500 Writing Prompts: Could Dinosaurs and humans coexist today? What would make that possible or impossible?

TL;DR: We do. They're called birds.

I'm thinking they probably don't mean that, though. They want the big ones, the mean ones. The ancient assholes. 

Intellectual property of The Oatmeal -- You know, Matthew Inman.

There is so much scientifically complicated and just wrong with this question that I'm annoyed just considering it. Which dinosaurs? There were a lot of them. The Mesozoic Era was comprised of three periods: Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, a span of approximately 200 million years. That's a lot of years, people. Modern humans only evolved in the past 200,000 years. I think they might have the upper hand on us. Or...claw...no, foot, I think it's foot.

The climate of these three periods varied widely but it was, in general, a lot nastier than ours, even with the wide range we have in our modern world. Would the dinosaurs survive in our climate? Some of them could, I guess, but probably only in the hot and dry or hot and wet areas of the world. Well, not the polar regions. Russia, the Scandinavian countries, large portions of Canada would probably be dinosaur free.

And which dinosaurs are we talking? You know they were mostly BIG, right? 

 I think some of this data is off.
Go measure your neighbor's velociraptor for verification. I'll wait.

Dinosaurs were hungry fuckers, and while WE may be able to avoid them, what with our big brains and all, I think they'd be eating up our food supply. Do you know what just a couple of lions can do to a herd of cattle? Or a village of people? Did you not see The Ghost and the Darkness? THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!! 

And not just our herds of cattle and flocks of chickens are in danger, there's veggie-sauruses out there too. See that brachiosaurus in the above picture? How are you going to keep that out of your corn fields? 

There's a lot of corn fields here where I live, in fact my town is surrounded by them (on three sides) and just imagining a brachiosaurus standing in a cornfield makes me giggle.

And yeah, we have machine guns and rocket launchers and tanks and stuff (can you imagine how many farms would go under if they had to pay for dinosaur insurance and assault weapons?) but if you have to set up razor wire perimeter fences are you really "coexisting"? A separate and independent but peaceable existence? I'm going to call that a NO.

But...if the dinosaurs...shrank, grew feathers, learned to sing (or at least croak endearingly), and generally be interesting in a way that (mostly kind of) did not threaten the habitat and life of humans, then yes. 

Birdie want a cracker?