Releasing a T-Rex into a modern ecosystem wouldn't be that bad, right?

T-Rex Forever LLC has a mating pair of Tyrannosaurus rex. They're a bit shady on how they got them, time travel, cloning...they won't say. Third-party biologists and paleontologists have examined the pair and their first clutch of offspring. They are definitely real.

Somehow, T-Rex Forever goes out of business. As a last act, they release this breeding pair out into the rain forests of Costa Rica.

How long can the T-rex' survive without starving in an environment without significant megafauna?

Never mind that any humans anywhere near a T-rex will be highly inclined to hunt it down and kill it. We aren't worried about diseases (infectious or metabolic) that the T-rex might catch, we are only worried about the predator-prey relationship between a T-rex and the things they eat. No other dinosaurs were released, just these two T-rex'.

My assumption is that without herbivore megafauna to prey on, or with scarce megafauna, it wouldn't be too big of a deal to release a mating pair of T-Rex into the wild. There wouldn't be enough for them to eat and they would starve before too long. (I'm using the "bigger than humans and not domesticated" definition of megafauna.)

posted over 6 years ago

Green‭

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