What dinosaur would be best for selective breeding to produce an animal with a lot of edible meat. What dinosaur could become a cow dinosaur
The cop-out answer is, of course, “a turkey”, since birds are dinosaurs. But we both know that’s not what you meant, so let’s get into it!
When looking at animals that are good candidates for livestock, there are a few traits that are necessary:
- Herbivorous. There’s a reason you don’t tend to see lion steak at the market. Even discounting the danger factor, farming a carnivore for its meat just doesn’t make sense if you think about it for just a few seconds - you have to put way more meat in than you’ll get out! If you start a T. rex farm, you’ll be feeding them enough hadrosaur meat to last them till they get to full adult size in 12-15 years. And a T. rex is….not much bigger than just one large hadrosaur.
- Fast-growing. Jumping off of that, you don’t want your livestock to take a long time to grow up. Cows mature in around 2 years. Elephants would produce a hell of a lot of meat, but they take 10-15 years to reach sexual maturity. In the meantime, you’ve got to take care of, feed, and protect that animal until it’s old enough to produce calves.
- Fast-reproducing. Jumping off of that, you want your animal to reproduce fairly readily. Pigs produce an average of 10-11 piglets per litter, and can have two litters per year. This gives the advantage of being able to produce more animals more quickly; elephants, which produce one calf every few years, would not be a good choice. This isn’t super relevant to dinosaurs, though, since (so far as we know) they all laid eggs, and could have fairly large clutch sizes.
- Safe/easy to contain. Now, before everyone gets on me about how dangerous cows are - yes, I know. That said, a cow is significantly safer as a farm animal than, say, a hippopotamus would be. I add “easy to contain” to this because something like a giant titanosaur, even if it were entirely docile, would be an absolute nightmare to keep enclosed.
- As large as feasible. This is self-explanatory - more meat.
With these criteria in mind, let’s start looking!
Most theropods are right out by trait #1. As carnivores, farming them for meat would be totally pointless.
Large ceratopsians, ankylosaurs, and stegosaurs are probably ruled out by trait #4. An animal with swords on its head or a tail that’s specifically evolved to smack things it doesn’t like probably aren’t very good choices for farm animals.
Giant sauropods are also probably out by #4. Good luck keeping a Brachiosaurus in a pen (much less figuring out how to safely and humanely kill one).
I’m going to count pachycephalosaurs out by #4 as well. Yes, we have many animals in captivity that use their heads to butt things, but there are other dinosaurs with fewer offencive weapons.
Excluding all other small dinosaurs by #5, we get down to two groups: ornithopods and early sauropodomorphs (the ”prosauropods” of days past).
And so we turn to trait #2! And fortunately, these are both groups for which we have detailed information on their life cycles, from analysing growth rings in bones from hatchlings to adults!
“Prosauropods” represent a grade - i.e. not a true natural group - of mostly herbivorous dinosaurs related to sauropods. Some species could get in excess of four tonnes; most species were bipedal as adults and had sharp claws on their hands. Massospondylus, a fairly typical “prosauropod”, was still growing at 15 years old.
Ornithopods are a clade of herbivorous dinosaurs defined by having no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. The largest are estimated to weigh up to 16 tonnes; hadrosaurs had no offencive weapons, instead probably relying on numbers and size as defence. Maiasaura is estimated to have reached sexual maturity around age 3, and continued growth through year 8.
In conclusion?
Weird discussions like this are my favorite part of tumblr
So, I brought this up with my family and they asked about dinosaur eggs. It occurred to me that chickens are dinosaurs and they lay fertilized and unfertilized eggs so it’s possible that ancient dinosaurs did too. So Hadrosaur burgers for lunch and hadrosaur eggs for breakfast!
So I’ve thought about this way too much.
Now, my determinations are going to be a little wilder because i’m just a paleonerd, my main thing is writing, and all of this is for a kidvid concept around time-displaced monster fighting dinosaur people, so your mileage should vary.
On the one hand, ceratopsians would seem easy to dismiss out of hand. Who wants an ill-tempered, violent animal with points on its head? Except that’s an Aurochs, the ancestor of modern cows. And domesticated pigs were derived from wild boars.
Plus you do have other options in the ceratopsian family that are smaller in size and have fewer nasty pointy bits, and entirely hornless forms like protoceratops. Avaceratops is about the size of a feed pig from this comparison, for instance:
Oviraptor was primarily herbivorous, and in most ways seems pretty emu-ish, which would put their clade and similar on the list.
And of course, we’re talking about domestic animals here. Selective breeding will warp them pretty far from where they start after just a few hundred years of amateur work, provided the reproductive cycle is fast enough. Fat, small-frilled, short-horned ceratopsians, tottering flightless pteranodons sheared for pycnofibers like archosaurian sheep, etc.
But the real protein bonanza of the cretaceous has no spine.
(from @Mycterops on twitter)
Weighing up to a pound each, the dragonflies of the era are essentially flying, angry sausage. Rich in protein, fast-reproducing, and not terribly picky about what they eat.
So if you have a society that produces, logically, mountains of biological waste, what do you do?
You feel the waste to mealworms, you feed the mealworms to dragonflies, then you deep-fry the dragonflies and serve them with a zesty dipping sauce with a side of tubercakes and a seven gallon soft drink in a tasteful collector’s cup.
Two comments on Trent’s addition:
1) Yes, pigs are that big.
2) Meganeura are not dragonflies, they’re morphologically very different once you get past the “silhouette” stage. The name griffonflies has been suggested for them.
Griffinflies. I like it. Still basically flying angry sausage, and still available with your choice of dipping sauce, or get the sampler pack with thrice the bite for twice the price!
Here’s a distressing thought. Any number of dinosaur species that didn’t have direct survivors could have had evolved a milk analogue and it would be tricky to tell at best, and crop milk is a thing in birds, so who knows what kind of odd excretions one might harvest with the right horrors of natural and unnatural selection.
