What Prehistoric Time and Place would you like to visit?

[Papi-Anon]

Assuming we don't have any risk of time paradoxes (grandfather, bootstrap, sound-of-thunder scenarios, etc), introducing modern-day diseases that could wipe out populations, or catching some ancient disease that would run amok in the present-day once we return (the last one is likely to happen anyways thanks to permafrost slowly de-permafrosting)...


...it's a 3-way tie for Late-Jurassic Morrison (specifically I would love more than anything to get some live pics and videos of Big Al in his/her prime years), Pleistocene Europe, Africa, and Asia (preferably when there was peak diversity of different species of our genus to see how they all compared to us in every way, or at least to spend a sabbatical with some Neanderthals), and really a world-tour of the middle-Eocene (specifically 42-40mya) just to see all the various early mammalian megafauna setting the molds of shapes yet to come (basilosaurid whale-watching out at sea would be a fun trip in itself).

[Stegotyranno420]

This has probably become my favorite thread on the forum. So many interesting and thought provokinv perspectives.

[Torvosaurus]

This is always one of those impossible questions. I love the Triassic and would really like to check out the Chinle Formation. You have the benefit of seeing a lot of weird stuff unlike anything alive today as well as dinosaurs just getting their start...

Oh, I forgot about the Chinle Formation.

In general, regardless of where you want to go, you're going to see creatures that we don't have the slightest idea about. The fossil record isn't complete enough, and that could be the best part of the entire trip.

Torvo

[Newt]

This is a fun topic! I couldn't narrow it down to just one, so I picked one from each of the last three eras.

I'd like to venture into Romer's Gap, the poorly-known part of the early Mississippian that separates the latest Devonian ur-tetrapods such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega from the diverse coal-swamp tetrapod faunas of the later Carboniferous. So little is known from this period it's difficult to select a place; Blue Beach in Nova Scotia is as good as any.

I would also love to see the great chain of rift lakes that formed the late Triassic Chatham Group in eastern North America, along a line from the Maritimes to the Carolinas. Tremendous diversity of plants and insects, aetosaurs, poposaurs, bipedal crocodylomorphs, proto-mammals, parareptiles, rhynchosaurs AND rhynchocephalians, dinosauromorphs, phytosaurs, dicynodonts, kuhneosaurs, metoposaurs, drepanosaurs, allokotosaurs, cute miniature tanystropheids, lungfishes and coelacanths galore - the splendor of the Late Triassic on full display. Plus lakes. I like lakes.

My final selection is the proto-Amazonian mega-wetlands of Miocene South America, the home of rodents of unusual size, toxodonts, the hilariously large side-necked turtle Stupendemys, and an incredible array of crocodilians, from tiny snail-eating caimans to the famous Tyrannosaurus-sized caiman Purussuchus, the less famous but equally tremendous gharial Gryposuchus, duck-billed Mourasuchus, and many others, as well as the precursors of the fabulous modern Amazonian fish fauna.   

[thomasw100]

I would actually like to visit any place far enough removed from the Chicxulub impact site 1 year before the impact and then 1 year after the impact to really see with my own eye what exactly happened.

[Halichoeres]

A Carboniferous coal swamp. Imagine, all those fascinating bugs and not a single one interested in biting a human.

Yeah, but the amphibians might!

Ha! Wait till they see how good primates are at climbing trees.

I gotta say I'm liking Gwangi's idea of going somewhere where we have very few fossils. Deep sea beds are often destroyed by subduction...can I take a submersible with me?

[triceratops83]

Ha! Wait till they see how good primates are at climbing trees.

I gotta say I'm liking Gwangi's idea of going somewhere where we have very few fossils. Deep sea beds are often destroyed by subduction...can I take a submersible with me?

The Time Travel agency offers various packages, including a submersible tour.

[Ikessauro]

Nowadays I have a feeling that if given a time machine the first time range I'd pick would be mid to late Jurassic of South America, specifically my country, Brazil. We have almost no fossil bearing rocks from the Jurassic exposed here, so the whole Jurassic fauna and flora is a huge mistery. Recently people found an outcrop of Jurassic sedimentary rocks here, from which a few scraps of bone have been dug and one of those has been tentatively described as a Dilophosauroid of some sort, base on a single or a couple of vertebras, if I can recall. I think it is possible that we had a vast fauna of diplodocoid dinosaurs, even stegosaurs around these parts, since these have been found in Africa and a few relatives in Argentina. If that single isolated stegosaur bone found in Argentina is truly a stegosaur, is is quite logical to assume we had those around here, like we had ankylosaurs, as recently evidenced by Stegosauros from Chile. If South American dinosaurs took a weird turn in evolution in the Cretaceous, with Abelisaurs and Ankylosaurs, just imagine what other weird unusual creatures must have roamed these parts that we don't know about. We could have had weird endemic branches of stegosaurids from around here, weird ornithopods, theropods and so much more.

[Gwangi]

A Carboniferous coal swamp. Imagine, all those fascinating bugs and not a single one interested in biting a human.

Yeah, but the amphibians might!

Ha! Wait till they see how good primates are at climbing trees.

I gotta say I'm liking Gwangi's idea of going somewhere where we have very few fossils. Deep sea beds are often destroyed by subduction...can I take a submersible with me?

There ya go! Who knows what lived in the prehistoric deep ocean, or open ocean for that matter.

[BlueKrono]

Irdin Manha Formation of Inner Mongolia, 40 million years ago. I don't care if I get eaten, I want to see what an Andrewsarchus actually looked like.

[andrewsaurus rex]

it's an interesting question whether dinosaurs would be interested in eating humans or not.  They wouldn't recognize us as prey and most predators have preferred food sources, although some will take a bite out of pretty much anything  they can.  Maybe don't run, don't act scared and they may not think you're prey?   Would take nerves of steel, though.

As for prehistoric bugs not biting.......well they may not at first but if one or two give it a try you may just become a feast.

[Halichoeres]

A Carboniferous coal swamp. Imagine, all those fascinating bugs and not a single one interested in biting a human.

Yeah, but the amphibians might!

Ha! Wait till they see how good primates are at climbing trees.

I gotta say I'm liking Gwangi's idea of going somewhere where we have very few fossils. Deep sea beds are often destroyed by subduction...can I take a submersible with me?

There ya go! Who knows what lived in the prehistoric deep ocean, or open ocean for that matter.

Yup. A surprising number of deep sea animals are from quite recent lineages, so something else was doing those jobs.

[Stegotyranno420]

The prehistoric seas (for somereason, specifically those before the Jurassic, I do not understand why) always gives me such a primeval sense of fascination.
Fascination is the best I can describe it as, it is a feeling I don't know how to translate.


I also heard many jungle environments have a bad fossil record (proportionally than expected) due to the conditions of fossilization being more rare in those environments(e.g. rapid scavenging and decomposition). Is this true?

[Halichoeres]

I also heard many jungle environments have a bad fossil record (proportionally than expected) due to the conditions of fossilization being more rare in those environments(e.g. rapid scavenging and decomposition). Is this true?

Yeah, dead stuff gets reused in a hurry. Rainforests also have really acidic soils, which dissolve skeletons when wet...which is often! So yeah, rainforests would give you a great opportunity to see something totally wild.

[Crackington]

I'd like to time travel to the Wealden formation on the Isle of Wight, specifically Yaverland Beach near Sandown.

We were very lucky a while back to see some sauropod footprints in the rocks of the beach on a fossil tour. The sand which usually covered the rocks had been blown away in a recent storm and this meant we could follow the huge footprints for a while down the beach.

It occurred to me that wouldn't it be great to actually see them being made by the giant sauropods, travelling through time to that exact moment.

We might also catch sight of hypsilophodons, Mantellisaurus, Polacanthus and Neovenator (from a safe distance of course!).

An amazing place (and time) in the early Cretaceous.

[Over9K]

There ya go! Who knows what lived in the prehistoric deep ocean, or open ocean for that matter.

Well, who really knows what's living there now? We know more about the surface of a couple neighboring planets than we know about the wet 70% of our own.


For me, and I know it's the boring/obvious answer, but... If I can only see one time, and one place, it HAS to be Late Cretaceous, Hell Creek.