#but...pteranodons would be the biggest threat

[swan2swan]

Dominion haters will fume like "If they were treating this dinosaur situation realistically with regards to environmental impact, they would be treating them like a proper invasive species, because the populations would have flourished from ten to ten thousand in four years! See, by every animal asexually reproducing with ten offspring every year, and the fact that nothing would kill them, we would reach numbers that would DEVASTATE the environment! Especially because the biggest creatures would reach full size within months of their birth!"

And I'm here just...

Guys. Elephants grow to full size over fifteen years.

Even if the accelerated growth gene Wu programmed into his animals resulted in fast-growing populations, they'd still probably take a year or two to reach adulthood and/or breeding age. Bumpy took a month or two to reach her peak, and she still turned out a runt, and she was a freak who was running at about 500% speed. And "rapid growth rate" is a whole different can of worms to study.

But...yes, it's boring, but that's not how invasive species work. I'm begging people to study the timelines of these things. I just looked into the python infestation in Florida, and they were basically introduced in the 1930s. The nineteen thirties. Almost a century ago. Then they were confirmed to be breeding in the wild in the nineties. Sixty years later. They weren't banned until 2012. They're an invasive species that's devastated the Everglades, but it took them decades to reach that point.

Pablo Escobar's hippos? Forty years.

But then you look at the Spotted Lanternfly and the Emerald Ash Borer. Insects. The Ash Borer came over in 2002, and it took a decade or so to mess up my neighborhood's ash tree population. The Lanternfly arrived in the 2010s. By the 2020s, it's Public Enemy Number One. Insect epidemics take a decade to latch on and do their thing. That's fast.

That's why the locust plot worked in Dominion. Because bringing back a prehistoric insect that can't be hunted by falcons or mantises or spiders or carnivorous non-avian dinosaurs is going to have FAR more rapid consequences than a dozen elephant-sized herbivores who wandered off a farm. Even a bunch of ostriches three times the size of ostriches.

If you take things seriously...you have to take it seriously in every aspect.