Could Intelligent Animals Existed During The Dinosaurs
Anthroposaurus
Did the Dinosaurs Develop Intelligence?
Abstract
Russell'south dinosauroid will accept differed from human beings in some respects. Most reptiles and birds procreate by pushing together their cloacae which are openings in the body doubling upwardly equally a sexual tract and an anus. This seems a bit of a hit and miss thing to the intelligent mammal and, if Bakker'south arguments are to mean anything, ane would have thought that hot blooded, sexually active dinosaurs would have evolved a more certain method of procreation. Although the tuatara lizard of New Zealand which is very similar to lizards from 200 million years ago has no penis, the marine iguanas of the Galapagos islands accept them. Notwithstanding, if birds are examples of latter day dinosaurs, Russell could be correct, and birds don't seem to have any trouble in procreating.
Contents Updated: Wednesday, Dec fifteen, 1999
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.
Anthroposaurus Sapiens
Did the dinosaurs develop intelligence before Adam?
Some dinosaur iconoclasts have dared to ask this question, merely even they accept only answered, "They couldn't have". Thus Bakker asks:
Why didn't [the dinosaurs] evolve larger cerebral systems? Why didn't they eventually produce super-intelligent species capable of making rock tools?
Desmond compares mammals with the superior dinosaurs and wonders, "Why did not "Man" land on the moon in the Cretaceous?" calculation that by "Man" he meant a creature filling the ecological office of humans. Sagan asks:
If the dinosaurs had not all been mysteriously extinguished some sixty-five million years ago, would the saurornithoides have continued to evolve into increasingly intelligent forms?
All believe dinosaurs would take reached intelligence were information technology not for the Cretaceous terminal extinction. And all agree that they failed to reach it because they died out first.
I disagree.
Some dinosaurs did develop intelligence and by then doing caused the Cretaceous terminal extinction, just as an insensitive ape developed intelligence at the stop of the Tertiary and created the mass extinction that marks the finish of that geological era. Though the direct evidence is sparse—I give what footling at that place is in the next affiliate—the circumstantial evidence is compelling. The thesis is non self-evidently false, equally, say, the idea of a flat world is. Today we consider it axiomatic that the earth is round and revolves round the Sun—but these ideas have only become accepted in the last few hundred years.
The movement of the continents, continental drift, noted by Wegener sixty years ago seems obvious to us all now, indeed it was probably obvious to whatever child studying a map of the earth decades before Wegener, simply because continents were and so massive and the experts could not think of a mechanism by which they could movement, no one was willing to ask the question, "must not S America and Africa once have been joined"?
We might discover ourselves realizing simultaneously that the anthroposaur preceded the states, and that we have merely stumbled over the precipice of our own extinction.
Mankind has adopted its position of global domination in just five million years. The dinosaurs, we have seen, were warm-blooded, active creatures and usurped the rule of the thecodonts in merely five million years. Mechanisms exist for species to evolve at astonishingly fast rates. On boilerplate a species of dinosaur did not last for more than than two or iii 1000000 years earlier becoming extinct or evolving into a new species. At that place is no reason why 1 of the dinosaurs should not have evolved intelligence during the terminal 5 million years or and then of the Cretaceous Period.
Dinosaurs evolved quickly and there was a spate of dinosaur evolution just prior to their last decline. Bakker says that the stenonychosaurs were "evolving quickly in many of their adaptive compartments" and with their bulky pair of mid-brain lobes they were probably "every bit as endowed as the Late Cretaceous mammals".
Fossil dinosaurs accept been institute with quite remarkably large brains... for dinosaurs. One authority says that triceratops had a encephalon weighing a kilogram, a fair size compared with our 1.5 kilograms, though its body weight was 9000 kg compared with our seventy kg. Struthiomimus had a brain to torso ratio like to that of a modernistic day ostrich—1:yard. And, though encephalon size is obviously a general measure of intelligence, there is no way of telling whether the encephalon of an extinct form of animals functioned in quite the same way every bit those of animals with which we are familiar. We cannot exist certain that modern creatures with larger brains are more than intelligent than the smaller brained dinosaurs. A higher metabolic rate, more active brains, faster synapses, sharper nerve impulses could all contribute to greater efficiency of the brain even though information technology were smaller than ours.
Of course, size is presumably directly related to retentiveness capacity merely, for humans, much of the encephalon seems redundant, evolution looks to have overshot—a consequence, mayhap, of sexual pick or a saltagen in a high quantum land. Information technology might not accept washed for dinosaurs whose memory capacity could have been better adjusted to the capabilities of their brains overall.
Then over again the nature of their intelligence might have differed from ours. Many cold-blooded animals do very well in the globe of the mammals past using abilities other than intelligence. In South America, farmers utilise marine toads to suppress mice and rats which otherwise would make a feast of their crops and seeds. A ponderous toad successfully preying on wily rats? Yet they do. The toads, weighing five pounds look with infinite patience for the cleverer victim to traverse its usual path, information technology pounces and the rat is gulped whole into the frog's maw, rendered insensible by poisonous saliva then swallowed. The abilities of dinosaurs might also accept developed rather differently from mammals.
Just even if dinosaur and mammalian evolution were truly parallel and dinosaurs had to evolve big brains to become intelligent, fast evolution could accept done it in a relatively short time. You lot do not take to believe me. Witness this remarkable paragraph past Adrian Desmond:
The almost intriguing Tardily Cretaceous inhabitants were the intelligent mimics unearthed in recent years—broad eyed ostrich dinosaurs, and dromaeosaurids like deinonychus and the saurornithoides with stereo-vision functionally mated to opposable thumbs. These dinosaurs, capable of more skilful behavioral feats than any other state animal hitherto, were separated from other dinosaurs past a gulf comparable to that dividing men from cows: the disparity in encephalon size is staggering. The potential in dromaeosaurs and coelurosaurs for an explosive evolution as the Third dawned cannot be doubted—who knows what new peaks the sophisticated "bird-mimics" would have attained had they survived into the "Age of Mammals". Yet evidently non a breeding population of these cute, alarm dinosaurs outlived the insufficiently cumbersome and dim witted giants.
Desmond almost proposes that the dinosaurs became intelligent simply he pulls up at the final hurdle.
Yes the "explosive development" did occur. Flesh has evolved from being a user of crude rock tools to our present level of civilization in just one million years. It must be possible that these alert creatures did the same. How would that have looked in the fossil tape, especially begetting in mind that the chosen habitat of these dinosaurs made their remains scarce, just as remains of early human are scarce and, of modern chimpanzees, non-real?
Dale Russell, discoverer of stenonychosaurus, has also postulated that late Cretaceous dinosaurs were well on the fashion to becoming intellectual animals, and would have succeeded if the dinosaurs had not suffered extinction, stenonychosaurus had an opposable thumb, stood upright most three feet alpine and had binocular vision. Russell commented, "it had all the ingredients of success that nosotros come across subsequently in the development of the apes". He believes that stenonychosaurs were the "chief predators on Cretaceous mammals" and that there must have been quite a lot of them considering, past the end of the Cretaceous, in that location were a lot of mammals, though they were small. Nevertheless few have been institute equally fossils, just as complete fossil mammals from that period are also rare. "The fossil record is and so limited that it is a deplorable reflection of past life", as Norman Myers puts information technology.
Russell deduced the advent of a stenonychosaurus that had evolved unhampered by disasters until the 20th century. A model of the creature, a dinosauroid, is on brandish in Ottawa. The formulation of the dinosauroid was based upon convergent evolution. Russell extrapolated trends observable in the dinosaurs like stenonychosaurus to across their extinction. By the 20th century, Russell believes their brain size would have been within the human range. To adjust it its skull would have expanded and its face would probably take flattened. The long dinosaur neck would have shortened to bear more comfortably the weight of its encephalon. Consequently its tail would have been lost since it would not have been needed to counterpoise the neck and caput.
He causeless live births and, rather illogically, that the dinosauroid would therefore have needed a omphalos. The young, though, were idea probable to accept been fed on regurgitated nutrient and the animal would not have had any "mammalia". Communication would take sounded similar to birdsong. As well these conjectured features he supposes there would be characteristics typical of dinosaurs such as scaly skin, big oval eyes with vertically slit pupils, absence of external sex organs and a three fingered hand, one digit of which would be opposed.
"Absence of external sex organs"—possibly, simply, although the tuatara lizard of New Zealand which is very similar to lizards from 200 million years ago has no penis, the marine iguanas of the Galapagos islands have them. Most reptiles and birds procreate by pushing together their cloacae which are openings in the trunk doubling up equally a sexual tract and an anus. This seems a bit of a hitting and miss affair to the intelligent mammal and, if Bakker's arguments are to mean anything, ane would have thought that hot-blooded, sexually active dinosaurs would take evolved a more certain method of procreation. However, if birds are examples of latter day dinosaurs, Russell could exist correct, and birds don't seem to have any trouble in procreating.
Nevertheless, if convergent development had required a convergence of shape appropriate for a thinking creature, the upright stance of the homo and the ventro-ventral fashion of copulation information technology induces, might have dictated the evolution of a penis in the dinosauroid, if not in other dinosaurs.
Nosotros considered some possibility of major differences in the structure of the encephalon of the dinosauroid and human. In mammals the brain grew by expansion of the cerebral lobes but in birds information technology was the corpus striatum that expanded. A keen deal of visual information processing in reptiles is done in the retina rather than being passed on to the brain. The ostrich mimic dinosaur had enormous eyes protected by bony plates. That is usually attributed to a nocturnal lifestyle but it could indicate that the parts of the brain of the dinosauroid that were to develop were associated with vision.
Russell was almost at pains to emphasize that his guesses were bourgeois—and that must be true. 65 million years, even in a thought experiment, seems also long for an active, warm-blooded creature already upwardly and running to need to develop what mammals did in the same menses of fourth dimension from a continuing beginning. With the mechanisms for rapid modify at the disposal of evolution such a long fourth dimension scale seems unnecessary if not silly. Information technology is more likely that intelligence evolved before the whole dinosaurian dynasty came to an stop.
Russell'south conjectures requite united states of america a model, non of the impossible simply of the possible. Not of the hypothetical dinosauroid today only the actual anthroposaur of 65 meg years ago.
Within a few million years of the extinction of the dinosaurs, the neocortex of the early primates had begun to develop. Quite ordinary mammals at present exhibit astonishingly sophisticated behavior that denotes the working of sophisticated brains. Consider 3 quick examples.
Compared with the hoofed animals of the veldt, hyenas are dull creatures. They can run at about 40 mph compared with 50 mph for a wildebeest. They accept therefore learned to be clever team hunters. Often lions scavenge from hyenas rather than the other way around. The hyaena seems to decide upon the blazon of prey information technology wants in accelerate then uses advisable tactics for that animal. David Attenborough tells us that they are happy to hunt wildebeest but volition ignore them if they accept decided that today'southward dinner is to be zebra. Prairie dogs, communal animals that live in "towns" go in for horticulture. They cut down certain plants, non to eat—they do not like the gustatory modality of them—simply to create more space for those they exercise similar. Every now and and then they exit a territory for no other reason than to let information technology lie fallow to recover, then they return to it. Finally Sea otters are intelligent plenty to use a tool, such every bit a suitable pebble, to suspension shellfish from the rocks and to crevice open their shells. All evolved since the death of the dinosaurs.
Yet surely the selective force per unit area on the mammals in the globe of the dinosaurs would accept been more favorable to the development of the mammalian neocortex. Intelligence is a weapon in the evolutionary artillery race between predator and prey. The mammals were the oppressed animals, oppressed by the superior dinosaurs. Plainly, if the mammals were more intelligent than the dinosaurs then they should have been able to outwit them and usurp the dinosaur's dominant status. They didn't and so they weren't. The mammals, including the primates, could not capitalize on intelligence in the Cretaceous considering there already were intelligent creatures effectually quite capable of holding their ain against other dinosaurs let alone the pretensions of early primates or any other mammal. Just every bit mankind eliminated the intelligent opposition, the anthroposaurs would have eliminated any other animal, dinosaur or mammal, that seemed likely to become a rival.
What of the niche later occupied past the primates. Was it occupied in the Cretaceous past primosaurs, dinosaur equivalents of the primates, and just when they died was the mammalian version able to develop? If convergent evolution is anything to go past, perhaps the intelligent dinosaur had to descend, similar the intelligent mammal, from the trees or, possibly, emerge from the water.
What was in the copse when the dinosaurs were on the ground? From the fossil record there seem to exist no dinosaurs adapted for tree dwelling in the sense that such creatures every bit monkeys, apes or fifty-fifty squirrels are today. Yet, if in that location were no dinosaurs in the copse, the mammals would have had a perfectly rubber niche, would surely have evolved into it and, if they merely had to find a place free of dinosaurs to realize their destiny, developed brains much earlier.
Fossils of predatory dinosaurs are rare—Robert Bakker claims that he only came across a few fragments of them in vi years of field work—but fossils of wood species are rarer. Fossil chimpanzees, from much closer times, are totally non-existent. We have only five fossil skeletons of Archaeopteryx which presumably spent some of its time in trees. Fossils of pterosaurs are mainly of marine species which swooped effectually the edges of the sea.
The problem with tree dwellers is that their dead bodies drop to the forest floor where they are near unlikely to leave a fossil record. The forest is rich in fungi and bacteria that thrive in the clammy and the shade and the little that is not eaten by scavengers decays in a short time. And the bones?—the wood floor is acidic and so that even the bones practice not survive long plenty to leave a trace. And so in that location is no fossil prove to suggest what was in the trees when dinosaurs roamed the basis.
Experts tell us that, since mammals, similar tree shrews, were there, dinosaurs were not—otherwise copse would not have been safe for them. But, if the dinosaurs were agape of heights, how did the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx learn to wing? It is absurd that dinosaurs should not have adapted to life in the trees and the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx testify it.
Lagosuchus, thought to exist an ancestor of the pterodactyls, was a archaic dinosaur that must accept climbed trees. Today, Komodo dragon hatchlings live in trees to avoid predators. Many other common cold-blooded animals climb trees, the many species of tree frog for instance. Why should at that place not have been hosts of dinosaur monkeys and dinosaur apes? Peradventure there were but, as we have seen, because of their habitat they did not fossilize easily: a whole fauna of advanced dinosaurs well-nigh which we know nothing. Is it so stupid so to gauge that 1 of them might have followed a pathway to intelligence just as nosotros did?
There is a parallel between the explosive radiation of dinosaurian grazers similar hadrosaurs and ceratopsians from the middle Cretaceous and the explosion of mammalian grazers about 11 million years ago.
The mid-Cretaceous explosion was a result of the breakthrough of the flowering plants about 117 million years ago only equally the more recent case was due to the emergence of the grasses 24 million years ago. Forth with the antelopes, horses, cows and elephants of the latter menses, taking reward of the new nutrient stuff, came the intelligent mammal, man. Lucy walked by that East African lakeside just every bit cattle and horses were evolving 3.vii million years ago. Since and so, homo has continued to evolve rapidly, though the animals that originally shared the savannah with him, such as the antelopes, have not.
Tin the parallel exist extended? Did an intelligent dinosaur emerge from the Cretaceous forests, a part of the explosive radiations of dinosaurs resulting from the earlier emergence of the flowering plants as a new source of nutrient, and, like human being, evolve exceedingly rapidly? If an aquatic phase gave man many useful features during his development, is it possible that some dinosaurs lived aquatically for awhile and adult a comparable streamlined shape and upright stance as well every bit other useful features?
With the plucking of the hadrosaurs from the experts' approved place in the swamps, to be placed in herds on mossy plains, there seemed to be no semi-aquatic dinosaurs remaining at the terminate of the Cretaceous. Animals such as the ichthyosaurs and the plesiosaurs, which the experts practice not allocate as dinosaurs, were fully aquatic, and the ichthyosaurs might accept died out before and then anyway. Still, for 20 meg years, body of water-levels had been college than at any time in the last 200 million years. In that location were vast areas of shallow continental seas. Surely a lot of species must accept dipped their toes in the water and some of them must have tarried awhile.
Lots of shallow seas imply lots of small, peradventure transient, islands ideal for evolutionary experiments like those described past Elaine Morgan—only 65 one thousand thousand years earlier. Suggestive also is Bakker's idea that the archaeopteryx was possibly able to utilise its archaic wings to swim rather as a hoatzin fledgling does. Both archaeopteryx and deinonychus had wrists with a semicircular joint which permitted accurate movement of the fingers and infrequent ability to flex them. It is conceivable that, while the archaeopteryx was evolving into birds that some other members of the family turned to brachiating and developed along the lines of first the modern primates, and so the aquatic ape, to yield Anthroposaurus sapiens.
Gribbon and Cherfas attribute the growth of intelligence in homo to the succession of water ice ages over the terminal few million years. This sequence of glacials and interglacials subjected the hominid apes to repeated intense selective force per unit area putting a premium on adaptability, versatility and intelligence. Though there were no ice ages at the finish of the Cretaceous period, we noted that the sea level was high. Information technology fell considerably and quickly 95 million years ago and once again 67 million years ago, but over several million years, well-nigh fourscore one thousand thousand years ago, in that location was a shallower dip. With big amounts of the continental shelves covered in water, fluctuations of only a few meters could successively expose then inundate large areas of state.
The normal tidal range today can brand the sea disappear over the horizon at low tide in those places where the embankment shelves at only a slight angle. The slow shallow dip observed in the sea level when information technology was at its height possibly signifies thousands of such incursions of the ocean. Imagine a Spring tide that went out for ten thousand years earlier information technology returned. And then it stayed in for x thousand years. This would put strong selection pressure on the species living on the flat coastal lowlands or on low islands.
Possible confirmation is the formation of oil bearing rocks at that fourth dimension. Half of our present oil reserves stem from that catamenia, the result of organic matter settling to the bottom of shallow stagnant seas. Incursions of the ocean would have trapped the organic layers between thin layers of mud somewhen giving rise to oil shales from which oil was squeezed under pressure.
Farther evidence of such cycles comes from the striated appearance of Cretaceous chalk cliffs. Is it possible that fluctuations in sea level provided the evolutionary stimulus for the anthroposaurs that Gribbon and Cherfas debate was provided past water ice ages in the evolution of mankind? Did the same fluctuations force a brachiating dromaeosaur to turn to the water temporarily, giving information technology a range of advantages but as Morgan argues for mankind's predecessor?
"A final mystery looms large in the story of [dinosaur] predator and prey", Robert Bakker tells us. It is that, dissimilar the ankylosaurs and the ceratopsians, the hadrosaurs had no obvious ways of defence against ferocious predators similar the tyrannosaurs. They "had no whiplike tails, long claws, or whatever blazon of fasten or plate. And their limbs were shorter and designed for lower tiptop speeds than were those of their gracefully long-legged hunters. How did these normally slow moving, unarmed browsers escape their enemies"?
An intriguing question.
Patently the various weapons of the other creatures were advantageous or they would not have evolved. Why then did the hadrosaurs not need them? Orthodoxy has it that they were caring parents and apparently moved about in herds, traits that could have given them sufficient reward. Their strong social sense and protective instinct would have allowed them to proliferate into immense herds wandering the continents. There is rubber in numbers as we encounter on what remains of the African veldt. Perhaps they just sacrificed the former, the infirm and the weak for the benefit of the rest.
Hadrosaurs showed explosive diversification shortly after descending from the iguanodonts towards the terminate of the Cretaceous. Extreme diversification depends on genetic variation. The greater the extremes, the more variation is unsaid and vice versa. Dinosaur extremes indicated bully genetic variation which deemed for their ability to adapt and to radiate into vacated niches.
The reason they could not cope with the events of 65 million years agone whereas they had successively coped splendidly with previous mass extinctions, the so-called Kimmeridgian turnover of 145 million years agone, the Aptian turnover of 117 million years ago and the Cenomanian turnover of 95 million years ago, was that in the few million years earlier the concluding act they had lost variation and had become inflexibly standardized.
The concluding few million years of the Cretaceous showed a marked reduction in multifariousness of dinosaur species: the earlier vigorous adaptive radiations of the hadrosaurs and the ceratopsians similarly gave way to a yielding of variety. For the final ii million years of the Period, a single genus of each—saurolophus and triceratops respectively—dominated the landscape, although they did so in vast numbers.
No gradual environmental modify is going to eliminate genetic variation in genus after genus of dinosaurs. That very variation will guarantee adaptation to the changes by natural selection before genetic variation has been significantly pruned. The motive ability of evolution is expansion of diversity with environmental alter. The dinosaurs' loss of multifariousness is much more characteristic of the loss of diversity in species nosotros are seeing today—by unnatural choice—at the manus of man.
Caches of bones of a unmarried species are regarded by paleoanthropologists every bit suggesting husbandry. In the evolution of human being, various cultures seemed to concentrate on ibex, horses, reindeer and so on. Could it be that ceratopsians and hadrosaurs were actually domestic animals similar cows and sheep kept for food?
Is it possible that hadrosaurs were the cattle of the Cretaceous period, herded on the slap-up plains earlier being shipped to a Cretaceous Chicago for making into meat pies and hamburgers? Is it impossible?
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