Personally, I am sick to death of the issues people have with the "
Spinosaurus beats
T. rex" scene in
Jurassic Park III.
It's a movie, with fictionalized portrayals of both species, hardly meant to be realistic. (Though JPIII was one of the first movies to correctly depict
Spinosaurus with an elongated crocodilian snout, anatomically their model doesn't have much in common with many scientific reconstructions of the species.) And it's worth noting that that
Spinosaurus had had a small
airplane collide with it just minutes before, and had little or no discernible injury to its sail (the area where it as hit) the next time it was seen. I think it's safe to say that
Jurassic Park's version of
Spinosaurus is considerably more durable than the real thing.
I for one found it refreshing to see
Tyrannosaurus upstaged by another theropod for once. Don't get me wrong, I love
T. rex, but with a history of almost a century of media appearances and glorification as the "king of the theropods", it's nice to see another dinosaur steal the show for once. On a similar note, I saw a piece of artwork online recently (which I sadly can't find now) that really struck a chord with me regarding my feelings about the criticism of that JPIII scene. It shows a
Spinosaurus (which
might have depicted ordering a drink at a bar, if my memory is not mixing with my imagination) saying something along the lines of: "I don't get it; when a giant ape (King Kong) beats
T. rex in a fight, everybody cheers. When
I beat
T. rex in a fight, everybody boos."
My tirade so far may be a little off-tangent from the subject of this thread; my point is that most of the complaints surrounding the JPIII fight scene are just stupid (no offense to anyone here who might have shared those complaints), because the combatants had virtually nothing in common with their real-life counterparts and were operating under Hollywood physics. A hypothetical confrontation between a
real Tyrannosaurus and a
real Spinosaurus is a whole other kettle of fish (stop drooling, Spino, it’s just an expression
). It's true; in real life, a
Tyrannosaurus would have had some significant advantages over
Spinosaurus in a fight, most namely its jaw strength. And real-life
Spinosaurus was more lightly built than
T. rex, despite having a greater overall length. So realistically speaking, if the real-life dinosaurs were to fight to the death, the
T. rex would probably come out on top. But I can’t help but address what I feel to be one of the most ridiculous things about these “who would win if _____ challenged _____” arguments, and that’s that they seem to assume that one side will always win, and that the outcome will always be the same. Honestly, anyone who knows a thing or two about competitive sports or anything involving a clash between two sides (whether sports, fistfights, or animal predators and prey) should know that this is bunk. The way I see it, the
Spinosaurus vs.
T. rex scenario is like bringing a knife to a gunfight (if anyone has seen the
MythBusters episode where the hosts test the validity of this phrase, you’ll know where I’m going with this): the
T. rex has the gun and a better chance of winning the fight, while the
Spinosaurus has the knife and is at a disadvantage, but is still armed and not without a chance of winning the fight. Sure, I think that in a realistic version of the JPIII battle scenario, the
T. rex would win most of the time. But I also think it’s possible that the
Spinosaurus could rip the
T. rex’s throat out with its claws before the latter managed to land a fatal bite, or that the
T. rex could beat the
Spinosaurus, but suffer some wounds in the process that would ultimately prove fatal. This sort of thing happens plenty of times in nature between living animals: polar bears hunt walruses, but sometimes the walrus kills the polar bear; aggressive elephants sometimes kill rhinos, but occasionally the rhino is the one who impales the elephant; lions and hyenas regularly kill each other. Even if one animal in a fight has an advantage, that doesn’t mean that that animal is guaranteed to win every time.
There’s one more twist in this hypothetical conflict that I want to bring up. I’m sure that most of us here are already aware that real-life
Spinosaurus was separated by tens of millions of years and thousands of miles from
Tyrannosaurus, but it did live alongside another predator as largeóor even slightly larger thanó
T. rex (though not as formidably armed):
Carcharodontosaurus. One theory regarding
Spinosaurus's sail is that, like the raised hackles of a cat, the puffed-up feathers of an owl, or the spread frill of a frilled lizard, the appendage made
Spinosaurus look bigger and more intimidating, which would deter other large predators like
Carcharodontosaurus from getting into a fight with it, or even allowing it to scare other large predators away from a carcass. (Though
Spinosaurus is widely hypothesized to have primarily eaten fish, the presence of
Iguanodon bones in the stomach of its close relative
Baryonyx suggests that dinosaur meat might not have been exempt from its menu.)
In my opinion, the most realistic portrayal of an encounter between
T. rex would proceed as follows: Rex and Spino meet from opposite sides of a clearing, just like in JPIII; Spino roars (or hisses, or bellows, etc.), gapes jaws and raises forearms to bare teeth and colossal meat-hook thumb claws, and turns sideways, showing off sail;
T. rex decides that Spino is way too big and scary to risk a fight with, and backs off; both dinosaurs go about their business, Spino returning to the river to catch some fish, Rex going off in search of wayward human tourists or motley band of baby herbivores or what have you. End of story. -_-
