I visited the museum and I heard two bros in the dinosaur exhibit having an earnest discussion about the best way to kill a T-Rex with a sword and what kind of armour should be worn into the battle and they spoke with such passion I really wish the scientific community could have heard them. I’d love to know how palaeontologists would weigh in on The Great Debate.
For instance, was the bro in the weed shorts right? Is it pointless to wear heavy armour when battling a T-Rex? Is it truly better to go into battle naked wielding dual swords? Or was the bro in the backwards cap correct? Should you go for a double-handed sword and iron armour? Will light bouncing off the armour really confuse and blind the beast? Realistically, what protection is armour against a dinosaur? Was Weed Shorts right when he proposed to use his superior agility to slash its tendons and stab the eyes when he brought it down? Or was Backwards Cap right when he said charge and slash open its soft belly?? What is the truth??!??
Hello, palaeontologist-in-training here! Thought I’d have a little think into this because hey, who wants to do coursework on trilobites when you could be considering T. rex instead?
Light and maneuverable is probably best when facing a rex. It’s big and it’s powerful but it’s not going to making any quick sharp turns any time soon.
According to our current estimates, a T. rex would be able to crush a small car with its jaws, so realistically, no amount of armour is gonna protect you if it grabs you.
If the T. rex manages to grab you you’re dead regardless. It could probably eat you within a couple of bites if it was trying.
Figures 1 & 2: Theoretical T. rex bite-force model fucking up a mini. Thank you, Bill Oddie and BBC’s The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs.
As far as armour goes, lighter is better, and at the end of the day isn’t going to mean shit anyway. T. rex can’t slash at you with claws, so it’s bite or bust, and if it bites YOU’RE bust. So, lets say a point to Weed Shorts. Why NOT fight a T. rex butt naked with swords.
T. rex had good binocular vision. Don’t believe Jurassic Park’s lies –T. rex was a hunter and could probably see you brilliantly whether you moved or not.
That said, a T. rex’s eyesight will work about the same as modern birds of prey. Think hawk, or eagle. I reckon light bouncing off anything would be a fairly minor hindrance, or at least, wouldn’t affect it any more than any other hunting bird.
So, using light to blind and confuse the rex? May potentially work but might be hard and wouldn’t do much for long. Don’t rely on this for strategy.
T. rex actually had gastralia, sometimes called ‘belly-ribs’. These protected and supported the internal organs.There would also be some seriously thick abdominal muscles to get through.
Unless you’re planning to do some precision stabbing with a very long sword, chances are you’re not gonna be killing a rex by slicing open it’s stomach. Also, being under its stomach is gonna put you in-reach of the Jaws Of Death.
I’m not sure how easy it would be, or how well it would work, to try and cut a T. rex’s tendons. Theoretically, sounds like it should work. However, you’re gonna need a lot of strength to get through them, probably.
I’d personally cut the throat rather than stab through the eyes once the rex is down, but that’s probably personal preference. Once you’ve felled it, it’s dead either way! A T. rex unable to hunt is a dead T. rex.
Figure 3: The gastralia of a T. rex. Bless u Scott Hartman for your skeletal references.
As far as attack goes, the belly is not as weak a spot as it seems. So, point to Weed Shorts on his execution plan. Sounds pretty solid.
Overall, I’d say that Weed Shorts had the best plan to defeat the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex. If you ever see him again, congratulate him on his solid plan of attack.
My favorite thing about paleontologists (and any scientist really, but paleontologists in particular) is that you can ask them COMPLETELY BATSHIT INSANE questions and by God, they will give you a completely Serious answer.
Also @assassinahsoka this reminds me of your guy who wanted to eat a t rex.
susie grits her teeth and grinds her jaw and spends the entire spring of their fourth grade year plotting how to get back at calvin for stealing mr. bun and dropping him in a mud puddle.
(it involves putting hobbes into a dress and taking polaroids; she still has the photos, even thirty years later)
she does her homework. does his homework too, sometimes, because mrs. wormwood gives them different math problems to discourage cheating, and susie likes math. his mom finds out when they’re in sixth grade, and offers her four times the going rate to tutor calvin in math. she agrees, because even at twelve she knows college isn’t cheap (not the ones she’s eyeing, anyway).
she has to learn quickly about superheroes and dinosaurs and aliens, because calvin won’t listen unless there’s at least one. she has her own opinions of aliens (real, but not the tentacled fanged monsters calvin draws in the margins; her aliens are gorgeously strange monsters, elegant, like a degas painting reflected in rainy puddles, glittering in distorted neon), and dinosaurs are cool, but they’re a boring sort of cool, not black hole kind of cool, so it’s only superheroes she lets him go on about.
this turns out to be a mistake. though he draws aliens and ray guns and flying saucers on the back sides of his homework, he has a whole thing built up around stupendous man. she’s seen the costume, but didn’t know there was lore. she doesn’t want to know the lore.
it’s stupid. no one can just fly. that’s not how the world works. capes are dumb. she can’t believe his mom made him another costume after he hit a growth spurt.
she still tutors him, but they drift apart in high school. calvin and moe somehow become friends, become even bigger assholes together, and susie discovers calculus and girls. she gets into harvard and yale and stanford and others, chooses to go to california. he waves at her from his driveway while she drives away in the moving truck.
“you were never stupid,” she tells him on the phone when they’ve drifted back into each other’s lives her senior year. “you just didn’t care.”
“yeah,” he laughs, and she pretends she can’t hear the desperation in it; his girlfriend kicked him out, he lost his job, and he’s now in the unfortunate position of acknowledging that his father was right and education was important. she has two finals to study for, the nasa interview next week, and a grant application to finish, but he’s had a rough week. she can take an hour to listen.
“the community college isn’t bad,” she suggests, though she knows it sounds patronizing coming from someone set to graduate stanford with honors.
“you mean i can’t just put on my stupendous man costume and live off the media attention?”
susie snorts. “not spaceman spiff? there’s a tv show there, i’m sure.” she’s been watching a lot of star trek in what little spare time she has.
“nah,” he says, “spiff’s always been your territory.”
they drift apart again, she goes to houston and he goes to art school. she loses track of him entirely right around curiosity’s landing. she skips their twenty-year reunion; she’s in the middle of a move down to chile for a three-year stint at atacama.
a package arrives the middle of her second year in the desert.
it’s a comic book. spaceman spiff, volume one. hardcover, full color. one of his signature tentacled fanged aliens takes up most of the entire cover, while a small astronaut with a ray gun hides behind a rock. he’s gotten much better, but it’s still unmistakably calvin’s art.
except – she squints at the astronaut. she flips open the book, thumbs through a few pages.
spiff isn’t the calvin-insert she remembers from their youth.
it’s her.
mousy brown hair, button nose, mr. bun tucked away in the back of her rocket ship.
I love how Thor learns to interact by watching and listening. Look at that last gif. She is showing acceptance and appreciation to him by touching his arm, so he reciprocates! Because he appreciates her too.
Also, he knows he did something that was culturally inappropriate and asks for permission to return to the restaurant instead of just assuming that replacing the cup made it okay.
“Alright, so a space werewolf, a Roman Catholic Cardinal, and a Decepticon Communications Officer all walk into a bar…”
New art meme idea for cool kids, from a cool kid (me). Draw your OC, (or AU design, or fursona, etc.) with characters that inspired their design or that you associate with them.
On the left is @bettsplendens’s Alzu, the flirty space werewolf? mercenary? (no one really knows what he is or what he does for a living). His expression and coloration are based off an Italian Wolf, and I mostly played his design by the ear (his should be longer) as he doesn’t really have a fixed design that I know of. He’s a charming and sweet dude with far too many teeth.
Center is my own design for Soundwave from Transformers Prime as a canine, A.K.A. Soundsnoot. He is mostly Belgian Groenendael with a whole mess of sighthound breeds mixed in. He is my best boy and the love of my life and so much fun to draw~! Sometimes he and Alzu’s paths cross and they go on dates, but he mostly sticks to himself and observes whatever’s going on at the moment.
On the right is @canisalbus‘s Machete. Boy howdy was this dude a big influence on the design of Soundsnoot. What an icon. I have no words for just how beautiful this man is. Also how much of a neurotic trash fire of a person he is. That too. In the (paraphrased) words of his creator, “Machete should not be in charge of anything, but someone put him there”.
Better stop flirting with the pretty sighthounds and put some pants on at least, Alzu, you godless heathen. Soundsnoot doesn’t mind, but Cardinal Machete might turn you over to the Inquisition where even you can’t charm your way out of.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 