As has been said before, Dinosaur Battlegrounds will simulate a dynamic, living environment. There will be day/night cycle, natural disasters such as flash floods, and aging flora and fauna. These effects simulate the natural processes that occur in any living system, and with enough trials and running time this allows one to observe trends in populations of different species while still accounting for stochastic processes that could otherwise undermine the validity of the data. This, however, relies on our ability to accurately reconstruct the flora and fauna of the paleoecosystem as accurately as possible. To do this, we must carefully examine all of the current scientific evidence. It also means that when there are two or more conflicting but equally plausible hypotheses for a certain aspect of the ecosystem or the biota residing within it, we must represent both in the game and allow the player to decide which they want to go by. This also provides a possible way for testing the validity of these hypotheses in an actual living environment, which may give new insights into the issue that had not been accounted for previously.
However, Dinosaur Battlegrounds involves other fields in addition to paleontology. We must actively consult with herpetologists, ichthyologists, ornithologists, and other scientists who study living taxa due to the fact that we are attempting to restore not only the living tissues of the animals, but also their behavior. One of the best way to infer possible behaviors or to infer the overall anatomy of fragmentary specimens is to look at their closest extant relatives, and make inferences using comparative anatomy. There are many other types of information that are not fossilized, such as diet (though this can be somewhat inferred from dentition), ecological niche, etc. Perhaps most importantly, there are many species of animal from the Hell Creek formation that are known only from extremely fragmentary remains - far too fragmentary to restore the rest of the anatomy by itself. In such cases, it is very useful to look at inferred relations to extant taxa, and to use those to attempt a restoration. One example of this is Palaeosaniwa - the missing parts were restored based on its closest modern relatives (Heloderma, according to Balsai, 2001), and in-game, its behavior will largely use knowledge of Heloderma and other related Platynotans.
In fact, almost all of the Polyglyphanodonts from Hell Creek are based on very small fragments of the dentary, making it impossible to make a full restoration based exclusively on fossil remains. In such cases, we use what I call "placeholder models" - these are models meant to represent the actual creatures, since they obviously played a role in the ecosystem, but are based mostly on modern taxa in terms of appearance. This allows us to still have the species present even though we cannot have a fully fossil-based restoration. They are called "placeholders" because as soon as there is sufficient remains of such species to make a fossil-based reconstruction, new models will be made and will subsequently replace the originals. We also use similar models to represent types of creatures that we can reasonably infer to have been present, but are not known from any body fossils. These are things such as various invertebrates (both terrestrial and aquatic) - these can be inferred based on the dentition of many Hell Creek animals supporting a diet comprised of such creatures, and various things such as molecular evolution data from those taxa supporting an evolutionary history implying their presence in certain regions at certain times.
Another example of where science fits in has been mentioned in a previous Sci-Day post, so I will not go into too much detail. We are basing the dynamics of our feeding system on the inferred metabolic rates and relative energy content per unit mass of different types of food. This further ensures the accuracy of our simulation, and also requires involvement of scientists studying living taxa since it is not possible to directly measure metabolic rates from fossils.
Perhaps one of the most important reasons why Dinosaur Battlegrounds is so amazing and important is the ideas for potential research. One idea was mentioned in the Dinosaur Metabolism Sci-Day post, and I have actually been discussing the possibility of doing that project with a professor here at my university. A related project relates to getting FEE values to use for non-dinosaur taxa, such as the reptiles, amphibians, and fish that lived in Hell Creek. These could be estimated based on data from their closest living relatives (ie for Amia fragosa and Melvius thomasi the FEE values would be based on modern Amiid fish). This gives scientists the opportunity to gather data on these species that could also be useful to studies that are not directly related to Dinosaur Battlegrounds, further increasing our positive impact on the scientific community.
Additionally, as has been mentioned many times before, Dinosaur Battlegrounds is not just a game - it can act as a simulation software that could be used to test hypotheses about many different aspects of a paleoecosystem. In many ways, it functions like any other model or simulation - if, for example, a hypothesized species distribution is unstable, the population might die off entirely, or simply settle into a completely different distribution that allows for a stable population. This is due to the integration of naturally occurring stochastic processes that are very hard to fully account for in current models/software used for this purpose. Such aspects of a paleoecosystem are extremely difficult to examine, as things such as fecundity and average population size in a given region cannot be measured in the same way as with extant flora and fauna.
Lastly, there are also many secondary benefits that contribute to the massive impact Dinosaur Battlegrounds will have:
- As a video game, Dinosaur Battlegrounds also provides a fun experience for non-scientists, while also teaching them about the prehistoric earth. In this way, it helps getting accurate information out to the public, and feeds an interest in paleontology and other life sciences.
- By allowing the player to choose between conflicting theories when applicable, it can help develop a capacity for analyzing evidence for contrasting ideas, which is an important skill for any scientist and for a healthy and happy populace.
- Perhaps most crucially, in order to ensure accuracy, we plan to use a portion of the profits we make to fund further research in Paleontology and other sciences in order to ensure that Dinosaur Battlegrounds continues to be the most accurate experience possible.
- Dinosaur Battlegrounds requires science to be applied in a new way. It requires us to figure out how to manifest various traits of the actual animals into the gameplay itself. For example, T. Rex had a visual overlap of 55°, whereas most herbivores had much smaller overlap (if any). While we understand the effects from an "outside" perspective, we have to actually put ourselves in the animals' shoes and figure out how to represent such differences. This can lead to a deeper understanding of their biology because of this.
References:
Balsai, Michael Joseph. 2001. The phylogenetic position of Palaeosaniwa and the early evolution of the Platynotan (Varanoid) anguimorphs (January 1, 2001). Dissertations available from ProQuest. Paper AAI3031637. http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3031637
Awesome
ReplyDeleteDude, this is amazing. I'm unfathomably excited for when this project is finished!
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