Does size matter in a dino fight?

[LittlefootAndAliTogether]

Ok, is it always guaranteed that a Longneck will be a Velociraptor or does size not always matter in a dino fight?

I mean, could size actually work against you in a fight?  

[Serris]

2 words: pack hunters.

Dromaeosaurs were hypothesized to be pack hunters that attacked larger dinosaurs.

[Nahla]

Depends..

A larger creature would have the advantage of pure size, a smaller one the advantage of speed.
A larger creature simply won't be able to move as quickly as smaller more agile one, that's just the way it works.

Most smaller predators and some large ones as well are pack hunters, they have the advantage of numbers, like Hyenas for one. Working together they can take down some of the larger prey such as Zebra, Buffalo, Antelope etc.  The prey has the size but the predators the numbers, and Hyena's wear down their prey but running them to exhaustion, taking turns.

There, numbers win.

But if say a Cheetah which always hunts alone hunts someone like a Dik Dik, size will win. A Cheetah is much stronger and faster then a little Dik Dik.

Dinosaurs most likely could of been the same way, a smaller predator would not take on something as large as an adult Apatosaurus alone, a younger one maybe but an adult could win on size and strength alone.

A pack would have numbers, some to distract, some to ambush etc.

You'll have to go research what Dinosaurs were from what Period and try and work out what they could of hunted and how they did it.

Course, The Land Before Time will have no answers to this, as most of those dinosaurs should not even be existing together.

[Ducky123]

Yep, size does matter of course but so does velocity, agility, weaponry and, as Nahla pointed out, often just the sheer number of attackers that'll take down a bigger dinosaur.

[jansenov]

The more resources the group has access to, the greater the collective intelligence of the group and the smaller the units it is made off, the more powerful, smarter and resilient it becomes. Big organisms are not resilient. For a species made of small numbers of large animals, fatal injuries to individuals or epidemics are catastrophic, while a species made of large numbers of small animals can handle it much easier. A species of large animals enjoys an advantage over a species of small animals of similar collective intelligence and resilience only if it greatly exceeds it in power. Thus, lions represent a great threat to baboons, but a very small, almost negligible threat to humans (even to hunter-gatherers like the Khoisan or the Hadza), thanks to their much higher collective intelligence. In turn, though humans have unparalleled collective intelligence, bacteria and insects thanks to their very small sizes and tremendous numbers have such superior resilience that they can readily beat human groups in many situations.

Taking all this together, an organism that is as small as a bacteria but can congregate with other such organisms into hyperintelligent swarms would be the ultimate life form. It would also easily devise a way to tap into the energy reserves of the solar system, thus adding power to resilience and intelligence.

[Chomper98]

Yes, it is possible to fight something much larger if you have the smarts to do it. I know not animals, but look at Robert E. Lee winning victory after victory over a Union army regularly a third to twice his army's size. But there's a limit. Something incredibly larger, like an Apatosaurus to a raptor, would still win, unless the Raptor got an extremely lucky hit on its throat or heart, which is very unlikely. So yes, size does matter in every fight, though so does strength, speed, cunning, and strategy.

[RockingScorpion]

I watched a documentation recently trying to figure out hunting strategies of Velociraptors, by building parts of the animals and trying to make them functional as well, like a leg with the claw to see what that claw could do (it was probably used to sting instead of cutting because it wasn't sharp on the edges).

According to those tests they were able to hunt down dinosaurs bigger than them, but that had a limit. There were dinosaurs at that time that could simply crush a Velociraptor with one hit, and that was probably just too risky. They wanted to survive and that also means to play it safe sometimes.

So yeah, there were some dinosaurs that were safe even from pack hunters because it still was to risky. Unless the pack was desperate to find something to eat (basically, try to kill something or die of hunger as the only options) they would avoid some species.