The Ministry of Minor Perfidy

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1. Buckethead 05.22.08 / 6am
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   Funny that you should bring this subject up. I was daydreaming on my over-long commute just the other day on this exact topic.

   Thing is, a shotgun is just the wrong weapon for dealing with T Rex. While your avoidance strategery is well considered, there is the possibility that a horny bitch Rex is going to come after you, or catch you while you’re grilling. What you need is an elephant gun.

   The T Rex is big. But a so is a big bull elephant, and a big bull elephant is also rather lethal to unprepared puny humans. Even before the age of gunpowder, hunters were able to kill elephants, so I think with some cleverness (if you could construct some sort of rudimentary lathe…) traps, deadfalls and the like could go along way. That’s how the pygmies kicked it back in the day. But a large traditional big game rifle, like a .454 Weatherby, could potentially do some real damage, and if you were a good shot, maybe put one down.

   If you had access to a time machine, you might also have access to one of my favorite weapons, the Barrett .50. I think that would be a potential Jurassic varmint gun par excellance.

   Pack hunting T Rexes are a scary thought indeed. If that was the case, I think I’d want a platoon of Marines with anti-tank weapons and automatic weapons. Here, though, I think we’d definitely start to see the limitations of the .556 round that our military seems so wedded to.
2. Patton 05.22.08 / 11am
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   Or, not to oversimplify, consider using just two 12-gauge shells, one into each eye-hole.

   Not yours - T-Rex’s.

   Somehow, the thought of being chased by a 5 ton version of a pseudo-Helen Keller is less scary.
3. Buckethead 05.22.08 / 11am
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   Jeez, Patton, you shouldn’t limit his choices that way. Two shells of double ought buck, eyeball, one each, would solve his problem no matter whether they were his or Rex’s.

   Although, putting two in your own head would require that you use a double-barrel, side by side scattergun, as I don’t think you’d have the wherewithal to pump and fire a second time otherwise.
4. Murdoc 05.23.08 / 10am
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   Yeah, but what about ZOMBIE dinosaurs?
5. GeekLethal 05.23.08 / 10am
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   Thing about elephants (or woolly mammoths before them) is, yes or forebears had some skill in hunting them, but I think that it was a non-trivial undertaking for the whole clan.

   I mean, the labor it takes to dig a pit big enough to trap an animal as big as an elephant must be considerable, and made even more difficult trying to do it without steel shovels. Alot of people must have been involved to spook or distract the herd so thoroughly you split off an individual; or similarly in panicking the herd right off the side of the cliff. And the risks of great physical harm to the hunters is ever-present.

   We agree on the utility of traps and whatnot, but I’m not convinced they would be a viable tactic. And again, not because I don’t think they would work, but because as an individual I don’t know that the time you spend trying to dig pits big enough for a t rex to lose his footing or for deadfalls to discourage his pursuit will be needed for other things. Like finding your own food, or resting, or making the repairs on your time travel conveyance. You might have to come up with a schedule to be efficient about it.

   I’m all about being proactive though. Despite my natural tendency or instinct to dig deep and wait and hope the big scary monsters go away, I am a human, and that makes all the difference.

   How’s this for proactive- everytime the female in the range you occupy lays eggs, locate the nest and destroy the eggs long-range; Barrett, Wetherby, what have you. That is, if you can’t just kill the adult for whatever reason. And you can locate the nest forma distance too.

   Downside though might be that the female would mate out of season to replace the loss, and thereby actually draw more mature individuals to the range than before.
6. GeekLethal 05.23.08 / 12pm
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   MO,
   I’m not sure whether a dinosaur being alive or undead really changes the survival calculus at all. I mean, it still wants to eat you…
7. Buckethead 05.23.08 / 12pm
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   GL, the Zombie dinosaur is clearly more dangerous than a regular dinosaur, for at least two reasons:

   1) It’s harder to kill, seeing as it’s already dead. You’ve got to blow its brains out, which is difficult because dinosaur brains are notoriously small targets, and hidden inside lots of bone.

   2) If the zombie dinosaur kills or even wounds one of your companions, they became zombies. The traditional dinosaur might kill you, but at least your hunting party won’t being turning into mini- T Rexes if they’re injured.
8. Patton 05.23.08 / 1pm
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   GL: Two things.

   First, your “nuke the eggs” thing sounds very much like the insecticide proposed (and for all I know, put to market) whose “active agent” was a chemical that turned roaches or mosquitos (or whatever the target actually was) ghey. Same basic result.

   Second, that entire “mammoth pit” thing sounds a little sketchy to me, even though that was surely a method used. Picture a mammoth who’s learned to “play possum”, and waits for the prehistoric hungry guys to get into the pit and start their barbeque. The cunning mammoth would then “wake up”, start thrashing, and then shit all over the scattered prehistoric body parts.

   Which would be kind of cool, if I weren’t one of the descendents.
9. Murdoc 05.23.08 / 7pm
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   Look, even tyrannosaurs feel pain. You hurt it and keep hurting it, eventually it’s going to decide to go pick on some easier prey. Even if it doesn’t realize you’re the cause of the pain, it will likely retreat to some hidey hole at some point. It’s just an animal.

   No dice with hurting or scaring off an undead T-Rex.

   I’m glad we can all have a logical, rational discussion about fighting dinosaurs and zombie dinosaurs. There just isn’t enough of that sort of thing these days.
10. Murdoc 05.23.08 / 7pm
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    I don’t believe I just used the “update your comment” thingy…but I did.
11. Dfens 05.23.08 / 9pm
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    Dude, they’re, like, scavengers. My advice, stay away from big, smelly, dead dinosaurs and you’ll be ok - at least as far as T Rex is concerned. Velociraptors, on the other hand, are a bitch. On the up side, I think a 12 gauge would work on those little bastards, though.
12. ryan 05.23.08 / 11pm
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    leave the shotgun at home.
    Bring the RPG
13. Friday Linkzookery - 23 May 2008: Murdoc Online 05.25.08 / 11am
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    […] Zombies, sure…but what about dinosaurs? How to defend yourself against a tyranosaur. […]
14. Buckethead 05.25.08 / 1pm
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    Murdoc, the update the comment thingy is more convenient than you’d think at first glance.

    For undead T rexi, I think a quad mount .50 might do the trick, or one of them Vulcan gatling guns like on the A-10.
15. GeekLethal 05.26.08 / 5am
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    Well Dfens is on to something, in that it’s not like the only creature waiting to eat you back then was a big old ‘rex.

    No sir.

    There was a pretty deep bench of bad nasties that would be out to keep you at the bottom of the food chain. Most though would no be nearly so large as the alpha-predator t rex, and I think a shotgun would do fine. Like any of your ‘raptors, yes, or various and sundry pteranodon-type flyers.
16. GeekLethal 05.26.08 / 5am
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    Something else I was thinking over the weekend was that if you did go back in time, the problem of hiding from/combating carnivorous monsters might be moot.

    Sure would suck to go back ready for adventure only to find that you show up the day before the big asteroid kills everything bigger than a mouse.
17. Dfens 05.27.08 / 9am
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    Perhaps you’d choose to go back to right before the asteroid hit so your hunting trip would have minimal effect on the timeline. Of course, then you’d step on a mouse and disintegrate. Here is an interesting paper on the Permian Extinction. It claims that there were a series of meteor impacts and that several of them actually pierced the Earth’s crust (like an armor piercing projectile) resulting in most of the damage being done on the far side of the planet. This was due to shock waves coalescing, not because the meteor kept going through the core. One of the interesting things he talks about is the “abiotic” formation of petroleum. Now that’s an interesting theory. If it’s true, then there could be oil on the Moon. If that were true, the Moon really would be the ultimate launch platform for exploration of the solar system.
18. Buckethead 05.27.08 / 10am
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    Dfens, I read a book by Thomas Gold about the abiotic theory of oil. It’s pretty interesting. I posted about it, but the old.perfidy site seems to be hosed at the moment, so I can’t give you a link. The book is “Deep Hot Biosphere” and there’s a preview at google books. Gold himself is an interesting figure, worth reading about as well.

    Of course, if you went back in time, you might avoid paradox by creating a new branch of the timestream. At least, if the many worlds interpretation is correct.

    Perhaps the birds might take over. *shudder*
19. GeekLethal 05.27.08 / 12pm
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    B,
    Ah, but they DID take over. Diatryma/Gastornis, the 6′+ flightless birds were the alpha predators of their time.

    I understand the folks who say that some of these species looked ferocious, but probably were vegetarian. Parrots, for instance, use their tremendous beaks to break open nuts and seeds, not to disembowel prey animals.

    But if you scale up from a parrot to gastornis, then you scale up the parrot-sized nut or seed into mellons or something. And…I dunno, I just don’t get an animal that large and that powerful developing that huge beak and supporting anatomy to crack Pleocene coconuts.

    Of course, for our purposes it’s a moot point as a shotgun could kill one. Erm, but load for bear, not bird.
20. zupatun 05.29.08 / 8am
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    .50 caliber semi-auto ala Barrett L82A1 http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=711086

    That’ll make him think about it a little…throw in some incendiary rounds for fun…

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