Well, here’s a really odd one, inspired by the cover art of any number of fantasy novels…from what we know of the species of dinosaurs that lived, which one(s) would be best suited for riding/domestication attempts? This would be HIGHLY speculative, granted. Even just using the criteria of “Herbivorous, and could support a human’s weight.” I mean, just look at the disparity between Horses and Zebras in the present era.
So, anyway, anyone up for this fairly silly topic?
Well, thanks for your time,
Ranchoth
Why not a brachiosaur? Fashion a harness/saddle right near its head and you’d be in business. Speedy way to travel. It could cover a mile in 200 steps or so (major estimate). It would present some problems through. How exactly would you keep it penned, fed, and trained? Animals that could squish you with just a porion of their foot don’t tend to be in awe of humans, hence the training problems.
Well, first try saddling and riding a crocodile or maybe an ostrich, some of the closest relatives we have to the dinosaurs. See how that works out for you.
Ostriches are more closely related to theropods than beasts such as the triceratops or brachiosaurus. The crocodile isn’t even a dinosaur. Are there any living relatives of the sauropods or sauricians because one of those would be more apt.
I’ve seen Ostrich Races as filler material on slow news days Finagle. But I get your meaning.
Two-legged dinos would be tough to saddle up because they don’t have the wings to wrap your legs around. There “shoulders” don’t stick out farr enough to keep you from just sliding right off their backs. So I figure you’d need to stick to the four-leggers.
Now you couldn’t get one too large, or they wouldn’t feel your kicking and yanking on the reins. They’d just lumber along and you’re stuck waaaaay up on their backs. (Seismosuarus and Apatosaurus? Out.)
The armoured ones (ankylosuarus and stegosaurus) probably wouldn’t be too great a choice either. (Again, feeling you back there trying to tell them where to go.)
Maybe a chasmosaurus? Oh heck, just go with gex gex’s triceratops. (Or a protoceratops if you don’t want to be so flashy.)
-Rue.
Elephants actually have very large brains (you know - the memory thing) and therefore are intelligent enough to be riden. Dinosaurs have small brains, which would be the main problem. Many dinosaurs would be more interested in eating you than giving you a ride and the others were hopelessly stupid. If dinosaurs were cold blooded and you wanted to ride in the forest and they wanted to sun, guess who would win. Good for book covers, and that’s it.
What about training them to pull things? Instead of pick up trucks, you could attach something to a brachiosaur’s tail and watch it go. And maybe you could use stun guns and the like to make it walk where you wanted it to go. Er…little help perfecting my idea?
Well, if lack of intelligence is the only barrier, why not ride on a Troodon? Biggest brain-to-body ratio of any dinosaur, IIRC. 'Course, they’re pretty small; I doubt they’d be able to support a full-grown human. And then there’s this:
Lone Ranger: Hi ho, Troodon, awaAIAIEIIEIIIEIEIEIE!
Well, in “Guns Germs and Steel” Jared Diamond provides a handly list of criteria explaining why, out of some many animal in the world, so few are fit for domestication.
Of course he didn’t take dinosaurs into acount, but the criteria is relevant…I would think beyond the practical considerations he brings up (a carnivore big enough to ride whould be too expensive to feed) the main point that comes to bear on dinosaur riding would be social structure. An animal you’re planning on riding would have to be social (if it doesn’t interact with it’s own kind it probably won’t interact with you) and it would have to have a hierarchal social structure (an animal that won’t take commands from their own kind-as horses will, but deer won’t- will probably no take commands from you.).
Also they couldn’t be too nasty (why we don’t ride zebra, apparently) or to panickee (like antelope).
I am not in a position tosay what dinosaur fits this bill…
The trick to domesticating difficult animals is implanting electronics in their heads. All you need is some electrodes in the pleasure center of their brain and condition them extensively for a few months, if they don’t have the brains to understand vocal commands drive them by wire too.
There aren’t many folks these days who would argue that dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Nor were they “hopelessly stupid”. Their brains were about as big as they needed to be, and about as big as one would expect from a reptile of a given size.
My first thought was “Um…no.” A zebra, so closely related to the horse, is typically unridable (although certain exceptions apply). If we can’t get something that close to a horse saddle-broke, something as outrageously feral as a dinosaur seems an apparent No.
Plus…they didn’t exactly have large brains, for the most part. Not that horses are going to be doing any higher math anytime soon, but they’re Koko the Signing Gorilla compared to the Stegosaurus. When a brain is so impossibly small a second neurological center is needed in a hip to control the back half (as some speculate was the stego’s case), then actual training of–well, anything–is laughable.
Not that anyone would want to ride a stegosaurus, anyway. Ouch! Pointy!
I think the problem would be that you’d basically be working with reptiles. You can’t domesticate them.
Mammals, esp. mammals who live in herds or packs, are fairly easy to domesticate. Because of their predisposition to co-dependence, you can create a bond with them. I’ll feed you and shelter you if you don’t try to stamp my brains out with your hooves when I try and put a leash on you kind of thing.
You could feed a komodo dragon a live chicken and scritch him under his chin every day and he’d try to bite off your arm the next.
I’m thinking you’d have zero success saddle breaking a dinosaur. If he’s big enough to ride, he’s big enough to hurt you, even in he was a plant eater. Because he’d be incapable of bonding with you. I mean, how many times have you stepped on a spider without thinking? That’s because we haven’t bonded or established a co-dependence with spiders.
But Pundit, some of those dinos lived in herds. Really. If I wasn’t so derned lazy, I’d look for a cite. In Jurasic Park (that WAS a documentary, right?) they had dinos running in a herd away from a T-Rex.
So maybe other dinos were herd animals. Could we maybe ride them? (Not the ones that would squash you of course.)
-Rue.