人类能和霸王龙掰手腕?

“First, we’re assuming that the T. rex（short for Tyrannosaurus rex） won’t just eat the person, right?” asks Jack Conrad, a vertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Right. This is a sanctioned match, and killing your opponent is strictly against the rules. Who's coming out on top?

美国自然历史博物馆的脊椎动物学家Jack Conrad说：“不如我们先假设霸王龙不会一口把你吞了。”和霸王龙比赛掰手腕，有很严的规则，吃了对手这种事是绝对不允许发生的。那么，谁会赢呢？

“Doesn’t matter,” Conrad says. “There’s no chance that any human alive could win.” The T. rex’s arms might have looked wimpy, but they were extremely strong. Each was about three feet long and, based on the size of the arm bones and analysis of the spots where muscle attached to the bone, they were jacked. “The bicep alone—and this is a conservative estimate—could curl 430 pounds,” Conrad says. Even the beefiest humans max out at around an embarrassing 260 pounds.

“不用说，得冠军这种好事人类想都别想。”霸王龙的手臂也许看上去很弱，其实相当强悍。每只都有三英尺长，根据骨头的大小和对肌肉的研究，霸王龙的手臂绝对是坚强有力。“保守估计，霸王龙的二头肌有430磅的曲力。”而肌肉最强壮的人，手臂撑死也就只有可怜巴巴的260磅曲力。

Surely an Over the Top–era Sylvester Stallone would put up a good fight? “Not even Lou Ferrigno in his prime would stand a chance,” Conrad says. “They didn’t just have big biceps. Their chest and shoulder muscles were huge too. They had huge arms and shoulders—bigger than my leg. They had the strength to rip a human’s arm right out of its socket.”

也许史泰龙能强过霸王龙？“绿巨人来了都不行。霸王龙不仅仅是靠二头肌吃饭的，他们的胸部和肩膀也非常巨大，它们能轻而易举把一个人的手臂撕下来。”

There are dozens of hypotheses about what the T. rex used its arms for, Conrad explains, but the ones taken most seriously involve pushing itself up if it was lying on its belly, tossing big chunks of meat into its mouth, or holding onto females during what scientists suspect was a very vigorous mating routine. These ideas are favored because such actions required up-and-down motions of the arm, and fossil evidence indicates that the dino king was incapable of rotating or twisting its arms. “The T. rex probably couldn’t have done the arm-wrestling move,” Conrad says. “So maybe you could get him on a technicality.”

大家都想知道霸王龙要那么强壮的二头肌干嘛，普遍接受的一种解释就是当它趴在地上时，强壮的肌肉能帮助它迅速支撑起身子，或者撕下猎物身上大块的肉饱餐一顿，或者在热烈的求偶活动中抓住心仪的对象不放。这些解释之所以比较可信是因为这些事都必须利用手臂的上下活动，而化石显示霸王龙的手臂是没办法旋转的。“霸王龙学不会摔跤的招数，也许你能在这上面赢过它。”