Best tail weapon?

[Supercommunist]

If it weren't for the short range, I would argue that stegouros was the best. The shape of the weapon looks pretty versatile. For now, I would say that the thagomizer might be the most deadly vertebrate tail weapon based on the fact we actually have fossil evidence of a stegosaurus stabbing an allosaurus in the groin.




Personally, I think the standard anky tail club design is overrated. In documentaries it is often assume that an ankylosaurus could break bone with a single hit but I think in a lot instances it the first strike would just inflict a very painful but short term injury. You don't see ram's caving in predator's skulls or ribs with headbutts, so I don't see why we should assume ankies would be capable of disintegrating femur bones.

Scorpion stingers, of course, have proven to be very effective in the invertebrate weight division.

[Infinity Blade]

I wondered if Doedicurus could take the cake among vertebrates, given its tail club with purported spikes would basically turn it into a spiked mace. However, 1) that it had spikes is not clear (the structures in the depressions would have been made of keratin, but because this tends to rot away, we don't know what shape these keratinous structures actually were), 2) the way they worked is suggested to have been more suited for static situations and ritualized combat, not against fast moving predators (Blanco et al., 2009). In Doedicurus' case, it could've been a case of "it's the animal, not the weapon", and it could be that it wasn't as great of a weapon (especially in a variety of contexts) as it appeared.

Most differences seem to be mediated by size. Smaller clubs are lighter and their owners were probably more manoeuvrable, whereas larger species with heavier clubs would have been less manoeuvrable and their clubs too heavy to move in many directions. If the tail clubs were used primarily for intraspecific combat, the behaviour of the larger species would have appeared as much more ritualized than that of the smaller more mobile flexible-tailed species. The position of the CP in the largest forms as Doedicurus can be interpreted as an adaptation to deliver very energetic blows without receiving damage on the mobile caudal vertebrae. On the other hand, this morphological adaptation implies a behavioural correlation: the animal needed to exert the tail blows with enough accuracy to obtain an impact near the CP. This is not very efficient for fighting against fast-moving rivals as some predatory species as sabre-tooth cats. These weapons seem better suited to more static situations. This could have been produced ritualized patterns of movement as in the intraspecific fighting of several extant species (Kitchener 2000 and references therein). Therefore, it seems that Doedicurus, and to a lesser degree Castellanosia and Panochthus, probably used the caudal sheath mainly for powerful blows in ritualized intraspecific fighting or in some other static situations. Other species studied did not have such extreme specialization and probably used the caudal sheath in a more varied way with lower power and much less precision required for the impact point.

As for ankylosaurs, keep in mind that there is one study calculating tail blow forces in small, average, and large-sized knobs, but as the author herself admits, the study doesn't account for the rest of the body contributing to force production (like the hips or hindlimbs, and IMO even the forelimbs) (Arbour, 2009). Basically, this study was like calculating the force of a punch, but only modeling the arm and ignoring the fact that you would never punch with just your arm while the rest of your body was deadass static.


Could it be that there's no real answer to this question, and that it's all context-specific?

[Supercommunist]

The main reason I am skeptical of ankylosaurus breaking a limb with one hit is because I have seen accounts of people taking baseball bat strikes without sustaining fractures. I suspect that a armed human would be more efficent at producing forces than an ankylosaurus at parity.

Also I think its worth noting that mantis shrimp which are designed to kill prey via blunt trauma often require multiple strikes to create visible cracks on a clam's shell.



As for doedicurus, yeah if it had spikes on the end of its tail it probably would have been more efficent at striking.

[theropod]

Personally, I think the standard anky tail club design is overrated. In documentaries it is often assume that an ankylosaurus could break bone with a single hit but I think in a lot instances it the first strike would just inflict a very painful but short term injury. You don't see ram's caving in predator's skulls or ribs with headbutts, so I don't see why we should assume ankies would be capable of disintegrating femur bones.

While I might be inclined to agree that ankylosaur clubs are somewhat overhyped (esp. considering most ankylosaurs simply weren’t that big compared to the giant tyrannosaurs they are usually compared to), I think these other, much smaller animals likely aren’t a very good model to conclude on the ineffectiveness of blunt trauma.

A small animal will have a much harder time inflicting severe blunt-force trauma on another small organism (and despite this, mantis shrimps appear to be effective enough at doing it) than a multi-ton ankylosaur would on a multi-ton theropod. The area over which forces are distributed, and the area resisting said forces, only scales with the square, but the mass (that is, both the mass of a tail club, that figures into the kinetic energy of the strike, and the mass of the theropod’s body, which will offer much greater resistance to being accellerated by such an impact, therefore meaning more of the impact force goes into actually damaging the impacted tissues).

I think the extreme diversity of blunt-force weapons in human history is a testament to their efficacy, and I would be pretty confident I could break (or at least seriously injure) someone’s leg with a baseball bat (or a warclub) most of the time, if I had to.

That being said, yes, I think ankylosaur clubs are a bit overrated in terms of their effect. A large part of that has to do with a very incorrect impression of the size and reach they usually had. Most ankylosaur tails were relatively short, and might have had a hard time reaching the legs of a bigger predator (even if approached from behind) before being in reach of that predator’s jaws. And then, as per the conclusions of Arbour 2009 (even though it’s been noted that the assumptions in that study were quite conservative), how much of an effect that strike would have would be heavily dependant on the relative and absolute sizes of the animals and tail club involved.

I’d probably agree that thagomizers are a good candidate for the most potent form of tail-weaponery. They combine some blunt force potential (see Mallison’s Kentrosaurus papers) with a major thread of deep, penetrating trauma, and they do seem to usually come with a considerably greater reach (longer, more flexible tail and greater height). I think this makes a lot of sense, as thagomizers were the sole line of defense for stegosaurs, while ankylosaurs had a secondary line of defense in their armour.

[Supercommunist]

I am not denying that blunt weapons can be good weapons just that people overestimate how reliable they can be. This is also true of bladed weapons like swords. There are videos of novices and even trained people struggling to cut targets.



Likewise, on paper, you would think that a bat to the head would just instantly incapacitate or kill a person with one hit, and while it certainly can, in most instances that doesn't seem to be the case. Neither of the videos below are very graphic. The guy in the first video fights a bunch of belligerent goons. The guy in the second video was randomly attacked but remained concious.






The victim in the second video apparently suffered laceration and bruising but no fracture. Obviously bats are not actually intended to be weapons so they would be worse at inflicting damage than something like a mace or a warhammer, but the same is true of ankylosaurus' boney tail club. I will admit we don't have any truly good analogs for ankylosaurus and multi ton animals probably were worse at absorbing impacts.

I am sure ankylosaurus could break a leg, and in some cases might have been able to do that with one swing, but I think in most instances it would need multiple swings to accomplish that.

[Infinity Blade]

Sept 19, 2023 20:05:28 GMT 5 theropod said:

I’d probably agree that thagomizers are a good candidate for the most potent form of tail-weaponery. They combine some blunt force potential (see Mallison’s Kentrosaurus papers) with a major thread of deep, penetrating trauma, and they do seem to usually come with a considerably greater reach (longer, more flexible tail and greater height). I think this makes a lot of sense, as thagomizers were the sole line of defense for stegosaurs, while ankylosaurs had a secondary line of defense in their armour.

There is a suggestion that stegosaur plates may have been sharp-edged with the keratinous covering, which may have actually made them better suited for defense than many postulated. Of course, a defensive function hasn't been proven over all other proposed functions (just hasn't been ruled out), and it still wouldn't be as extensive as ankylosaur armor, but the idea that stegosaurs might have had their plates as another defense is intriguing. What do you think?

The function of stegosaurian dorsal plates as defensive structures has been rejected by several authors, based on their internal trabecular structure, which is not considered crush resistant, and would therefore make a defensive use ineffective (Buffrénil et al. 1986; Main et al. 2005). The histological study of Buffrénil et al. (1986) also did not find an asymmetrical distribution of Sharpey’s fibres within the plates that would have indicated the possibility of moving the plates to a recumbent and therefore more protective position, as suggested by Bakker (1986). However, the keratinous covering could have increased their strength considerably, depending on its thickness, since beta-keratin, which makes up scales, claws, and other cornified structures in reptiles, is considered to be one of the strongest natural proteins (Baden et al. 1974). The keratinous covering could also have created much sharper edges on the plates than what is seen on the osteoderms and thereby increase their value as defensive structures, even in an upright position. Although the protection of the upright plates might not have been needed over the spinal cord in the pelvic and thoracic regions as pointed out by Bakker (1986), it would have been important protection for one of the most exposed regions of the animal, the neck. The cervical plates would have greatly increased the height of the neck making a lateral attack more difficult and could have been an effective defence against a dorsal attack on the neck, which a reported cervical plate with a possible bite mark (Carpenter et al. 2005) might prove.

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00015-010-0026-0