From: "no go" <honkietong@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: honkietong@hotmail.com
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: Armoured Spinosaurus?
Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 11:05:29 +0000
Has there been any evidence of armoured Spinosaurids, particuarly
Spinosaurus?
I've been watching JP3, and despite the abysmal storyline and the almost
obvious lack of effort in making the small monkeys look realistic (I have
no
idea why people keep telling me they were intended to be humans), one thing
in the movie kept coming to me:
The scene in question is when the T.rex grabs hold of the Spinosaurus on
the
neck and drags it around for a few moments. This would have finished any
dinosaur, but not good ol' Spino who manages to get off with barely a
scratch and even manages to turn the tables.
The strange thing is, Spinosaurus was up against the undisputed champion of
bite force, which could shatter Triceratops hipbones with its obscenely
powerful 13,400 N bite. Considering that, it's pretty amazing that
Spinosaurus could not only survive the bite to his looking much more
fragile
then a hipbone neck, but with nary a scratch. Was Spinosaurus neck
armoured?
Has there been any evidence for that? I know the movie monster theory could
be used up to explain this, but what on earth could Ingen mess with to give
Spinosaurus such amazing abilities? Is there any fossil evidence to suggest
an armoured Spinosaurus?
Also, JP3 seems to tell us that Spinosaurus had an incredibly tough neck,
despite having his multi-ton mass dragged in such a violent way, it did not
dislocate or break, nor even show significant signs of tissue damage. I
know
we should speculate a little on dinosaurs, but was Spinosaurus really
armoured and had a powerfully built neck or are the movie makers just
yanking my crank in a really badly rigged fight? Can I put this down as one
of the all-too-many times when dinosaur movies suspend the laws of physics
or is there really any justification for Spinosaurus rather amazing neck
feats. Spino struck me as big and mean, but it was his indestructable neck
that really got to me...
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