# Medieval Lord Threatened by Tyrannosaurus! **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 19, 2012, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006 "2012-08-19T23:11:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Victor\_Charlie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/7ea924/32.png) [@Victor\_Charlie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Victor_Charlie)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2012, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006/41 "2012-08-20T19:02:58Z")
> [@dracoi](#): > > It’s worth noting, though, that knights didn’t take out mammoths on a regular basis. A lot of mammoth hunting involved spears, traps and running them off of cliffs - in other words, the kind of dirty tricks and mass tactics that have been suggested. The knight’s footmen will be more effective than the knight himself. Plus, mammoths weren’t fast, agile, apex predators that could dismember men and horses with ease. ---
**Author:** ![Victor\_Charlie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/7ea924/32.png) [@Victor\_Charlie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Victor_Charlie)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2012, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006/42 "2012-08-20T19:20:04Z")
> [@Simplicio](#): > > As someone said above, hand-propelled harpoons managed to penetrate whales easily enough. I think your overestimating the rigidity of bone and tissue. > > (also, the T-rex skeletons I’ve seen don’t have much in the way of bone protecting the front of the abdominal cavity. So even if your lance shattered on the bones, you would’ve penetrated through the internal organs and be hitting the spine or back of the pelvis by the time you got there. That might not drop the animal right away, but I suspect it would incapacitate it enough so that it wouldn’t give chase effectively, and it would die from the would relatively quickly) I agree that lances and the like could penetrate dinosaur flesh, and you could potentially injure it badly enough that it might die eventually. But, I’m talking about a clean kill that would give the knight some chance of survival. It took early whale hunters hours to bring in a whale, and the only reason that even worked is because the whale generally didn’t fight back, opting to flee. It would die due to exhaustion and blood loss. It wouldn’t work that way with a T. Rex. The T. Rex would lay waste to anything near it before succumbing. Think of a Tyrannosaur’s stance and movement. Unless you caught it totally by surprise (on a charging horse, not likely) there’s not much chance it would leave its belly exposed. They certainly had to be adept at protecting that region considering some of its prey used exactly that defensive tactic. To survive a direct assault, you’d get one shot at it. The odds are exceedingly slim that a horse-mounted knight could deliver a clean kill in one pass. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2012, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006/43 "2012-08-20T20:38:14Z")
Build a picket field of upraised sharpened wooden pikes. Holding a rope, with an agile charger (what’s a charger, anyway?) repeatedly run rings around the beast’s legs. Or, perhaps only one circuit is necessary. Beast falls on spikes; finish it off, if necessary. Or just skip the spikes. The beast on its back is helpless, I think. Even on its side. And the rope circling thing would be all the more easier because I don’t think the beast’s field of view doesn’t even cover those areas, and it certainly is not a twinkle toes. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2012, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006/44 "2012-08-21T01:03:22Z")
Ooh, I like the rope idea. I saw a documentary once where some dinosaur hunters were using that tactic. Except that the dinosaurs were big four-legged combat walkers, and the horses were made of metal and flew. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2012, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006/45 "2012-08-21T02:21:01Z")
That footage was faked. Everyone knows that four-legged combat dinosaurs were cold blooded and couldn’t live in snow. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2012, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006/46 "2012-08-21T02:45:14Z")
Anyway, I stole the idea from some Irishman. And yes, but in my scenario the knight gets the hairy headphones. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/medieval-lord-threatened-by-tyrannosaurus/632006.md?page=2)