"Walking With Prehistoric Beasts"--what about HUNTING them?

[Cosmoline]

I've been watching the show "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts" on Discovery. These episodes focus on some pretty recent extinct species from the Pleistocene. These species interest me greatly. Frankly I know enough about the dinosaurs to know 90% of what we think we know about the creatures is just educated guessing based on some ancient bone scraps

But when we're looking at the pleistocene, we're on much firmer ground. The fossils are often almost totally intact, and we've even found hides and soft tissues. Plus, many of the brutes are still with us.

I must say I'd love to see some of these guys back in the woods up here, and if they could revive the genetics I'd support reintroduction. The woolly mammoth in particular would be a fantastic game animal. Something like an elephant, but much better adapted to the boreal forest and tundra. The big saber tooth would also be cool. And of course the ultimate northern predator--Arctodus simus, or short-faced bear. There are many legends of what the Yupik call the "shrew bear" which match the fossils of the short-faced bear. These beasts were said to be far more aggressive and lethal than any griz. If the legends are indeed a cultural memory of what must have been *very* memorable bears, then they were still running around up here within the past few thousand years.

At the very least, reintroduction would provide ample justification for me to buy at least two more very large rifles. And on that basis alone it would be well worth while. Go science go!

 

[jeff-10]

I read a few years ago the Japanese want to clone Mammoths and open a theme park or something in Siberia. Could be just net rumor who knows. Anyways hunting cave bears, cave lions, giant elk or wooly rhinos? If ancient man could do it with stone spears and flint arrow heads I figure we could develop something real easy. Too bad when we had the last land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska we didn't get any tigers there. Would make for some interesting hunting.

 

[thorn726]

yo joe!
dino hunters vehicle!

dinosaur night spotter

dinosaur camo specialist!

your guess is as good as mine on the camo guy there..... heheheh


the thing id be a little worried about is those ultra stealth, super fast critters like velociraptors and dire wolves.

 

[bad LT]

Can anybody say 700 NITRO ( ). It should be perfect for this application.

 

[Preacherman]

No, thanks... if I've got to take on anything worse than what we've got running around at the moment, I want - at a minimum - something armored and on tracks, with a main gun of at least 20mm. in caliber, preferably with a very high rate of fire, terminal projectile guidance, and highly explosive shells interspersed with depleted uranium penetrator rounds. Now, that should see off Mr. Wooly Mammoth, Mr. Sabre-Tooth Tiger and Mr. Short-Faced Bear quite satisfactorily!

 

[RevDisk]

Heh, small game (Utah rapters and such), FAL would do nicely

Larger game (T-texes and such), Barrett with lots of mags. Preferably SLAP rounds.

http://www.fas.org/MAN/dod-101/sys/land/slap.htm

Ultralarge game? RPG-7, firing PG-7VR rounds. The PG-7VR can blast through 1.5m of reinforced concrete. I haven't heard of any dinosaurs that have any bone thicker than 1.5m. If any dinosaurs like that existed and were cloned, you would deserve to be trampled to death for being stupid enough to hassle one.

 

[CleverName]

.577 T-Rex. Let me say it again.

.577 T-REX

 

[boofus]

Umm, I'd feel safer hunting dinosaurs inside a tank I think. Weren't the big lizards' nervous systems so primitive that they could suffer a killing blow and not know it and still thrash around for a while?

Plus the tank would come in handy for anti-zombie exercises.

 

[Number 6]

I read a few years ago the Japanese want to clone Mammoths and open a theme park or something in Siberia.

Not to go too far off topic, but they have been trying clone them for a few years now. They were using mammoths that they dug out of the ice in Siberia, but the big problem was that even though they have been frozen for a few thousand years the DNA deteriorated to the point that it was not usable.

Now if I were somewhere where dinosaurs were present, the gun I would want to use would be the one attached to a tank. I don't think there would ever be too much gun when hunting that type of game.

 

[MLH]

The tank would also be handy

For hauling your prize home!

 

[birddog]

I think if prehistoric critters -- especially dangerous ones like the T-Rex and the sabretooth -- were around the subject of hunting them would be moot. THR posts wouldn't be "what's the best round to hunt..." it would be "what's the best round to protect myself if a T-Rex jumps me on the way to the 7-11?". I think we'd see far more posts in Strategies & Tactics than in Hunting. Perhaps a new THR category would be developed: Surviving Predation.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

I read a few years ago the Japanese want to clone Mammoths and open a theme park or something in Siberia. Could be just net rumor who knows. Anyways hunting cave bears, cave lions, giant elk or wooly rhinos? If ancient man could do it with stone spears and flint arrow heads I figure we could develop something real easy. Too bad when we had the last land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska we didn't get any tigers there. Would make for some interesting hunting.

Just what part of Siberia do the Japanese own so that they could open a theme park?

As for the last land bridge and not getting tigers, we may have, or at least lions. There is some debate about whether either lions or tigers (or both) came across and were in Alaska at about 100kbp. Of course, the saber-tooth tiger is not an actual tiger.

Umm, I'd feel safer hunting dinosaurs inside a tank I think. Weren't the big lizards' nervous systems so primitive that they could suffer a killing blow and not know it and still thrash around for a while?

What? Just when do most animals suffer killing blows and know it? Given that none ever suffers a killing blow and survives, then none have the experience of having suffered a killing blow and survived such that the next time they suffered a killing blow they would know they should be dead.

I know I have seen footage of humans with their superior nervous systems who have suffered kills blows, automotive impacts, and gun shots that thrashed around for a while before the onset of death. I have read the accounts of soldiers in battle suffering gunshot wounds and not knowing it until after the battle was over, either because they discovered they were bloody, somebody else pointed it out, or they dropped due to blood loss.

Whether or not the nervous system is considered primitive doesn't seem to matter when it comes to being cognitive about recognizing whether or not one has suffered a 'death blow.' Either that, or maybe humans are a lot more primitive than we realize.

 

[mike1966ga]

Well now, I do not know about the rest of you but I really, and I mean really like being on the top of the food chain, and I am not to keen on the idea of recreating something that could eat me in one bite ( saw it in a movie and it did not work out to well) it would be like a salmon trying to get the best of a big brown
you people need a new hobby if you think you need to hut an animal the size of a large house

 

[jobu07]

Plus the tank would come in handy for anti-zombie exercises.

"what's the best round to protect myself if a T-Rex jumps me on the way to the 7-11?".

No no no! I think we all know that the biggest problem that we would see after dino's were cloned is the onset of Mutant Zombie Dinosaur Bikers or MZDBs.

 

[rwc]

.50 BMG to hunt (Is it "hunting" if you are in a tank and invulnerable?)

For defense, a flamethrower (I would bet that even dino.s know what fire is), a high capacity shotgun with shaped charge tipped slugs, and a 40mm repeating grenade launcher with each round's fuse set for progressively shorter arming distances.

And a helo to get out of Dodge.

 

[bakert]

A few years ago at the Falls Of The Ohio State park they had an exhibition of dinosaur skeletons from the size of a large chicken to a T-Rex. Can any of you imagine a world with these creatures running around eating on each other. They also have on permanent display a woolly Mammoth skeleton that is pretty impressive. I've read articles by people that claim the woolly mammoth was still alive in the Pacific northwest in the 1500s and that there are Indian ledgends about them. Although it's an interesting topic, being a rather timid soul where creatures are concerned that claw and chaw on things and some that eat meat, for my part I say Let sleeping dogs or dinosaurs lie.

 

[Cosmoline]

Looks like someone is actually trying to do this at the Mammoth Creation Project:

"The scientists with the Mammoth Creation Project are hoping to find a mammoth that is sufficiently well preserved in the ice to enable them to extract sperm DNA from the frozen remains.

They will then inject the sperm DNA into a female elephant, the mammoth's modern-day counterpart. By repeating the procedure with offspring, scientists say, they could produce a creature that is 88 percent mammoth within 50 years. "

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/04/0408_050408_woollymammoth.html

Apparently the team is in Siberia right now looking for intact DNA strands
Now Jurassic Park is a fantasy, unlikely to ever really happen. But pleistocene park? Is this enough justification to buy a .375 H&H?

 

[bad LT]

What about black powder season:
http://www.wildimports.com/new_page_3.htm

 

[svtruth]

Right Round

Dinos were long gone by the time Homo sap appeared, but our ancestors hunted and killed the mammoths and bears with stone tipped spears. Talk about tough guys.

 

[El Tejon]

The state museum in Indianapolis had a couple of skeletons of the short-faced bear which were as numerous as squirrels here thousands of years ago. Bigger, and more aggressive than a grizzly bear and could run as fast as a horse.

Of course, that was before Hoosiers. What do you call a short-faced bear in Indiana--extinct, or about to become that way! *front sight, press*

They pulled a mammoth out of the ground on one of my former secretary's land here. It's now in the Field museum in Chicago. If I had to shoot it with something handheld, I cannot imagine anything other than a 4 bore rifle.

Maybe something on a tripod and belt fed and water-cooled. No reason to be "sporting" when extinction is called for.

The prehistoric critter that keeps me up at night when I am not worrying about bears, pumas and magic unicorns, is that meat-eating ostrich with an axe beak in South America. It stood 9 feet tall and could run up to 50 mph.

 

[NMshooter]

David Drake wrote some excellent stories on this very subject, you can probably find some of them in your local used book store.

The main character used an M1 and only took brain shots...

Heavy machineguns and grenade launchers were also present.

 

[Rico567]

Serious study of this problem should proceed from the evolution of the modern "express rifle" in Africa in the 19th century. The game there represents the ultimate in (dry land) hunting that historical humans have known. Take the estimated sizes of the game one would encounter in the Cretaceous (before the extinction of the dinosaurs) or the Pleistocene-forward (the Golden Age of Mammals) and ramp up what it was discovered it would take to stop an elephant or a cape buffalo, and you'll be in the ballpark. Perhaps the studies of Julian Hatcher in the course of developing the .45 Auto cartridge might help, too. It comes down to a matter of basic physics. Mass, velocity, inertia, momentum. There are factors that are harder to quantify, but this is a start.

 

[RevDisk]

.50 BMG to hunt (Is it "hunting" if you are in a tank and invulnerable?)

For defense, a flamethrower (I would bet that even dino.s know what fire is), a high capacity shotgun with shaped charge tipped slugs, and a 40mm repeating grenade launcher with each round's fuse set for progressively shorter arming distances.

It's hunting when you consider some dinos outweighed said tanks. Hardly invulnerable if the dinos can flip it over.

Shotgun thing has been tried, the GyroJet. Ammo was too expensive to be practical. Flamethrowers have their uses, but they are very short distance weapons. Less range than a shotgun. Odds are, if you used it on a large critter, it'd still kill you before it died. Maybe it'd work on a psychological level, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. Smaller critters? Yep, work perfectly.

Repeating grenade launcher? Pfftt! Try belt fed full auto grenade launchers. Reload times on repeating grenade launchers is rather slow. With belt fed, you just need to keep linking.

 

[Harry Tuttle]

not dinos
ice age mammals!

ever seen a giant sloth recreation?
or a giant armadillo the size of a VW beetle?

some of the wurm deer were monsters

hows about wolly rhinos?

Utah had its own Big 5

 

[Chrontius]

Main Gun
RPG-7.
40mm pump-action with shaped charges.
Jackhammer shotgun with tracing microgrenades.
XM8 SAW configuration.
M82a2 with optimized ammunition (44" temporary/permanent cavity!)
m202 Flash rocket launcher; frag warheads used on Afghanistan terrorist-hunting robots; optical homing optional

Oh Crap
Maadi-Griffin pistol
Serbu shorty, microgrenades
Carbon 15, select fire, 100-round drum
.500 S&W X-frame
6 pounds of C4 implanted in your chest cavity