Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24370505-20140224183045/@comment-34326521-20140225164238

Silentia Altum wrote: Being the dominant species of a planet would not necessarily require having no natural predator, just having, well, dominance over it; as could be accomplished by intelligent species with technological superiority. An alien race could be the dominant species of its homeworld and have a natural predator: the two are not mutually exclusive.

But in the case of humans, no existing animal, I think, could be considered the human predator, though there are more than a few species that can and will eat humans under certain cicumstances. But if the galvan predator can be extinct, I see this going the way Doctor Animo proposed above, except for the dinosaur part. If humans get a predator, I would expect it to be from a much later period, when humans were emerging as a species and there was a lot of wildlife that few people bother to learn very much about (i.e. free artisitic license for the creators), some of which would certainly have menaced early man. Trying looking at Pleistocene megafauna and go from there. I only spoke of humans. We're frail, compared to other species. We can't survive in a large percentage of the planet due to the fact that we have next to no natural defenses against heat or cold. And that's just one component of survival: temperature.