To Kill a Dino-Bird

Factual Questions
1

Yep, still researching my story.

Apparently, shooting an elephant in the head is a bad idea, since its large sinuses will protect it. So, where should a skilled hunter with basic knowledge of a Dinosaur skeleton and a Nitro Express rifle firing an early .620 round?

(Sadly, the fitting .577 Tyrannosaur cartridge was only developed in 1993… The same year the Jurassic Park film came out. Coincidence? I think not.)

Obviously, the aiming would differ with species. First specimen: Allosaurus fragilis.

Looking at this image, it seems that the animal’s head was well-protected. It seems the bones in the skull could take a bullet while allowing the Allosaurus to survive long enough to kill you. While there are big holes in the skull, it seems risky to aim there. Would a better target be the large, seemingly unprotected chest? Or am I missing something here? And in either location, any idea how long till the Allosaur dies? I know we can’t know for sure, since Allosaurus may have been tough or fragile, but as a predatory reptile, I think it would have been at the least as tough as a modern Rhino or Hippo, right?

Next up: Styracosaurus.

The frill looks like it definitely could stop (or at the very least, slow down to a non-fatal range) a bullet, unless it happened to go through one of the openings and strike the back. But what about a head shot? Is the skull thick enough?
Finally, about other dinosaurs:

Stegosaurus and his kin had very small heads. If a high caliber bullet hit a Stegosaur in the head, which seems to be only slightly larger than a human’s, would the dinosaur not be instantly killed?

Hadrosaurs: These animals seem to be relatively defenseless. Bullets to the neck are the best bet here?

Sauropods: How hard would it be to take one in the 10-30 ton range down? Obviously, only very high caliber bullets would do enough damage quickly enough… How about shoulder mounted whaling harpoons, especially those with explosives? (Keep in mind that the year is 1895… No ultra-modern explosives). With a standard gun, any particular place to aim?

2

Chest shot. They probably have large lungs and their hearts were most likely larger than their brains.

Most of the head of carnosaurs is just framework for the jaws and jaw muscles, the brain box is small and tucked away down and back. I would never try to take one down with a head shot.

Trying to take down a ceratopsian with a head shot is as suicidal as trying to take out a cape buffalo with a head shot. You are probably just going to get the critter really mad at you. (A shot through one of the fenestrae in the frill is only going to embed itself in the shoulder muscles.)

A stegosaur without its head will likely run about like the proverbial chicken. I would not want to be in the same county if this happens.

Hadrosaurs would be treated like deer or antelope. A neck shot could work, but again a chest shot is more likely to be effective in stopping the beastie.

If I needed to take down a sauropod, I would try to sever a major vein in its neck. I believe the blood pressure would cause it to bleed out before it could trample much of my expedition.

A head mount is a much better trophy, so you want to keep the head in good shape for the taxidermist.

3

read L. Sprague de Camp’s A Gun for Dinosaur (or the fix-up book, Rivers of Time). I’m pretty sure he recommended a chest shot.

The idea of time-traveling dinosaur hunts has a long history. I don’t think Ray Bradbury specified a shot in The Sound of Thunder, but de Camp was the kind of guy who cared about these things. I don’t recall what David Gerrold suggested in deathbeast

4

I was wondering if there might be some strategic advantage to first addressing the proto-brain some dinosaurs (Stegosaurus) reportedly had in their tail, and then moving on to slay the disabled beast but, alas, we now understand this was just a once fanciful notion from around the time of our childhood.

5

The most reliable scheme is a shot that damages the heart. There is essentially always a bone-free path to the heart, and a creature thus hit will be dead within a few seconds.

6

I was looking at websites about stegosaurs recently. The most common description of how big they were: “the size of a bus.” Sounds like a good way to get Thagomized.

7

So all dinosaurs should be shot in the chest. Got it.

Well, except for Ceratopians. They have 4 legs. How do you aim for the chest? Do I have to shoot through the side?

And how about Ankylosaurs? I doubt the armor could actually stop a bullet, but could it not redirect one away from the dino?

8

Here you go.

9

But don’t modern scientists believe that those were just nerve clumps, rather than a full-on brain?

10

OK – lets treat dinos as we would modern game until we off a couple and butcher them. Four-legged models I’ll treat as deer or elk and pick out the shoulder joint and go slightly behind and low. I’ll stay to broadside shots or slightly quartering away. If he is quartering to me, I may wait. If I can’t wait, the chest followed by one under the chin hoping to cut the windpipe, blood vessels and maybe spine.

Two legged are another story. Chances are better that the heart/lungs are better protected. here I am going to work as I would against a person and go chest and slightly left or right of center. Two legs usually mean “predator” and my shot will probably be straight on. But if I’m lucky enough to get a broadside shot, I’m going to look for the base of those stumpy front legs/arms and go below and inside the body from there. If he rocks his head back like an ape or bear I may try for the throat just under the chin.

11

Yes; the “two-brains” idea is crap. Dinosaurs have one brain, just like all other vertebrates.

It would depend on the size of the bullet, of course, but ankylosaur armor was quite thick. I wouldn’t bet on an effective shot from most angles (at least not with anything short of artillery). Similarly, I wouldn’t attempt a head-shot against a pachycephalosaurid.

As for shooting Allosaurus, the roof of its braincase was relatively thin, so a top-of-the-head shot would probably work (getting that shot would be another issue…).

12

When you take a look at that Allosaurus skull, it’s actually very lightly constructed. The bones are just struts to support the upper jaw. And the brain is waaaaay down in back and tiny, tiny, tiny. In fact, almost all dinosaur brains are really small compared to modern mammals.

So it doesn’t matter much whether a dinosaur skull is robust or gracile, the problem is that hitting it in the brain is very difficult. You could pump a dozen rounds into an Allosaur skull and not hit its tiny brain. And of course, as mentioned above, there’s the famous “chicken with its head cut off” phenomenon. Destroy the brain and the animal will die, sure. But probably not right away. A bullet in the brain will prevent coordinated actions, but there’s going to be a lot of thrashing and twitching and kicking.

13

it’s not that it’s “lightly constructed”, it’s that it’s damned heavy. All those openings are to reduce the overall weight. It’s still as tough as it needs to be. The brain is actually pretty well protected inside a solid knot of bone.

The ankylosaur skulls (and the pachycephalosaur, and the Stegoceras) were pretty thick tough shells of bone, and I think you’d have a hard time breaking them open (the pachycephalosaur that used to be in the AMNH was pretty tint, too – I don’t know if it was a young specimen or typical. The Stegoceras was way bigger).

I note that in the book (though not the movie) The Relic, they killed the dinosaur-like monster with its heavy skull by firing in through the orbit of the eye and letting the bullet bounce around inside that heavy skull. That seems to me to demand some pretty precise shootin’, and I wouldn’t recommend it with a charging enraged dino. That’s the sort of shot you only make in a book. Or the movies.*

*I note, too, that one of the authors wrote a history of the AMNH. I wonder if he was inspired in part by that Stegoceras skull).

14

Some Allosaurus skull notes:

See that lump of bone at the back of the skull and above the neck vertebrae? That’s the braincase (technically, it’s the parietal bone, but the braincase is under there).

Another angle; note the brain is in the back, by those big condyles right at the back of the skull. You hit the big flat surface, and you’re just hitting bone and muscle.

And, Yet another view. This is an illustration of a Sinraptor skull, but the pattern is similar. The mass of bone in front of the quadrate and under the squamosal is where the brain is housed. Not a very large target at all, and not something you’re likely to be able to hit under duress if the beast has decided you’d make a good snack.

15

And whatever you do, don’t step off the path!

16

Compare the Allosaurus skull to this Tyrannosaurus skull:

http://www.healthstones.com/dinosaurstore/dinosaurskulls/t_rex_skull/t_rex_skull.html

The Allosaur’s skull is much more lightly constructed.

File:Allosaurus skull SDNHM.jpg - Wikimedia Commons.

You’re right that both are in absolute terms very heavy, but the Allosaur is lightly built while the Tyrannosaur is heavily built.

But in both cases, the brain is tiny and well protected. You could shoot into either creatures head and you’d only hit the brain by pure luck.

17

While true, Tyrannosaurus was a coelurosaur, and thus had heavily pneumaticized skull bones (link is to .pdf paper on the subject). From that paper:

So, for Tyrannosuarus we’re looking at a head that weighed over 1,000 lbs when fleshed out, but the bones themselves contributed only about 36 lbs of that total weight.

A Tyrannosaurus skull looks a lot heavier than it actually is (or, was…).

18

You dropped a decimal point there, Doc.

165,658.2 grams is 165 kilos, not 16 kilos. But you’re right that the bone weight is very low.

19

Well. So he did; the skull itself would actually have weighed about 360 lbs. Which is, of course, a big chunk of bone, but still not as much as one might expect from a 5’ long, pretty massive-looking, skull.

20

Still weighs more than a human :wink:

About the Stegosaurs: Could a high-caliber shot, or maybe a close range shotgun shot, blow the entire head off?

And how well would a shoulder-mounted harpoon work on a Sauropod of 10 to 30 tons?

What about the very big ones?