LoTR cave troll vs Tyrannosaurus rex

Gunner · Post by **Gunner** » 2002-08-19 01:59pm

The cave troll and T-rex enter from opposite sides of a large arena like the Roman Coliseum or Genosian execution arena. Both are fairly angry.

What happens?

Next of Kin · Post by **Next of Kin** » 2002-08-19 09:41pm

Is the cave troll armed with a spear, chain, hammer? Is he wearing armor of any sorts? I really don't think it would matter. The T-Rex possesses an incredibly strong jaw and is fast to boot. Winner: T rex

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2002-08-19 10:06pm

Troll swings weapon at Rex. Rex, who instinctively knows to dodge pointy objects (Triceratops horns) and heavy blunt objects (Anklyosaurus tails), avoids the slow, clumsy troll's attacks, waits for him to become off balance, and rips a chunk of flesh out of his hide the size of a sofa. Troll falls to the ground in agony, Rex tears his throat out and crushes his spinal column with the next bite. Troll dies. Troll is eaten. All hail the King.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-08-20 01:30am

Troll swings weapon at Rex. Rex, who instinctively knows to dodge pointy objects (Triceratops horns) and heavy blunt objects (Anklyosaurus tails), avoids the slow, clumsy troll's attacks, waits for him to become off balance, and rips a chunk of flesh out of his hide the size of a sofa

I highly doubt a Trex would recognize a weapon as a threat until too late. They're incredibly stupid for all their size. It'll take getting stabbed to wise up.

The troll moves damn quick for something its size. And unlike a rex it will know that it's enmy can hurt it. In something a confining as an arena the Rex won't be able to get gong very quick and it's not terrible agile; all that weight and size counts against it. The troll can, with luck, stay out of the way of the rex's jaws.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2002-08-20 05:53am

The troll was quick, but not THAT quick. And the T-rex's added size means that there's very little that the troll's blunt objects can do to it. Meanwhile, all the T-rex needs is one good bite on the troll, and the fight is over.

Dark Primus · Post by **Dark Primus** » 2002-08-20 06:20am

Or as the T-rex did in Jurassic Park 3 ram the other dinosour. In this case the troll when it is is not prepeared, and when it lies on the ground undefended the T-rex gets one big bite.

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2002-08-20 08:04am

t rex has some midday munchies, perhaps with light wounds.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-08-20 01:15pm

Assuming that the Cave Troll actually got the T-Rex in a fight it could not flee from, the Cave Troll would win. T-Rex was merely a scavenger who was not designed for hunting or combat.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2002-08-20 02:44pm

Master of Ossus wrote:Assuming that the Cave Troll actually got the T-Rex in a fight it could not flee from, the Cave Troll would win. T-Rex was merely a scavenger who was not designed for hunting or combat.

Say some paleontologists (including Jack Horner, but he made his name studying ornithopods, not therapods), based on the idea that Rex was too big to chase anything for long distances and his arms are too small to be useful in hunting. That doesn't rule out his being an ambush hunter (the Earth in the late Creteacious was almost entirely forested), and his prey, the giant ornithopods (duckbills) and ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs) were hardly swfit of foot either. And even if he did scavenge, he's hardly a defenseless coward. "Sue", the most complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton ever found, has both healed and unhealed Tyrannosaurus bites on her skeleton--proof that Rexes fought each other in life.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-08-20 10:50pm

The Rex also had an extraordinarily large olfactory organ, which would be unecessary in anything except a scavenger.

lgot · Post by **lgot** » 2002-08-20 11:40pm

heh

I doubt you two will get a clear conclusion from something that paleontologists still debate for a long time without any final word.

But even if the Rex hunt, he is not fast. Or he was a scavenger or hunt for other not so fast animals. Either way, Rex have no running Jurassic Park power.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2002-08-21 12:31am

As if a powerful sense of smell wouldn't be useful in hunting. Its olfactory lobe/body weight ratio is enormous, second in evolutionary history only to the turkey vulture, a scavenger, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was a dedicated scavenger. As I've mentioned before, the environment a Tyrannosaurus would have hunted in was mostly forest, not the open grassy plains today's large predators hunt in. Sense of smell would be more useful than eyesight in an environment where even a very large animal could hide effectively, especially if the predator hunted individually (which Rex probably did, as he seems to be more of a giant crocodile than anything else). Rex has very few other physiological adaptations for scavenging. He doesn't have a long, probing snount like Baryonyx or Spinosaurus (suspected scavengers no matter what Jurassic Park III has to say), or, for that matter, like a vulture's beak. His arms are too small for digging into a corpse. And only a few people consider the rest of the Tyrannosaurids pure scavengers, and Rex is nothing more than an outsized Albertosaurus or Daspletosaurus. And what, exactly, does a scavenger need with 6 inch teeth and a neck designed to take hard impacts? Did Rex scavenge when the opportunity arose? Undoubtedly--meat is meat, and Rex was big enough to chase away smaller predators and steal a kill, just like modern lions do, and if he came across a corpse in the woods in serviceable condition, he'd probably eat that too. Hell, I'll even concede that your average Rex probably ate as much as a pirate and scavenger as he did as a hunter. But the fact of the matter is, there's no evidence whatsoever proving Rex was a pure scavenger, and even if he WAS, he still wouldn't roll over and die in the face of a cave troll, as you've argued, for the reasons I've given in this post and previous ones.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2002-08-21 12:40am

lgot wrote:heh
I doubt you two will get a clear conclusion from something that paleontologists still debate for a long time without any final word.

But even if the Rex hunt, he is not fast. Or he was a scavenger or hunt for other not so fast animals. Either way, Rex have no running Jurassic Park power.

Rex probably was the same kind of long distance runner I am: a very poor one. The doesn't mean he wasn't QUICK. His whole body was mounted on a pivot, with his spinal column held perpendicular to the ground, tail straight out in back to counterbalance his torso, neck, and giant head. Rex could keep his feet planted firmly, or take a few walking steps (his stride length is enough to keep him moving at 10kph even at a walking pace), and lunge for the kill, mouth agape. He could deliver a crushing, killing blow like this, driving his teeth deep into his target, then close his jaws (the attachment sites for his jaw muscles on his skull are enormous), breaking and possibly crushing bone, and tearing off giant hunks of meat. Or, alternately, he could clamp down, shake his body violently, and by extention his prey's, and break their neck if they were small or just cause massive internal damage if they were large. Delivered properly, this kind of attack is not survivable by anything this side of a sauropod, balrog, or main battle tank.

lgot · Post by **lgot** » 2002-08-21 12:50am

Rex probably was the same kind of long distance runner I am: a very poor one. The doesn't mean he wasn't QUICK. His whole body was mounted on a pivot, with his spinal column held perpendicular to the ground, tail straight out in back to counterbalance his torso, neck, and giant head. Rex could keep his feet planted firmly, or take a few walking steps

I am aware of all that and by this is what I meant a slow Rex. His adavtange is clearly his size and brute strentgh not great agility or speed (But then, Like my brother like to point out, he might be perfect, since No one really know). He is probally fast enough to dodge or hit the Troll, which is a big and probally slow as him animal, but not agile enough to perhaps hunt smaller and agile animals.
Btw, I see many people using Jurassic Park movies as cannon, which is a mistake, because we actually have a bunch of people doing studies over this. What the JP do is consulting some top (more famous) people like Bakker or Horner and getting the list of different teories and picking up the most interesting for a movie, not the most accepted or possible. Its so clear that you see the T.Rex being able to see people not moving in the second movie and the feathers in the raptors in the third one.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2002-08-21 01:16am

Yeah, Chrichton and Speilberg definitely went shopping for the coolest theories they could find. The "he can't see you if you don't move" thing was such a horseshit plot device, and I'd sure love to hear how a biped can run at 70 miles per hour. And while raptors that are as smart as chimps sounds fun, they just don't have the brain to body ratio to pull it off, unless a lot of our theories about brain size being related to intelligence are totally wrong (always a possibility). The raptors get smarter each movie, too. In JP III, they could talk to each other. I'm sure by IV, they'll have figured out fire, and by about VI, they'll be doing vector calculus and working out unified field theory in between eating people.

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2002-08-21 06:28am

-remembers reading spoof of how the raptors sent emails to you, warning they were coming-

Lusankya · Post by **Lusankya** » 2002-08-21 09:45am

Harry Potter has a very good character shield, though.

Shadow WarChief · Post by **Shadow WarChief** » 2002-08-21 07:18pm

When the hell did Harry Potter come into this? This is the cave troll rom the Fellowship of the Ring. The kick ass cave troll. Not the retard HP troll.

And as for T-rex's hunting habits or lack there-of, In the tail of an edmontosaurus (or some other duck billed dinosaur), a piece of its tail bones have been bitten off. They put a t-rex tooth in the groove in the tail, and the tooth fit the wound perfectly. T-rex was the only thing around with a tooth big enough to make something the size of the wound.

Now you scavenger-ites I know what you're thinking: "Couldn't T-rex have bit off this chunk of the tail while scavenging?

The answer is no.

1) If T-rex was scavenging, why go for a relatively meatless portion of the body such as tail, and not its juicy hind corners?

2) The bone showed signs of healing indicating that the animal was alive when T-rex bit in.

T-rex would have had to have been hunting this animal.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-08-21 09:03pm

I have seen the said evidence for a hunting Rex, and I disagree with it entirely. There are other carniverous dinos, many of them with teeth that large. There are also aquatic predators that could easily have caused the damage, though with many of them it would have been very unusual for them to escape the attack. Incidentally, note the position of the wound--which is inconsistent with an attack from above and from the side (ie. Rex attack). It would be possible for the Rex to have caused the damage, but extremely unusual. I still think that it is more likely that the Tyrant King was a scavenger, as indicated by the size of its "arms," its massive olfactory sensors, and its unusual leg/hip structure, which is inconsistent with an animal built for real speed (though it is possible that the Rex would not need to move all that fast to catch its prey).

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2002-08-22 12:26am

There were only a few carnivorous dinosaurs with teeth the size of Rex, of the ones who lived in North America and Asia at the same time he did, they were all Tyrannosaurids, which doesn't help your case very much. As for sea creatures, the by the late Cretacous, the pliosaurs (short necked plesiosaurs with huge skulls), the only seagoing reptiles with a reasonable chance to take down an adult Edmontonosaurus were extinct. That left sharks, and nobody is going to mistake a shark's tooth mark with a thecodont's, and Dinosuchus, a 50 foot crocodile whose range did overlap with Rex, but again, croc teeth and Tyrannosaur teeth weren't all that similar. As for the bite mark's position, it doesn't seem that strange if the duckbill dodged or Rex just misjudged his attack, and Rex ended up biting the tail instead of driving his teeth into his flank.

Onto your other evidence that Rex was a pure scavenger. I've already addressed the use of a large, well developed olfactory lobe in a previous post. By the way, since we're on the subject of senses, why does a scavenger need binocular vision? Rex's eyes faced forward, giving him depth perception, utterly unnecessary for scavenging. His arms were small and almost certainly useless for hunting, but ALL the Tyrannosaurids shared the same feature, so that doesn't automatically make Rex a scavenger unless you'd like to seriously argue that there were no large predators in the western part of North America in the late Cretacous. The jury is still out on how fast Rex was, but ultimately that doesn't matter so long as he was faster than his prey. Ceratopsians almost certainly couldn't run: their front legs sprawled out from their bodies. The big ornithopods may have been slightly faster, but the same problems for a fast Rex come into play with a fast Corythosaurus or Lambeosaurus. And anyway, these animals were forest dwellers, and 50 foot animals don't go running through forests! We think of predators having to be fast because most of today's big animals (and thus big predators) live on grasslands where there's no cover and no way to quickly disappear. The prey have evolved to be quick and thus so have the predators. There weren't any grasslands 65 million years ago because there wasn't any grass, and the climate was wet enough to support continent-spanning forests with enough vegetation to hide Tyrannosaurs. Not to belabor the point, but I've said repeatedly I think Rex was an ambush hunter, like a crocodile, who used dense forest to sneak up on herds of duckbills and horn faces, and then brought down his prey in one hit.

Rex was a hunter, plain and simple. As the Tyrannosaurs evolved, the ornithopods and ceratopsians they hunted got bigger in response, as sheer bulk proved to be best way to protect oneself from a Tyrannosaurid attack. The Tyrannosaurs, in turn, got bigger to take advantage of larger prey. Doesn't it seem like an odd coincidence that the largest known Tyrannosaur (Rex himself) evolved at almost the exactly the same time as the largest known ceratopsian (Triceratops) and the largest known ornithopod (Shantungosaurus)? There's not a shred of evidence whatsoever that Rex was a pure scavenger. Most palentologists don't think he was a pure scavenger, and the only really vocal one, Horner, is a duckbill specialist.