African bush elephant (x3) vs Tyrannosaurus rex

[Deleted]

vs.

[Deleted]

lol

[Deleted]

I favour Tyrannosaurus rex. One bite would kill each of the elephants.

[Hardcastle]

I think it would kill one of the elephants while the other two broke the t-rex's hips and knocked it over, where they would stab it to death at leisure.

[Deleted]

Jan 12, 2023 18:27:56 GMT Hardcastle said:

I think it would kill one of the elephants while the other two broke the t-rex's hips and knocked it over, where they would stab it to death at leisure.

Doubt it. Elephants were never mean't to tackle animals larger or just as large as they are (reason for their large size), while Tyrannosaurus was designed to prey on animals just as large and dangerous as itself. The elephants wouldn't be able to knock over the dinosaur, they just aren't agile enough and would have a hard time damaging fricking T. rex. One bite would mortally wound (if not instantly kill) ANY elephant, or possibly any land mammal ever - apart from a few. Also if I recall correctly, elephants without tusks usually do better against ones that have tusks - they are decent weapons but far from being high tier. T. rex is also smarter too I guess.

[Hardcastle]

Smarter?

Did I read that correctly?

That's... kind of wild bro...

An elephant's brain is 1571% larger than a T-rex brain.

Just ... huh? I recall there is some new theory that T-rex probably had a high concentration of neurons for it's brain's size, because birds do, and that's fine... they still aren't anywhere near as smart as an elephant.

Bull elephants push on other bull elephants with tremendous force, the tusks at this stage of a fight aren't actually doing much, which could be connected to this "no tusks do better" assertion (I don't know). I think it's somewhat true it makes no difference in the pushing contest which is more about bumping actual noses together. It takes all of the bull elephant's low centre of gravity and four limbs planted firmly in the dirt to prevent them from being knocked over, and sometimes they are sliding backwards on all 4 stiffened resisting legs while clouds of dust rise around them. I think a T-rex could acbsolutely get bowled over when hit from the side by a bull elephant who wasn't the one being chewed on. THEN the tusks could come into play, piercing straight through the dinosaurs rib cage.

[Deleted]

AMAZING poll.

[Deleted]

Jan 12, 2023 19:15:30 GMT Hardcastle said:

Smarter?

Did I read that correctly?

That's... kind of wild bro...

An elephant's brain is 1571% larger than a T-rex brain.

Just ... huh? I recall there is some new theory that T-rex probably had a high concentration of neurons for it's brain's size, because birds do, and that's fine... they still aren't anywhere near as smart as an elephant.

Bull elephants push on other bull elephants with tremendous force, the tusks at this stage of a fight aren't actually doing much, which could be connected to this "no tusks do better" assertion (I don't know). I think it's somewhat true it makes no difference in the pushing contest which is more about bumping actual noses together. It takes all of the bull elephant's low centre of gravity and four limbs planted firmly in the dirt to prevent them from being knocked over, and sometimes they are sliding backwards on all 4 stiffened resisting legs while clouds of dust rise around them. I think a T-rex could acbsolutely get bowled over when hit from the side by a bull elephant who wasn't the one being chewed on. THEN the tusks could come into play, piercing straight through the dinosaurs rib cage.

That may have been the case - neuroscientist Susana erkulanovuso may have started a revolution in estimating the intelligence of extinct taxa.

Her paper published January 5th 2023 discusses how her lab utilized isotropic fractionation a technique to quickly and accurately calculate the amount of cells and neurons in a brain in order to create a new system for calculating intelligence. According to her study the old way of estimating a dinosaur's smarts known as EQ or in civilization quotient is unreliable and doesn't reflect how intelligence actually works.

EQ is where you compare the brain mass and body mass of an animal and generate a ratio. If the brain is proportionally larger than what you'd expect from an animal of that size it has a high EQ and is regarded as more cognitively capable, for example previous studies on Tyrannosaurus Rex using EQ gave it a fairly low score from 2 to 2.5, that's comparable to a modern alligator or a crocodile, which while intelligent for a reptile, hardly matches up to complex problem solvers like Ravens or chimps.

However the ways that brain and bodysize develop in reptiles and mammals and birds are very different. She does goes on to explain that there is no universal relationship between body mass and neuron density or even brain mass of neuron density, that is a ratio that has to be determined on a clade by clade or group by group basis, so that's exactly what she did.

She used an isotopic fractionator to calculate how many neurons were in the pallium - the brain region that forms our cortex in mammals and the area that predicts innovative ability in birds, which are the closest living relatives to theropods. This method has actually been used previously to estimate neuron density in extinct mammals. Although as far as I'm aware this study is the first usage of the technique on dinosaurs. So for each plate of animals that she studied she based the methodology off of their closest relatives and known brain volume.

She also didn't limit the study to just theropods or even just dinosaurs. Sauropods, ornithisians and pterosaurs were in there too. She pulled from a database of reptilian neuron density generated by Kevirkova (2022) and used those values for prehistoric taxa based on how closely related they were and what she discovered was insane.There was a very clear difference between non-avian siropsids generally known as reptiles and birds as far as neuron density and brain body mass goes with birds possessing a significant lead, that lead applied to birds that lived before the k-Pg extinction as well and goes all the way back to archeopteryx, indicating that other theropods had it, as a basal trait the other theropods in the study did in fact share that clitistic brain to body mass ratio of birds, which indicated they were an APT analog for neuron density. Sauropods were considerably lower, while ornithisians and pterosaurs depended on the species, but what were the numbers? What does this all mean? Well, aliramis (a relatively small tyrannosaur) would have had just over a billion tonecephalic neurons. That's comparable to a Capuchin, which are widely considered to be the most intelligent New World monkeys. Triceratops fell quite a bit lower at 172 million since it didn't express the same brain to body ratio as birds and likely didn't possess that level of neuron density. Tyrannosaurus with its study breaking brain of 343 grams could have had 3.3 billion neurons in its pallium (scoring higher than all monkeys), which equals high cognitive abilities and social skills.  Comparable only to chimps and humans. A couple of ornithicians were fairly high, while sauropods and e.g. pterosaurs struggled comparatively.

So what do we learn from this phenomenal study? Well for one, it's dangerous to rely old and out-dated methods. Dinosaurs were such a diverse group with so many different clades that we can't expect a single ratio to play equally to all of the various species represented by the clade. Two, theropod dinosaurs were actually smart, T-Rex had more neuron pathways than even modern corvids like ravens and crows, which can solve complicated puzzles, engage in play and pass along baboons which also scored lower than T-Rex - have demonstrated the ability to understand and track numbers.

The possibilities of dinosaur intelligence and culture are fast. The author goes as far enough to say that there are more intelligent theropods... and I quote "had the biological capability to use and craft tools and develop a culture like modern birds and primates" I do personally doubt that Tyrannosaurus were out there shoving sticks into termite nests, using rocks to crack open oysters and etc, but that's more of a lifestyle thing than a limitation for intelligence thing.

We should seriously consider this going forward in how we depict dinosaur intelligence in the media. Imagine how pair of T-Rex could set a trap for her to ceratopsies or pass down information on a certain area of forest to their young or recognize individuals and retain complex memories.

[Deleted]

Attachments:

[Hardcastle]

Your general emphasis on "Old and outdated" info = bad vs "new 2020s" info = good, is to me WAY overstated.

The old stuff used to be new, too, and it's wrong, so that should tell you something. Time isn't stopping today, lots of new stuff will turn out to be wrong also.

This is a radical and contraversial, also very incomplete, theory, it's possibly complete bullshit with many critical errors, more likely overestimated or somewhat true. You've got a little too much faith in the latest fad postulations IMO. Like "nnnnoW! they got it just right. This time!".
What are the odds of that? One thing required actually is time for it to be scrutinised. If something still seems as flawlessly correct after 164 years (like Darwin's theory of natural selection, for example), that's actually far stronger than a theory that was postulated 8 days ago. Some old stuff is wrong, some old stuff is right, some new stuff will prove to be right, lots of new stuff will prove to be wrong.

One thing I would ask is why would a T-rex even NEED to be intelligent? Why does it have the most devastating cannon of a jaw on it's shoulders in terrestrial animal history and a genius problem solving super brain? To hunt slow moving and slow witted (even the lady says so, in 2023) sauropods? "Walk up and chomp" isn't exactly a brainteaser.

I'm open to "bird brain", I think time will prove she was reaching and making mistakes by imagining more brainpower than that. You seem way too sure she's absolutely correct as a matter of fact and I don't know why.

[Deleted]

Jan 12, 2023 20:12:42 GMT Hardcastle said:

Your general emphasis on "Old and outdated" info = bad vs "new 2020s" info = good, is to me WAY overstated.

The old stuff used to be new, too, and it's wrong, so that should tell you something. Time isn't stopping today, lots of new stuff will turn out to be wrong also.

This is a radical and contraversial, also very incomplete, theory, it's possibly complete bullshit with many critical errors, more likely overestimated or somewhat true. You've got a little too much faith in the latest fad postulations IMO. Like "nnnnoW! they got it just right. This time!".
What are the odds of that? One thing required actually is time for it to be scrutinised. If something still seems as flawlessly correct after 164 years (like Darwin's theory of natural selection, for example), that's actually far stronger than a theory that was postulated 8 days ago. Some old stuff is wrong, some old stuff is right, some new stuff will prove to be right, lots of new stuff will prove to be wrong.

One thing I would ask is why would a T-rex even NEED to be intelligent? Why does it have the most devastating cannon of a jaw on it's shoulders in terrestrial animal history and a genius problem solving super brain? To hunt slow moving and slow witted (even the lady says so, in 2023) sauropods? "Walk up and chomp" isn't exactly a brainteaser.

I'm open to "bird brain", I think time will prove she was reaching and making mistakes by imagining more brainpower than that. You seem way too sure she's absolutely correct as a matter of fact and I don't know why.

Yeah, but as of RIGHT NOW these are considered correct and the estimates we have to go off, unless you have a time machine hooked up.
So please, stop disregarding new and updated evidence, I've had to repeat this like a million times, you're always like "well how do you know that paper is correct?", like jesus man give it a rest or post your own studies.

You remind me of Mondas. You just blatantly say my evidence is wrong, without following it up with your own information. You don't like to admit when you're incorrect.

T. rex was probably smart, so what? What did it need that intelligence for? Well I don't know lol, obviously for a reason. Most likely to raise their young and plan out co-ordinated attacks on prey.

[Hardcastle]

It would be insane to just fully subscribe to every latest paper that comes out, the day it comes out, like it's definitely 100% true.
I'm not gonna start doing that ever, so get used to it.

I don't think you fundamentally understand how the process of establishing these things are facts, works. It's a proposal at this stage, from one lady, that's all. She's got herself a nice little argument. It's not chiselled into the stone tablet as a fact for eternity. I wouldn't even bother thinking about it yet. It needs to be scrutinised by her peers for a few years first. I'd prefer decades, if you want to know the truth.

You could almost say she's trolling to make a name for herself, she got greedy with HOW intelligent she wanted people to believe T-Rex was. Jack Horner had a "New" idea too, the latest newest info was that T-Rex was strictly ONLY a scavenger when he came up with that theory. You didn't like that latest cutting edge information did you?

It turned out to be wrong, this almost assuredly will as well because it's also pretty stupid. It will probably be partially correct to a way toned down level than what she is theorising. Maybe me seeing these things come and go so many times is why I have this attitude.

[Deleted]

This reminds me of a Dale Earnfart argument on Carnivora.

[Deleted]

Jan 12, 2023 20:38:00 GMT Hardcastle said:

It would be insane to just fully subscribe to every latest paper that comes out, the day it comes out, like it's definitely 100% true.
I'm not gonna start doing that ever, so get used to it.

I don't think you fundamentally understand how the process of establishing these things are facts, works. It's a proposal at this stage, from one lady, that's all. She's got herself a nice little argument. It's not chiselled into the stone tablet as a fact for eternity. I wouldn't even bother thinking about it yet. It needs to be scrutinised by her peers for a few years first. I'd prefer decades, if you want to know the truth.

You could almost say she's trolling to make a name for herself, she got greedy with HOW intelligent she wanted people to believe T-Rex was. Jack Horner had a "New" idea too, the latest newest info was that T-Rex was strictly ONLY a scavenger when he came up with that theory. You didn't like that latest cutting edge information did you?

It turned out to be wrong, this almost assuredly will as well because it's also pretty stupid. It will probably be partially correct to a way toned down level than what she is theorising. Maybe me seeing these things come and go so many times is why I have this attitude.

But here's the thing, it was already considered back in 2018.

"Steve Brusatte, indicated the encephalization quotient of Tyrannosaurus was similar in range (2.0–2.4) to a chimpanzee (2.2–2.5)."

(Brusatten, Steve (2018). The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers)

This new paper is just the icing on the cake.

[theundertaker45]

I think it's also important to mention that there are many Tyrannosaurus specimens and most people solely refer to "Sue" or "Scotty" when comparing them with other animals. They are the absolute largest of their kind and the largest elephant bulls out there are just as big and can weigh 10.000kg. So it's essentially a TRex vs 3 herbivores of roughly the same size which will be very difficult with the thus resulting overall size advantage on the elephants' side.

I was in contact with a digital dinosaur artist on Discord a while ago who in turn was also in contact with almost all DeviantArt artists who publish their works on DeviantArt and dinosaur megaservers; I asked them a few questions to make a proper comparison between the largest TRex and the largest African elephant and this was the final result after editing multiple times, it should be as accurate as it can get: