Science note, avian dinosaurs are birds, non-avian dinosaurs are what regular, reasonable people call dinosaurs. They went extinct when a comet or asteroid hit earth about 66 million years ago. I will call non-avian dinosaurs, simply dinosaurs for the rest of this webpage.
Of course, it would be far easier for scientists to bring back the woolly mammoth than the dinosaurs, so as long as you do not see any really hairy elephants you are very safe. Nevertheless, just in case, here is my advice, based on the experience of my friends and relatives, and the standard advice of the experts on how to avoid being eaten by today's predators.
If so, encounters with dinosaurs might be much less dramatic than Jurassic Park-Jurassic World movies suggest. There are about a million warm blooded predators in the United States and Canada that are large enough when full grown to eat an adult human. There are also over a third of billion humans in the United States and Canada who frequently hike around in the wild with no protection against these predators. Yet only three to four people per year are eaten in the average year.
Coyotes are too small to eat adults, but not little children and surely these coyotes have many opportunities to attack and kill little children, but only one child has died this way in the last several decades. Lots of dogs and cats, probably millions, but only one child.
So if dinosaurs acted like our present predators close encounters between dinosaurs and humans might be much less bloody than the movies.
Given, as I said above, there are about a million mammalian predators in the United States and Canada that when full grown can kill an adult human and millions of coyotes, tens of thousands of which live in cities, that could kill our little children it might be useful to understand how to avoid be eaten by them while we wait for the unlikely event of a dinosaur attack.
Apparently bears are concerned with dental hygiene. Which I guess is understandable given that they do not have dental insurance and it would be difficult to collect enough berries and insect grubs to pay a dentist. Perhaps Smokey the Bear has a new slogan, "Only you can prevent tooth decay." So if they actually do create a real world Jurassic Park you should bring toothpaste just to be safe. A close friend of mine who frequently goes camping and has friends that do also confirms that the bears love toothpaste.
My close friend also confirms that the bears are getting cozy. One of her best friends, whom I also know, was having breakfast while camping with her family. A bear invited itself to their breakfast and in the process brushed up against her. She was so flustered she spilled coffee on the bear. The bear took it well. There was no lawsuit, surprising for California, and the bear did not even growl. The bear was mellow, it ate breakfast and left.
As mentioned above bears love toothpaste, but they are also fond of paintballs used in paintball wars. There is a Canadian resort called Whistler that has lots of bears and paintball wars. The paintballs are made so that the wildlife like to eat them. That is the clean up plan. When the horn sounds to start the paintball war the bears consider it a dinner bell. Children shoot each other with paintballs, bears eat paintballs but not the children. Apparently the Russian cartoon "Masha and the Bear" is more realistic than Jurassic Park/World.
Do not run is perhaps the most common advice for dealing with predators, and no doubt good advice based on a lot of experience. But while the advice is good, the reasoning that is given to justify it makes little sense.
It is argued that running activates the hunting instinct of the predator. I suspect that hunting instinct of a predator is activated by hunger and is usually active. Our objective is to activate the don't eat anything that you do not know is safe to eat instinct. If the predator is going to survive long enough to reproduce this has to be a powerful instinct and this is what keeps us safe.
If an animal does not run it is usually dangerous to eat, for example, rattlesnakes, cobras, and other venomous snakes. In the wild standing your ground is a sign that you are not safe to eat. As the bear has never eaten a human before, we would have killed it if it had, bears very rarely will want to risk eating a human who stands their ground.
The bear may have seen the situation as similar to what we have seen on nature documentaries. Predators growl and threaten one another as the try to control the carcass of an animal one of them killed. The bear may have been saying, this is my garbage can, get your own. I am speculating on this, but it seems safe to say that, while you do not want to run away it is best to give bears and no doubt predatory dinosaurs their space. Three or four feet is too close.
Nevertheless, in our national parks campers and bears seem to coexist in surprising proximity, as the experiences of my relative and friends illustrate. This seems to be a growing trend, but if we go back far enough there was an even cozier relationship. People used to feed black bears by hand, with nothing between them and the bears. This resulted in occasional mauling, and was suppressed because it was dangerous for the campers. But most of time the humans were not mauled because the feeding persisted for quite some time.
In spite of this, I do not recommend feeding large predators by hand with no protection. Black bears are not teddy bears, and predatory dinosaurs were not Barney the dinosaur.
Actually bears frequently charge, but rarely actually attack. After all, only three or four people are killed by large mammal predators in the United States and Canada in the typical year. So jumping off a cliff into water of unknown depth is not a good bet. When you face a predatory dinosaur do not assume that an attack is certain. Do not do anything very dangerous to escape.
If the predator had grown up in Jurassic Park or Jurassic World and mostly ate sheep, goats, and cattle, it might be very familiar with humans but it would never have eaten them. So from the predator's point of view humans are around all the time and the humans are not particularly afraid of them, so humans are probably not safe to eat. As argued above, if an animal does not run away it usually has some way to defend itself.
But even animals that are not toxic can be dangerous to eat. There are porcupines that have quills that can work their way into a predator and kill it. Even skunks could be dangerous. The stench they leave on a predator could warn potential prey and make it difficult for the predator to hunt. By the time the stench wears off the predator might die of starvation.
So there are a lot of animals that might look like defenseless prey, but that are quite dangerous to large predatory mammals. Eating anything that moves would almost always kill the predator long before it was able to reproduce. As surviving and reproducing is what evolution is all about large predators on land have evolved to be selective and careful.
The same can be said for animals in the ocean, it is estimated that ten percent of all species of fish in the ocean are poisonous, it is probably higher than ten percent for the invertebrates. So on both land and sea the predators need to avoid eating prey they are not familiar with. If a predatory fish, whale, or seal sees something that it is unfamiliar with and furthermore it looks weird and swims slowly it is probably toxic or otherwise dangerous to eat. Lucky for us, we fit that description perfectly.
So a key safety tip, perhaps the most important safety tip is do not do anything dangerous or avoid anything healthy because of a completely unrealistic fear of predatory dinosaurs, or a largely unrealistic fear of today's large predators. Large mammal predators only eat on average one out of every hundred million Americans and Canadians in an average year.
The people who wish to introduce bears, particularly grizzlies complain about these jokes, claiming they are not funny. Actually, they are funny, but humor is not necessarily a good guide to safety.
A better response might be to compare human bells with a rattlesnake's rattle. By making noise including wearing bells we are warning the bear that we are dangerous, just as a rattlesnake warns potential predators to eat something else. By making noise you make your presence obvious, which is something that defenseless prey would avoid. The noise warns the bear that you are dangerous to eat, which you are because humans will usually kill the offending bear and any other bear or potential predator in the area.
It has been suggested that perhaps instead of bells we should carry rattles that sound like rattlesnake rattles. Perhaps. This would be an interesting experiment for the experts and then possibly an interesting business opportunity for some businessman. If it worked on the bears and mountain lions it would have the advantage that people could easily understand why it worked and would be more likely to use it.
As a teen I went to a camp, which had a farm next to it. We were chatting with the farmer's wife and she said that in one of the last few nights a mountain lion had attacked their horse. They came out and scared the cat off. It occurs to me that even with an umbrella I would not look as large as a horse.
On the other hand the umbrella would look weird to the predator, sort of like a puffer fish blowing its self up. It is generally argued that puffer fish blow themselves up so they will be too big for the predator to eat. I figured that the real reason that puffer fish puff up was to warn predators that they are very poisonous to eat. I later saw a video that started with the standard explanation about being too big, but they added my explanation, the poison warning.
Opening that umbrella while you stand your ground may make you look weird and weird things that stand their ground are often poisonous, venomous, or otherwise dangerous to eat, like puffer fish, or cobras spreading their hood.
As our strategy of warning predators from bears to sharks seems to work well there is a fair chance that it would work with dinosaurs too. In our movies we are using dinosaurs not because they would be more dangerous but because we know that today's predators are pretty tame so to create exciting fantasy we have to use yesterday's, or perhaps I should say yesterera's predators, to keep up the excitment.