What To Do In Case Of Dinosaur Attack: The Text!

Hi, I’m Reverend Matt, and today we are going to discuss what to do in case you are attacked by a dinosaur. First of all, by show of hands, how many people here have been attacked by a dinosaur? All right, secondly, by riotous cheering, how many people have not been attacked by a dinosaur? Now, I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “I could never be attacked by a dinosaur, getting attacked by a dinosaur is something that happens to other people,” but are you aware that over 57% of Americans are attacked by dinosaurs every year? And do you know why you were not aware of that? I’ll just let you guess why. In any case, those are bad odds, and so it behooves even those people living in relatively dinosaur-free geological periods or undiscovered islands, valleys, or plateaus to learn a few simple techniques of managing dinosaur attack.

We’ll start out with some general do’s and don’ts, applicable to all dinosaur attack situations.

Do: Evacuate the city. Or town, or farmstead, or nature reserve, circus, luxury cruise liner, Burning Man Festival, 1970s truckin’ convoy, or other collection of humanity that has come into contact with dinosaurs of any kind. Get the people away from the dinosaurs in as orderly a fashion as possible. It won’t be easy, people will be panicked and even incredulous, when you tell them that the city is being attacked by Triceratopses some people will actually challenge your honesty. They will. Believe me.

Don’t: Bring dinosaurs to civilization in the first place. I know, I know, you’ve found a dinosaur, or created one, and step two is to bring it to a major metropolitan area, because step three: Profit. But of course what you’ve got to understand is that step three is not profit, step three is the dinosaur escaping and killing just all sorts of people and, as likely as not, you, which might be pleasingly ironic to onlookers but that doesn’t make you less dead.

Do: Disregard the feathers. Many sorts of dinosaurs are known to have been feathered, and many people hate this. They hate it with a white-hot fury usually reserved for people who have a differing opinion of Star Wars from their own, and if people getting worked up into a frenzy by something so practically inconsequential as dinosaur feathers sounds implausible to you, allow me to introduce you to the internet. They hate feathered dinosaurs because they feel that this makes them not scary, because apparently what‘s scary about dinosaurs are the scales? Maybe are were some other things that are scary about dinosaurs, I feel, but you’re the boss, yelling internet person. It’s great that dinosaurs have feathers, y’all, it makes them weirder, more outside of anything that we might imagine, and insisting on them being the dragons of our youth is a failure of imagination.

Don’t: Just scream. Just scream and scream and scream. It is a popular option in case of dinosaur attack, but the dinosaurs don’t care, and if they do they will want to quiet the noise, which has just made things worse. Plus I’m trying to sleep, for god’s sake, what’s the matter with you.

Do: Wait it out if possible. Eventually, dinosaurs will be destroyed by a six-mile-long asteroid that throws sufficient ash into the atmosphere to block out the sun for months or years and all of the dinosaurs will die off. So if you can hold off until that happens, so much the better. Two downsides: It might be awhile, and also it will kill you as well. But nobody said dealing with dinosaur attack was going to be easy. Well, probably somebody did, but they just want attention.

Don’t: Construct a theme park. Just don’t! Yes, I know you’ve invested in all of the best possible security, but life will, uh, find a way, and it will end badly. If you have to scratch that itch just play a Jurassic Park park-building video game. In the most recent one you eventually start making enough money that you can start just shrugging off the lawsuits when visitors are slaughtered by dinosaurs, so you stop worrying about that, it is amazing.

Do: Avoid dinosaurs generally. This can be harder than it sounds; dinosaur attack is a nigh-inevitable consequence of almost all varieties of time travel, for example, which sounds like it can be easily enough skipped, but what if the person with the time machine is super handsome, hm? We have mentioned lost plateaus and valleys and islands, avoid those, unless there’s money in it for you, in which case go do it, obviously. The Hollow Earth is full of attractive cavemen and women usually but it is also full of hostile dinosaurs so you need to weigh the risks. Avoid genetic research facilities as well. Most are for medical or agricultural research, of course, but these things could involve dinosaurs at any moment, genetics is a weird science. And finally, don’t let your raft plunge a thousand feet below, there’s sleestaks.

Don’t: Taunt the dinosaur. That’s all. Don’t taunt the dinosaur. Write this down on your hand for a reminder if you need to.

Do: Raise the dinosaur from birth. Then you will have a dinosaur friend! The advantages of this are numberless, including the joy of companionship, nobody wanting to sit next to the two of you on the bus, and that you will almost certainly have adventures together, which is a positive way to say that people will try to kill you. But this one particular dinosaur won’t! Usually. I mean, sometimes it will. Almost inevitably, actually. Okay, don’t: Raise a dinosaur from birth.

Don’t: Punch the dinosaur on the nose to incapacitate it, that’s sharks, and furthermore, no, that’s not sharks, if you bought that hitting sharks on their noses was anything other than a confusing, dangerous, and ultimately pointless hobby some people have then I have a well-thought-out, non-disruptive and speedily finished road construction project to propose to you.
Also don’t: Lay down underneath the dinosaur.

Do: Obtain a reliable dinosaur detector, because the safety of your home and family comes first. Can you really afford to be without the Reverend Matt Dino-tector, only 39.95, available on revmattsmonsterscience.com, and wherever fine paleontological countermeasures are sold.

Don’t: Attempt to reason with the dinosaurs. They have little interest in what you might have to offer. Money, love, ice cream, Kanye singles, dinosaurs have no desire for any of these things. The predators may desire your flesh, and of course you can offer this to them if you’ve decided you’ve had a good run; I have been remiss in failing to mention that one thing you always can do in case of dinosaur attack is die. But otherwise, do not try to bargain with the dinosaurs, or reason with the dinosaurs, or kiss the dinosaurs, repeat, do not kiss the dinosaurs. I’m not here to judge your kinks, but our topic tonight is safety. Also, consent is normally difficult to establish.

Do: Infiltrate the dinosaurs. Put on a dinosaur suit and pretend to be a dinosaur, go among them as one of their own, basically it’s a plan that can’t miss, is it even possible for something to go wrong with this plan?

And, don’t: Go to the bathroom during a dinosaur attack.

Now, aside from these helpful do’s and don’ts, there are three basic techniques of dealing with dinosaur attack. We will look at each of these, and move on to applying each of them to different dinosaurs on a case by case basis.

The first is of course to run. It is one of the most natural human reactions to fear of any sort, which does make me wonder why everyone isn’t just running everywhere at all times these days, but at the same time when I do see somebody running in what appears to be no response to immediate danger, I do want to try to calm them down, to comfort them. Of course, when the dinosaurs do attack and these people will be better at running than we are, who will be laughing at who? They will, they’ll be laughing at us, they’re really mean. Runners: They’re practicing for dinosaur attack.

Of course, the problem with this is that many dinosaurs are quite fast, either because they’re built for speed or even simply because of great stride length. We will examine this on an individual basis, but in general, if you can eschew running – yes, eschew, just because we’re discussing dinosaur attack doesn’t mean we’re abandoning class – in favor of bicycling, driving, flying in an airplane, or doing whatever this man is doing, then always do that. Do not, however, attempt to escape on a roller coaster, as they will find a way to use that to their advantage.
The second technique would be hiding. There are two things to consider here: The senses of the dinosaur – it is often easy enough to hide from a dinosaur’s line of sight, but in those cases where the dinosaur has an exceptional sense of smell, or hearing acute enough to hear your breath or the rustling of the potato chip bag you’ve opened in your rather startling overconfidence, then mere disappearance will not suffice. Again, we will examine this by dinosaur type.

The second concern is defensibility of the hiding place; if you are found, can the dinosaur get to you? Attractive Japanese paper screens seem like a good place to hide for the modern sophisticate, but even the smallest of dinosaurs will be able to get through them; and even enormous rocks are liable to be pushed over by dinosaurs. Choose carefully. Or, haphazardly, these are just guidelines, what am I, Pharaoh?

And because we’re human beings there is of course a third standard option, and that is attacking the dinosaur one’s own self. If Godzilla was real, some Americans would try to shoot him with guns, it is their favorite thing. For larger dinosaurs, you will of course need larger guns with larger calibers, so-called elephant guns, which were invented because someone had to do something about all those damned, lying elephants. The largest dinosaurs may be beyond the reach of even these, and even smaller ones will also be weapon-resistant when they’re made by mad science – which is when you have mad hypotheses which you test under mad control conditions for mad peer review.

Other means of attack are of course one’s fists, which I am going to go ahead and just not recommend. Unless, of course, you are a master of the martial arts, and the fact that there is not a movie in which Shaolin Monks fight raptors, both sides leaping about and attacking with their feet, is perhaps the greatest possible indictment of global civilization itself. It’s why the aliens haven’t contacted us. We are not ready.

Lasers and particle beams and other sorts of rays have somewhat better chances of effectiveness, but when we’ve got technology of this level of course our most reasonable countermeasure is mechanical versions of those dinosaurs. That’s just common sense. It is also worth noting that one version of Mechagodzilla was in fact a vehicle, piloted by humans, and there is a persistent myth among men that potential sexual partners are very interested in what kind of car they drive; this is for the most part untrue, but of course if you’re behind the wheel of a Mechagodzilla then, well, ladies.

Perhaps the best anti-dinosaur weapon is in fact other dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are as eager to attack one another as they are to attack us; indeed, if you look at them, they’re frequently enormous and also covered in spikes or teeth or enormous claws, life meant business in the Mesozoic, nothing came to mess around. Nevertheless, they are in most circumstances more apt to go after each other, because other dinosaurs pose the greater threat or provide the greater amount of meat. Of course, using this anti-dinosaur technique carries its own risks, as it requires the presence of additional dinosaurs, and also dinosaurs are notoriously difficult to control, or we would not be having this talk. All the same, some would say that the best answer to a bad guy with a dinosaur is a good guy with a dinosaur. These people are insane.

So let’s now get into the various dinosaur types. We’ll begin with the theropods, the group that contains all of the carnivorous dinosaurs, as well as some herbivorous types, including many modern birds, which are technically all a variety of theropod. We will not be discussing what to do in case of modern bird attack, because there is just one thing to do if you are attacked by any modern bird, and that is think about your life choices.

We’ll start with the dinosaur of perhaps the greatest general concern, and this of course is Velociraptor. The first thing you’re going to want to do is figure out what kind of Velociraptor you’re dealing with. If it’s a real, actual Velociraptor, you’re dealing with an animal that is more or less fox-sized, and presumably of a similar ecological niche. It is therefore not terribly likely to attack you, unless it feels threatened itself. And if it does, then brush it off of you, get rid of that Velociraptor, it weighs like 20 pounds, I’m betting you can take it.

But of course this is not the animal that most of you think of when you hear the name ‘Velociraptor.’ Instead you’re thinking of this larger, deeper-snouted animal, which is actually a sort of dinosaur called Deinonychus. But what happened was that a popular book on Theropods was published in 1988 in which it was proposed that the animal known as Deinonychus was actually similar enough skeleton-wise to Velociraptor that it should count as a large species of same. Nobody bought it and the author retracted it, but in the meantime, Michael Crichton wrote a book. And then later, Stephen Spielberg, looking for a vehicle film for Jeff Golblum’s torso, bought the rights to that book and adapted it to his open-shirted needs.

And when dealing with Jurassic Park Velociraptors, well, now you do have a problem. They are very nearly sapient; I half expected them to have developed a civilization by Jurassic Park 3, with buildings and government and quality television, and was disappointed when they did not. The Velociraptor named Blue was the only character in the first Jurassic World movie who had a narrative arc. This has a serious effect on the hiding contingency; doors famously will not stop them, if you think your hiding place is especially clever it probably isn’t.

Running is a poor option against Jurassic Park Velociraptors, as they move at cheetah speed, which is 60 to 70 miles per hour, which is a super easy thing to just say instead of “cheetah speed” but some people can only comprehend measurements based on animal facts. “Hey, how many donuts are left?” “Why, the same number as the number of eggs laid by a purple gallinule.” Six to eight, by the way. These Velociraptors are vulnerable to conventional weapons, however, though of course one runs the risk of their learning how to operate them themselves, or indeed, reverse-engineering them.

Do not focus on a single Velociraptor, because then of course other Velociraptors will come at you from the sides, though if this happens do remember to compliment the Velociraptor. Do use your junior high school acrobatic skills to awkwardly evade the Velociraptors; this is of course their weakness. Otherwise, though, your best bet against Velociraptors is to simply wait for the Tyrannosaurus ex machina.

Now, actual Deinonychuses, the animal on which Jurassic Park Velociraptors are in fact based, well, here you’ve got a different problem. They’re not actual, literal members of Mensa, and they run at maybe 30 miles per hour, but what they do have is the so-called killing claw on each foot, huge and held up off of the ground to keep it sharp. Blue and his pals have these too, but they are underplayed in the films, presumably not to upset children with their goriness, but what you’ve got to understand is that actual predatory animals will be concerned about upsetting children maybe 25% of the time at best. And so Deinonychus would have leaned on this weapon pretty hard, using it to eviscerate its prey, or, according to a more recent theory, to hook itself onto its larger prey like it was mountain climbing gear, and tear away at its victim with its teeth and foreclaws.

I don’t have any jokes about that because I’m just so happy right now. Now, don’t get me wrong, Jurassic Park Velociraptors are amazing movie monsters, I own a decommissioned animatronic one from one of those touring shows, but an actual Deinonychus was as scary as it is, but sleeker, weirder-looking. It helps that it’s very human-scale, legs and torso and arms of similar length; a Tyrannosaurus is almost a natural disaster, but a Deinonychus will hunt you. Ozzy Osbourne never dressed up as one on any of his album covers and we must educate people about dinosaurs to ensure that this mistake is never repeated.

Tyrannosaurus Rex is perhaps the greatest of all of prehistory’s charismatic megafauna. that is a term from the scientific literature, by the way, “Charismatic megafauna,” and of course is the name of my signature fragrance. And Tyrannosaurus is likely the most charismatic of all; indeed, its very name means “tyrant lizard king,” and though this is misleading because the fossil record tells us very little about dinosaur administrative systems, it does sound a good deal better that “democratic lizard chairman.”

We will be using “Tyrannosaurus” here tonight, rather than “T-rex,” because “Tyrannosaurus” is just too delightful and meaty a word to dispense with. This kind of abbreviation is for J-Lo, and I mean no disrespect to Jenny from the block, but she is not a Tyrannosaurus, and I can prove it.

Now, with a Tyrannosaurus one is famously advised to freeze, to stay perfectly still. Leaving aside the fact that that’s stupid, we are told that this is because their vision is based on movement, and that they hunt exclusively by vision. Now, first of all, there is no scientific reason to believe that their vision is based on movement, and second of all, having a predator’s primary sense be terrible is troubling at best. Such dinosaurs wouldn’t need six miles of rock from space to destroy them; they were just terrible at their jobs.

Some will propose that freezing is a good stratagem in general, regardless of the dinosaur’s senses, presumably because the dinosaur would feel that eating you under such circumstances would be, perhaps, unsporting? Well, boy, have I got some bad news for you.

Fortunately, in the sequel to the film with the half-blind, vision-dependent Tyrannosaur, this problem is actually corrected, and we have a Tyrannosaur with an exceptional sense of smell, which is consistent with the paleontology. Indeed, based on this sense of smell, the paleontologist John Horner – on whom Jurassic Park’s Alan Grant was based, primarily in terms of handsomeness – has suggested that Tyrannosaurus was primarily a scavenger. This in part because its sense of smell was comparable to the modern turkey vulture. An interesting idea, though I do invite my clever and physically attractive audience to see if they can think of some ways a Tyrannosaurus and a turkey vulture might be different.

Here’s one: a Tyrannosaurus’ bite force was 12,800 pounds, which, according to the Internet, is the equivalent of 13 Steinway Model D grand pianos falling on you. No no, that’s Model D. Thank you, Internet, now I get it. But the point is, this is a bite force slightly in excess of what is necessary to pull dead flesh languidly off of bones; this is not the bite of a scavenger. Also, Tyrannosaurs being scavengers would be super boring, and science does need to pay attention to how awesome its conclusions are. Or no. No it doesn’t.

The problem in the first film is still in that film, as most scientists agree that you can smell something even if it is standing still, but at least they try, in the second. It’s the only time they try; as paleontology has developed ahead of and away from the movie series, the films have ignored it, which is a shame after their fairly strong start. And if they’re going to ignore the science, one begins to wish they would double down. Hybrid dinosaurs? Great – giant raptor with a Triceratops head, a Stegosaurus tail, and Pteranodon wings, plus it can play canasta. Let’s do this.
One thing relevant to our topic that we learn about Tyrannosaurus at the end of Jurassic Park, when our heroes are finally cornered by the raptors but then are suddenly saved, is that a Tyrannosaurus could be anywhere, it could be right there in the room with you and you’d have no idea, you’re in a public bathroom stall and suddenly, Tyrannosaurus! I would like to advise alertness but this is obviously for naught, Tyrannosaurs are masters of ninjitsu, the art of invisibility, which I am extremely disappointed in my word processor’s spellcheck for not accepting. Anyway, this does of course check out with the paleontology.

So what do you do about Tyrannosaur attack? Well, hiding is not an amazing option, due to aforementioned sense of smell. Running is better than it sounds; a Jurassic Park tyrannosaur clocks at 32 miles per hour, which is apparently faster than their jeeps, and I’m just going to say, when equipping your dinosaur island, go ahead and splurge on jeeps that can go faster than 30 miles per hour. An actual tyrannosaur is a good deal slower than this; though this speed was regarded as good science at the time the first movie was made, the biophysics have been reassessed. Still, a real tyrannosaur’s running speed is going to be 17 miles per hour, as compares to the average human running speed of six to eight miles per hour, or the number of eggs laid by a purple gallinule, and so running is still not a good option, though at least your jeep should be able to manage the speed. If it is not, take it to an authorized dealership, though I will admit that this is sometimes not practical while in the midst of being attacked by a Tyrannosaurus.

Conventional weapons are also difficult where tyrannosaurs are concerned, due to their great size. And so what is left? Well, probably your best bet is to get yourself into some sort of hole or other enclosure that is too small for its head to fit into, because it’s not going to suck you out with its lips, delightful though its image may be. It is also not going to grab you with its arms, because, and I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Tyrannosaurus arms are very small, I have been telling jokes about Tyrannosaurus for several minutes now and I have not mentioned anything about the arms, I could be arrested.

It has been proposed that a good anti-Tyrannosaurus weapon is a Spinosaurus, which is in fact a predatory theropod that was larger still than Tyrannosaurus. And a Jurassic Park Spinosaurus can in fact serve this purpose. A real Spinosaurus, though, perhaps less so, as it was a 20-ton, 60-foot-long, semi-aquatic fish eater. Which makes one wonder what was going on with fish in the Mesozoic. So, what to do in case of Spinosaurus attack: Don’t be a fish. Or at least stay away from the water. If you do catch a Spinosaurus’ attention, running is a surprisingly good option, because it has teeny tiny little legs, look at them, they’re ridiculous, you will be shaking with mirth as you flee, but as per usual, do not taunt the dinosaur.

Though one large theropod, Ornithocheirus, looked like this, and in this single instance I do advise taunting, I mean look at it, it must be ashamed of itself.

Now, as you scale down from tyrannosaurs and spinosaurs, theropods actually get more dangerous to humans. They get faster, and more agile, their heads can fit into smaller spaces, and we are a relatively bigger meal for them. The sheer levels of energy expenditure that we often see tyrannosaurs produce in order to devour humans, proportionately the size of a candy bar to them, are entirely unreasonable for actual animals. But then I did once get into a half-hour fistfight in order to secure one single “Mr. Goodbar,” because Mr. Goodbars are delicious. And so are humans, apparently, we are clearly the most scrumptious animal on Earth based on how hard things try to eat us. Vehicular escape is your best bet with mid-sized theropods, or hiding deeply enough in enclosures they can’t get into; most will not have the tyrannosaur’s sense of smell but they will have a predator’s senses, and so it is best to assume they will be able to find you.
Another technique that has been seen to work on the 30-foot-long dinosaur Allosaurus is lassoing, and yes, yes, thank you. Always lasso dinosaurs where possible.

Also here’s this. Moving on.

Another mid-sized dinosaur is Dilophosaurus, twenty feet long and living at the beginning of the Mesozoic, before the dinosaurs had generally become immense. As such, it was the largest carnivore in its environment, and as such was probably doing fine, and therefore lacked such defensive mechanisms as a scary frill and blinding projectile venom. Still, a Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus does have these for some reason, and is very small for some reason, and so, protective eyewear is advised, and try not to be too scared of the frill, it’s just skin, I know it looks like the Dilophosaurus has suddenly become super big, but it hasn’t really, calm down, you’re embarrassing us.

When you get down to the level of theropods that are human-sized or smaller, tactics begin to change. Hiding becomes harder; their senses remain acute and now they can get into smaller spaces. They’re faster, so this is a problem with running; they do become vulnerable to small-arms fire, however, and to throwing knives, and swords +1. But then of course when they get small enough they cease to be a genuine threat; again, going to the Park, we see a small girl killed by a pack of tiny Compsognathuses, much as John Hammond is in the book, and come on, small girl, get it together. Real Compsognathuses are unlikely to attack something human-sized, even in a pack, as they are effectively weasels ecologically, and whereas weasels can be bad news one is not generally advised to take elaborate precautions when in weasel country.

Our next group of dinosaurs is the sauropods, the huge ones with the enormously long neck and tail. The largest of these were up to 130 feet long and 106 tons in weight. And you cannot imagine a living animal that big walking on the ground. You may say you can; stop lying. It is too much for the human brain. But for all of this, they, like the rest of the non-theropod dinosaurs, were exclusively herbivorous, and as such were less likely to chase you around. Your primary concern with sauropods would be that they would, in fact, step on you, trample you to death, and you are indeed beneath their notice most likely and so this is a concern. The good news is that, though they are faster than they look due to their enormous stride length, much like AT-ATs, let’s just think about AT-ATs for a second, they are still not actually fast and outrunning them is still on the table. And even if you find yourself caught in the midst of a herd, their individual steps may well be so ponderous and deliberate that they are easily avoided if just a little attention is paid. And this is another piece of good advice for dinosaur attack in general: pay attention to what’s happening. Do not lose interest.

Hiding from sauropods should also be relatively easy because they will rarely be looking for you. Indeed, hiding from sauropods may well consist of just sort of standing off to the side. Attacking them, however, is hard, as most weapons will not trouble them as much as they would other animals, due to the sauropod’s immense size. Rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons would probably do the trick, but if you’re bringing those on your dinosaur adventure I feel like we’re not really having any fun.

Some sauropods actually do have defensive weapons on their tails. A Diplodocus has a sort of thin, flexible whip for the end of its tail, thought by some scientists to be fast and maneuverable enough to create tiny sonic booms. Shunosaurus was a smaller sauropod, though still fully 30 feet long, and on the end of its tail it had a club like an ankylosaur’s, only with spikes on it, and this is what people in the fashion industry call “a lot of look.” A sauropod with a spiked tail club? How does something like that even go extinct? This is the pinnacle of evolution. What this all tells us is that, counter-intuitive though it may be, try to stay towards the front of the sauropod.

Which of course brings us to our third group, the thyreophorans, you know, the thyreophorans, the stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, with their famous tail weapons. True story: In an old “Far Side” cartoon a caveman is teaching a class of other cavemen, and he is pointing to a picture of a stegosaur tail, saying, “Now, this end is called the thagomizer…after the late Thag Simmons.” And after the publication of this cartoon, paleontologists started referring to the spiky tails of stegosaurs as “thagomizers” in formal, scientific papers, and now, “thagomizer” is in fact the formal, scientific name for a stegosaur’s tail-weapon. Awesome. Awesome.

And so again, stay away from the front of the animal, stay away from the thagomizer, or the tail club, in the case of ankylosaurs, it doesn’t have as cool of a name but that may not be a comfort to you if you are killed by it. Or it may, do your thing. Indeed, an Ankylosaurus may be one of the best dinosaurs to weaponize against other dinosaurs; with its impossibly impressive armor, just lie down underneath it – an exception to the earlier rule – and let it do the work. And also prevent it from lying down on you using your finely-honed hoping skills.

Actual thagomizers are, of course, a bit more dramatic, and come in a variety of configurations, much like the plates on the back. These plates are not a weapon of any sort and so are not relevant to our discussion, though one briefly-proposed theory from some time ago held that the plates were held out horizontally and used for gliding, and if you find yourself attacked by a stegosaur of this variety just lie down somewhere comfortable and wait for it all to pass. The most impressive thagomizer belongs to Kentrosaurus, which has terrible spikes all the way up its tail to over its hips, it has come to fight you, it does not even care. Like many stegosaurs apart from Stegosaurus itself, it also has enormous spikes over both shoulders, pointing backwards, because stegosaurs had a big problem with creatures running up towards their heads from behind apparently. So don’t do that, Kentrosauruses are ready for that, in fact this is dinosaur to just maintain a respectful distance from in general, like half of it is made entirely out of murder.

But if you don’t get near a thyreophoran you will probably be all right. They’re not fast, they’re not smart, their senses aren’t particularly acute, many of them are hard to kill with weapons, but if you can easily run away from a dinosaur and you still want to kill it with weapons then you are a bad person and get out.

Our fourth variety is another variety to avoid approaching, this would be the marginocephalians, give it up for the marginocephalians! The most famous of these are the ceratopsians, Triceratops and pals, and here obviously you want to be avoiding the head. Less obviously, recent research has indicated that the ceratopsians had quills on their backs, like a porcupine, making them impossible to approach from literally any vector, they get you coming and going. Still, the quills are easily enough evaded if you can avoid doing any flying tackles – and I know, I know, sometimes it is impossible to avoid doing flying tackles. But the business end is the head, and here there is actually some good news; a ceratopsian doesn’t actually want to kill you, that’s a massive energy expenditure and its horns would get covered in gore, that’s grody, possibly even to the max, and so it has this massive, broad frill on the back of its head which it is going to kind of wave around by way of sort of encouraging you to get your coat. Get that coat. It doesn’t want to kill you but it doesn’t have those horns all over the place for opening bottles. At least, not according to current paleontology. Some of them have three horns, of course; some of them have just the one, which will kill you just as easily, or perhaps two horns, as in Diabloceratops here, look at it. Look at it! That is – that is glorious.

The other sort of marginocephalian would be the pachycephalosaurs, the so-called ‘bone-headed’ dinosaurs. These dinosaurs had big, domed heads, but tiny little brains and instead just a lot of solid bone, and so it has most often been supposed that their heads were like a bighorn sheep’s horns, used for butting against one another in mating contests. It’s a lovely idea, but it has the problem that these dinosaurs’ heads were smooth, round domes, flat on no axis, which meant that unless they hit each other in the perfect spot, their heads would glance off each other, quite likely breaking their necks. And the number of animals whose bodies are specifically adapted to break their own necks is a small one. Here, then, is a lesson from natural selection: Don’t break your own neck. It is now felt by many paleontologists that the bony head was simply a defensive weapon, that pachycephalosaurs just rammed into predators and such with their heads. Unlike in the most recent Jurassic World movie, they did not in fact do this with sufficient force to ram down brick walls, that’s dumb, but they were of course extremely dangerous nevertheless.

Marginocephalians tend toward the fast, and so on-foot running is not recommended; hiding should work, again due to likely disinterest, and as for weapons you’re obviously going to want large ranged ones because again, don’t go near it.

Our final group is the ornithopods, and the thing that science tells us about ornithopods is that they are the worst. No claws, no spikes, no horns, no armor, nothing. They are a waste of perfectly good dinosaurness. Admittedly, they are some peoples’ favorite dinosaurs, and that’s fine, of course, it is your right as an American to be completely wrong. But I will say two things for the ornithopods. One: Not everything can be lions and rhinos and elephants, some things have to be zebras and cows, and that is okay. Two: Ornithopods are still dinosaurs, and if I saw one of them I would totally freak out.

But there’s not much here by means of attack. They might trample you, Iguanodon has spikes for thumbs so stay away from the top part of its hands, and the smaller ones have essentially nothing. Maybe they’ll kick you. And if you’re kicked to death by a small plant-eating dinosaur then you were always beyond the help of a talk such as this.
For our final unit, we will cover dinosaur special cases.

One that you’re going to have to deal with is that some dinosaurs are just covered in lasers. The answer to this is, fortunately, a simple one: More dinosaurs covered in lasers. A dinosaur covered in lasers in every classroom.

Where riding dinosaurs are concerned, some of them are in fact vulnerable to the power of Grayskull. In order to access the power of Grayskull, simply hold aloft your magic sword and say “By the power of Grayskull, I have the power,” upon which it will manifest, in the form of your hair darkening, your tan becoming more breathtaking, and most of your clothing going away. Ladies and gentlemen: the power of Grayskull. If you don’t have a magic sword, maybe try your magic kitchen knife, your magic throw pillow, your magic feminine products; just basically lift stuff in your house over your head and say “By the power of Grayskull.”

In one 1980s documentary series, “Dinosaucers,” sentient humanoid dinosaurs with names like “Allo” and “Plesio” come from outer space and have various conflicts. Not only are they sentient dinosaurs, but they possess full spacefaring technology, and as such are obviously impossibly dangerous, perhaps effectively invincible. Luckily, they are vulnerable to practical jokes and the true meaning of friendship. Why doesn’t anyone remember Dinosaucers? Because it was so, so dumb? Oh right.

If the sauropod that you use to quarry rock, or the pterosaur that flies you and other passengers to another city after saying a quip of some kind, should suddenly turn on you and attack, know that you are in some sort of hip, snide, postmodern reconstruction of a harmless children’s narrative and that therefore your best option is to pray to the deity or deities of your choosing because nobody gets out of those any better off than when they came in.

If you’re up against Vincent Stegron, a man who was turned into a Stegosaurus-man, which is obviously a remarkable coincidence and let us all be thankful that his last name wasn’t Johnson, Dick, or Genitals, well, there are basically two options. One, lure him into someplace cold and let that slow him into lethargy; dinosaurs were of course warm-blooded and this wouldn’t work on them but suffice it to say some of the science here might not be totally perfect. The other option is to pummel him with your superhuman strength, which you have because are you strong? Listen, bud; you’ve got radioactive blood, that doesn’t actually answer the question, or because you are the monarch of Wakanda, and the “Black Panther” movie was amazing but if the second one doesn’t have Stegron in it we need to burn Disney to the ground.

On February 3rd, 2013, an old college friend posted the following on my Facebook wall: “I just awoke from a dream that you had written a book called “Ecology Of The Video Game Dinosaur.” I didn’t get to read much of it, but I assume there was a chapter on how nightmarish it is that Yoshi can UNHINGE HIS JAW enough to swallow creatures THE SAME SIZE AS HIS OWN BODY and then they DISAPPEAR AS THOUGH THEY NEVER EXISTED. Which clearly means that there’s a portal to another dimension somewhere in his bowels. Yoshi is not the dinosaur. Yoshi is JUST THE PART OF THE DINOSAUR OUR MORTAL MINDS CAN PERCEIVE. AND THAT PART IS THE MOUTH. Anyway, good morning!”

I have little to add to this scholarship. I must be mentioned, though, that not only does Yoshi consume items his own size, but also expels them, abruptly and without seeming harm; I speak, of course, of the eggs. This indicates that the Yoshi that we perceive is not only the mouth of the pan-dimensional hyper-Yoshi, but also, its cloaca. Perhaps this entity has a single orifice, used for eating, birth, breathing, waste expulsion, sweat, perhaps it dispenses various beverages, you don’t know, indeed, your pathetic, limited human brain is physically incapable of knowing. And that single orifice looks like an adorable green dinosaur. And it extrudes this orifice into the Prime Material Plane in order to feed, deposit its young, and render assistance to a plumber who is extremely good at jumping.

There is nothing to do if you are attacked by this entity. Perhaps you could try worshipping it.

In the video game “Primal Rage,” which is, coincidentally, the name of my other signature fragrance, you may dispense with dinosaurs with such techniques as a-button down down up forward. Here we see the excellent anti-dinosaur technique of being a dinosaur, or, in this case, perhaps a giant, farting ape.

We’ve started seeing some entirely made-up dinosaurs here, but since they are still recognizably dinosaurs, similar countermeasures apply. Jurassic World’s Indominus rex, for example, was essentially a clever, camouflaging Tyrannosaurus and would best be handled as such, though of course in the film it is handled by a mosasaur that is literally at least ten times longer than an actual mosasaur suddenly eating it; another dinosaur ex machina. Another frustrating thing about the Indominus is that it is mostly a slightly larger theropod, and the fossil record has plenty of those; Giganotosaurus, Characharodontosaurus, and other sexily-named things like that. So why bother with the hybrid nonsense? We’ve already got featherless, genius Deinonychuses called Velociraptors; just decide that Giganiotosauruses were camouflaged and cunning and take the rest of the day off.

The same goes for the more recent Indoraptor, which may as well be one of the larger raptor dinosaurs, Dakotaraptor for instance, only pitch-black and conspicuously evil, like Sauron. One deals with an Indoraptor by making it crash through a greenhouse roof onto the Triceratops fossil horns below, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

If we’re going to make up dinosaurs, let’s make up Godzillas. Obviously, Godzillas are hard to deal with. Run if you can; your hiding place will be destroyed, and your weapons won’t work. If you’ve invented a device that destroys the oxygen content of water, immediately skeletonizing whatever is in that water, then yes, try that, it is a method demonstrated to work. If you can lure him into an ice canyon and then use your airplane guns to cause an ice avalanche, that works too, though I regret to inform you of this but he will actually get out eventually. I’m glad you were all sitting down. But the most reliable and frequently used method of dealing with Godzilla attack is to have another monster fight him, perhaps a giant moth or some sort of outer-space cyborg penguin, though in this latter case the penguin is evil and Godzilla is good, there’s a lot to talk about in this series, it is a rich tapestry.

Godzilla was in part inspired by the Rhedosaurus from 1953’s “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” an extremely handsome city-wrecking monster awoken my nuclear testing, who was ultimately dispatched by shooting it with a dart containing a radioactive isotope, proving once again that the best answer to science gone mad is science gone even madder still.

Other imaginary dinosaurs are stranger still. In 1982, the paleontologist Dale Russell unveiled the dinosauroid, an exercise in speculative evolution, proposing this as a Troodon dinosaur evolved into humanlike sentience. It is not terribly well-regarded in scientific circles. And for our purposes it throws everything out the window, really. A dinosaur like this, perhaps you can bargain with, or charm, or buy off, or seduce. And you don’t know what it’s going to do, either; hide from you or attack you with weapons or put together a Fringe Festival show mashing up two unrelated pop-culture properties. No no, strike that last one, that’s ridiculous.

Some say there is a real sauropod still inhabiting the African jungle, mokele-mbembe it’s called, meaning ‘one who stops the flow of rivers’ in the Lingala tongue, this is all cryptozoology, the study of things like bigfoot and Nessie. And nobody wants there to be a living sauropod in the African jungle than me. Literally nobody. No living human. But unfortunately, the way to deal with mokele-mbembe attack is to understand that it is not real.

Mokele-mbembes were the subject of the 1985 movie “Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend,” here’s the promotional candy dispenser, and remember that movie? No? Weird.

Finally, of course, there are weredinosaurs, which I have made up, which are only vulnerable to weapons made out of actual dinosaur fossils. And so of course you should not do this, dinosaur fossils are priceless scientific artifacts, using them as weapons would be a crime against learning, and would also deprive you of the chance of maybe, just maybe, contracting weredinosaur lycanthropy yourself. And weredinosaur lycanthropy is the name of my third signature fragrance.

I hope that none of you are never attacked by a dinosaur. And you mustn’t live your life in fear of it; many of you, perhaps even most of you, never will be. But a little preparedness goes a long way. And if you remember what you’ve heard here tonight, and I am extremely confident that each and every one of you has memorized every word of it, then you will be that much better equipped to get out of that encounter with body and soul still together. And if these techniques don’t work for some reason, you will at least have gone out the awesome way.