The bigger they are …
by Carl Wieland
People and dinosaurs living at the same time? Surely the creationists can’t be right
about that, some people think when confronted with the evidence. After all, they
reason, any such people would be helpless prey for huge meat-eaters like Tyrannosaurus
rex, wouldn’t they?
In fact, dinosaurs probably had to steer clear of people, not the other way around.
Humans may have even helped in killing off the last remaining ones of some kinds
of dinosaur. A number of factors need to be taken into account.
First, man’s intelligence and ingenuity—present from the beginning—have always been far more formidable than any animal’s size or strength. People
have consistently shown that, especially when they band together, they can outwit,
trap, and/or kill even the biggest elephants, whales, or rhinos—or the largest
meat-eating cats or bears, even with so-called ‘stone age’ technology. There is
no reason to think that the dinosaurs would have been the exception.
In any case, some scientists now believe that T. rex could not have been
the ferocious hunter-killer depicted in, for example, the film Jurassic Park.
For one thing, its teeth seem to have been too shallow-rooted to chomp into a live
Triceratops without risking leaving many of them behind.1
As if that were not demotion enough from its status as everyone’s favourite fierce
monster, dinosaur expert James Farlow, of Indiana-Purdue university, now says that
if you were attacked by a charging T.rex, simply tripping it up or getting
its feet somehow tangled would have been enough to smash it into a lifeless heap.2
Farlow and a physicist colleague have calculated that the huge beast was so heavy
and high that if it tripped and fell while running, a tumbling tyrannosaur’s torso
would have slammed into the ground at a deceleration of 6g (six times the acceleration
due to gravity). Its tiny front legs would have been inadequate to substantially
break its fall.
This means that in dry soil, its body would have made an impact crater 20 centimetres
(eight inches) deep! Its head would have hit with a brain-shattering impact of more
than twice as much force.
Farlow states that it is unlikely that a big dinosaur of this type could have run
anywhere near as fast as some have assumed, because the danger of a stumble would
have been too great. He says a fall at any speed could have been lethal.3
Thus, hunters would only have had to have caused T. rex to trip, stumble,
and fall in order to obtain an easy prey.
Further Reading
References and Footnotes
- See Creation magazine Vol.18 No.1 p. 9. The item states in part that in
a new display the American Museum of Natural History now claims that T. rex
was a scavenger, not a ferocious predator.
- New Scientist, October 7, 1995, p. 18.
- It has been claimed recently that a new dinosaur, very similar to a tyrannosaur
but possibly even larger, has been discovered. By Farlow’s assessment, something
even taller and heavier would have its brains splattered even more surely by a simple
fall.
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