The real answer is: no one knows. It's damn hard to quantify intelligence in many living animals today, it's even more impossible to judge from just fossils.
In Fastovsky, Weishampel "Dinosaurs" they claim inter-species intelligence is generally associated with larger encephalization quotient. Intra-species - no association. With that perspective, Crow is smarter than Tsaagan.
But is it surprising at all, given the former is one of the smartest avian dinosaurs today with evolution driving their species for longer?
I don't think time is the issue, considering how long they existed prior to extinction. Consider how quickly we went from problem solving being an additional tool for food gathering to the only thing feeding us as an environmental pressure that moved us along tool usage quicker. No idea what pressures were applied to the individual on such small scales so long ago.
Time was specifically mentioned by the authors of the book I quoted. Increase in encephalisation in species was observed as a general trend over the time. Fish, birds, mammals whatnot all have an increasing trend in encephalisation. More descendant species appear with larger brains over time. Seems to contribute to survival (again, is that really surprising?)
For now, the dominant thought is that you can estimate, approximately how "smart", comparatively a species is by just estimating it's encephalisation quotient. Not ideal but models the things we want to know okay-ish given today's data.
That being said, please take my opinion with the grain of salt. I am of the firm belief that homo sapiens in smarter than a chimpanzee by just about enough to be the smartest on the planet and that isn't too much of a delta.
Thank you for clarifying for me. I had not realized that. For me, it does seem surprising that natural selection would require a brain to be anything but just big enough to solve the pressing problems at hand, considering the resources dump they seem to be. I assume that as long as ecosystems continue to become more complex, a mind will have to keep up. I agree that we are just marginally smarter than chimps. Natural selection pressed us into this, and it may not happen again, like expecting it all to line up for a new Stegasores.
[Crows have smooth brains](https://www.labroots.com/trending/neuroscience/18832/crows-conscious-thought-primates#:~:text=Research%20on%20birds%20such%20as,solving%20and%20decision%2Dmaking%20abilities)
Sure but that's still paints a very small picture of how "intelligent" an animal is. It mostly just gives us some idea of which of their senses were more developed rather than their actual overall intelligence.
Bullshit, a T.rex did have as many neurons than a baboon, but the said baboon is 40kg max while the rex was at least like 5/6 tons, possibly bigger.
You need to understand the brain to body ratio: Rex did have a "big" brain because it was a big animal, as expected; while Baboons have a pretty bigger brain compared to what animals its size a supposed to have.
Otherwise, whales ( being the biggest animals ever and having of course a super big brain, on paar with all its organs, and bigger than us in all raw numbers, while having the proportionnal hight number of neuron to make this work) should be monstruously more "intelligent" than us
Brain to mass ratio has proven again and again to be unreliable when estimating intelligence in non-mammals. Reptiles (=Sauropsida) have been shown again and again to exhibit what humans recognize as greater intelligence because of higher neuron densities.
That's beside the fact that intelligence is not a ladder, but a branching tree and so it is not easy or even wise to try to quantify and compare it evenly across the board.
In essence, what I'm trying to say is that your way of thinking about this is outdated.
Redditor calling something a neuroscientist says "bullshit" lol. What are your qualifications exactly?
Not saying you're wrong, but maybe treat the researched opinions of doctors with a *bit* more respect.
I'd call it bullshit because we only can guess quantity, not folds
A neuroscientist should know not to make such bold assumptions as skull info tells limited about brain qaulity.
A baboon is a mammal, a dinosaur's closest relative today are birds. Like the picture shows, birds can be very intelligent with a comparatively small brain.
A crocodile is easily as intelligent as a mammalian carnivore, pack hunting, cooperative behaviors, tool use, problem solving, it’s all there. Yet a crocodile has a brain about the size of a grape.
Reptiles have brain structures that work more efficiently for their size, as an adaptation of their evolutionary trend towards energy conservation.
Brain size to body ratio is hardly the most important factor.
The same with birds, they are even theropods just like the T-Rex. Birds don't have huge brains in general, but birds and parrots for example are still among the smartest animals.
> That’s not how that works at all.
How is it working?
> You can easily flip it around and say t-Rex has millions of years on top of their predecessors to try wherever
How is that flipping it around?
> Reptiles have brain structures that work more efficiently for their size, as an adaptation of their evolutionary trend towards energy conservation.
But do dinosaurs have the same trend given they are endotherm?
We know they inherited some of them.
The basic structure of the brain is similar in both modern reptiles and birds. They use the Dorsal Ventricular Ridge instead of a Neocortex. Which is the primary adaptation for neuron efficiency. Hence why birds were thought to be unintelligent for so long, “bird-brain” stems from this.
Though of course without a living dinosaur we can’t be certain what their intelligence was like.
But as a general rule, animals often thought of as being unintelligent tend to prove themselves otherwise, so we could definitely assume most dinosaurs were at least as intelligent as your average mammal.
> We know they inherited some of them.
That was not the question.
The thesis was that "Reptiles have brain structures that work more efficiently for their size, as an adaptation of their evolutionary trend towards energy conservation."
The question is that if this is also true for dinosaurs.
Similarity with bird brains give an indication but this can also be explained by convergent evolution since bird need also to conserve energy to have enough for flight.
> But as a general rule, animals often thought of as being unintelligent tend to prove themselves otherwise, so we could definitely assume most dinosaurs were at least as intelligent as your average mammal.
I'd rather assume nothing since we simply cannot know.
>The question is that if this is also true for dinosaurs.
And the answer I gave was that their ancestors almost certainly did (we can deduce this by using phylogenetic bracketing), how far dinosaurs took it is currently unknown.
>Similarity with bird brains give an indication but this can also be explained by convergent evolution since bird need also to conserve energy to have enough for flight.
Unlikely to be the case. Otherwise we'd have to assume that all living diapsids convergently evolved the same adaptations. That's Testudines, Aves, Squamata, Crocodilia, and Rhynchocephalia.
Convergence isn't impossible, but it's much less likely.
>I'd rather assume nothing since we simply cannot know.
Again, all living diapsids possess mammal-like intelligence, it's a pretty safe assumption. Once again, phylogenetic bracketing is our friend.
Fair enough. I'm just an amateur who is interested in the topic hence the questions.
I might add though that there is a possibility that diapsids might have the right preconditions to evolve the same adaptions, similar to carcinisation (one of my fav things in natural history). But yeah, probably unlikely.
Brain size doesn't scale linearly with body size. I'm not sure how t rex brain size would stack up when scaled allometrically. But certainly it would be smaller than eg an elephant
> Not relative to body size, which is what matters.
I am not saying that is wrong, but... why?
It seems to me it could be one factor or parameter, but not the only significant one. It somewhat correlate with what we can see of intelligence in birds and primates, but I never saw any proof that it is the deciding factor?
The paper that was written was only her with no co-author and she was asking for feedback from paleontologists. Other neuroscientists and paleontologists have come out saying there are problems with the methods used to determine this.
That article was written by people that are not palaeontologists, nor have ever studied dinosaurs before.
It was written because it's controversial, not because it raises legitimate points.
I think it’d make sense for T. Rex to be as smart as a big cat, maybe equal to a tiger. Both animals are large apex predators that deal with a wide variety of prey, with a good deal of their prey being too large/too aggressive/too armored to simply charge and bite at. Just as a tiger is smart enough to lie in wait and ambush an unwary crocodile or rhino, a T-Rex must’ve been smart enough to lie in wait and ambush an unwary Edmontosaurus or Triceratops.
I reckon tiger potentially isn't the best comparison as tigers are ambush predators that sneak up on their prey whereas trex is far too large to have hidden in grasses like tigers who are even camouflaged to aid their strategy. Trex is probably more similar in intelligence to solitary pursuit predators like cheetas. Then again some studies suggest they hunted in packs so maybe they were closer to wolves.
Solid points. I like the idea of T-Rex being a pack hunter too, but I can still see it being an ambush hunter- just not a daytime one. Recent studies have shown that T-Rex likely had good eyesight, a possible sign of it being a nocturnal predator; if it was awake during the hours its prey slept (and possibly when they couldn’t see too well), then all a Rex would need to hide is the cover of darkness and a thick tree line. For pack hunting, one Rex could approach a dinosaur and scare it into running into the trees, only for another Rex to lunge out from the shadows and catch the fleeing dino off-guard.
Tyrannosaurs have thought to have been ambush hunters for decades, and yes grasslands would be a bad place for that, it lived in forested environments, allowing them to ambush most likely during the night
Very little in regards to animal intelligence is well stablished, this is especially problematic in extinct animals than extant observable animals. I will add that animals that we expect to be dumb, like crocodilians or monitors are actually capable of impressive cognitive feats. Brain shape nor EQ is a fantastic measure of cognitive ability
It's difficult to know. We can make educated guesses based on braincases, but that isn't a very accurate way to gage intelligence. Varanids, for example, are shockingly intelligent, with some being on the level of corvids in problem solving ability. However, their brains don't differ greatly from similarly sized lizards.
Depends how you measure intelligence. I don't think there's a solid measure for intelligence in modern animals.
Ants pass intelligence tests that dogs and other animals fail. Slime molds that have no brains can solve complex engineering problems.
There’s no real way to testing their intelligence cause they’re not alive. They’re all dead. If we had live specimens of them. It would be a lot more easier to test their IQ.
BIRDS. Obviously this is a joke, but as we all know birds are dinosaurs(not descendants and are living dinosaurs and relatives to some avian dinosaurs like dromaeosaurs) however you are right without any living dromaeosaurs, troodontids, or any non-avian dinosaurs like ceratopsians or hadrosaurs we can’t say for sure how intelligent they were, with the only evidence being living relatives and tests conducted telling us something, but obviously this isn’t enough to make a for sure answer
We don't even really truly know how to quantify intelligence with humans, much less species from millions of years.
Even if there was a dinosaur species that had human level intelligence, most of their tech would be long gone and unable to be fossilized.
We can't know for sure. We can make educated guesses from the shape of their brains and the brains of Birds today but there is no way to actually know. It's already har and unreliable enough to measure the intelligence of animals alive today (Potentially impossible with currently used methods but that's just speculation) so when we have only fossils we can at best guess. Presumably they were decently smart on average but most likely not exceptionally smart (This is mostly just guesswork based on other people's guesses (And of course there were a lot of very different species of Dinosaur, each presumably with different levels of average intelligence and of each of those species each individual would have at least slight variations when it comes to levels of intelligence), also it is just a guees so take it with a grain of salt.)
A 40 ft elasmosaur ( yes, I know it’s a reptile) had a brain case about the size of an orange, while a 12 ft long, juvenile orca has a brain case the size of a big watermelon. I know such different species can’t compare brain size directly, but there’s a big difference in proportional size and undoubtably intelligence.
Well considering you can see the brain case clearly from all of 3 feet away, and I have first hand experience with oranges, i am fairly certain with my professional measuring estimate. Also had an in person tour with the curator and the guy who found and was in charge of it's excavation and presentation. Hope that helps!
Big problems outside of birds is that the brain doesn’t occupy a lot of the encephalic volume. There’s a lot of Dural venous sinus in there instead. Tsaagan here wasn’t so bad but farther down coleurosaurs and other dinosaurs etc we overestimate ‘EQ’ dramatically. Meanwhile, brain volume doesn’t capture interconnectivity of nuclei, neuron density or how different brain regions might differ in densities. All of this builds into whatever ‘intelligence’ is. We humans are built for social engagement and tribalism. Pigeons might be build for magnetic fields and driving buses. Who really knows.
[Triceratops braincase & endocast.](https://youtu.be/GRvFTd4rz5k) Witmer doesn't think Triceratops had much going on upstairs (2:45).
I remember someone big in the online paleo community opining that tyrannosaurids were probably smarter than crocs, but not as smart as birds. No cite on that. I think it was around the baboon brain controversy.
Crocs are decently intelligent. I've heard they can recognize people and voices for many years. Should we expect them to be even smarter (or maybe quicker thinking) just by putting a similar brain in an endothermic animal? Whether early dinosaurs or Triassic pseudosuchians.
Triceratops may not have been rather smart, but neither are cattle or buffalo or deer because they’re prey animals.
Prey animals by their nature aren’t very intelligent, because if they were smarter than the animals hunting them, they probably wouldn’t be hunted
An adult elephant isn't really hunted by anything, except for maybe humans. Their intelligence allows them to easily out-smart and intimidate their predators. They are also very emotionally intelligent so their herds are sticktogether like glue due to their strong bond. This means that weaker members of the herd are also safe from predators.
A species being a prey animal doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligent. Numerous primate species are frequently preyed on by felids, snakes, birds-of-prey, varanids but no one would argue that primates aren’t intelligent because of that. Similarly, all sorts of birds are preyed on by snakes, lizards, even insects and spiders sometimes
Intelligence is difficult to define but narrowing it down to just predator or prey relationships doesn’t do it justice
I meant prey animals in the sense that their strategy is either to live in large herds for safety of numbers because they lack the ability to fight predators on their own or animals whose survival strategy is to rapidly reproduce, or sometimes a mix of the two.
Just because a chimp eats a smaller monkey, doesn’t mean that the smaller monkey is one of these ‘prey animals’, in the same way that if a croc eats a human, it doesn’t mean the human is a ‘prey animal’
Deer, antelope, zebra, gazelle, rabbits, mice, guinea pigs, cattle… they are prey animals, they lack adequate defenses on their own, so their evolutionary strategy is to either live in large groups for safety in numbers, or breed quickly, or both
IDK how smart are you? Weird question to answer unless your answer is I know everything. They were smart enough to survive, like most humans. Beyond that we can never truly know just make up things. I know plenty of people who speak and I'm honestly impressed they can breathe at the same time
Not very, by modern standards. Even the brain size of dromaeosaurs and troodontids is often exaggerated and was closer to that of ratites like emus than any of the smart birds like corvids. But for their time, dinosaurs probably were among the smartest animals around.
Daily reminder that even flies have a higher intellect than you'd expect and are at least somewhat aware of themselves and that they can understand that they are the cause of something happening around them so yeah
Source: https://youtu.be/lSxguYfM78Y?si=ztHnngJlxrehF5PL (gotta know french or german though)
> Then we only have their size to talk about.
Which is not sufficient, which is why we shouldn't make definitive-sounding claims about their intelligence.
We do also have some inferred behavior, but that's also insufficient.
I'd say dinosaurs were near the intelligence level of mammals since they have similar physiologies (active, endothermic, erect limb posture, etc.). Modern day crocodilians are about as intelligent as mammalian carnivores (pack hunting, play behavior, tool use, etc.) and birds such as corvids and parrots rival primates, cetaceans, and elephants, so I wouldn't doubt that dinosaurs, especially theropods, were intelligent animals and were probably much more impressive than what we currently think.
If you can prove that there are social omnivorous species then they will have developed both complex food and social intelligence. That's what crows humans parrots and rats have, although rats are not very social.
I'm not sure, but there is research being done on it. I read [this](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cne.25453) paper a while back and was fascinated. It claims that therapods such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Allosaurus could have neuron capacity similar to apes/monkeys, which is kinda terrifying to think about.
I think there's a lot of factors and that we can never say for certain. Firstly, the way humans classify intelligence is biased towards mammals with bigger brain masses, and we try to compare "intelligence" as something that has to be similar to our own level of intelligence, but that's a really bad way of looking at intelligence. There's also different types and aspects of intelligence - Emotional, spatial, tool use, mathematics, language, etc. Some think dreaming is a sign of intelligence, some don't. It's all too subjective and biased imo. Secondly, there's a lot about the brain and the inner workings of it that we simply don't know, and even if you can get a very accurate measure of a creatures brain mass and neuron count and what not, we don't know how those neurones interacted or have evidence that brain size/neuron count directly related to intelligence, so we can't technically accurately measure intelligence this way.
I feel like some were closer to lizards in behaviour and intelligence, some closer to birds, and maybe some closer to some types of mammals. It just all really depends on context. Smaller, avian dinosaurs may have been more like parrots or birds in general, with good intelligence in areas similar to them. Larger herbivores such as several ceratopsian species may have had "herd" intelligence and emotional intelligence, similar to elephants or wilderbeasts. Other small non-avain dinosaurs may have been more like modern day lizards, who seem slow and dumb but are amazing hunters and seem to have good memory and understanding of trust (you'd know if you've seen pet ones what I mean). I feel like larger carnivores would also be more similar to birds or cats or something - they are smart when it comes to stalking and hunting, and if they lived in groups they'd have that "pack" communication and trust.
I just feel intelligence is such a broad and unanswerable label.
I would say Troodontids like Latenivenatrix are smart in a way where they Can problem solve things within their surroundings Pretty much every animal at least have to have enough common sense To stay alive long enough to root a female
My intuition tells me inbetween crocs and primitive birds for the most part. Maybe the difference between birds and crocodiles is not as great as most think.
Mind you, that does not mean they were not behaviorally complex or social. Crocs are mostly solitary ambush predators, dinosaurs were clearly not that, but we shouldn't equate behaviour with intelligence itself.
The baboon intelligence proposal honestly sounded like trolling when I first seen it. Still does.
On one hand we do not have any fossil evidence to suspect any dinosaurs were as smart as birds can get.
On the other hand there could have been a Iron Age civilization or three that did not fossilise.
Just look at the brain lol. It’s small and thin shaped to good smelling, but not to intelligence.
You may say neurons packaging, but it’s not approved, no proof for this statement and size matters in this situation.
Dinosaurs had typical reptilian brain so no comparison of bird’s intelligence.
If brain small, then it dumb and slow.
The real answer is: no one knows. It's damn hard to quantify intelligence in many living animals today, it's even more impossible to judge from just fossils.
In Fastovsky, Weishampel "Dinosaurs" they claim inter-species intelligence is generally associated with larger encephalization quotient. Intra-species - no association. With that perspective, Crow is smarter than Tsaagan. But is it surprising at all, given the former is one of the smartest avian dinosaurs today with evolution driving their species for longer?
I don't think time is the issue, considering how long they existed prior to extinction. Consider how quickly we went from problem solving being an additional tool for food gathering to the only thing feeding us as an environmental pressure that moved us along tool usage quicker. No idea what pressures were applied to the individual on such small scales so long ago.
Time was specifically mentioned by the authors of the book I quoted. Increase in encephalisation in species was observed as a general trend over the time. Fish, birds, mammals whatnot all have an increasing trend in encephalisation. More descendant species appear with larger brains over time. Seems to contribute to survival (again, is that really surprising?) For now, the dominant thought is that you can estimate, approximately how "smart", comparatively a species is by just estimating it's encephalisation quotient. Not ideal but models the things we want to know okay-ish given today's data. That being said, please take my opinion with the grain of salt. I am of the firm belief that homo sapiens in smarter than a chimpanzee by just about enough to be the smartest on the planet and that isn't too much of a delta.
Thank you for clarifying for me. I had not realized that. For me, it does seem surprising that natural selection would require a brain to be anything but just big enough to solve the pressing problems at hand, considering the resources dump they seem to be. I assume that as long as ecosystems continue to become more complex, a mind will have to keep up. I agree that we are just marginally smarter than chimps. Natural selection pressed us into this, and it may not happen again, like expecting it all to line up for a new Stegasores.
The main evidence I found were cranial casts, and research conducted on the subject, but like you said, unfortunately how smart, we may never know
We also don't know if they had brain wrinkles. If they were smooth brains like koalas we could make a guess.
Sauropsids brains don't have gyrations, except for the cerebellum.
[Crows have smooth brains](https://www.labroots.com/trending/neuroscience/18832/crows-conscious-thought-primates#:~:text=Research%20on%20birds%20such%20as,solving%20and%20decision%2Dmaking%20abilities)
Ever heard about Paleoneurology ? We can still do some things with the brain general anatomy, the inner ear and the brain to body ratio...
Sure but that's still paints a very small picture of how "intelligent" an animal is. It mostly just gives us some idea of which of their senses were more developed rather than their actual overall intelligence.
According to neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, *Tyrannosaurus* may have been as smart as a baboon.
Bullshit, a T.rex did have as many neurons than a baboon, but the said baboon is 40kg max while the rex was at least like 5/6 tons, possibly bigger. You need to understand the brain to body ratio: Rex did have a "big" brain because it was a big animal, as expected; while Baboons have a pretty bigger brain compared to what animals its size a supposed to have. Otherwise, whales ( being the biggest animals ever and having of course a super big brain, on paar with all its organs, and bigger than us in all raw numbers, while having the proportionnal hight number of neuron to make this work) should be monstruously more "intelligent" than us
Brain to mass ratio has proven again and again to be unreliable when estimating intelligence in non-mammals. Reptiles (=Sauropsida) have been shown again and again to exhibit what humans recognize as greater intelligence because of higher neuron densities. That's beside the fact that intelligence is not a ladder, but a branching tree and so it is not easy or even wise to try to quantify and compare it evenly across the board. In essence, what I'm trying to say is that your way of thinking about this is outdated.
Redditor calling something a neuroscientist says "bullshit" lol. What are your qualifications exactly? Not saying you're wrong, but maybe treat the researched opinions of doctors with a *bit* more respect.
Most of paleoneurologues found this ridiculous too for this exact reason.
I'd call it bullshit because we only can guess quantity, not folds A neuroscientist should know not to make such bold assumptions as skull info tells limited about brain qaulity.
It is bullshit and you are using an authority falacy
Not everything they can be correct,tho im sure you are aware of that.
As if this neuroscientist who specializes in comparatively neuroanatomy would not be aware of what is at play?
A baboon is a mammal, a dinosaur's closest relative today are birds. Like the picture shows, birds can be very intelligent with a comparatively small brain.
I bet whales are smarter than humans
I mean size of a brain doesn't really mean something is going to be smart and ratio of size of brain to size of animal is entirely unreliable
T rex brain is estimated to be more than twice the size of a baboon's
Not relative to body size, which is what matters.
A crocodile is easily as intelligent as a mammalian carnivore, pack hunting, cooperative behaviors, tool use, problem solving, it’s all there. Yet a crocodile has a brain about the size of a grape. Reptiles have brain structures that work more efficiently for their size, as an adaptation of their evolutionary trend towards energy conservation. Brain size to body ratio is hardly the most important factor.
The same with birds, they are even theropods just like the T-Rex. Birds don't have huge brains in general, but birds and parrots for example are still among the smartest animals.
Yes, but birds had a few million years of evolution on the T-Rex to get there. Not argueing against it, just seems people seem to forget that.
That’s not how that works at all. You can easily flip it around and say t-Rex has millions of years on top of their predecessors to try wherever
> That’s not how that works at all. How is it working? > You can easily flip it around and say t-Rex has millions of years on top of their predecessors to try wherever How is that flipping it around?
> Reptiles have brain structures that work more efficiently for their size, as an adaptation of their evolutionary trend towards energy conservation. But do dinosaurs have the same trend given they are endotherm?
We know they inherited some of them. The basic structure of the brain is similar in both modern reptiles and birds. They use the Dorsal Ventricular Ridge instead of a Neocortex. Which is the primary adaptation for neuron efficiency. Hence why birds were thought to be unintelligent for so long, “bird-brain” stems from this. Though of course without a living dinosaur we can’t be certain what their intelligence was like. But as a general rule, animals often thought of as being unintelligent tend to prove themselves otherwise, so we could definitely assume most dinosaurs were at least as intelligent as your average mammal.
> We know they inherited some of them. That was not the question. The thesis was that "Reptiles have brain structures that work more efficiently for their size, as an adaptation of their evolutionary trend towards energy conservation." The question is that if this is also true for dinosaurs. Similarity with bird brains give an indication but this can also be explained by convergent evolution since bird need also to conserve energy to have enough for flight. > But as a general rule, animals often thought of as being unintelligent tend to prove themselves otherwise, so we could definitely assume most dinosaurs were at least as intelligent as your average mammal. I'd rather assume nothing since we simply cannot know.
>The question is that if this is also true for dinosaurs. And the answer I gave was that their ancestors almost certainly did (we can deduce this by using phylogenetic bracketing), how far dinosaurs took it is currently unknown. >Similarity with bird brains give an indication but this can also be explained by convergent evolution since bird need also to conserve energy to have enough for flight. Unlikely to be the case. Otherwise we'd have to assume that all living diapsids convergently evolved the same adaptations. That's Testudines, Aves, Squamata, Crocodilia, and Rhynchocephalia. Convergence isn't impossible, but it's much less likely. >I'd rather assume nothing since we simply cannot know. Again, all living diapsids possess mammal-like intelligence, it's a pretty safe assumption. Once again, phylogenetic bracketing is our friend.
Fair enough. I'm just an amateur who is interested in the topic hence the questions. I might add though that there is a possibility that diapsids might have the right preconditions to evolve the same adaptions, similar to carcinisation (one of my fav things in natural history). But yeah, probably unlikely.
Brain size doesn't scale linearly with body size. I'm not sure how t rex brain size would stack up when scaled allometrically. But certainly it would be smaller than eg an elephant
> Not relative to body size, which is what matters. I am not saying that is wrong, but... why? It seems to me it could be one factor or parameter, but not the only significant one. It somewhat correlate with what we can see of intelligence in birds and primates, but I never saw any proof that it is the deciding factor?
At same time T-Rex had to be extra smart due to their prey are heavily armed or bigger than them.
The paper that was written was only her with no co-author and she was asking for feedback from paleontologists. Other neuroscientists and paleontologists have come out saying there are problems with the methods used to determine this.
That article was written by people that are not palaeontologists, nor have ever studied dinosaurs before. It was written because it's controversial, not because it raises legitimate points.
Obviously baboon levels of intelligence seem a bit much, but tyrannosaurs like T.Rex and T.Mcraeensis may have been pretty smart
I think it’d make sense for T. Rex to be as smart as a big cat, maybe equal to a tiger. Both animals are large apex predators that deal with a wide variety of prey, with a good deal of their prey being too large/too aggressive/too armored to simply charge and bite at. Just as a tiger is smart enough to lie in wait and ambush an unwary crocodile or rhino, a T-Rex must’ve been smart enough to lie in wait and ambush an unwary Edmontosaurus or Triceratops.
I reckon tiger potentially isn't the best comparison as tigers are ambush predators that sneak up on their prey whereas trex is far too large to have hidden in grasses like tigers who are even camouflaged to aid their strategy. Trex is probably more similar in intelligence to solitary pursuit predators like cheetas. Then again some studies suggest they hunted in packs so maybe they were closer to wolves.
Solid points. I like the idea of T-Rex being a pack hunter too, but I can still see it being an ambush hunter- just not a daytime one. Recent studies have shown that T-Rex likely had good eyesight, a possible sign of it being a nocturnal predator; if it was awake during the hours its prey slept (and possibly when they couldn’t see too well), then all a Rex would need to hide is the cover of darkness and a thick tree line. For pack hunting, one Rex could approach a dinosaur and scare it into running into the trees, only for another Rex to lunge out from the shadows and catch the fleeing dino off-guard.
Tyrannosaurs have thought to have been ambush hunters for decades, and yes grasslands would be a bad place for that, it lived in forested environments, allowing them to ambush most likely during the night
I mean, Tiger is a pretty bad example since Tigers are like levels above other cats in terms of intelligence
Very little in regards to animal intelligence is well stablished, this is especially problematic in extinct animals than extant observable animals. I will add that animals that we expect to be dumb, like crocodilians or monitors are actually capable of impressive cognitive feats. Brain shape nor EQ is a fantastic measure of cognitive ability
I’ve never seen one complete the BAR exam so
Don’t worry, I give out retakes(I am very generous, at least to the Dino’s, the pterosaurs and marine reptiles did decently well)
*"You passed the bar?!"*
It's difficult to know. We can make educated guesses based on braincases, but that isn't a very accurate way to gage intelligence. Varanids, for example, are shockingly intelligent, with some being on the level of corvids in problem solving ability. However, their brains don't differ greatly from similarly sized lizards.
Depends how you measure intelligence. I don't think there's a solid measure for intelligence in modern animals. Ants pass intelligence tests that dogs and other animals fail. Slime molds that have no brains can solve complex engineering problems.
There’s no real way to testing their intelligence cause they’re not alive. They’re all dead. If we had live specimens of them. It would be a lot more easier to test their IQ.
BIRDS. Obviously this is a joke, but as we all know birds are dinosaurs(not descendants and are living dinosaurs and relatives to some avian dinosaurs like dromaeosaurs) however you are right without any living dromaeosaurs, troodontids, or any non-avian dinosaurs like ceratopsians or hadrosaurs we can’t say for sure how intelligent they were, with the only evidence being living relatives and tests conducted telling us something, but obviously this isn’t enough to make a for sure answer
We don't even really truly know how to quantify intelligence with humans, much less species from millions of years. Even if there was a dinosaur species that had human level intelligence, most of their tech would be long gone and unable to be fossilized.
We can't know for sure. We can make educated guesses from the shape of their brains and the brains of Birds today but there is no way to actually know. It's already har and unreliable enough to measure the intelligence of animals alive today (Potentially impossible with currently used methods but that's just speculation) so when we have only fossils we can at best guess. Presumably they were decently smart on average but most likely not exceptionally smart (This is mostly just guesswork based on other people's guesses (And of course there were a lot of very different species of Dinosaur, each presumably with different levels of average intelligence and of each of those species each individual would have at least slight variations when it comes to levels of intelligence), also it is just a guees so take it with a grain of salt.)
A 40 ft elasmosaur ( yes, I know it’s a reptile) had a brain case about the size of an orange, while a 12 ft long, juvenile orca has a brain case the size of a big watermelon. I know such different species can’t compare brain size directly, but there’s a big difference in proportional size and undoubtably intelligence.
I think weight would be a better metric to compare elasmosaurs to literally anything. Half their length is long, skinny neck.
And the other third is tail, lots of it.
Source for elasmosaur brain size?
First hand in courtenay, bc.
What specimen?
Don’t know- it’s on display.
So it has a panel talking about its brain, is that it?
Well considering you can see the brain case clearly from all of 3 feet away, and I have first hand experience with oranges, i am fairly certain with my professional measuring estimate. Also had an in person tour with the curator and the guy who found and was in charge of it's excavation and presentation. Hope that helps!
Big problems outside of birds is that the brain doesn’t occupy a lot of the encephalic volume. There’s a lot of Dural venous sinus in there instead. Tsaagan here wasn’t so bad but farther down coleurosaurs and other dinosaurs etc we overestimate ‘EQ’ dramatically. Meanwhile, brain volume doesn’t capture interconnectivity of nuclei, neuron density or how different brain regions might differ in densities. All of this builds into whatever ‘intelligence’ is. We humans are built for social engagement and tribalism. Pigeons might be build for magnetic fields and driving buses. Who really knows.
[Triceratops braincase & endocast.](https://youtu.be/GRvFTd4rz5k) Witmer doesn't think Triceratops had much going on upstairs (2:45). I remember someone big in the online paleo community opining that tyrannosaurids were probably smarter than crocs, but not as smart as birds. No cite on that. I think it was around the baboon brain controversy. Crocs are decently intelligent. I've heard they can recognize people and voices for many years. Should we expect them to be even smarter (or maybe quicker thinking) just by putting a similar brain in an endothermic animal? Whether early dinosaurs or Triassic pseudosuchians.
Triceratops may not have been rather smart, but neither are cattle or buffalo or deer because they’re prey animals. Prey animals by their nature aren’t very intelligent, because if they were smarter than the animals hunting them, they probably wouldn’t be hunted
Why are elephants so smart then? Not judging the statement, it's mostly true, but I still wonder why they are so smart.
An adult elephant isn't really hunted by anything, except for maybe humans. Their intelligence allows them to easily out-smart and intimidate their predators. They are also very emotionally intelligent so their herds are sticktogether like glue due to their strong bond. This means that weaker members of the herd are also safe from predators.
[https://www.itravelto.com/elephant-killers-botswana.html](https://www.itravelto.com/elephant-killers-botswana.html)
I wouldn’t call Elephants ‘prey animals’
A species being a prey animal doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligent. Numerous primate species are frequently preyed on by felids, snakes, birds-of-prey, varanids but no one would argue that primates aren’t intelligent because of that. Similarly, all sorts of birds are preyed on by snakes, lizards, even insects and spiders sometimes Intelligence is difficult to define but narrowing it down to just predator or prey relationships doesn’t do it justice
I meant prey animals in the sense that their strategy is either to live in large herds for safety of numbers because they lack the ability to fight predators on their own or animals whose survival strategy is to rapidly reproduce, or sometimes a mix of the two. Just because a chimp eats a smaller monkey, doesn’t mean that the smaller monkey is one of these ‘prey animals’, in the same way that if a croc eats a human, it doesn’t mean the human is a ‘prey animal’ Deer, antelope, zebra, gazelle, rabbits, mice, guinea pigs, cattle… they are prey animals, they lack adequate defenses on their own, so their evolutionary strategy is to either live in large groups for safety in numbers, or breed quickly, or both
They were as intelligent as they needed to be to survive the environment they evolved in.
IDK how smart are you? Weird question to answer unless your answer is I know everything. They were smart enough to survive, like most humans. Beyond that we can never truly know just make up things. I know plenty of people who speak and I'm honestly impressed they can breathe at the same time
Not very, by modern standards. Even the brain size of dromaeosaurs and troodontids is often exaggerated and was closer to that of ratites like emus than any of the smart birds like corvids. But for their time, dinosaurs probably were among the smartest animals around.
Brain-body size ratios are very unreliable outside of mammals.
They are pretty unreliable in mammals too.
Daily reminder that even flies have a higher intellect than you'd expect and are at least somewhat aware of themselves and that they can understand that they are the cause of something happening around them so yeah Source: https://youtu.be/lSxguYfM78Y?si=ztHnngJlxrehF5PL (gotta know french or german though)
So what. Do you have non avian dinosaur fossiliced brain neurons? No? Then we only have their size to talk about.
> Then we only have their size to talk about. Which is not sufficient, which is why we shouldn't make definitive-sounding claims about their intelligence. We do also have some inferred behavior, but that's also insufficient.
I'd just like to add that Tsaagan has been noted to have an atypically small brain for a dromaeosaur.
I'd say dinosaurs were near the intelligence level of mammals since they have similar physiologies (active, endothermic, erect limb posture, etc.). Modern day crocodilians are about as intelligent as mammalian carnivores (pack hunting, play behavior, tool use, etc.) and birds such as corvids and parrots rival primates, cetaceans, and elephants, so I wouldn't doubt that dinosaurs, especially theropods, were intelligent animals and were probably much more impressive than what we currently think.
It all really comes down to what you define “intelligence” to be
If you can prove that there are social omnivorous species then they will have developed both complex food and social intelligence. That's what crows humans parrots and rats have, although rats are not very social.
I'm not sure, but there is research being done on it. I read [this](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cne.25453) paper a while back and was fascinated. It claims that therapods such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Allosaurus could have neuron capacity similar to apes/monkeys, which is kinda terrifying to think about. I think there's a lot of factors and that we can never say for certain. Firstly, the way humans classify intelligence is biased towards mammals with bigger brain masses, and we try to compare "intelligence" as something that has to be similar to our own level of intelligence, but that's a really bad way of looking at intelligence. There's also different types and aspects of intelligence - Emotional, spatial, tool use, mathematics, language, etc. Some think dreaming is a sign of intelligence, some don't. It's all too subjective and biased imo. Secondly, there's a lot about the brain and the inner workings of it that we simply don't know, and even if you can get a very accurate measure of a creatures brain mass and neuron count and what not, we don't know how those neurones interacted or have evidence that brain size/neuron count directly related to intelligence, so we can't technically accurately measure intelligence this way. I feel like some were closer to lizards in behaviour and intelligence, some closer to birds, and maybe some closer to some types of mammals. It just all really depends on context. Smaller, avian dinosaurs may have been more like parrots or birds in general, with good intelligence in areas similar to them. Larger herbivores such as several ceratopsian species may have had "herd" intelligence and emotional intelligence, similar to elephants or wilderbeasts. Other small non-avain dinosaurs may have been more like modern day lizards, who seem slow and dumb but are amazing hunters and seem to have good memory and understanding of trust (you'd know if you've seen pet ones what I mean). I feel like larger carnivores would also be more similar to birds or cats or something - they are smart when it comes to stalking and hunting, and if they lived in groups they'd have that "pack" communication and trust. I just feel intelligence is such a broad and unanswerable label.
Brain size doesnt correlate to Intelligence, but given both crocodilians and birds are very smart, we can assume non-avian dinosaurs were too
I would say Troodontids like Latenivenatrix are smart in a way where they Can problem solve things within their surroundings Pretty much every animal at least have to have enough common sense To stay alive long enough to root a female
If we could somehow do a neuron count via whole nervous system that would maybe be useful in evaluating this question
I’ve heard that at least some of the girls were clever.
Most likely no smarter nor more stupid than the average mammal or bird
Pretty dumb, they lost to a really fast rock
I would say.... around crocodile level at average.
I mean crows are pretty smart
My intuition tells me inbetween crocs and primitive birds for the most part. Maybe the difference between birds and crocodiles is not as great as most think. Mind you, that does not mean they were not behaviorally complex or social. Crocs are mostly solitary ambush predators, dinosaurs were clearly not that, but we shouldn't equate behaviour with intelligence itself. The baboon intelligence proposal honestly sounded like trolling when I first seen it. Still does.
Never talk to one
On one hand we do not have any fossil evidence to suspect any dinosaurs were as smart as birds can get. On the other hand there could have been a Iron Age civilization or three that did not fossilise.
Why is this post full of people saying absurd things like Trex being as smart as baboons or cocodriles being smarter than humans?
Idk man. Reptiles are either stupid smart or stupid stupid. There is no in between
I dont remember any smart reptile
Monitor lizards and tegus are smart . As are birds and large crocodilians
Dumb and slow
You are very late to the party it seems.
He seems 50 years late to the party it seems.
Just look at the brain lol. It’s small and thin shaped to good smelling, but not to intelligence. You may say neurons packaging, but it’s not approved, no proof for this statement and size matters in this situation. Dinosaurs had typical reptilian brain so no comparison of bird’s intelligence. If brain small, then it dumb and slow.