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With a size of about 150 square miles, would the island from the 2nd and 3rd movies have had the necessary vegetation to support its herbivorous dinosaurs for very long? Or for that matter, enough herbivores to support the carnivores who'd also need to eat regularly? From what I read, a single Brachiosaurus would eat 800 pounds of vegetation and a single Tyrannosaurus would eat several hundred pounds of meat a day.

Looking at the long-term, what about a growing population needing to be fed and the lack of genetic diversity in a colony?

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    Mate, you're confusing Isla Sorna with Isla Nublar.. the former is about 150 sq. miles, and the latter is 30 sq. miles. See here for an image of the two islands.
    – Charles
    Commented May 28, 2018 at 5:24
  • And for reference, 150 sq. miles is roughly the size of Denver, CO.
    – Charles
    Commented May 28, 2018 at 5:27
  • You're right, I googled "how big is Isla Sorna" and got the results for Isla Nublar.
    – Joe Schreck
    Commented Jun 9, 2018 at 12:28

1 Answer 1

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What is the smallest size island to have a population of elephants in recent times? Actually many islands had populations of dwarf elephants due to island dwarfism. So the question should be what is the smallest island to have a population of regular sized non dwarf proboscideans?

Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia has an area of 7,600 square kilometers or 2,900 square miles. The population of Woolly Mammoths surviving there until about 2,000 BC was considered to be dwarf mammoths but have recently been considered to be non dwarf mammoths.

St. Paul's Island, Alaska has an area of 43 sq mi (110 km2). as sea levels rose, St. Paul's Island became separated from the mainland and shrank for thousands of years until it reached it's present size about 6,000 years ago. But mammoths continued to live on the island until about 5,600 years ago, plus or minus 100 years.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160801163855.htm1

Thus it seems possible for herbivores the size of elephants to survive on islands the size of Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar for generations, centuries, or millennia. But one might have to multiply the size of the islands for dinosaur populations depending on how much those dinosaurs exceeded the body mass of elephants. And of course the tropical vegetaton on Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar might offer more nutrition per acre.

So I guess the answer is a big maybe.

06-26-2018 addition.

There was proably an island in what is now Transylvania, Harteg Island, with a population of dwarf dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha%C8%9Beg_Island Since Harteg Island had an area of about 80,000 square kilometers, about the size of Hispaniola, but wasn't large enough for full sized dinosaurs, one might imagine that a significantly larger area would have been required for herds of large dinosaurs.

See also here:https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/190130/what-would-be-the-area-size-of-land-required-for-dinosaurs-to-survive-and-flouri2

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  • Very interesting read. I wonder if there are other similar situation regarding large animals on small remote locations.
    – jedicurt
    Commented May 30, 2018 at 18:21
  • That is possible for some species in certain circumstances. On the other hand, there have been a number of fair-sized islands that had ecosystems devastated by invasive rats, frogs, and rabbits. There are a lot of possibilities; small predators eating eggs, carnivores thriving and other species dying off for lack of a proper breeding colony (inbreeding would become a problem), or major carnivores dying off early and herbivores eventually increasing beyond the resources available leading to an ecological collapse.
    – Joe Schreck
    Commented Jun 9, 2018 at 13:33

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