Intelligent Dinosaurs

[Toby Frost]

I've always been fascinated by dinosaurs, and particularly by the question of what might have happened if they hadn't died out. It's clear that certain types of small, predatory dinosaurs were becoming more intelligent, although it's far from certain that they would have evolved human-like intelligence if they hadn't died out.

A paleontologist called Dale Russell came up with a very human-like "dinosauroid" in the 80s, which has been criticised as too much like a human. More recently, Darren Naish suggested that they might look like large birds. C.M Kosemen and Simon Roy produced art based on this, where the intelligent dinosaurs look like huge crows and use their snouts and feet to manipulate tools (I gather that crows and other corvids are very brainy, for birds).

http://www.cmkosemen.com/dinosauroids.html

Harry Harrison considered dinosaurs (well, moasaurs) evolving intelligence in his really odd West of Eden novels, and I think a couple of Doctor Who monsters were dinosaur-based. In The New Dinosaurs, Dougal Dixon made the point that intelligence might not actually be very useful to a species in the long term (an unintelligent species can't come up with genocide, global warming or nuclear war, after all).

Anyhow, I have no particular scientific knowledge here, but I've always found it interesting.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

I've just finished re-reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's "The Doors of Eden," which includes some "dinosauroids" - he specifically thanks Kosemen and Roy in the acknowledgements.

 

[Hugh]

Clifford D. Simak's short story "Auk House" (1977) has some wonderfully believable benign intelligent dinosaurs who evolved psychic abilities in a parallel Earth-world.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Dr. Who featured the Silurians under Derbyshire.

 

[Foxbat]

C.M Kosemen and Simon Roy produced art based on this, where the intelligent dinosaurs look like huge crows and use their snouts and feet to manipulate tools (I gather that crows and other corvids are very brainy, for birds).

It looks like we already have intelligent dinosaurs. I am constantly outwitted by the local crows in my attempts to prevent them stealing the bird feeders in my garden.

It’s official: birds are literally dinosaurs. Here’s how we know

Drop any preconceptions of dinosaurs, which are likely reptile-centric and warped by Spielberg; the real dinosaurs are outside your window. Yes, birds are dinosaurs. Shaun Hurrell interviews dinosaur evolution expert Professor Roger Benson to unearth the latest research on the origin of birds.

www.birdlife.org

 

[paranoid marvin]

I think yhat dinosaurs developing 'human intelligence' would have seen them go extinct much earlier than they actually did.

 

[Dave]

I aways remember that there was this odd Stenonychosaurus card in an old edition of Dinosaur Top Trumps:

 

[Toby Frost]

Not sure if the illustrator understood the assignment there. Apparently the "dinosauroid" was originally displayed next to a model of Stenonychosaurus, so maybe the artist drew the wrong one and the card had to justify it!

 

[Swank]

Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light trilogy has several waves of intelligent beings that left the earth, including the Saurs and the Kraken.

 

[BAYLOR]

The tv sitcom Dinosuars.

Anonymous Rex By Eric Garcia In this book the Dinosaurs never went extinct . When mankind evened . The Dios, disguised themselves as human to blend in it was made into tv film , Very entertaining stuff.

West of Eden by Harry Harrison

 

[CupofJoe]

Not directly related but...

Walking With Dinosaurs - BBC Factual releases roarsome first look pictures

More than 25 years after it first stomped across our TV screens, a new six-part series is coming to BBC iPlayer and BBC One

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[wazz]

Don't know how we got this far without a mention of the Voyager episode!

Evolutionarily, there's little reason to think of intelligence (specifically the way we have it) as a desirable end goal in particular. Intelligence is a response to the particular niches we found ourselves in. Abstract thinking and adaptability (and their cousins, language and tool manipulation) were our hallmarks of success, and while it's reasonable to see the success we've accrued and conclude that intelligence -> success automatically, our ability to fundamentally change the rules of the game (i.e. take ourselves out of the food chain and establish dominance over the planet) was a) the first time in history it's ever been scaled up like this and b) not actually at all evidence of any tendency for species to evolve more intelligence over time. It is talked about as if it's gravity, a fundamental direction of evolution, but that's only going to be true in very limited ways for a limited number of species.

And that's before we take into account the cultural and political weight behind notions of intelligence as being very limited to seeing things through human eyes. We think that intelligence means solving quadratic equations, and that makes us better than all the wide variety of animals that show incredible perception and strategy and collective work. Even my dog can solve quadratic equations - I'm not even joking, when I throw a ball, he judges the speed and direction and has a pretty good guess where it's going to land. He may not be doing the algebra, but he's solving it nonetheless.

There is an evidence base & good reason to believe that neanderthals were at least as intelligent than us. And they died out!

 

[Swank]

Evolution doesn't have "goals". Evolution is good at filling niches, and if there is a niche for an intelligence over brawn or speed animal then there is a possibility that it will be filled. Especially when you consider dinosaurs had an period of 190 million years to experiment compared to only 66 million for mammals.

There's also a little hubris in concluding that paleontologists have found every possible branch of the dinosaur family - as if even an intelligent dinosaur would have to have been so common and well distributed to have popped up in the kinds of places we dig bones up in. What if they were very communal and didn't spread out much? And what if that location is where the asteroid hit, or is now in the ocean? There could have been multiple species of prehensile dinosaurs that came and went that we will never have the ability to find.

 

[wazz]

Evolution doesn't have "goals".

I might take mild issue with this. While 'goals' implies intentionality or design, evolution could be said to have the goal of minimising the chances of extinction. The hyper - specialisation of human intelligence could be described as a novel experiment by evolution, to see if we can break on through to the stars, or fail inelegantly to some 'great filter'. Flowers that arrange their petals according to the golden ratio can also be spoken of as having design even if not 'intelligent' in any anthropomorphic filter.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Doctor Who's "Silurians" were very much in the humanoid dinosaur tradition. I think the scriptwriter, Malcolm Hulke, was a bit confused about paleontology. They keep a Tyrannosurus Rex as a guard dog, yet they co-existed with ape-men and they're named after a geologial era long before any vertebrates made it onto land!

I like the idea that some species of small theropod dinosaur may have built a civilisation. Appararently, even our own industrial civilisation would be very hard to detect after tens of millions of years if we went extinct, so you never know.

 

[Karapace]

Don't know how we got this far without a mention of the Voyager episode!
View attachment 129214

Evolutionarily, there's little reason to think of intelligence (specifically the way we have it) as a desirable end goal in particular. Intelligence is a response to the particular niches we found ourselves in. Abstract thinking and adaptability (and their cousins, language and tool manipulation) were our hallmarks of success, and while it's reasonable to see the success we've accrued and conclude that intelligence -> success automatically, our ability to fundamentally change the rules of the game (i.e. take ourselves out of the food chain and establish dominance over the planet) was a) the first time in history it's ever been scaled up like this and b) not actually at all evidence of any tendency for species to evolve more intelligence over time. It is talked about as if it's gravity, a fundamental direction of evolution, but that's only going to be true in very limited ways for a limited number of species.

And that's before we take into account the cultural and political weight behind notions of intelligence as being very limited to seeing things through human eyes. We think that intelligence means solving quadratic equations, and that makes us better than all the wide variety of animals that show incredible perception and strategy and collective work. Even my dog can solve quadratic equations - I'm not even joking, when I throw a ball, he judges the speed and direction and has a pretty good guess where it's going to land. He may not be doing the algebra, but he's solving it nonetheless.

There is an evidence base & good reason to believe that neanderthals were at least as intelligent than us. And they died out!

The jury is still out on whether our intelligence will cause us to die out but I feel we are getting closer to an answer ;-)

 

[Karapace]

I've always been fascinated by dinosaurs, and particularly by the question of what might have happened if they hadn't died out. It's clear that certain types of small, predatory dinosaurs were becoming more intelligent, although it's far from certain that they would have evolved human-like intelligence if they hadn't died out.

A paleontologist called Dale Russell came up with a very human-like "dinosauroid" in the 80s, which has been criticised as too much like a human. More recently, Darren Naish suggested that they might look like large birds. C.M Kosemen and Simon Roy produced art based on this, where the intelligent dinosaurs look like huge crows and use their snouts and feet to manipulate tools (I gather that crows and other corvids are very brainy, for birds).

http://www.cmkosemen.com/dinosauroids.html

I liked the link. I think the "humanoid" dinosaurs were working aong the lines of you need opposible thumbs and binocular vision to make full use of intelligence. Crows are pretty intelligent but there is only so much you can do with a beak (mind you the Daleks built loads of stuff with a gun and a plunger) ;-)

 

[Swank]

I might take mild issue with this. While 'goals' implies intentionality or design, evolution could be said to have the goal of minimising the chances of extinction. The hyper - specialisation of human intelligence could be described as a novel experiment by evolution, to see if we can break on through to the stars, or fail inelegantly to some 'great filter'. Flowers that arrange their petals according to the golden ratio can also be spoken of as having design even if not 'intelligent' in any anthropomorphic filter.

Evolution is an explanation why things change due to the interaction of gene change and environment change to take novel forms. It is not a process in and of itself. Evolution frequently leads to creatures too specialized to survive, and evolution disrupts stable biomes. If avoiding extinction was a function, the earth would have stabilized with algae and some oxygen breathing algae eating microorganism.

But genes, being the product of a haphazard assembly, are prone to changes due to environmental pressure and recombination. Usually those changes are lethal, but when they are useful a niche will be invaded. Maybe for a few generations, maybe for millions of years. But it is best to see evolution as a process that creates a few winners out of enormous amount of death - like a surfer riding a tsunami into a city.


Intelligence like ours is uncommon because it is such a risky expenditure of calories, gestation and maturation. It is much easier to have quills, or burrow underground, or reproduce in large numbers, or live in colonies, etc.


One thing that is often missed about humans is that they aren't just communicators and tool users and problem solvers. We are also the highest endurance land animals, capable of running down any prey animal given enough time. The antelope tires out before we do. So we are rather remarkable as far as animals go - a lot of advantages that offset our considerable vulnerabilities. But it took a long time for something like us to pop up.

There may be or may have been more intelligent creatures. Who knows what secrets of the universe the sperm whale has puzzled apart with their 20 pound brains? Just because they don't act on what they know, doesn't mean they don't have insights beyond our imaginations.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

There's a particular group of theropod dinsosaurs called "Maniraptora" which seems like the best candidate for a dinosaur civilisation, and by quite a long way. They're fairly small two-legged, feathery creatures, distant relatives of Tyrannosaurus (and technically, the group includes all birds!) The ones didn't go all-out for wings had nice long arms and hands for grabbing things, and many of them had dexterous feet for climbing. One explanation for their featheriness is that it was for display purposes, which tends to go with being a social animal.

The brains are the thing, though. Theropods already had much bigger brains relative to body size than other types of dinosaur, and the Maniraptora turned this trend up to 11. Plus, their bird descendants actually have more efficient brains than us mammals, with small, densely-packed neurons that fit a lot of processing power into a tiny space. If Velociraptors already had similar brains, they may have been very clever girls indeed.

A paleontologist called John Ostrom did some ground-breaking work on a maniraptoran called Deinonychus, back in the '60s. I read about it when I was about 10, and got very excited about dinosaurs again. Ostrom had looked at the specimens and reconstructed how this creature stood and moved around. He realised there was no way the thing was a slow, stupid monster like dinosaurs were generally assumed to be. Its whole anatomy was built for speed, balance and agility. It would need a fast metabolism and the ability to think quickly, too. IIRC, the Jurassic Park "Velociraptors" were actually based on Deinonychus

[/nerd]

 

[wazz]

Evolution frequently leads to creatures too specialized to survive, and evolution disrupts stable biomes. If avoiding extinction was a function, the earth would have stabilized with algae and some oxygen breathing algae eating microorganism.

Absolutely - and sapiens versus neanderthals demonstrates this concept fantastically well. Avoiding extinction - e.g. by avoiding the trap of specialisation - is indeed a function of evolution, just with respect to each individual species - which doesn't care if enough competitor in or near it's niche goes extinct. Evolution does not seek stability, but instead dynamic equilibrium.