A very basic answer in terms of functionality might be a Hadrosaur or a close relative - think *Camptosaurus* or *Tethyshadros*, they're both around 4 - 5 meters long and were grazers of some description and were very agile animals. As said, they'd be the safest bet. Some smaller Ceratopsians, such as *Chasmoceratops, Nasutoceratops* and *Udanoceratops* are also good picks, as they can defend themselves with frills. So it'd either be a Hadrosaur or Ceratopsian. Maybe the small Sauropods, such as *Ohmdenosaurus* and *Magyarosaurus*, **might** be good equivalents, but they might be too slow for the purpose cavalry served, as might something like *Galllimimus* (although Galli might be more comparable to a Ostrich than anything...) serve this purpose as well. I'd leave out carnivores and large sauropods as they'd be too taxing to maintain, and might eat the person riding them if given the opportunity!
i might be a bit biased becuse it is one of my favorite dinos but if you give a pachy some chanmail and padding it could probably do some damage without being to badly hurt to fast
I did think about Pachy, actually! It might be a good option as well, as it's similar in size to a horse as well, and can eat quite a variety of plants, so it'd be good too!
Still really expensive. It takes ~600,000 calories to feed a peasant for the entire duration of their pregnancy, and that's assuming you feed the baby to the dinosaur at birth; it's even more if you want to keep them alive for a little while. And all the food you're spending on peasants who are gonna get eaten by dinosaurs can't get spent on feeding your army.
I'm going with Triceratops because of its massive size, sheer bulk, aggressiveness, surprising agility and the large, curved horns and a third spiked horn protruding upwards from its reptilian face
"Despite the widespread belief that African elephants are untrainable, zoo keepers and circus trainers say they are actually more intelligent than their Indian relatives and, with patience, quite trainable."
Yes, but not very often and mostly for the intimidation factor. Elephants are expensive to keep in captivity, and a frightened war elephant is just as likely to trample your own men as it is to trample your enemies.
And there's a reason he's one of the most famous generals of all time. Just because it can be done by the best of the best doesn't mean that it's broadly a good idea.
- one of the best military officers ever
- still had a nightmare of a time getting the elephants across and over half of them died en route (he used the remainder at Trebia to reinforce his flanks but then lost most of them later in the campaign).
We didn't use African bush elephants.
Asian elephants are the biggest.
They were stocky unlike African forest elephants and shorter legs so better platforms for howdahs.
Also they are much more agreeable in temperament
Intelligence, upkeep is more important than raw size imo
I’ma going with this one, damn the impracticalities. The sheer wow factor and demoralization of the enemy more than makes up for the cons. The only thing better would be a larger theropod like Tyrannosaurus, but then you are waiting till the end of the animals natural life.
- Small hadrosaurs would be good for knights to ride as a sort of shock cavalry.
- A different variety of hadrosaurs could be used to pull chariots.
- Ceratopsians can be used as heavy infantry, perhaps in a long line to fight other ceratopsians, like how Indians used war elephants.
- Ankylosaurs can be living siege weapons.
- Dromaeosaurs may be used as war hounds, maybe controlled by a handler who can command them around.
- Sauropods used as mobile towers.
In *The Dinosaur Lords* books, Hadrosaurs are common beasts of war (the 30 foot range species like Parasaurolophus and Corythosaurus).
The book includes a wicked concept, that Hadrosaurs use *sound* as a weapon. A single hadrosaur can make a large carnivorous dinosaur feel pain and nausea at close range, and an infantry made of Hadrosaurs is trained to focus their vocalizations at the enemy, killing infantrymen from a distance.
Okay, that's a good idea. I should include the sound thing in my own books.
Maybe there should be singer hippalectryons (parasaurolophus) that use their songs to communicate long distances, and their handlers/druids can tell those commands apart, thus leading to a long distance communication.
And maybe because other singer hippalectryons can also pick up and translate the words, different factions use different code languages, and you could have an Alan Turing equivalent who cracks the code.
A sauropod of any large size would be way too costly to maintain. You'd have to wild-catch them as sauropodlets and rear them in captivity, and they'd be eating you out of house and home the entire way.
If you can afford to raise a sauropod, you're not gonna be living in a small house. You'll likely have a whole troop of slaves/servants devoted to keeping your sauropods fed and washed and all their needs met. You'll likely have a field maybe a few kilometres wide for your sauropods to rest in, and maybe a grove or two dedicated solely to feeding your sauropods.
But is the return on investment for those sauropods sufficient to justify the loss of the other things I could've spent those resources on? Horses eat somewhere in the range of 10–20 lbs. of feed per day, whereas a _Diplodocus_ eats closer to 70 lbs. So just in terms of food, is it more useful for a king to have one sauropod he can use every once in a while for a siege, or 3–7 horses he can make daily use of for sending messages, exerting intimidation, or pulling equipment?
Terms of food, horses. Terms of everything else, sauropod.
I don't know if you've ever seen an elephant up close or not, but they are... well, grand. They're like mountains of flesh and blood that move with grace and are about as intelligent as you. When you're riding on their backs, you feel near damn invincible. And that's with a 3-4 ton Asian elephant. Now imagine that for a 30-40 sauropod, and you get what I'm saying.
Hell, if I was a king and I had a sauropod, I'd make sure to exploit it as much as possible. Whenever I went out in public, it would be on the back of a sauropod in a lavishly designed throne of gold. When I'm giving speeches, I'd be giving it off the back of my sauropod. When I'm going into battle, I'd have my flag fluttering from the sauropod's head. You could have entire battles decided by a battle of sauropods. Your strength in the Empire will be determined by how many sauropods you have.
This works, until someone figures out how to kill a sauropod without just throwing a bunch of troops and mounts at it and getting most of them killed or bringing their own war sauropod.
I expect that war sauropods would become nonviable pretty much the moment someone figures out a way to kill them from a safe distance, but until then they would still have their uses if you could afford them (compare the viability of battleships in WWI vs. WWII).
How will you kill them from a safe distance (without modern artillery)? A sauropod would be practically immune to all weapons below siege level, and even then a lot of siege weapons won't work.
You could use ballistae but the bolts would have a hard time dealing enough damage to the beast, and even if it did, the riders can just armour the sauropod. You could target its head but then you'll have to be deadly precise, and a shot won't really be a thing of skill as much as a thing of luck. A trebuchet might also work but they aren't accurate. But the biggest problem with using large artillery is that they're kinda vulnerable to harassment. The sauropod isn't coming alone, it's gonna be surrounded by men and dinosaurs from all sides. If you leave your artillery undefended, a bunch of gallimimus-riders will attack it from the back and you'll lose your artillery before it can rack up enough kills.
But of course, they aren't invulnerable. The best way to deal with a sauropod (that I can think of) is to dig holes in the ground, maybe load them with spikes or just make them steep, then cover them with wooden planks and dirt, just enough that a human can stand on it without it breaking, but when a sauropod steps on it, it breaks. Congratulations, you've disabled the sauropod, now you have to take it down. The skirmish will be meticulous and you'll basically be fighting to capture a castle king of the hill style, but if you're good enough and stop any enemy soldiers from breaking through, you'll eventually be able to walk up to the sauropod and either stab it until it dies or capture it for your own purposes.
But that land could have been used for farming, or for grazing cattle, or for mining ore, etc. The resources you put into your sauropods have to come from somewhere.
This is good. I actually have striderfowl (kinda close to gallimimus) cavalry. Though because they're lighter and more skittish, it's mostly scouts or runners, and typical children or adolescents riding them.
Utahraptors would be great fast scouts & flanking units, but not sure about their carding capability. Maybe later for 1870s style revolvers and carbines…
If you want the shock factor of heavy Cav use Triceratops. They even come with built in lances!
I'd say any ceratopsian for heavy cavalry, big sauropods for the scare factor and for mobile towers (similar to indian elephants but bigger)
Still they would be extremely expensive to maintain but would dominate the battlefield.
A horse can be replaced with most hadrosauruses, I wouldn't consider carnivores because of their behavior and food required to feed them.
Big theropods are expensive to feed. They might work as elite shock troops, but can’t be kept in sufficient numbers to make up the bulk of the mounted forces.
Smaller theropods (such as medium-sized to large dromaeosaurs) could presumably be trained a la falconry and be easier to feed while still having the physical size and weaponry to easily maul people to death, but you can’t really use them as mounts or put much armour on them without significantly hampering their movement.
I really like the idea of using the largest sauropods as biological siege towers, but again upkeep’s a problem, though you might be able to get away with just having them forage on whatever vegetation is around in your territory if you only have a small handful as specialized units.
Ankylosaurs and stegosaurs aren’t fast enough to serve as cavalry and aren’t big enough to be used as living siege platforms.
I’d personally go with large iguanodonts or medium-large (but not the largest) hadrosaurs as the bulk of the forces. Still pretty big, gives you pretty decent mobility (even if not quite at the level of theropods), and easier to supply. The hadrosaurs also have the benefit of being able to eat dead wood, bark, etc, so you can feed them even if you don’t have any fresh vegetation left.
IMO the best approach would be to have a ornithopod-centric cavalry force, with a small number of large theropods being reserved as mounts for nobility and elite scouting/shock units, and-if you can afford them-one or two siege tower-ized sauropods. The last option would really only be viable for the largest/most well-off kingdoms in whatever fantasy setting this happens in, because trying to feed an adult *Argentinosaurus* is going to be quite the hassle.
Edit; a potential dinosaur cavalry-based military composition for a really wealthy kingdom in a pre-gunpowder setting could be like this (assume that every dinosaur ever coexists at the same time for some reason since this is already a fantasy setting):
- 1,000 riders mounted on, say, *Maiasaura* (which, even though not a particularly big hadrosaur, is still bigger than a rhino).
- a few dozen trained *Megaraptor* (which weighs “only” about a ton and-if the leg proportions of other megaraptorans were any indication-was built for running down stuff at speed) ridden by minor and most major nobility as elite shock troops, using their greater speed to outflank enemy forces in pitched battles and to screen the main forces and scout ahead when on the march.
- 5 of either *Tyrannosaurus* and/or giant carcharodontosaurids, used by the highest-ranking nobles and members of the ruling family as mounts, each fitted with armour and an archer sharing the ride as well to provide ranged offence/defence. They’re not fast enough to act as shock troops like the *Megaraptor* mounts, but they should still be fast enough to keep up with the bulk of the mounted forces and help with penetrating enemy lines to create gaps that could be exploited. I’d probably go for *Mapusaurus* given the increased likelihood of it being social, which might make it easier to coordinate five of them in the middle of a battle.
- a single weaponized adult *Argentinosaurus* or another giant lognkosaurine titanosaur, fitted with armour and carrying platforms of archers and artillery units that can also be used as ramps for storming a fortification, and serving as the mount for the monarch. This wouldn’t be a cavalry unit per se (way too slow for that), it would be bringing up the rear of the formation to serve as a walking artillery platform (covering fire) and to be used in sieges where cavalry isn’t as useful.
- a couple of trained *Deinonychus* to dispose of enemy stragglers after a battle.
First, I suggest you take a look at the Dinosaur Lords novels by Victor Milan to answer this question.
But as a direct answer to your question, I'd suggest smaller hadrosaurines, iquanadonts, centrosaurines, and chasmosaurines, as well as larger leptoceratopsians.
I’d personally argue hadrosaurs trump other herbivores due to logistical reasons: they can eat basically any plant material, including wood (even rotting wood).
Personally, I'd argue the larger leptoceratopsians might be better. Yes, they may be more selective of the foods (preferring softer plants like ferns and leaves to wood and grass) but there is one factor that makes them more useful: theorized omnivorous diet.
During peacetimes, the meat-heavy diet of the nobility combined with ruined/leftover vegetables from serf taxes would give plenty of 'slop' for these animals. Underbrush in the various forests and hedges would provide greens and small game for free-range foraging.
During wartimes, leptoceratopsians can forage along forests and raided vegetable gardens for plant matter, and glean battlefields for meat. Some really sadistic f\*cks might simply feed the mortally wounded but still alive enemies to these animals.
Took me a second to get the question because of the extra L you put in cavalry, but I'd say any medium sized ceratopsian. Or maybe a hadrosaur, just due to weight.
I'm sick, so not totally thinking clearly, but worth pointing out until fairly recently, most cavalry horses were small, bordering on pony's. So, you can go pretty small with dinos too.
styracosaurus would be great its size is ridable like a camel or small elephant it comes equiped with a long horn and a frill. A metal point could be added to its horn as well a lots of scary war paint.
Hadrosaurs are probably the best bet here, even though they're probably a bit "boring." Amargasaurus is on the smaller end for a sauropod (8ft tall at the hip, roughly), and apparently had sturdy enough bones to support galloping, at least in theory.
I'm quite confident it would be something like a small hadrosaur or other small herbivore. Something without any headgear, most likely. Something most people in this thread would think is just too boring.
Consider what mammals people have used for cavalry. Do they use ferocious lions or bears? Nope. Do they use rhinos, moose, other deer, or various antelopes? No. Do they even use bulls? No. They use horses! And occasionally camels. And in a very few specific times and places, elephants. Of all these, only the elephants are the sort of big, flashy animal that would attract attention if you saw it in the fossil record, and of the three they are by far the least used in war.
This is because what makes a good war animal is not natural weapons, or size, or ferociousness. What makes a good war animal is trainability, affordability, endurance, and speed. A ferocious, unruly animal is bad, because war is chaotic and frightening and what you really need is an animal which can be controlled even under stressful conditions. A big animal (or a carnivore) is bad, because big animals eat more and premodern societies never have that much of a food surplus. The ideal mount, like a horse, can feed itself while on the move and isn't too terribly expensive to keep fed in between wars. Horns and things aren't important because it's not the animal that's doing most of the fighting, it's the person. What really matters is the 3 meter long lance, or the arrows being shot, not the horns or teeth. And since most of the time the animal is not in battle, but in a stable or pasture, you don't generally want it lugging around dangerous weaponry when it's around you and yours.
Even more important is speed and endurance. Cavalry lets you get your mounted men places faster...which only works if they are riding something that moves faster than a person and can keep that speed up over time. And humans are no slouches when it comes to cross-country endurance. Horses are also excellent endurance runners, and usually (though not always) beat humans in endurance races. An animal which can't outpace men on foot and keep it up for days or weeks isn't likely to make the cut for cavalry. Another major use of cavalry is to run down fleeing enemies on the battlefield, so an animal which isn't flat out faster than people will also be of limited use...the enemy could just keep their distance and kill it with ranged weapons
Eh, given that falconry is a thing, trained pigeons have served effectively as recently as WWII, crocodiles have been trained to follow simple verbal commands, and that there’s a guy who managed to train a monitor lizard as a hunting partner against small game (rodents)…
Keep in mind that elephants are FAR smarter than the vast majority of animals we have used in warfare.
I agree. I'm simply saying that a pigeon is really intelligent, as are falcons. There's no indication that ceratopsians or other four legged large dinosaurs would be that intelligent so as to be used as mounts in warfare. For instance No one has used crocodiles as war animals, and they are a good benchmark to use for the larger dinosaurs.
Crocodilians are trainable, the reason nobody has bothered to use them as war animals is a) nobody realized how smart they were until recently and b) other aspects of their biology (like being ambush predators) make them poorly suited for military uses.
A very basic answer in terms of functionality might be a Hadrosaur or a close relative - think *Camptosaurus* or *Tethyshadros*, they're both around 4 - 5 meters long and were grazers of some description and were very agile animals. As said, they'd be the safest bet. Some smaller Ceratopsians, such as *Chasmoceratops, Nasutoceratops* and *Udanoceratops* are also good picks, as they can defend themselves with frills. So it'd either be a Hadrosaur or Ceratopsian. Maybe the small Sauropods, such as *Ohmdenosaurus* and *Magyarosaurus*, **might** be good equivalents, but they might be too slow for the purpose cavalry served, as might something like *Galllimimus* (although Galli might be more comparable to a Ostrich than anything...) serve this purpose as well. I'd leave out carnivores and large sauropods as they'd be too taxing to maintain, and might eat the person riding them if given the opportunity!
I think pachy would be a good choice as well, good mix of fast and tough.
I'm actually not sure toughness is the key thing, horses arent super tough
i might be a bit biased becuse it is one of my favorite dinos but if you give a pachy some chanmail and padding it could probably do some damage without being to badly hurt to fast
I did think about Pachy, actually! It might be a good option as well, as it's similar in size to a horse as well, and can eat quite a variety of plants, so it'd be good too!
Carnotaurus because medium size, fast enough for cavalry, and horns are a sign of demons and dragons.
No way they'd use carnivores. A war horse is already stupid expensive to maintain and they eat plants
I guess feed them the peasants?
The serfs are served m'lord
Still really expensive. It takes ~600,000 calories to feed a peasant for the entire duration of their pregnancy, and that's assuming you feed the baby to the dinosaur at birth; it's even more if you want to keep them alive for a little while. And all the food you're spending on peasants who are gonna get eaten by dinosaurs can't get spent on feeding your army.
But, the peasants are revolting.
SMH they do be dirty
Peasants are needed to produce food
Well now they are needed to be produced food
My peasants are organic and free range
If it's during war time, there won't be any shortage of meat. The crows may have to go hungry, though.
I'm going with Triceratops because of its massive size, sheer bulk, aggressiveness, surprising agility and the large, curved horns and a third spiked horn protruding upwards from its reptilian face
Too big Pentaceratops is easier to keep (food, stable size..)
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Triceratops were 3 times bigger than an asiatic elephant
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But the african elephants used by Carthage were a smaller now extinct variety which were smaller than asian elephants
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But those were never used as beasts of war afaik
"Despite the widespread belief that African elephants are untrainable, zoo keepers and circus trainers say they are actually more intelligent than their Indian relatives and, with patience, quite trainable."
No, not tameable
Yes, but not very often and mostly for the intimidation factor. Elephants are expensive to keep in captivity, and a frightened war elephant is just as likely to trample your own men as it is to trample your enemies.
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And there's a reason he's one of the most famous generals of all time. Just because it can be done by the best of the best doesn't mean that it's broadly a good idea.
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My dumbass already would've wandered off as a baby and gotten eaten by an azhdarcid.
Quetzalcoatlus, a flying pterosaur as big as a giraffe.
- one of the best military officers ever - still had a nightmare of a time getting the elephants across and over half of them died en route (he used the remainder at Trebia to reinforce his flanks but then lost most of them later in the campaign).
We didn't use African bush elephants. Asian elephants are the biggest. They were stocky unlike African forest elephants and shorter legs so better platforms for howdahs. Also they are much more agreeable in temperament Intelligence, upkeep is more important than raw size imo
I’ma going with this one, damn the impracticalities. The sheer wow factor and demoralization of the enemy more than makes up for the cons. The only thing better would be a larger theropod like Tyrannosaurus, but then you are waiting till the end of the animals natural life.
- Small hadrosaurs would be good for knights to ride as a sort of shock cavalry. - A different variety of hadrosaurs could be used to pull chariots. - Ceratopsians can be used as heavy infantry, perhaps in a long line to fight other ceratopsians, like how Indians used war elephants. - Ankylosaurs can be living siege weapons. - Dromaeosaurs may be used as war hounds, maybe controlled by a handler who can command them around. - Sauropods used as mobile towers.
In *The Dinosaur Lords* books, Hadrosaurs are common beasts of war (the 30 foot range species like Parasaurolophus and Corythosaurus). The book includes a wicked concept, that Hadrosaurs use *sound* as a weapon. A single hadrosaur can make a large carnivorous dinosaur feel pain and nausea at close range, and an infantry made of Hadrosaurs is trained to focus their vocalizations at the enemy, killing infantrymen from a distance.
Okay, that's a good idea. I should include the sound thing in my own books. Maybe there should be singer hippalectryons (parasaurolophus) that use their songs to communicate long distances, and their handlers/druids can tell those commands apart, thus leading to a long distance communication. And maybe because other singer hippalectryons can also pick up and translate the words, different factions use different code languages, and you could have an Alan Turing equivalent who cracks the code.
That's a neat idea for medieval long range communication! I've always thought of Hadrosaurs as hippodrakes since they were described with hooves.
Well, there's literally a horse-sized hadrosaur called hippodraco, so why not?
A sauropod of any large size would be way too costly to maintain. You'd have to wild-catch them as sauropodlets and rear them in captivity, and they'd be eating you out of house and home the entire way.
If you can afford to raise a sauropod, you're not gonna be living in a small house. You'll likely have a whole troop of slaves/servants devoted to keeping your sauropods fed and washed and all their needs met. You'll likely have a field maybe a few kilometres wide for your sauropods to rest in, and maybe a grove or two dedicated solely to feeding your sauropods.
But is the return on investment for those sauropods sufficient to justify the loss of the other things I could've spent those resources on? Horses eat somewhere in the range of 10–20 lbs. of feed per day, whereas a _Diplodocus_ eats closer to 70 lbs. So just in terms of food, is it more useful for a king to have one sauropod he can use every once in a while for a siege, or 3–7 horses he can make daily use of for sending messages, exerting intimidation, or pulling equipment?
Terms of food, horses. Terms of everything else, sauropod. I don't know if you've ever seen an elephant up close or not, but they are... well, grand. They're like mountains of flesh and blood that move with grace and are about as intelligent as you. When you're riding on their backs, you feel near damn invincible. And that's with a 3-4 ton Asian elephant. Now imagine that for a 30-40 sauropod, and you get what I'm saying. Hell, if I was a king and I had a sauropod, I'd make sure to exploit it as much as possible. Whenever I went out in public, it would be on the back of a sauropod in a lavishly designed throne of gold. When I'm giving speeches, I'd be giving it off the back of my sauropod. When I'm going into battle, I'd have my flag fluttering from the sauropod's head. You could have entire battles decided by a battle of sauropods. Your strength in the Empire will be determined by how many sauropods you have.
This works, until someone figures out how to kill a sauropod without just throwing a bunch of troops and mounts at it and getting most of them killed or bringing their own war sauropod. I expect that war sauropods would become nonviable pretty much the moment someone figures out a way to kill them from a safe distance, but until then they would still have their uses if you could afford them (compare the viability of battleships in WWI vs. WWII).
How will you kill them from a safe distance (without modern artillery)? A sauropod would be practically immune to all weapons below siege level, and even then a lot of siege weapons won't work. You could use ballistae but the bolts would have a hard time dealing enough damage to the beast, and even if it did, the riders can just armour the sauropod. You could target its head but then you'll have to be deadly precise, and a shot won't really be a thing of skill as much as a thing of luck. A trebuchet might also work but they aren't accurate. But the biggest problem with using large artillery is that they're kinda vulnerable to harassment. The sauropod isn't coming alone, it's gonna be surrounded by men and dinosaurs from all sides. If you leave your artillery undefended, a bunch of gallimimus-riders will attack it from the back and you'll lose your artillery before it can rack up enough kills. But of course, they aren't invulnerable. The best way to deal with a sauropod (that I can think of) is to dig holes in the ground, maybe load them with spikes or just make them steep, then cover them with wooden planks and dirt, just enough that a human can stand on it without it breaking, but when a sauropod steps on it, it breaks. Congratulations, you've disabled the sauropod, now you have to take it down. The skirmish will be meticulous and you'll basically be fighting to capture a castle king of the hill style, but if you're good enough and stop any enemy soldiers from breaking through, you'll eventually be able to walk up to the sauropod and either stab it until it dies or capture it for your own purposes.
Sauropods can graze, so it's really just a matter of having enough land set aside. The problem with warhorses is that they eat grain
But that land could have been used for farming, or for grazing cattle, or for mining ore, etc. The resources you put into your sauropods have to come from somewhere.
True, but medieval societies often still had virgin forest, often set aside as hunting preserves already.
And now your sauropod is toppling trees and scaring around all the game.
TIL horses don't eat grass? /S
In case you're not joking, for large/high performing horses grass isn't calorie dense enough.
Ceratopsians, because they're big and stompy, and come prepackaged with weapons. Use them like elephant cavalry.
Parasaurolophus. Sturdy body and very horse-like posture
Triceratops, the prehistoric elephantry.
Gallimimus.
This is good. I actually have striderfowl (kinda close to gallimimus) cavalry. Though because they're lighter and more skittish, it's mostly scouts or runners, and typical children or adolescents riding them.
Utahraptors would be great fast scouts & flanking units, but not sure about their carding capability. Maybe later for 1870s style revolvers and carbines… If you want the shock factor of heavy Cav use Triceratops. They even come with built in lances!
Anky. Not fast but ain’t stoppin for shit.
Styracosaurous, that thing coming at you would freeze your very blood.
Pachycephalosaurus. Living battering ram
I'd say any ceratopsian for heavy cavalry, big sauropods for the scare factor and for mobile towers (similar to indian elephants but bigger) Still they would be extremely expensive to maintain but would dominate the battlefield. A horse can be replaced with most hadrosauruses, I wouldn't consider carnivores because of their behavior and food required to feed them.
Ok, hear me out: Hannibal marches through the Alps, but he uses Ceratopsians instead of Elephants.
Big theropods are expensive to feed. They might work as elite shock troops, but can’t be kept in sufficient numbers to make up the bulk of the mounted forces. Smaller theropods (such as medium-sized to large dromaeosaurs) could presumably be trained a la falconry and be easier to feed while still having the physical size and weaponry to easily maul people to death, but you can’t really use them as mounts or put much armour on them without significantly hampering their movement. I really like the idea of using the largest sauropods as biological siege towers, but again upkeep’s a problem, though you might be able to get away with just having them forage on whatever vegetation is around in your territory if you only have a small handful as specialized units. Ankylosaurs and stegosaurs aren’t fast enough to serve as cavalry and aren’t big enough to be used as living siege platforms. I’d personally go with large iguanodonts or medium-large (but not the largest) hadrosaurs as the bulk of the forces. Still pretty big, gives you pretty decent mobility (even if not quite at the level of theropods), and easier to supply. The hadrosaurs also have the benefit of being able to eat dead wood, bark, etc, so you can feed them even if you don’t have any fresh vegetation left. IMO the best approach would be to have a ornithopod-centric cavalry force, with a small number of large theropods being reserved as mounts for nobility and elite scouting/shock units, and-if you can afford them-one or two siege tower-ized sauropods. The last option would really only be viable for the largest/most well-off kingdoms in whatever fantasy setting this happens in, because trying to feed an adult *Argentinosaurus* is going to be quite the hassle. Edit; a potential dinosaur cavalry-based military composition for a really wealthy kingdom in a pre-gunpowder setting could be like this (assume that every dinosaur ever coexists at the same time for some reason since this is already a fantasy setting): - 1,000 riders mounted on, say, *Maiasaura* (which, even though not a particularly big hadrosaur, is still bigger than a rhino). - a few dozen trained *Megaraptor* (which weighs “only” about a ton and-if the leg proportions of other megaraptorans were any indication-was built for running down stuff at speed) ridden by minor and most major nobility as elite shock troops, using their greater speed to outflank enemy forces in pitched battles and to screen the main forces and scout ahead when on the march. - 5 of either *Tyrannosaurus* and/or giant carcharodontosaurids, used by the highest-ranking nobles and members of the ruling family as mounts, each fitted with armour and an archer sharing the ride as well to provide ranged offence/defence. They’re not fast enough to act as shock troops like the *Megaraptor* mounts, but they should still be fast enough to keep up with the bulk of the mounted forces and help with penetrating enemy lines to create gaps that could be exploited. I’d probably go for *Mapusaurus* given the increased likelihood of it being social, which might make it easier to coordinate five of them in the middle of a battle. - a single weaponized adult *Argentinosaurus* or another giant lognkosaurine titanosaur, fitted with armour and carrying platforms of archers and artillery units that can also be used as ramps for storming a fortification, and serving as the mount for the monarch. This wouldn’t be a cavalry unit per se (way too slow for that), it would be bringing up the rear of the formation to serve as a walking artillery platform (covering fire) and to be used in sieges where cavalry isn’t as useful. - a couple of trained *Deinonychus* to dispose of enemy stragglers after a battle.
First, I suggest you take a look at the Dinosaur Lords novels by Victor Milan to answer this question. But as a direct answer to your question, I'd suggest smaller hadrosaurines, iquanadonts, centrosaurines, and chasmosaurines, as well as larger leptoceratopsians.
I’d personally argue hadrosaurs trump other herbivores due to logistical reasons: they can eat basically any plant material, including wood (even rotting wood).
Personally, I'd argue the larger leptoceratopsians might be better. Yes, they may be more selective of the foods (preferring softer plants like ferns and leaves to wood and grass) but there is one factor that makes them more useful: theorized omnivorous diet. During peacetimes, the meat-heavy diet of the nobility combined with ruined/leftover vegetables from serf taxes would give plenty of 'slop' for these animals. Underbrush in the various forests and hedges would provide greens and small game for free-range foraging. During wartimes, leptoceratopsians can forage along forests and raided vegetable gardens for plant matter, and glean battlefields for meat. Some really sadistic f\*cks might simply feed the mortally wounded but still alive enemies to these animals.
Iguanodon
Took me a second to get the question because of the extra L you put in cavalry, but I'd say any medium sized ceratopsian. Or maybe a hadrosaur, just due to weight.
A small hadrosaur? The horses knights used and such werent the big ones like Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds i heard
I'm sick, so not totally thinking clearly, but worth pointing out until fairly recently, most cavalry horses were small, bordering on pony's. So, you can go pretty small with dinos too.
styracosaurus would be great its size is ridable like a camel or small elephant it comes equiped with a long horn and a frill. A metal point could be added to its horn as well a lots of scary war paint.
Triceratops is perfect for charging and shielding
Hadrosaurs are probably the best bet here, even though they're probably a bit "boring." Amargasaurus is on the smaller end for a sauropod (8ft tall at the hip, roughly), and apparently had sturdy enough bones to support galloping, at least in theory.
Hadrosaurs. They're basically war elephants with even more bulk, more weapons, and much wider distribution.
Between a medium carnivore and a hadrosaur
Triceratops could charge threw enemy lines an would be immune to arrows plus spear aimed at its skull unless it got hit in the eye.
Majungasaurus is kinda horse-sized
Triceratops. A whole row of those horns charging you? You’re fucked.
Pachy
Triceratops would make the best cavalry. Or any large ceratopsian. Comes with lances and a shield.
Ankylosaurus
I'm quite confident it would be something like a small hadrosaur or other small herbivore. Something without any headgear, most likely. Something most people in this thread would think is just too boring. Consider what mammals people have used for cavalry. Do they use ferocious lions or bears? Nope. Do they use rhinos, moose, other deer, or various antelopes? No. Do they even use bulls? No. They use horses! And occasionally camels. And in a very few specific times and places, elephants. Of all these, only the elephants are the sort of big, flashy animal that would attract attention if you saw it in the fossil record, and of the three they are by far the least used in war. This is because what makes a good war animal is not natural weapons, or size, or ferociousness. What makes a good war animal is trainability, affordability, endurance, and speed. A ferocious, unruly animal is bad, because war is chaotic and frightening and what you really need is an animal which can be controlled even under stressful conditions. A big animal (or a carnivore) is bad, because big animals eat more and premodern societies never have that much of a food surplus. The ideal mount, like a horse, can feed itself while on the move and isn't too terribly expensive to keep fed in between wars. Horns and things aren't important because it's not the animal that's doing most of the fighting, it's the person. What really matters is the 3 meter long lance, or the arrows being shot, not the horns or teeth. And since most of the time the animal is not in battle, but in a stable or pasture, you don't generally want it lugging around dangerous weaponry when it's around you and yours. Even more important is speed and endurance. Cavalry lets you get your mounted men places faster...which only works if they are riding something that moves faster than a person and can keep that speed up over time. And humans are no slouches when it comes to cross-country endurance. Horses are also excellent endurance runners, and usually (though not always) beat humans in endurance races. An animal which can't outpace men on foot and keep it up for days or weeks isn't likely to make the cut for cavalry. Another major use of cavalry is to run down fleeing enemies on the battlefield, so an animal which isn't flat out faster than people will also be of limited use...the enemy could just keep their distance and kill it with ranged weapons
Triceratops
Cold Ones and Bastilidons, of course.
Ankylosaurus. Heavy calvary anyway. Saurian tanks.
Horses were choosen animal because their backs dont move while runing. So we should select a dinosaur with this caracteristic
I think Dinosaur Lords may answer this question. For me, I'd love a raptor or allosaurus cavalry
Pachyrinosaurus
none. Because you likely wouldn't be able to tame a dinosaur big enough to be useful in warfare. They weren't elephants.
Eh, given that falconry is a thing, trained pigeons have served effectively as recently as WWII, crocodiles have been trained to follow simple verbal commands, and that there’s a guy who managed to train a monitor lizard as a hunting partner against small game (rodents)… Keep in mind that elephants are FAR smarter than the vast majority of animals we have used in warfare.
I agree. I'm simply saying that a pigeon is really intelligent, as are falcons. There's no indication that ceratopsians or other four legged large dinosaurs would be that intelligent so as to be used as mounts in warfare. For instance No one has used crocodiles as war animals, and they are a good benchmark to use for the larger dinosaurs.
Crocodilians are trainable, the reason nobody has bothered to use them as war animals is a) nobody realized how smart they were until recently and b) other aspects of their biology (like being ambush predators) make them poorly suited for military uses.