Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – If not extinct, dinosaurs are said to have intelligence like humans. An asteroid impact with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
This event changed the course of evolution. The sky darkens, plants stop photosynthesizing, and food chains collapse. However, this cataclysmic event made human evolution possible. The surviving mammals thrived, including the tiny proto-primates that would evolve into what we are today.
In the 1980s, paleontologist Dale Russell proposed a thought experiment in which carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to become intelligent tool users like humans.
Called a “dinosauroid,” it had a large brain, opposable thumbs, and walked upright, as discussed in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.
The common thread connecting dinosaurs is that they were sauropods. Dove possessed the anatomy of a sauropod, consisting of a lung, hollow bones with a high strength-to-weight ratio, metabolism, which unlocked their evolutionary potential. It allowed them to grow in a way that land animals never could before.
Similarly, carnivorous dinosaurs repeatedly developed large predators. Over the course of 100 million years, megalosaurids, allosaurids, carcharodontosaurids, neovenatorids, and finally tyrannosaurs evolved into gigantic apex predators.
Dinosaurs had big bodies, but those with big brains not so much. Dinosaurs showed a weak trend of increasing brain size over time. Jurassic dinosaurs such as allosaurus, stegosaurus and brachiosaurus had small brains.
By the end of the Cretaceous, 80 million years later, tyrannosaurs and ducks had evolved larger brains. But despite its size, the T. rex brain still weighed just 400 grams. The Velociraptor brain weighed 15 grams. The average human brain weighs 1.3 kilograms.
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Photo: Canadian Museum of Nature
Image of the dinosauroid model and Dale Russell. |
Dinosaurs occasionally entered a new niche. Small herbivores are becoming more common and birds are becoming more diverse.
Furthermore, dinosaurs also had much better eyesight than other mammals.
Their ability to recognize colors is better, so they will also have a high alert level.
Today, some descendants of dinosaurs, birds such as crows and parrots, have complex brains. They can use tools, talk and count. This is proof that Russell’s speculation may be true.
And it’s mammals like monkeys, elephants and dolphins that develop the largest brains and the most complex behaviors.
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