Anthroposaurus Sapiens
Contents Updated: Monday, September 13, 1999
Ancient torch
Intelligent Dinosaurs?
Brain and Intelligence
Explosive Evolution?
Dale Russell and the Dinosauroid
A Model of the Possible
Primosaurs?
The Importance of Flowers
Cycles of Inundation
A Final Mystery
"The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations."
Intelligent Dinosaurs?
Did the dinosaurs develop intelligence before Adam?
T rex attacking Triceratops Some dinosaur iconoclasts have dared to ask this question, but even they have merely 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 stone tools?
Desmond compares mammals with the superior dinosaurs and wonders:
Why did not "Man" land on the moon in the Cretaceous?
adding that by Man he meant a creature filling the ecological role 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 have reached intelligence were it not for the Cretaceous terminal extinction. And all agree that they failed to achieve it because they died out first.
I disagree.
Some dinosaurs did develop intelligence and by so doing caused the Cretaceous terminal extinction, just as an insensitive ape developed intelligence at the end of the Tertiary and created the mass extinction that marks the end of that geological era. Though the direct evidence is sparse—I give what little there is in the next chapter—the circumstantial evidence is compelling. The thesis is not self-evidently false, as, say, the idea of a flat earth is. Today we consider it evident 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 any child studying a map of the world decades before Wegener, but because continents were so massive and the experts could not think of a mechanism by which they could move, no one was willing to ask the question must not South America and Africa once have been joined?
We might find ourselves realizing simultaneously that the anthroposaur preceded us, and that we have just 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 only five million years. Mechanisms exist for species to evolve at astonishingly fast rates. On average a species of dinosaur did not last for more than two or three million years before becoming extinct or evolving into a new species. There is no reason why one of the dinosaurs should not have evolved intelligence during the last five million years or so of the Cretaceous Period. ...