Fill the shell of a 5,000lb laser-guided bomb with concrete and load the inert weapon into a fast-moving bomber (I’m thinking F-117 but there’s room to negotiate here). Have a Special Forces team track the Brontosaurus until it falls asleep. “Paint” the head with a laser and use surveying techniques to get the GPS coordinates. Send the coordinates to the bomber as the aimpoint, and do a high-altitude, high-velocity release so that the bomb comes in very flat.
A direct hit should kill it instantly. A glancing hit might snap the neck or break a shoulder. A miss would do nothing more than startle it, and you can try again later that night.
Erg. I meant 2,000lb – we don’t make 5,000 pounders except for special occasions, and I’d like to use something off the shelf with a known accuracy. You might even be able to get away with using a 500lb JDAM.
But… it isn’t a chicken. Unless it has one of those noncentral nervous system jobbies lack of brain function should result in immediate heart failure, yeah?
Besides, once its head’s been blown off it’s not like it will SEE you or anything. So you’d have plenty of savannah (or swampland, or whatever) to run around on to keep away from it.
If you were going to cripple it rather than go for an outright kill, wouldn’t you blow off one of its forelegs instead?
Thanks for the correction. Although you could still hunt anti-brontosaurus partisans with a cannon, I guess. It just wouldn’t be as much fun, unless you could target them before they get out of their vehicles.
Sure, but I want modern navigation and altimetry equipment, along with a Norden bomb sight and a bowling-ball release mechanism that doesn’t impart any lateral velocity on the ball. And fill those thumb-holes!
Chickens are more closely related to Tyrannosaurs than they are to Brontos, but they are still fairly close to the latter - more so than they are to crocs, which are birds’ closest living relatives. A Bronto probably had an even less centralized nervous system than a chicken - its brain was certainly much, much smaller relative to its body weight. It’s not at all unlikely that a Bronto could continue moving around vigorously for some time even if you blew off its entire head. A head shot probably wouldn’t kill it very quickly.
Good luck with that.
As I suggested, you would be better off blasting its pelvic, or sacral, ganglion, the very large nerve complex in the hips that controls the hind legs and rear body, than blasting the tiny amount of nervous tissue in the head. A missle to the pelvic ganglion would immobilize the beast; a shot to the puny brain would not. The ganglion would make a bigger target, too.
But take a look at the brain of a Brontosaurus. They practically don’t even HAVE a brain, at least compared to modern day birds and mammals.
I think we have a very poor idea of how these large sauropods behaved. I have to imagine that the brain did very little processing at all. Their eyes were tiny, their heads were tiny, the brain was double-tiny. And Colibri brings up the famous “second brain”, the spinal cord swellings that were larger than the actual brain. One theory is that sauropod brains got so small to reduce the need to pump much blood up the neck…giraffes have all kinds of special adaptations to keep their relatively gigantic brain supplied with blood, but sauropods didn’t need that, their brains were the size of the proverbial walnut. In an animal the size of a house.
It seems to me that a brontosaur will have very little reaction to ANYTHING. An adult sauropod has outgrown all potential predators. So they have no need to for fear. Or maybe the only reaction is simply to lift the head 20 feet in the air for a while to protect it. And they must eat constantly. And we believe they walked really slowly. I can imagine a Brontosaur moving agonizingly slowly across the landscape, swinging the head back and forth to hoover up vegetation without needing to expend the energy to move the entire body. Food isn’t chewed by the teeth, just raked in and swallowed, all food processing takes place in the gigantic gizzard and then on to stomach, gigantic fermentation vats on a scale never seen since.
I have a hard time understanding how these Sauropods could even walk, since their eyes are so far away from their feet. I suppose they were functionally blind for control of the feet…each foot operates without much input to or from the brain, they would just have to feel for solid ground. Stampeding them over a cliff might work, if you could get them to stampede at over 2 miles an hour.
The modern revolution in understanding dinosaurs is all very well and good, but these sauropods have been left out. They weren’t “new dinosaurs” at all, but old style dinosaurs. Sure, we now know they weren’t semiaquatic and we know they at least sometimes traveled in groups…but how much complex behavior could they have exhibited? Even with size homeothermy keeping their bodies warm, you can’t get past that walnut-sized brain.
So take off the head, it it could take the body literally hours to even notice that the head was gone. Very little blood can be pumped up the neck, so you won’t see the spurting blood you see in a decapitated bird or mammal, or even a decapitated reptile. That head is TINY. In birds the brain plays an important role in inhibiting behaviors…cut off the head and the chicken famously runs around, the inhibiting role of the brain is gone. Of course, no one knows if dinosaurs in general or sauropods in particular would have anything like this reaction. But a chicken is a much better model than any other animal, even crocodiles are not as similar to a sauropods as birds are.
So cut off the head and your Brontosaur takes off at top speed…3 miles an hour. Maybe the head waves around. Maybe the tail waves around. A couple of hours later the muscles start to fail due to lack of oxygen due to breathing problems since the trachea in the neck are likely swelling shut. Eventually it stops moving. I wonder if it will fall over as it dies, or more likely, since an adult Brontosaur probably never got off its feet, it dies standing up. Creepy.
