If you time traveled into the triassic time period with only two water bottles, two granola bars, and a flashlight, how would you survive?

I wouldn’t, it’s that simple.

Dear God no

Don’t get me wrong, I’m decent at wilderness survival. I’ve taught classes on it before. The problem is that I don’t have enough gear to do much, and more importantly, I’m in a pretty sucky place. Every animal around me is going to be nightmarishly large, so while eating bugs for food isn’t a problem, there’s plenty of things that can kill me without trying.

If I wanted to survive then my plan is to ditch the granola bars (they won’t provide enough food to last me more than one more day) and the flashlight (I don’t have batteries anyway). Instead of those I plan on bringing the highest quality hunting knife that money can buy, a high quality and long lasting Firestarter, the best hatchet that I can purchase and several files to sharpen it.

With those tools I now have a chance. As I already said, bugs are going to be my main source of food. I will have to make the water last until I can find my own, but if I can’t then I’m going to need to go back to my summer camp days and drink bug juice. Lucky for me it tastes like fruit punch.

My first goal is to build a fire. Once I have one started, and make no mistake, I can get one started, my next goal is water. Once that’s sorted out I find some kind of shelter, making it if I need to. From there I look for food.

Once my basic needs are sorted out then it’s on to long-term survival and improving my quality of life.

Hahahaha, no way.

You’re on the way to the gym to have a run on the running machine. You pack two bottles of water and two granola bars, and it’s winter. It gets dark early. You take a flashlight. Zzziiippp boom, you found yourself in the Triassic period 252 to 200 million years ago. How could this have happened?

The length of the day was less than 23 hours. We are adapted to something between 23 and 24 hours; this would almost be ok, but not quite. After some time, some adverse effects would be felt and would shorten the lifespan of the would-be time traveler, but in your case, there will be no lifespan to shorten because you will not survive, maybe even a day, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
All landmasses were arranged into the supercontinent Pangea. Hopefully, the zzziiippp didn’t take you to the middle of the desert that would be the mother of deserts, even in comparison to the Sahara. You only have two bottles of water. Good luck with that. There would be no escape. On some sides, the deserts were divided by 11 km/35 000 feet tall so-called super continental mountain ranges that were extremely inhospitable and taller than the Himalayas. They came to be when earlier continents smashed into each other to form Pangea. Maybe vulture-like pterosaurs already existed since they evolved 215 million years ago. They would devour your rotting remains.
If you landed elsewhere in the Pangea, you might end up in a swarm of endearingly named Titanopteran insects or even Gigatitans, pictured above. They were up to 40 cm/1.4 feet big, and some had sharp features on their exoskeletons for piercing prey. They could pop your eyes.
This might even be good because soon after, there would be another zzziiippp of the jaws of a massive, bipedal or galloping ferocious crocodile-like, Pseudosuchian apex predators or in the swamps, giant crocodile-like Temnospondyl amphibian ambush predators. Some were many times larger than you. It’s better not to be aware of what is about to happen. Zzziiippp CENSORED.
Let’s assume that it wasn’t so bad so that the adventure can continue. Mind you that it won’t be for much longer, no matter what, anyways. You decide to set up a camp and prepare for the difficult night dealing with vicious animals. You have your glass bottle of water that is already empty. You are trying to light a fire by focusing sunlight through the glass. You are gasping for breath; it must be because you’re scared, you think. You just remembered some dude with a devious smile from Gdansk on Quora; where is this Gdansk anyways, you thought, Poland, Turkey, Honduras, or maybe Estonia? What was he on about? You didn’t bother to read his whole answers about traveling in time to various periods of the history of Earth, and now you regret it. But then you realize there is not enough oxygen in the air. You won’t be able to light the fire because it needs 15–16% of oxygen. You’re doomed! You’re still lucky to be even able to breathe. In the early Triassic, it might have been as low as 12% at sea level. You would die if you landed in an even modestly elevated area, let alone the super-tall, super continental mountain ranges, where the air density was very low.
Even if you managed to survive for a while, there was no fruit in the Triassic yet. You would soon get scurvy from the lack of vitamin C. Unless you ate eyes of fish, yuk, or bothered to prepare teas from bark, or just ate plain leaves.
After living there for a while there could be another zzziiippp but this time from within. The air was at the time filled with copious amounts of spores of plants. Pollen didn’t evolve yet. An extreme allergic reaction might ensue, edema might swell your face and throat, and you might die from being unable to breathe.

There is conflicting evidence regarding the air pressure in the distant past. Some points to it being lower. If it were the case, humans would not have a chance of surviving anywhere at these levels of oxygen in the air in the Triassic period. Furthermore, it would not be possible to remove pathogens from water by boiling it, assuming that we could even light a fire or use an electric water boiler. This is because water boils at a lower temperature than 100 C/212 F at low pressure. If the air pressure were higher, it might be easier to breathe at low oxygen concentrations.

The Triassic period was one of the most bizarre periods in the history of our planet if it comes to animals. One of my favorites was the odd Tanystropheus, which looked very vulnerable with this long neck. This might indicate that it might have had some nasty, surprising adaptations if it was a land animal. Studies suggest that they might not have been aquatic. In the modern world, such vulnerable animals are poisonous, untasty, or have some bizarre defense mechanisms that could come from soft tissues and would not be visible from a paleontological record; for example, they could shoot venom into the eyes of predators from some delicate tissue organs, lose a tail when attacked or lose slippery skin when grasped by predators.

This means that survival in the Triassic period with so few supplies would not be possible. In fact, at some points, you would need to breathe air from oxygen bottles. This dangerous part of the history of our planet was not for faint hearted or… for so utterly unprepared.

The question was: If you time-traveled into the Triassic period with only two water bottles, two granola bars, and a flashlight, how would you survive?

This zzziiippp boom took you back in time to the Triassic period.

Pseudosuchians, the ferocious bipedal relatives and ancestors of crocodiles, would be difficult to escape from.

Tanystropheus was a bizarre animal from the Triassic period. We don’t know how it lived. Surprisingly, it might not have been aquatic. How did it keep its neck so long if it didn’t live in water?

Eretmorhipis was a grotesque aquatic animal.

Longisquama was a weird tree-dwelling reptile with odd structures on the back.

Teraterpeton was a lizard with a beak similar to birds, except that birds didn’t evolve for another tens of millions of years yet when this creature was around.

Lisowicia was an elephant-sized animal related to mammals that lived in the Triassic period shortly before dinosaurs got big and dangerous and mammals couldn’t evolve large sizes anymore.