A steg’s head was about the same size as a modern horse. I never had the chance to play with any personal ordnance which could blow a horse’s head off.
This grand old’un might be of some help: What weapon should I use to hunt a Tyrannosaur?
One more thing.
Those Tyrannosaurs? I consider it morally certain that since the closely related Veliciraptors have been proven to have feathers (Velociraptor Had Feathers | ScienceDaily), Tyrannosaurs must therefore have been covered with soft yellow down, like a baby duck.
And I will brook no disagreement.
According to this site…
Interesting. I suppose you could try a headshot since its not as heavily armored but then you have the stegosaurus issue of a flailing, 30 ft, seven ton animal. Actually, you might just be small enough to shoot at its less armored undercarriage since it seems to be better equipped for stopping tyrannosaur bites from above.
I wouldn’t count on that.
Stegosaur heads were indeed large. I was looking at a juvenile fossil.
So what about his smaller cousins, like Kentosaurus?
The Finnish L-39 20mm antitank rifle is probably the weapon you want. Although it’s not quite man-portable by one person. And it was developed in 1939.
Won’t work. Story’s set in 1895.
So nobody knows about harpoons and Sauropods?
Also, if one of the large Theropods or a large Ceratopian charged a man who was about 40 yards away and firing a Maxim gun, would either dinosaur die before reaching and killing its target?
The low-end estimate for Allosaurus’ top speed is about 19 mph. That means it could cover 40 yards in about 5 seconds (assuming it were already at a full charge). In that time, the Maxim gun would get off about 50 rounds. Depending on the accuracy of the gun (and the nerve of the gunner…), Al could very well win that one…
At the upper end of Allosaurus speed estimates (~30-35 mph), odds are even more in the Allosaurus’ favor.
Yikes… Makes you wonder how the hell Medieval people believed a man with a sharp metal stick could kill a creature far bigger than Tyrannosaurs…
Earlier, someone stated that shooting a Ceratopian head on is suicide. So, what do you do if one charges you?
The problem is that the Maxim gun is an antipersonnel weapon. It fired a .30 caliber rifle bullet. And its maximum rate of fire is 600 rounds a minute. Which sounds like a lot, but from wikipedia: “Trials showed that the Maxim could fire 600 rounds per minute, equivalent to the firepower of about 30 contemporary breech-loading bolt-action rifles.”
So 30 guys blasting away with bolt action rifles could do as much damage as a Maxim Gun. With each getting a shot every 3 seconds (20 rounds per minute), they match the Maxim Gun.
Alright, so Maxim guns aren’t the best choice.
What would a team use against a pack of Allosaurus, using 19th century weapons only?
A battery of cannon loaded with chain shot. Shoot at the level of their legs and you may bring some down.
But if the pack has more than two or three you’re probably screwed.
Oh, wow. A pack of 10 Allosaurus is really that tough?
Could a modern squad of 20 marines armed with the best modern guns take a pack of that size down?
Poison. The answer is poison. It’s how the Kalahari Bushmen take down Eland with bows that look like toys.
Pikes or lances?
I mean, you send the native levies to attract/corner the beast, and gore it, while the hunters themselves start in with the firearms.
Or you could try a punt gun.
If I needed to collect an ankylosaur, I would use a standard tiger trap (pit with stakes).
Could someone work out the dimensions that a boar spear would need to be to reach the vitals of an allosaurus and still keep the jaws away from the spear bearer? My back-of-the-envelope approximations give me something highly unwieldy. (Maybe a pike square…)
Poisoned arrows always worked for Turok and Andar…
Is there a poison which would have been available in 1895 that can act on an animal in the 2 to 30 ton range to prevent a charge?
I’m enjoying this thread immensely, but I feel I must point a couple of things out.
First off, we know next to nothing about the internal physiology or behavior of dinosaurs. While the speculation you’ve been getting here is very much in line with some of the current “official” speculation about these things, in the end all it is is speculation. I would therefore say that you can have a very wide creative license in this department.
To join in the speculation, though, I would say that though large dinosaurs were nothing like anything ever seen by humans in terms of just sheer scale, there’s no reason to think they’d be any better adapted to hunting by humans (especially humans with guns) than any other of the large animals that have been driven to or near extinction by humans both historic and prehistoric. Even things like rhinoceroses and elephants were no match for someone with a large-caliber rifle and I really don’t see how a Stegosaurus or a Sauropod would be significantly harder to take down (even the armored ones are only armored in places where they’d be likely to be bitten-- there’s plenty of unarmored space to shoot them in). Prehistoric humans were able to bring down things like Mastodons with freakin’ atlatls, so I think someone with an elephant gun should be able to bring down a large dinosaur without too much trouble.
As for the charging Allosaurus thing, I don’t see any reason why a few shots from a machine gun (or any other kind of gun) wouldn’t mortally wound it and/or turn it around. If nothing else, I think it would be fairly easy to knock one over as they were quite top heavy. But I suppose that scenario entirely depends on the knowledge of internal physiology and behavior that we don’t have.