For an organism to survive they need to sustain homeostasis. Homeostasis is when an organism reaches an internal equilibrium, meaning that the body is running in a normal state. For a hamster to survive the Cretaceous period they are going to have to sustain homeostasis despite warmer temperatures, high sea levels, and an asteroid extension event.
The hamster I am going to be specifically choosing is the Syrian hamster, as there is a lot more research about these creatures and they are more fit than other hamster species.
First we need to know about Syrian hamsters. Syrian hamsters live in Western Asia in countries like Syria (shocker) and Turkey. The habitat there is a palearctic one which means it’s essentially a desert with extreme temperature swings. The lowest temperatures are 35 and the highest are 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The Cretaceous period had a similar temperature range from 40 to 98 degrees Fahrenheit. This makes Syrian hamsters perfectly suited for this climate. Habitat during the Cretaceous was similar to those today with abundant desert and grassland biomes.
The next challenge is food availability. Syrian hamsters are omnivores, meaning they can eat both plants and meat. Specific diets for wild Syrian Hamsters are not well studied and the only well documented diet for Syrian hamsters are for domesticated types. Using this information, we can predict the diet of a wild Syrian hamster to include insects, seeds, grains, nuts, roots, and general vegetation. The food available during the Cretaceous period would have included insects, general vegetation, seeds, and roots but nuts and grains might be limited. Nuts during the Cretaceous period were newly evolved and were different from the ones of today, making them possibly inedible to a hamster. Grains were also recent and came in the later half of the Cretaceous.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to the Syrian Hamster would be predators. Since hamsters are so small their competition will also have to be small. Most medium to large sized dinosaurs just aren’t a problem for hamsters as they aren’t going to be hunted by a Tyrannosaurus rex, or be driven off the territory of a Triceratops. The biggest competitors for hamsters are going to be similarly sized creatures. (Need help with researching similarly sized animals)
Recent research tells us that some dinosaurs were nocturnal hunters. This poses a problem for the hamster because they are also nocturnal feeders. They might be able to avoid many of the predators during the day due to their nesting behavior, but night would be dangerous for them. Fortunately, their small size, acute sense of smell, speed, and ability to borough gives them an opportunity to avoid predators.
In spite of their status as a cute childhood pet, the Syrian Hamster could have been outside during the Cretaceous, head to head with some of the fiercest dinosaurs. These hamsters possess the right biology to survive the extreme climate, they can exploit a variety of food sources, and they would have faced few predators. But could they have survived the asteroid extinction event? Most likely and in fact, yes, because the era following the Cretaceous was the Paleogene era which was also known as the age of mammals.
