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Possibility of sapient dinos?

Glitch

Glitch

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Great White North, eh
There is a lot of ludicrously intelligent and social life on Earth - ravens and dolphins for example. Some even speculate the primate family are intelligent but well you know.

Anyway this is just a thin slice of the history of life on earth and it is just teeming with intelligent life.

Is it possible there were sapient dinosaurs? And if so, to what extent? How far might it have developed?
 
If they created an industrial civilization, they'd have used up all the easily-accessible metal deposits, and we wouldn't be finding fossil fuel deposits as old as we are.

If they never made it that far for whatever reason, then it's entirely possible. The fossil record is extremely incomplete.
 
It's been discussed before, if raptors had civilizations on par with the Roman or Mayan civilizations they'd be undetectable. Stone age civilizations are still civilizations and they have been around for tens to hunderds of thousands of years, and if there where any 65 million years ago... Undetectable.

There is some argument about brain mass but mamal brains scale by surface area, bird brains scale by volume as a very rough approximation, so Dino's might well have a more efficient brain structure.

What can't have existed in the past is an advanced civilization, assuming they follow roughly human tech progression, up to 1920 or so it's possible that we wouldn't notice, after that there are more and more things that would show up, plastics and their decay products, an layer from all the nuclear testing in the 1950's... And after that space probes becomes lasting artifacts, we'd have found a Mars orbiter or similar, esspecially as humans have put 3 or so in Mars orbit? Over millions of years their orbit would get perturbed but with multiple there is a good chance we'd still find one.... Or elsewhere in the solar system.

So we are the first space age civilization on Earth, and almost certainly the first industrial civilization, unless the industrial revolution happened just a few years/decades before they went extinct. Anything more primitive than that would be worn away over tens of millions of years. So we can't rule it out. Doesn't mean it's likely.
 
Catty Nebulart said:
It's been discussed before, if raptors had civilizations on par with the Roman or Mayan civilizations they'd be undetectable. Stone age civilizations are still civilizations and they have been around for tens to hunderds of thousands of years, and if there where any 65 million years ago... Undetectable.

There is some argument about brain mass but mamal brains scale by surface area, bird brains scale by volume as a very rough approximation, so Dino's might well have a more efficient brain structure.

What can't have existed in the past is an advanced civilization, assuming they follow roughly human tech progression, up to 1920 or so it's possible that we wouldn't notice, after that there are more and more things that would show up, plastics and their decay products, an layer from all the nuclear testing in the 1950's... And after that space probes becomes lasting artifacts, we'd have found a Mars orbiter or similar, esspecially as humans have put 3 or so in Mars orbit? Over millions of years their orbit would get perturbed but with multiple there is a good chance we'd still find one.... Or elsewhere in the solar system.

So we are the first space age civilization on Earth, and almost certainly the first industrial civilization, unless the industrial revolution happened just a few years/decades before they went extinct. Anything more primitive than that would be worn away over tens of millions of years. So we can't rule it out. Doesn't mean it's likely.
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Agriculture is unlikely, as we would see a few species of plants and animals suddenly undergo a very rapid spread over an extremely small time period with no seemingly obvious reason to do so normally.
 
Daedwartin said:
Agriculture is unlikely, as we would see a few species of plants and animals suddenly undergo a very rapid spread over an extremely small time period with no seemingly obvious reason to do so normally.
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If you're not finding the strata with the fossils themselves you're not finding the strata of the associated agriculture.

Also even if you did, it would be extremely hard to differentiate normal explosive evolutionary radiation from adoption of agriculture.

Furthermore, time resolution of fossils from those periods of a few hundred of thousand years is considered "extremely precise"; that's dozens if times longer than agriculture has existed so far, which is about 10,000 years max.

You don't see "plants and animals suddenly undergo a very rapid spread over an extremely small time". You just see the "before" and "after" pictures, and only if you're very lucky you might get the "just before" and "just after" pictures.

tl;dr agriculture would only be marginally easier to detect than stone age hunter-gatherers. Most of that would be the effect of higher population densities, not so much than artefacts would be more identifiable per se.

I feel that people really overestimate the completeness of the fossil record. Talk of "gaps" and "missing links" might give the idea that if it's a film reel, only some frames are missing here and there; when the reality is the inverse, we have a handful of frames and everything in between is extrapolatedoing filling in. So if there is an unexpected scene in the movie, you won't know it exists if you didn't have the luck to catch a couple of pictures from it.

To go back to the OP and make an observation:

The present configuration of continents is such that all except one are either touching each other or only separated by short stretches of water, making humans spreading to theme possible.

Generally under the Mesozoic continents were more isolated. And sea levels higher.

A continental or subcontinental species is much less likely to be detected than a global one.

So if it evolved in such a configuration of continents that it could not reach others without oceanic navigation, it'd be much more easy to miss.
 
Glitch said:
There is a lot of ludicrously intelligent and social life on Earth - ravens and dolphins for example. Some even speculate the primate family are intelligent but well you know.
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Not to be too nitpicky. But ravens are technically dinosaurs, and given that they pass the mirror test and can use tools, I would argue that they could count as sapient dinos.

And they can fly!
 
This discussion makes me think of Stephen Baxter's Hunters of Pangaia.

Catty Nebulart said:
There is some argument about brain mass but mamal brains scale by surface area, bird brains scale by volume as a very rough approximation, so Dino's might well have a more efficient brain structure.
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I've got a suspicion that the efficiency of modern bird brains has something to do with modern birds being the product of many millions of years of strong selection pressure for low weight due to being fliers. I've got nothing solid to back it up, but it seems like a parsimonious explanation for it. If I'm right, non-avian dinosaur brains were probably less efficient than modern bird brains (comparable to modern mammal brains?).

xa na xa said:
If you're not finding the strata with the fossils themselves you're not finding the strata of the associated agriculture.

Also even if you did, it would be extremely hard to differentiate normal explosive evolutionary radiation from adoption of agriculture.
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I think a more obvious thing would be invasive species. Consider future intelligent beings studying the fossil record of Australia; they might miss the direct footprint of human agriculture, but they'd notice the marsupial diprotodons and big kangaroos being replaced by placental mammals descended from camels, horses, cattle etc., and the marsupial thylacines and thylacoleo being replaced by canine predators descended from dogs and dingos. Looking at the fossil record of the whole Earth they'd probably see variations of the same kind of thing all over the place (though probably usually not as dramatic). This would be more likely to be detected than direct evidence of agriculture because the changes to the ecology would probably last long after the intelligent species that caused them disappeared - think humanity dying out and ten million years later Australia is full of placental herbivores distantly descended from horses, cattle, camels, sheep, and pigs and aside from crocodiles the big predators are all distantly descended from dogs.

xa na xa said:
The present configuration of continents is such that all except one are either touching each other or only separated by short stretches of water, making humans spreading to theme possible.

Generally under the Mesozoic continents were more isolated. And sea levels higher.

A continental or subcontinental species is much less likely to be detected than a global one.

So if it evolved in such a configuration of continents that it could not reach others without oceanic navigation, it'd be much more easy to miss.
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I've given a little thought to the concept of an as-yet-undetected extinct dinosaur civilization, and the thought I had was the best bet for a relatively advanced dinosaur civilization staying undetected is if it was mostly confined to Antarctica. Antarctica was quite habitable in the greenhouse climate the dinosaurs enjoyed, and its fossil record is mostly buried under kilometers of ice (and the harsh and uninhabited nature of the continent discourages archaeology). Maybe these hypothetical Antarctican intelligent dinosaurs didn't spread out to the rest of the planet because the non-polar lands were too hot for their liking?
 
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It is really hard to predict what could happen with an extra sixty five million years of evolution but it's not theoretically impossible given that many birds are extremely intelligent.

They aren't going to look like those awful human like dinosapiens though, they'd probably look like maniraptors with somewhat enlarged heads.

Now as for the past? I made a very long and detailed post about the likelihood of finding signs of sapient life in the geological record and concluded that it's possible they could have slipped through the fossil record without us ever noticing, but the more sophisticated they become the more noticeable their presence should be.
 
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Memphet'ran said:
I've got a suspicion that the efficiency of modern bird brains has something to do with modern birds being the product of many millions of years of strong selection pressure for low weight due to being fliers. I've got nothing solid to back it up, but it seems like a parsimonious explanation for it. If I'm right, non-avian dinosaur brains were probably less efficient than modern bird brains (comparable to modern mammal brains?).
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It's pretty much imposible to know, the fossil record doesn't perserve those details, but the way the mammal brain functions is preserved among all mammals from blue wales to rats, and there are commonalities in the brain structure between birds and mammals so much of the brain is preserved. It's just to establish that pure brain mass estimations might be off due to those differences.

Daedwartin said:
Agriculture is unlikely, as we would see a few species of plants and animals suddenly undergo a very rapid spread over an extremely small time period with no seemingly obvious reason to do so normally.
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The fossil record is sparse enough as it is it could slip by, especially when you consider the other massive changed that where happening say 65 million years ago. The op is talking about dino's afterall... And we know there was major climate change and disruption 65 million years ago even before the asteroid hit... or at least we strongly suspect from the records we have in stone and ice.
 
Memphet'ran said:
I've got a suspicion that the efficiency of modern bird brains has something to do with modern birds being the product of many millions of years of strong selection pressure for low weight due to being fliers. I've got nothing solid to back it up, but it seems like a parsimonious explanation for it. If I'm right, non-avian dinosaur brains were probably less efficient than modern bird brains (comparable to modern mammal brains?).
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That's probably at least partly true. Birds have smaller individual cells with less DNA in each, which is almost certainly a flight adaptation; among other things it means they can cram more neurons into the same space.

The brain architecture issue on the other hand is more debatable; it's at least as likely that mammals just got stuck with a brain design that doesn't scale up well.
 
DrGilga said:
Not to be too nitpicky. But ravens are technically dinosaurs, and given that they pass the mirror test and can use tools, I would argue that they could count as sapient dinos.

And they can fly!
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Have to correct myself. It seems that ravens don't pass the mirror test. But these flying dinos can do shit like this:
 
Memphet'ran said:
This discussion makes me think of Stephen Baxter's Hunters of Pangaia.

I've got a suspicion that the efficiency of modern bird brains has something to do with modern birds being the product of many millions of years of strong selection pressure for low weight due to being fliers. I've got nothing solid to back it up, but it seems like a parsimonious explanation for it. If I'm right, non-avian dinosaur brains were probably less efficient than modern bird brains (comparable to modern mammal brains?).

I think a more obvious thing would be invasive species. Consider future intelligent beings studying the fossil record of Australia; they might miss the direct footprint of human agriculture, but they'd notice the marsupial diprotodons and big kangaroos being replaced by placental mammals descended from camels, horses, cattle etc., and the marsupial thylacines and thylacoleo being replaced by canine predators descended from dogs and dingos. Looking at the fossil record of the whole Earth they'd probably see variations of the same kind of thing all over the place (though probably usually not as dramatic). This would be more likely to be detected than direct evidence of agriculture because the changes to the ecology would probably last long after the intelligent species that caused them disappeared - think humanity dying out and ten million years later Australia is full of placental herbivores distantly descended from horses, cattle, camels, sheep, and pigs and aside from crocodiles the big predators are all distantly descended from dogs.

I've given a little thought to the concept of an as-yet-undetected extinct dinosaur civilization, and the thought I had was the best bet for a relatively advanced dinosaur civilization staying undetected is if it was mostly confined to Antarctica. Antarctica was quite habitable in the greenhouse climate the dinosaurs enjoyed, and its fossil record is mostly buried under kilometers of ice (and the harsh and uninhabited nature of the continent discourages archaeology). Maybe these hypothetical Antarctican intelligent dinosaurs didn't spread out to the rest of the planet because the non-polar lands were too hot for their liking?
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Here have some bronze aged dinosaurs.

But as far as invasive species it would be very very hard to actually know that it was because of an intelligent species. Give a few 10s of millions of years and the ideas of where continents are gets very fuzzy. So fuzzy that we rely on what kinds of dead animals we find to help up figure out where continents where. You would need a good fossil record to be able to tell the difference between rafting events, uplifting connecting continents for a bit, and intelligent species fucking everything up. If you have an entire mass extinction event marked out by previous fauna dying out and being replaced by a small number of the survivors then it is going to be hard to split Great Dying 2 from Sapient species are jerks as far as extension events go.
 
Catty Nebulart said:
It's been discussed before, if raptors had civilizations on par with the Roman or Mayan civilizations they'd be undetectable. Stone age civilizations are still civilizations and they have been around for tens to hunderds of thousands of years, and if there where any 65 million years ago... Undetectable.

There is some argument about brain mass but mamal brains scale by surface area, bird brains scale by volume as a very rough approximation, so Dino's might well have a more efficient brain structure.

What can't have existed in the past is an advanced civilization, assuming they follow roughly human tech progression, up to 1920 or so it's possible that we wouldn't notice, after that there are more and more things that would show up, plastics and their decay products, an layer from all the nuclear testing in the 1950's... And after that space probes becomes lasting artifacts, we'd have found a Mars orbiter or similar, esspecially as humans have put 3 or so in Mars orbit? Over millions of years their orbit would get perturbed but with multiple there is a good chance we'd still find one.... Or elsewhere in the solar system.

So we are the first space age civilization on Earth, and almost certainly the first industrial civilization, unless the industrial revolution happened just a few years/decades before they went extinct. Anything more primitive than that would be worn away over tens of millions of years. So we can't rule it out. Doesn't mean it's likely.
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So Omanana wasnt Dino!Voyager returning home?

It didn't hear the pleisiosaur songs it wanted, so it moved on?

/Confusing Star Trek movies here.
 
Tasrill said:


Here have some bronze aged dinosaurs.

But as far as invasive species it would be very very hard to actually know that it was because of an intelligent species. Give a few 10s of millions of years and the ideas of where continents are gets very fuzzy. So fuzzy that we rely on what kinds of dead animals we find to help up figure out where continents where. You would need a good fossil record to be able to tell the difference between rafting events, uplifting connecting continents for a bit, and intelligent species fucking everything up. If you have an entire mass extinction event marked out by previous fauna dying out and being replaced by a small number of the survivors then it is going to be hard to split Great Dying 2 from Sapient species are jerks as far as extension events go.
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My problem with that is how do these dinosaurs even put their clothes on (or for that matter, even make them)? I'd think they'd need to develop limbs with better articulation to even think about making a complex tool-using society, let alone make and wear clothing.
 
Tasrill said:


Here have some bronze aged dinosaurs.

But as far as invasive species it would be very very hard to actually know that it was because of an intelligent species. Give a few 10s of millions of years and the ideas of where continents are gets very fuzzy. So fuzzy that we rely on what kinds of dead animals we find to help up figure out where continents where. You would need a good fossil record to be able to tell the difference between rafting events, uplifting connecting continents for a bit, and intelligent species fucking everything up. If you have an entire mass extinction event marked out by previous fauna dying out and being replaced by a small number of the survivors then it is going to be hard to split Great Dying 2 from Sapient species are jerks as far as extension events go.
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My issue with this is that it's very likely that the Deccan traps eruption only occurred due to the Chicxulub meteor impact.
 
The Atlantic had a long piece a couple of months ago about the Deccan Traps:

Article:
The Nastiest Feud in Science
A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she's reopened that debate.

BIANCA BOSKERSEPTEMBER 2018 ISSUE

Gerta keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. "You won't die," she told me cheerfully as soon as I'd said hello. "I'll bring you back."

[cont. reading]
 
xa na xa said:
The Atlantic had a long piece a couple of months ago about the Deccan Traps:

Article:
The Nastiest Feud in Science
A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she's reopened that debate.

BIANCA BOSKERSEPTEMBER 2018 ISSUE

Gerta keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. "You won't die," she told me cheerfully as soon as I'd said hello. "I'll bring you back."

[cont. reading]
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I'm sorry, but almost as soon as the article had placed the asteroid impact theory alongside "Similarly bizarre theories" like the dinosaurs dying of stupidity, I started to roll my eyes. Other bits like how she claims that her family were so lacking in money that they ate the cat and butchered her dog for meat, while living in Switzerland and living on a farm, really does not do her any favours. Not to mention her declaration that human is doing an equal amount of damage as the Deccan Traps. It is also noteworthy that most theories about the asteroid state that it was the finishing blow to an already stressed environment.

All in all... she does come across as exactly what her detractors claim: a crank.
 
Harry Leferts said:
I'm sorry, but almost as soon as the article had placed the asteroid impact theory alongside "Similarly bizarre theories" like the dinosaurs dying of stupidity, I started to roll my eyes. Other bits like how she claims that her family were so lacking in money that they ate the cat and butchered her dog for meat, while living in Switzerland and living on a farm, really does not do her any favours. Not to mention her declaration that human is doing an equal amount of damage as the Deccan Traps. It is also noteworthy that most theories about the asteroid state that it was the finishing blow to an already stressed environment.

All in all... she does come across as exactly what her detractors claim: a crank.
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Yeah, it's hard to see how the asteroid didn't play a role, that crater looks too damn big to me.

But I could see how the Deccan traps could have weakened life, making the asteroid strike far more devastating than it would have been otherwise.

A bit like the Great Extinction might have been a combination of the Siberian Traps and Pangea formation.
 
xa na xa said:
Yeah, it's hard to see how the asteroid didn't play a role, that crater looks too damn big to me.

But I could see how the Deccan traps could have weakened life, making the asteroid strike far more devastating than it would have been otherwise.

A bit like the Great Extinction might have been a combination of the Siberian Traps and Pangea formation.
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The thing is? Looking her up one of the things she has stated is that people "Vastly overestimate the effects that the impact had on life" as well as "In a few hundred years life went back to normal." There is also the fact that she claims her dating of the extinction as being 90,000 years before the impact as correct and all other estimates are wrong as well as the extinction happening ten thousand years before the boundary layer... using core samples of marine sediments buried between the layers of flood basalts.

She also claims that every mass extinction is caused by flood basalts without actually, you know, looking for proof.
 
Harry Leferts said:
The thing is? Looking her up one of the things she has stated is that people "Vastly overestimate the effects that the impact had on life" as well as "In a few hundred years life went back to normal." There is also the fact that she claims her dating of the extinction as being 90,000 years before the impact as correct and all other estimates are wrong as well as the extinction happening ten thousand years before the boundary layer... using core samples of marine sediments buried between the layers of flood basalts.

She also claims that every mass extinction is caused by flood basalts without actually, you know, looking for proof.
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Especially since the only one with credible evidence is the great dying, and that is only because of the sheer size of the siberian trappes occuring at the same time of an anaerobic event in the oceans combined with a general increase in temperatures. Oh, and a asteroid triggering the intial eruption hasnt been ruled out.

Oh and the funny bit? One of the major theories as to what caused the deccan trappes is literally the Chicxulub impact.
 
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