4 ms·

It dropped by a third, which is less than the difference between New York and La Paz, so I guess they could deal with it? I wonder how well their immune systems

It dropped by a third, which is less than the difference between New York and La Paz, so I guess they could deal with it? I wonder how well their immune systems would handle modern germs, though...

warent 4y ago
It seems like they would be invulnerable to modern germs, because how could any germs exist which would thrive off hundred-million-year-old genomes
- cogman10 4y ago
  "germ" is a bad term. Certainly it's somewhat unlikely (but not impossible!) for them to be susceptible to a virus. Bacteria/fungal/etc though? They are perfectly susceptible to all those "germs". Strep doesn't really care if it's infecting a human or an animal. It just needs a hospitable environment.
- VLM 4y ago
  We've never done the experiment, but there are innumerable germs that infect across species, so they'd be catching all kinds of stuff. "FIV cross-species transmission: An evolutionary prospective" is an interesting paper as an example. It seems FIV infects all cats in the cat family. That paper has a long discussion of the old and new world cat problem as relates to FIV. I'm well aware that saber tooth tigers are not dinos but if we brought saber tooth tigers back they would probably be screwed over by FIV either instantly or at least very soon. An interesting google search phrase is "diseases of farmed crocodiles and ostriches" and apparently there's a reason our supermarkets are full of the livestock we eat; raising meat crocs looks like a HUGE disease headache. Imagine a giant 400 foot long dinosaur suffering from Caiman Pox. Raising disease free reptiles that we already have experience with seems to be a big headache; I predict it would be pretty tough to raise dinos.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Dinosaurs are distant ancestors of birds, and we keep billions of birds in captivity all over the world, which has allowed for a whole host of pretty nasty diseases that affect birds to evolve. It would be surprising if none of those were capable of infecting dinosaurs.

It dropped by a third, which is less than the difference between New York and La Paz, so I guess they could deal with it? I wonder how well their immune systems would handle modern germs, though...

warent 4y ago

It seems like they would be invulnerable to modern germs, because how could any germs exist which would thrive off hundred-million-year-old genomes

cogman10 4y ago
"germ" is a bad term. Certainly it's somewhat unlikely (but not impossible!) for them to be susceptible to a virus. Bacteria/fungal/etc though? They are perfectly susceptible to all those "germs". Strep doesn't really care if it's infecting a human or an animal. It just needs a hospitable environment.
VLM 4y ago
We've never done the experiment, but there are innumerable germs that infect across species, so they'd be catching all kinds of stuff. "FIV cross-species transmission: An evolutionary prospective" is an interesting paper as an example. It seems FIV infects all cats in the cat family. That paper has a long discussion of the old and new world cat problem as relates to FIV. I'm well aware that saber tooth tigers are not dinos but if we brought saber tooth tigers back they would probably be screwed over by FIV either instantly or at least very soon. An interesting google search phrase is "diseases of farmed crocodiles and ostriches" and apparently there's a reason our supermarkets are full of the livestock we eat; raising meat crocs looks like a HUGE disease headache. Imagine a giant 400 foot long dinosaur suffering from Caiman Pox. Raising disease free reptiles that we already have experience with seems to be a big headache; I predict it would be pretty tough to raise dinos.
mywittyname 4y ago
Dinosaurs are distant ancestors of birds, and we keep billions of birds in captivity all over the world, which has allowed for a whole host of pretty nasty diseases that affect birds to evolve. It would be surprising if none of those were capable of infecting dinosaurs.