well. Aztecs riding brontosaurs, feeding hearts to caged tyranosaurs, Lakota riding around on raptors, and all the Amerinds wearing dinoskin cloakes and tooth and claw topped spears just really captured my imagination. Might do a few stories on in anyway, truth be damned!

Stories are cool, and pictures- seriously i'd pay someone to draw the images described above and some such.
 
there's dinosaur/(like) cretaures that can be ridden in Gor and similar sci-fi stories (think I heard/read a story set on an inhabited venus with riddable dinos)
 
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