herbivore dinosaur chomping on sailor

Long ago I heard a story about some zoo or circus elephant who carried a human body in its mouth.

I don't remember the details.

The story might have referred to Frank Fisher, an elephant trainer at the Lemen Brothers Circus, who got drunk in 1899 and annoyed the big elephant Rajah, who was said to hold part of Fisher's body in his mouth for some time after Fisher was dead.

There is also an urban legend of a European Zoo elephant in the first part of the twentieth century who ate a woman. The most common version has Chang eat Bertha Walt at the Zurich Zoo about 1945. However, the most first hand version I found says that the woman was "really most sincerely dead" but not eaten.

When Indian elephants sometimes get really angry at Humans and start hunting down and killing them, they are sometimes said to eat their victims. This is explained as witnesses seeing the elephants hold body parts in their mouths as they pull their victims apart.

Elephants don't eat any kind of meat any more than Humans eat other Humans.

However, Humans are generally believed to be slightly more intelligent and emotionally complex than elephants and much more cultured and civilized.

When Roman Emperor Caligula was assassinated, some of the assassins cut pieces off his body and allegedly ate some. In the 1340s a mob in Florence cut a man and a teenager to pieces and allegedly ate some of the pieces. In 1672 Cornelius and Jan de Witt were lynched and pieces of their bodies were allegedly eaten.

So it is possible that elephants sometimes swallow pieces of their enemies for the same reasons civilized and cultured Humans sometimes swallow pieces of their enemies.

Another reason might be that when an angry elephant was done with making sure that an animal which had provoked its ire was not just merely dead but really, really, really dead a dozen times over, and calmed down it would probably start eating plants right at the spot, since elephants have to spend most of their waking hours eating. Thus it might eat some of the plants which had been splattered with bits of the unfortunate creature.

Thus the rural legend that an elephant who killed 17 Humans after her child was killed had Human flesh in her stomach when killed might not be false.

Of course a sauropod dinosaur would be much less intelligent and emotionally complex than a Human or an elephant.

But if a sauropod normally fought other creatures by biting them, as many animals do, it would be perfectly willing to bite a Human it was fighting with. And with its big mouth, it would win the fight.