The Cretaceous after Time Spike (spoilers)
- Thread starter ChucK Y
- Start date
What happens next in the Cretaceous?
Eric Flint has stated that he will not write any follow-up for the people sent back to the Cretaceous, though he will write more about the group of investigators in the present.
So what is likely to happen to the people sent back to the Cretaceous? There were about forty to fifty thousand humans in an area with a radius of seventy to eighty miles. There were about a hundred prison CO's and nurses and several hundred convicts from the present, about three hundred Cherokee from the late 1830's, the Cahokia mound builders, and a lot of villages of earlier Native Americans. Various patches of land, plants, and animals from various time periods were also carried back in a jumble in the area, but most of the area remained from the Cretaceous.
Could the later flowering plants and mammals establish themselves as a viable ecosystem? How well could they compete against the dinosaurs and other reptiles?
Eric Flint has stated that he will not write any follow-up for the people sent back to the Cretaceous, though he will write more about the group of investigators in the present.
So what is likely to happen to the people sent back to the Cretaceous? There were about forty to fifty thousand humans in an area with a radius of seventy to eighty miles. There were about a hundred prison CO's and nurses and several hundred convicts from the present, about three hundred Cherokee from the late 1830's, the Cahokia mound builders, and a lot of villages of earlier Native Americans. Various patches of land, plants, and animals from various time periods were also carried back in a jumble in the area, but most of the area remained from the Cretaceous.
Could the later flowering plants and mammals establish themselves as a viable ecosystem? How well could they compete against the dinosaurs and other reptiles?
I would guess the flowering plants would end up doing all right eventually; after all, they did OTL, even before the asteroid/comet impact. The bigger problem is the different climate and possibly atmospheric conditions of the time. I'm not really sure, but it's possible that the Cretaceous climate is too warm or too cold or the atmosphere is too oxygen-rich (or poor) and so they can't make a go of it--they die from heat stroke, frost bite, slowly suffocate, their crops can't grow, etc. Of course, the Native Americans are also really likely to suffer from diseases from the modern-day and 1830s populations, which can't possibly help.