The new Jurassic World movie envisions a time where dinosaurs are no longer every theme park's health and safety nightmare, but have instead started to reintegrate themselves as an ordinary part of our modern wildlife. Velociraptors stalk the woods like wolves. Men on horseback herd Parasaurolophus like cattle. A Tyrannosaurus rex disrupts a drive-in movie like... a bloody massive Tyrannosaurus rex. It's a premise that raises interesting questions. What impact would reintroducing dinosaurs into the wild have on our ecosystem, for example? And how would dinosaurs fare in a world so profoundly different to the one they originally lived in?
Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh and an advisor on Jurassic World Dominion, theorises that introducing, say, a T. rex into the British countryside would not be a great idea.
"There have been many cases where a predator is introduced to an ecosystem and wreaks havoc," he says. "It's happened when we brought rats or dogs to new islands, so just imagine something at the T. rex's scale.
Esta historia es de la edición June 2022 de BBC Science Focus.
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