READ ME: I'M NEW! With six years of phd work on theropod dinosaurs behind him, Darren Naish mostly spends long, happy hours in the library, hunched over his laptop. But he gets out sometimes, and picks up litter and pursues exotic lizards across the British countryside, aiming all the while to publish his technical work on obscure Cretaceous dinosaurs. He also messes around with pterosaurs, swimming giraffes, British big cats and stuff like that. He has given up on the stupid idea of being a dedicated academic and ekes out a living as a technical consultant, editor and author. He can be contacted intermittently at eotyrannus (at) gmail dot com. For more biographical info go 
Maybe it's because I write too much, but I am frequently surprised and sometimes a little freaked out at the strange coincidences that have so often cropped up during my time here at Tet Zoo. Long-time readers will recall the several occasions when we've looked at hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs: it started back in 2006 with my contention that ground hornbills (bucorvids) should be regarded as the dinosaurs most convergent with hominins (here). Humanoid dinosaurs like Dale Russell's hypothetical big-brained troodontid - the 'dinosauroid' - are (in my opinion) utterly unrealistic, relying more on the notion that humans are the bestest animals ever, rather than on what we might really infer from dinosaur evolution. Inspired by all of this, my good friend Nemo Ramjet (blog here) designed a new-look dinosauroid, the bucorvid-like post-Cretaceous deinonychosaur Avisapiens saurotheos (here). Nemo went on to create a culture and society for Avisapiens, with cave art and everything (here)...
Perhaps partly because of this - but partly because of coincidence - two new articles have recently appeared on big-brained hypothetical dinosaurs. The first was by Jeff Hecht: Jeff is best known in the zoological world for the reporting he does in New Scientist on new palaeontological discoveries, but he's best known globally (so I understand) for his writing on lasers and fibre optics. Jeff's new article (Hecht 2007) highlights the fact that, 25 years on, palaeontologists are still interested in the thought experiment initiated by Russell & Séguin (1982), but think that 'Russell's dinosauroid needs updating'.
Jeff spoke to theropod expert Tom Holtz, who is quoted as saying that the dinosauroid looks too human, and that - if troodontids were to evolve primate-like braininess - they would retain the long tail and horizontal body posture common to theropods (Hecht 2007). This might sound familiar, because it's the same argument I used when writing about dinosauroids at Tet Zoo. I'm not implying there that Tom stole my idea: he probably thought these thoughts before I did. I'm also quoted in the article, again making the point that, if theropods were to evolve big brains and sentience, there is no reason other than anthropocentrism to think that they might resemble us physically. Exhibit A: parrots.
Ah, Simon Conway Morris would be proud :)
A second article, this time on the subject of brain size and intelligence in dinosaurs, appeared in a 2008 issue of the Czech magazine Svĕt. The article, by Vladimír Socha (and written in Czech of course), includes a discussion of hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs [this section shown below], and what will interest Tet Zoo readers in particular is its reference to Nemo's Avisapiens. This is the first time Avisapiens has appeared in print if, that is, you don't count Nemo's portfolio (available here).
McLoughlin's Bioparaptor
In another curious and totally unconnected coincidence, Tet Zoo regular Steve Bodio (of Querencia) recently sent me a copy of an article that I was totally unaware of: John C. McLoughlin's 'Evolutionary bioparanoia', published in Animal Kingdom magazine in 1984. Most of you will know of John because of his 1979 book Archosauria: A New Look at the Old Dinosaur (less well known is its 1980 follow-up Synapsida: A New Look into the Origin of Mammals). Written back when everyone was getting all excited about Robert Bakker's dynamic, hot-blooded view of the dinosaurian world, Archosauria was one of the first works to visualise dinosaurs as active, alert animals with boldly patterned, sometimes feathery, bodies. John depicted his dinosaurs chasing, trotting and foraging, and many were much-copied by other artists and proved highly influential (many of the dinosaurs in David Lambert's 1983 Collins Guide to Dinosaurs, for example, are copied from those that appeared in Archosauria).
John's 1984 article describes his contemplation of a new psychiatric disorder he recognises in himself: evolutionary bioparanoia. It is 'an acute, often immobilizing sense of dread generated by fatigue in persons interested in both the current state of world affairs and the evolutionary history of life on Earth' (McLoughlin 1984, p. 25). The article begins by considering the probable short lifespan of technologically advanced societies, the (alleged) short-lived nature of anthropogenic artefacts, buildings and other constructions, and the fact that humanity's rise to global dominance and massive impact on the global biota will be all but geologically instantaneous. John notes that, in a global biota with a horribly impoverished large animal fauna, the most abundant large non-humans animals are domesticated cattle. We imagine what non-human geologists, living in the far distant future 60 million years hence and looking back at the Holocene fossil record, will see if human society obliterated itself by way of nuclear war. A layer of unusually concentrated elements; massive erosion caused by agriculture and war; a time of massive dying.
Here's where the evolutionary bioparanoia kicks in. Noting that this sort of thing is, pretty much, what we see in the fossil record of the latest Late Cretaceous, John explains how comparatively big-brained maniraptorans like the dromaeosaurs might perhaps have evolved their very own sentient tool-maker: ladies and gentlemen, I give you McLoughlin's smart tool-making maniraptoran, yet another hypothetical big-brained sentient theropod. He doesn't name it, but I'm going to call it Bioparaptor macloughlini (bioparanoia + raptor, 'macloughlini' isn't a typo: the ICZN recommends that 'Mc' spellings become 'mac-' names).
Depicted as a swell-headed deinonychosaur that wears jewellery and has invented nuclear weapons, Bioparaptor recalls Russell's dinosauroid in having a short-jawed, big-brained skull and in having lost its pedal sickle-claw, but differs from it in being long-tailed and overall more dinosaur-like. Its nefarious activities not only resulted in a nuclear conflict that caused the end-Cretaceous event, but its domestication of herding cattle-like herbivores (Triceratops and kin) resulted in an impoverished terrestrial fauna where other big animals were rare or absent. I'm shocked that no-one has brought this to my attention earlier, and am surprised that John's Bioparaptor hasn't been mentioned more often. McLoughlin (1984) makes no mention of Russell's dinosauroid (published in 1982): while I'm sure that John was aware of it, the fact that Bioparaptor looks so different implies that it 'evolved' convergently, the product of a different thought experiment.
Magee's Anthroposaurus sapiens
Moving on, here we come to the next coincidence as, while working with Jeff Liston in Glasgow's Hunterian Museum during November 2007, I learnt that views essentially identical to those expressed by John had managed to get into the non-fictional literature elsewhere, thanks to an obscure little 1993 tome by one Mike Magee, titled Who Lies Sleeping: the Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man. Thanks to Jeff, I've since gotten hold of this book.
It's very weird. As in McLoughlin (1984), the main thrust here is that sentient, big-brained dromaeosaurs - Magee calls them Anthroposaurus sapiens - evolved at the end of the Late Cretaceous and, via industrial pollution and a nuclear war, caused their own extinction as well as that of many of their contemporaries. On the way, Magee stops to look at Elaine Morgan's aquatic ape hypothesis (I'm still not sure why) and generally agrees with it, and also spends a chapter examining the evidence for evolutionary saltation and super-rapid evolution (Magee 1993). He's a big fan of Bakker's The Dinosaurs Heresies and Desmond's The Hot Blooded Dinosaurs (in fact they seem to be about the only dinosaur literature he cites). It is proposed that anthroposaurs evolved from arboreal primate-like theropods and that, like the aquatic apes of Morgan's AAH, they went through an aquatic phase and hence convergently became human-like.
As in McLoughlin (1984), it is suggested that the low-diversity ornithischian assemblage of late Maastrichtian North America reflects the fact that the smart dinosaurs maintained Triceratops and Edmontosaurus as domestic animals: 'herded on the great plains before being shipped to a Cretaceous Chicago for making into meat pies and hamburgers' (Magee 1993, p. 110). Anthroposaur industry resulted in the evidence for iridium concentration, acid rain, rising global temperatures and so on seen in the late Maastrichtian record, and it is suggested that some dinosaur lineages actually evolved to cope with the chronic atmospheric pollution that resulted. Here we have the explanation for the elaborate cranial crests of lambeosaurs, the convoluted nasal passages of ankylosaurids and the big nose of Altirhinus (which wasn't Maastrichtian, but let's not worry about that).
The nuclear war that finished off anthroposaur society explains the evidence for global wildfires, the bits of stressed quartz and the tektites interpreted by others as evidence for asteroid impact. Mummified dinosaurs - like Sternberg's famous Edmontosaurus from Wyoming [shown here] - surely owe their remarkable preservation to this global nuclear conflict: I think my favourite sentences in the whole book are 'Dinosaur mummies are rare, but when found they are usually late Cretaceous hadrosaurs. Why should they have died so perfectly and been preserved? Because they died of gamma radiation and neutrons which preserved them as surely as it would preserve strawberries in a plastic bag?' (Magee 1993, p. 148).
Equally if not more entertaining is Magee's suggestion that the various man-like tracks reported from the Mesozoic are not the distorted genuine tracks, amorphous holes, or blatant fakes which examination has demonstrated them to be, but are instead actual anthroposaur tracks.
The book's title refers to the idea, loosely 'explained' in the very last chapter, that anthroposaurs lay sleeping, though whether this is meant literally (that they are hiding under the ground) or figuratively (that they are somehow within our psyche) is never made clear. It might be both, as he writes of Typhon, Echidna, Tiamat and the serpent from the Garden of Eden as if they and other mythological semi-reptiles might be racial memories of smart dinosaurs, and of course there's the fact (I use the term loosely) that H. P. Lovecraft had a telepathic connection with anthroposaurs, and that this explains his references to the Old Ones, the fallen city of R'lyeh, his loathing of immigrants, desertion of his attractive wife, and poekilothermic physiology. Err, yup.
A magazine article published in 1984 and a strange book published in 1993 are not exactly news, but Hecht (2007) and Socha (2008) clearly are. For me, it has been curiously coincidental, not only that both articles appeared within the last few months, but also that I only learnt about McLoughlin (1984) and Magee (1993) within this same space of time. Clearly, this is evidence that I too am in telepathic contact with the sleeping anthroposaurs. Or, wait, maybe I am an anthroposaur. I did always pretend to be a dinosaur when I was a kid, and I do generally prefer reptiles to people.
Thanks to Steve Bodio, Jeff Hecht and Jeff Liston for instigating it all. And to see what's happening with Russell's dinosauroid these days, visit Michael Ryan's article here.
Refs - -
Hecht, J. 2007. Smartasaurus. Cosmos 15, 40-41.
Magee, M. 1993. Who Lies Sleeping: the Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man. AskWhy! Publications, Frome.
McLoughlin, J. 1984. Evolutionary bioparanoia. Animal Kingdom April/May 1984, 24-30.
Russell, D. A. & Séguin, R. 1982. Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid. Syllogeus 37, 1-43.
Socha, V. 2008. Dinosauři: hlupáci, nebo géniové? Svĕt 3/2008, 14-16.
Life Science
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Comments
I believe that the behavior and existence of Paris Hilton also supports this theory.
We might also consider that the picture of the anthrosauriad dressed in the red shorts and wide tie is evidence of less-than-successful mating rituals, leading to a sudden and inevitable loss of mating success, with the obvious negative results.
Posted by: J-Dog | March 24, 2008 8:31 AM
I once had a very strange gentleman talk to me at length about nuclear fuel rods found in the Cretaceous and its implications. Since people with such, er, unconventional beliefs always hold them very strongly, I just sat back and listened in awe. The reptoids people also love dinosauroids (Rhodes treats Russell's creation as fact) and if I remember a Coast to Coast show correctly they survived by living in the center of the Earth and now fly around in UFOs and impersonate republicans and the queen and so forth.
And how dare Magee talk about Lovecraft that way!
Posted by: Cameron | March 24, 2008 9:10 AM
Fascinating. Must try and get hold a copy of the Magee book.
But if you want dinosaur survival may I recommend the series of books by Eric Garcia - "Anonymous Rex", "Casual Rex" and "Hot and Sweaty Rex".
Posted by: Nicholas Pope | March 24, 2008 9:51 AM
The lying sleeping reminds me of an old Dr. Who I watched back when they repeated them, where they find a race of hominid reptiles which evolved from dinosaurs but went into suspended animation when they wrecked the planet. I wonder if ill get marks in my upcoming exams on a KT boundry question if I state the 'theory' of hominid dinosaurs destrying themselves as a possible cause!? lol
Posted by: neil | March 24, 2008 10:14 AM
Indeed, I've been thinking about this a LOOOOONNNNGGGG time. In fact, my phrase "avoid the 'roid" (itself a reference to the evil "avoid the 'noid" Domino's Pizza commercials of the 1980s) dates back to the late 1980s, and I quote it in this late Neoproterozoic posting on the DML here
[from Darren: sorry for delay, the message got spam-filtered dammit]
Posted by: Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. | March 24, 2008 11:06 AM
I remember a very interesting hypothetical animal from the great specworld-site, which looks a bit like a tree-living parrot-Oviraptor-mix. It is said to live in families similar to primates, has still functional hands and a head very similar to a parrot. I think such a creature could also work as hypothetical ancestor of hypothetical intelligent dinosaur descendents. Sadly I canīt find the animal anymore.
Posted by: Sordes | March 24, 2008 11:17 AM
Actually I did something like this myself. Mines more inthe vein of the movie Mimic with humans and dinosaurs living together. Of course I later read your blog about it and it was far more correct than my idea:
http://demonpuppy.deviantart.com/art/Dinosauroid-65922950
Love the blog!
Best,
Brett
Posted by: Brett Booth | March 24, 2008 11:39 AM
As interesting as dinosauroids might be, they are mere amateurs next to the intelligent Gorgonopsians that annihilated all life on earth during the awful Second War of the Solar System back in the end of Permian. That war was hell on everybody...
Posted by: Nemo Ramjet | March 24, 2008 11:46 AM
McLoughlin wrote a science-fiction novel fleshing out his polluting, triceratops-domesticating intelligent maniraptors (Toolmaker Koan). Not a great science fiction novel per se, but he did a fine job of working out the society of these dinosaurs, far better than the alien society extrapolations typifying most science fiction. But then McLoughlin not only knows some biology, but thinks that it's worth knowing about, unlike most sf writers and readers. Probably why his science-fiction writing career wasn't long-lasting - he was no worse as a writer than others who keep on churning out the same crap year after wearying year, but he evinced some concern about twee topics such as ecology.
Posted by: Lars | March 24, 2008 12:50 PM
You're talking about the carpos, which are difficult to find because someone managed to misspell the filename. I'll fix that ASAP. Keep in mind, however, that the page is not up-to-date; the picture of the black carpo in particular is outdated.
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 24, 2008 1:01 PM
Oh - and when I said Spec's birds were lame, I did not have carpos and nerds of paradise in mind, rather things like the tweety-birds. While on the subject of Spec, someone really should copyright all the text and illustrations asap.
Posted by: Darren Naish | March 24, 2008 1:19 PM
Thanks for that David. Iīm a big fan of Specworld since I found it for the first time some years ago, when I was looking for information about terrestrial crocs. I ended up with hoplocrocs and at the beginning I actually they were real.
But I just discovered today that Brian Choo, who I know since several years from a forum and who helped for my model-reconstruction of Janjucetus is also one of the Spec-Creators. The site is really fantastic, but it is sad that there are so many missing pages. I can hardly imagine how much work was needed to invent and illustrate all this species. It would be really great if it would be available as a book. Creating hypothetical animals is a hobby of me I had already in primary school, and in general I always tried to stay realistic. Yesterday I just found a Bestiarum-journal with more than 100 hand-written pages I wrote some years ago, and it was really cool to read about some of the creatures, especially about the strange cave-creatures I invented. If I find time (perhaps in some weeks) I will perhaps try to create a new hypothetical ecosystem with new creatures.
Posted by: Sordes | March 24, 2008 1:22 PM
Hyper-intelligent dromaeosaurs killed themselves via nuclear holocaust? I am a FIRM believer in that hypothesis.
Posted by: Zach Miller | March 24, 2008 2:27 PM
Lovecraft mentioned "Serpent people" in a story or two, but never really fleshed out the concept. I find his intelligent Pre-Cambrian Crinoids a lot more interesting.
( Though they are assuredly not tetrapods...) Wonderful
post, thank-you!
Posted by: Craig York | March 24, 2008 2:53 PM
In "Mountains of Madness" there is some information about the reptilian "pre-humans" and a bit about their history, and I think they were mentioned in "The Haunter of the Dark". But thatīs mainly Cameronīs area, as he knows much more about Lovecraft than I do.
Posted by: Sordes | March 24, 2008 4:21 PM
Nuclear holocaust? Why can't they have steered an asteroid into a collision course with the reprehensible, despicable, devil-spawn of Yucatan, and just miscalculated the consequences? If our own Bush administration were so equipped, I've no doubt they would (albeit aiming elsewhere than Yucatan).
And, why do they need big brains? Parrots seem equal to deeper reasoning, with their tiny brains, than some of my own colleagues. If we need sentient dinosaurs, I'm all in favor of thickening the spinal cord to serve in loco cerebellum, and reserving the entire brain proper for their analog of thought.
Posted by: Nathan Myers | March 24, 2008 4:56 PM
Lovecraft did occasionally refer to subterranean reptilian people, but they weren't emphasized--the major pre-human races were the radiate Old Ones who made their last stand in Antartica, the Great Race of Yith, and the children of Cthulhu and flying polyps that opposed them, respectively.
A race of intelligent reptiles comes up in "The Mound", which he ghost-wrote, as an enemy of the subterranean Kn'yan. "The Nameless City" has croc-like reptile men, as an interbreeding race with the Egyptian dynasties. Most of the other references to serpent people are part of the shared world Lovecraft encouraged fellow SF/horror/fantasy writers to write in. Robert Howard, of Conan fame, used subterranean serpent people a lot as antagonists, and Lovecraft's mentions are homages to Howard.
So, really, if any pulp authors of the 1930s were in cahoots with the sentient maniraptors in stasis deep below the earth's surface, it was Howard. Maybe that's why he committed suicide...
Posted by: Nick Herold | March 24, 2008 5:04 PM
Well.. you know, parrots don't have small brains, quite the contrary. The brains of the bigger-brained species overlap with those of primates, including of hominids like orangs, gorillas and chimps. Again I will quote Andrew Iwaniuk: "if you overlay a graph of brain size to body mass for parrots on top of one for non-human primates, they sit in a perfect line".
Posted by: Darren Naish | March 24, 2008 5:05 PM
Wouldn't macloughini still be a typo, since you're missing the l?
[from Darren: yes, dumbass typo which I've now corrected. Thanks for noting it.]
Posted by: Alec T | March 24, 2008 5:37 PM
I had this basic idea (K/T extinction event was caused by dinosaurs with human-equivalent intelligence via anthropogenic (dinosaurogenic?) climate change and/or weapons of mass destruction) about 5 years ago, without ever having heard of either McLoughlin or Magee.
I did grow up on Lovecraft, tho, along with fortean/ancient-conspiracy writers like F.W. Holliday and Zechariah Sitchin, so i'm sure i wasn't "original" either. In fact, i remember there being a thread on the old Fortean Times bulletin board (before FT was taken over by some other company and they changed the board registration system) about the subject. I guess it was inevitable, considering how long no one really knew exactly what caused the K/T event for (do they even know exactly now?), that when the ideas of dinosaurs being warm-blooded and with intelligence in the same ballpark as modern mammals became popular, someone would hypothesize that there was a Cretaceous global civilisation.
Lovecraft and Howard, despite being very different writers in terms of style, did actually collaborate quite a lot, along with several other members of a circle they were the most famous of, and intended their works to be part of a single "continuity", IIRC. They were also both notorious racists, sadly, but, well, pulp fiction has always overlapped heavily with actually-believed-in pseudoscience...
Re parrots' brains... yes, their brain-to-body-mass ratios are high, but, well, they're pretty small overall. There's probably an absolute size (or at least number of neurons) as well as relative size needed for intelligence. I mean, put a human brain in something the size of Amphicoelias, and its brain-to-body-mass ratio would be tiny, but it would still be as intelligent as a human.
Then again, Homo floresiensis is potentially exciting in redefining this area, as they seem to have eliminated "redundancies" in their brain mass to keep at least Homo erectus level intelligence in a braincase smaller than that of a chimp...
Posted by: shiva | March 24, 2008 5:58 PM
Funny, birds show that high intelligence can evolve in situations completely different than humans. Forget sapient savanna dinosaurs and ground horbills...
What if Common Ravens evolved to better steal carrion from carnivores and developed higher intelligence?
Would be interesting sci-fi. Scary Ravenmasters invade from parallel world. They come with terrible soldiers and slaves - semi-sapient descendants of wolves and big cats. And, to make things worse, Ravenmasters are adept in spreading divisions and manipulating humanity to their goals...
Or, sapient Kea versus Florida Scrub Jays? Gangs of bloodthirsty pirates flee from their freezing islands. Who caused climate change? Pacifist blue-winged farmers spreading their acorn oak plantations across much of Americas. Pirates declare war, naturally. But pacifists finally win, not by force, but by their better grasp of introspection and psychology. And what next? Pirates and farmers declare peace and venture across the Arctic to discover new continents and new sapient birds...
If I lived 2000 years, maybe I would develop that sci-fi story...
Posted by: Jerzy | March 24, 2008 6:35 PM
Off-topic: Pipa birth.
But... but... the tweeties are poisonous!!!
From a legal point of view, they are copyrighted simply by not having been explicitly put in the public domain. From a practical point of view... well... I know how to download pictures from the Dinosauricon. (That's a site that actually tries to prevent you from doing that: right-clicking on it and clicking "save" does not work.) I've done it for talks. It's trivial. So why bother.
"Come, come to the dork side of the farce." Instructions here.
Unfortunately, though, Daniel Bensen and Brian Choo haven't done anything for years, due to lack of time. That's why Spec is currently on my university webspace.
BTW, most of the "missing" pages are there, it's just that the links don't work.
What does a filter-feeder need intelligence for?
For pretty high values of "exactly"... :-)
What do you think they've been doing all the time? :-)
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 24, 2008 7:43 PM
This isn't a rhetorical question: why would body mass have anything to do with those bits of brains used for thinking?
We might speculate that brain tissue may be repurposed from managing physical processes, temporarily, for thinking. Or, we might speculate that some percentage of brain tissue might be stolen from physical-process management to think with, instead. But brain tissue is used as much for more-or-less passive sensory processing (visual, auditory) as for managing the body, for which body size should make little or no difference. That is, a body of size X reasonably needs nervous system tissue in quantity kX (not all intra-cranial, necessarily) to manage it, plus some constant amount Y for sensory evaluation, and further amount Z to think with. Y and Z ought to be independent of body mass X.
All of the above seem to favor finding sentient reasoning to develop in physically larger individuals and, on average, physically larger species. Would a blue whale even notice, metabolically, giving over the brain tissue equivalent to an adult human cortex, to be used for cogitation? Perhaps elephants Never do Forget, but neither do they seem inclined to poetify, even during adolescence.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of some given mass of nerve tissue for thinking ought to depend enormously on architecture. How well is the available supply of nerve cells used in the process? In the absence of deliberate design, ought not tissue tuned over eons for some other survival role to be of only indifferent quality when turned to some brand of abstract thought? I would expect easily an order of magnitude difference from one accidental repurposing to another, even discounting differences observed between individual humans (who anyway just about all learn to drive a car). The cognitive efficiency -- to be crude, theorems proven per unit time per unit mass of nerve cells -- ought to be low for younger genera, and higher for older ones. (The coelacanth ought to be a genius among fishes, and might even be; likewise tortoises.) Parrots have had far longer in their niche than have hominids in theirs.
This linear mass relationship seems very suspicious to me. It suggests that the mass of nerve tissue found in creatures is a consequence of some sort of resource budgeting that has only a tenuous relationship to how much processing power can be brought to bear for the short periods where it tends to make a difference.
Posted by: Nathan Myers | March 24, 2008 9:05 PM
The first dinosauroids (although, in this case, they turned out to be mosasauroids) I remember running across are the Yilane from Harry Harrison's West of Eden (and the rest of the Eden trilogy). Not much in the way of scientific accuracy, but the series has some pretty creative ideas about how language might develop in reptiles, and how said brainy reptiles might genetically alter a frog to become a functional living microscope.
Posted by: Jason Adams | March 24, 2008 10:27 PM
Expanding (sorry!) on this linear mass ratio (body::brain) common among avian and non-Homo hominid species...
For these numbers to fall on a line suggests very strongly that they are dictated not by anything related to an animal's way of life or its environment. Rather, the numbers are dictated by metabolic limits common to any warm-blooded vertebrate living in a sufficiently complicated environment. That is, the brain size is not determined by what is needed to compete; the brain size is simply as large as can be sustained at all, given the resources typically available to these creatures. (I.e., a richer environment yields a larger population, not a bigger brain.)
It also implies that the animal can make use of as much processing power as can be brought to bear -- but only sometimes, such as during mating season, so that the cost of sustaining any extra brain mass during the rest of the time limits its size. This suggests, further, strong selective pressure to improve brain architecture to make more economical use of what brain tissue can be afforded, applied to those problems where it makes the difference -- again, most likely, mating competition. It suggests, finally, that Homo's innovation was in discovering uses for extra brain tissue on an everyday basis, to justify a metabolic investment above that of other creatures of similar mass.
Has all this already been explored by people better equipped than I am?
Posted by: Nathan Myers | March 25, 2008 3:21 AM
I remember a while back (a few years, at least), there was news of an upcoming book....in said book, a descendant of famed Antarctic explorer Byrd retraced her ancestor's steps, and finds (the ruins of?) a dinosaur city -- because, back in the Mesozoic, another civilization arose, and they went to sleep rather than become extinct.
Another, if shorter, story, was in either Analog or Azimov magazine...a paleontologist becomes obsessed with the idea of that dinosaurs must've produced at least one intelligence....and by the end, her husband realizes that, if you look at some (Triassic?) tracks, you can see the herbivores being herded.
Posted by: Anthony Docimo | March 25, 2008 3:22 AM
Great article on intelligent dinosaurs. Thank you for citing my article here, it's truly an honor for me. I've also written a story on this topic, but again, completely in Czech :-) Keep up good work, Vlad
Posted by: Vladimir Socha | March 25, 2008 4:01 AM
I was going to mention Harry Harrison's "West of Eden" books about human-like dinosaurs, but another poster beat me to it. Harry's books over all are your usual science fiction pulp but I thought the "West of Eden" books were quite entertaining, he seemed to write them with a little more care.(Although I do agree about the scientific inaccuracys) The hypothetical dino-critters above also resemble the sleestacks from "Land of the Lost". Anyone ever see that show?
Posted by: Susan | March 25, 2008 4:49 AM
Surely you are talking about John C. McLoughlin's SF novel TOOLMAKER KOAN. Though THE HELIX AND THE SWORD was a better book, in IMHO -- that second one being vastly underrated.
Posted by: Jay Lake | March 25, 2008 6:26 AM
Not that I know of.
Remember: the closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets.
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 25, 2008 8:08 AM
Back to apocalyptical Cretaceous war, one dinobook I had as a kid had a page listing various more-or-less sane explanations for the extinction of dinosaurs, ranging from asteroidal impact to volcanic eruptions, mammalian egg-predation, disease, and, indeed, technological war, complete with an illustration of two theropods blasting one another with what looked like standard-issue SF laser pistols. I imagine it was written in the '80s.
Posted by: Andreas Johansson | March 25, 2008 8:52 AM
Jay Lake mentioned 'The Helix and the Sword' - one of my all time favourite sci-fi novels, but rarely referred to and not given the recognition it deserves in my opinion. Lots of good stuff about genetic modification.
I notice again the reference to ground hornbills - several years ago (2004) I saw wild southern ground hornbills in South Luangwa Valley national park Zambia. It occurred to me at the time that their behaviour on the ground may be a much better model of the behaviour of small to medium sized dromaeosaurs than the usual pack hunter of megafauna model I see used. The ground hornbills foraged as a small group catching large invertebrates and small vertebrates - apparently sometimes cooperating to flush prey (though I didn't see that happen). Even the sickle claw would seem more convincing as a means of pinning down and/or despatching small prey than as a slashing weapon it is usually depicted as. On the latter point the BBC program of a year or two ago convinced me that the sickle claw was not effective as a slashing blade - I know some have tried to argue that the program got it wrong, but frankly thier arguments have been less convincing to me than the original work was.
I also don't like the use fo the name 'hobbit' for 'Homo floresiensis', which remains an unproven taxon as far as I am concerned. At the moment the jury is out until we have substantially more material, but it seems to me the best fit with the overall evidence is that poor little 'Ebu' (LB1) was probably an abberrent individual in a population of either pygmy Homo sapiens or pygmy Homo erectus.
I am actually more interested in the fervour with which so many people want to believe 'Homo floresiensis' is a valid separate species of human - some appear to want to believe because they just love the idea, others seem from their comments to have anti-religious ideas (though this seems to be more that it doesn't fit with their idea of how theology should be, rather than it actually being a problem for any religious belief).
As for ravens being intelligent - just go out and watch them - they are truely amazing. Few birds give such a strong impression of simply getting a kick out of flying. I see them over my garden and in the mountains a few miles away. The way they do somersaults in the air and clearly play is wonderful. I saw a film clip a few years back of a pair of ravens teasing a dog - there was no other word for it, they were quite deliberately for no apparent reason other than getting some kind of fun out of it cooperating to annoy the dog - it was incredibly funny to watch, but I guess not if your a dog lover!
I have often wondered if there is any correlation between play behaviour and self awareness or sentience. Mammals and birds generally seem to show play behaviour at least at some stages in their lives - with the apparently more intelligent forms showing more developed play behaviour. Outside of mammals and birds, the most convincing evidence I know of is for play behaviour in some Lamniform sharks, though other potential instances exist for a few reptiles, some large teleosts and cephalopods. Except for the sharks I dont find the others particularly convincing. Any thoughts on play behaviour as an indicator of sentience, and highly developed play behaviour as an indicator of significant intelligence?
Posted by: Mark Lees | March 25, 2008 9:08 AM
Mark - thanks for comments. The argument that the deinonychosaur sickle-claw did not function well in predation (as argued by Manning et al.) was appallingly bad and most certainly does not match with the evidence: I'll have to elaborate on this at some time (was planning a paper on it actually).
Having read the papers, I think the evidence that Homo floresiensis is a real species is far better than the evidence that the individuals are stunted abnormalities. I agree that people seem to have developed opinions on this issue based on their personal preferences, but this seems to have afflicted those arguing for microcephaly/cretinism the most. I don't quite understand how this has anything to do with religion, but I'll take your word for it.
Finally, if you haven't already seen it, I discussed play behaviour in reptiles back here. The evidence that turtles, lizards and crocodilians engage in play is pretty compelling.
Posted by: Darren Naish | March 25, 2008 9:41 AM
Have you read this?
Global and regional brain metabolic scaling and its functional consequences by Jan Karbowski, BMC Biol. 2007; 5: 18.
Posted by: StupendousMan | March 25, 2008 1:24 PM
WRT play behavior: I once saw a murder of crows harassing a cat. They had surrounded it and were trying to get a rise out of it. Unfortunately for them, the cat didn't know it was supposed to be upset, or even predatory, and kept making play gestures back at them. Eventually they just settled in a circle around it and stared. I had to move on then, so I don't know what happened.
Posted by: Jenny Islander | March 25, 2008 3:31 PM
The intelligent reptiles in Doctor Who went into suspended animation to survive a asteroid impact, but the asteroid was captured, becoming Earth's moon - which is even less plausible than the biology. They were named Silurians by the first scientists they met, after their presumed era of origin. The Doctor eventually said they came from the Eocene. They'd used genetic engineering to get a third eye which could shoot various rays, as you do, but otherwise looked pretty humanoid.
Posted by: Robert | March 25, 2008 5:03 PM
Thanks, StupendousMan! What a cornucopia of empirical numbers, and of references. I like that there are exactly 100 of the latter, another example of one of those suspicious numbers.
Going back to the original topic, then, to develop sentience we need (a) a mode of life in which increments of brain capacity can, somehow, help secure correspondingly more resources, on a daily basis; but (b) not at the expense of related individuals; (c) brain organization that can apply such increments to securing those extra resources; and (d) brain organization suitable to ponder freely when not called upon for (c).
Posted by: Nathan Myers | March 25, 2008 5:05 PM
@ Nathan: to start with your last question, almost certainly yes. That is, there's a lot of stuff out there on those topics, and I gather you are not yet fully equipped with this background. Also note that the brain mass: body mass values fall on a straight line (within a physiologically and cognitively 'equivalent' set of taxa) only on a log-log plot, i.e. it's a power law rather than an actual direct proportionality.
Posted by: John Scanlon, FCD | March 25, 2008 7:45 PM
In my limited experience, it's more the other way around: some people just don't want to believe in human island dwarfs and prefer speculating about rare combinations of rare diseases. The situation reminds me of how the Neandertal controversy raged for decades in the 19th century (rachitic Cossack and all).
The paper on the island dwarfs of Palau is very interesting in this respect: it suggests that some "primitive" features could be a result of dwarfing, so that the hobbits (sorry, I love that name -- perhaps because I haven't read Tolkien) could actually be H. sapiens rather than (derived from) H. erectus.
I don't understand. Please explain.
Regarding the sickle claw, it might have had a cutting edge; the TV show assumed the edge was rounded... in any case, the show was majorly unrealistic in having the claw first stabbing into the, uh, substrate and then being pulled through it, instead of having all that done in one smooth motion, so that the pulling is done by the whole leg, part of a kick, and not just by the 2nd toe alone.
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 25, 2008 8:05 PM
Let me add at this point that David is not one of my clones, that any and all similarities are purely coincidental :)
(if you don't know what I'm getting at, read my comment seven up from this one)
Posted by: Darren Naish | March 25, 2008 8:13 PM
@John S.: To be precise, I wonder if it has been explored whether lying on that line implies only seasonal use of full brain capacity. It's certainly the case that I'm not equipped, professionally, to explore the question myself.
It bugs me, too, hearing those skeletons called hobbits. For one thing, nobody knows if their feet had curly hair on top, and it seems unlikely that they lived in snug, cozy homes with circular doors dug into hillsides, or undertook quests to hurl inconvenient jewelry into Gunung Agung. I'd be much more comfortable calling Welshmen hobbits, albeit not to their faces.
Posted by: Nathan Myers | March 26, 2008 12:01 AM
Great post and great example of cultural convergence...
About 16 years ago, when I was 14, I began to wrote a story about a "K-T Boundary maker" intelligent theropod morphologically similar to the Bioparaptor that I called Anthroposaurus (yes, the same name was used at least twice). I've never heard of McLoughlin's or Magee's versions of this idea! I believed only Russel's dinosauroid have been created.
"My" anthroposaurs lived in colonies similar to hen houses, and founded two super-states in Eastern North America and Northern Gondwana (this explains why anthroposaurs remains are absent in the rich fossil sites from Patagonia, Western North America and Asia: these were their immense food reserve). The K-T event was the effect of a Total War between the Laurasian and the Gondwanan states.
Now, I prefer "Avisapiens": it's less anthropocentric.
Posted by: Andrea Cau | March 26, 2008 6:28 AM
Very cool article! Agreed, there is absolutely no reason why an intelligent species must be shaped to use a human-built phone booth!
Regarding the possibility of an intelligent dinosaurid, I note that a goodly number of our own artifacts probably will survive to the next geological age, but a lot of that is plastics, and the hypothetical dinosaurids presumably wouldn't have had nearly as much access to crude oil. (Modulo theories about inorganic/geological sources....)
On the other hand, the Great Extinction we've been causing depends more on our voraciousness and wanderlust than high technology -- between forest clearance, ocean "harvesting", and scattering exotic species, we'd be getting into trouble Real Soon Now, even without the CO2 overload.
Regarding the brain/body mass issue -- note that between australopithecus and Cro-Magnons, our ancestors did get a lot bigger, presumably allowing for absolutely larger brains. (And demanding much more food, thus hunting techniques and agriculture.)
Posted by: David Harmon | March 26, 2008 8:23 AM
Star Trek: Voyager's Voth race, anyone?
Posted by: trekker | March 26, 2008 8:34 AM
Darren, I've had as much fun watching the grand evolution of the sentient dromaeosaur as you have (I was a sophomore in high school when the Dale Russell dinosauroid made the news, and I bought the issue of OMNI that featured its pictorial and theoretical skull structure), and I have one extra to add as far as cultural references. I've noted that the idea of long-lost prehistoric technologies turning up in the middle of London is a long-running British science fiction theme (for instance, the old Doctor Who villains the Silurians and Sea Devils, the terrestrial and aquatic subspecies of Earth's first civilization, are coming to DVD in the US next month), and Alan Moore, the comics writer behind Watchmen and V For Vendetta, played around with bioparanoia over 25 years ago.
If you look, you can find the strip in question from the old British stalwart weekly 2000 AD, the venue that brought us Judge Dredd. (2000 AD also had a lot of fun over the years with the meme of dinosaurs living in atomic wastelands, but that's another story). In this "Future Shock", we have two classrooms, with two instructors making similar observations on the effect of an asteroid strike on Earth and a global thermonuclear war. At the end of the asteroid strike lecture, the professor notes that this almost definitely wiped out the dinosaurs, giving us our opportunity, and that any similar event might give the insects a chance. One student scoffs "Us being replaced by insects? No chance!"
Meanwhile, we discover that the other lecture ends with the professor noting that a global thermonuclear war would lead to a massive extinction event, with the dominant forms possibly being replaced by the mammals. We discover that the lecture was held 65 million years ago, with a theropod student mouthing off "Us being replaced by small furry mammals? No chance!" while kicking a shrew to the pavement.
Posted by: Paul Riddell | March 26, 2008 9:42 AM
" my good friend Nemo Ramjet " has a lot of Wayne Barlow''s excellent work running through his head. Tons and tons and tons of it. Wayne's "Expedition" book, as well as his earlier "Thype" project. It's so obvious I don't even have to go look up the references.
Ramjet has some talent, but it is wasted trying to be someone else, and I'm sure Mr. Barlow would say so as well.
Posted by: Venusian | March 26, 2008 9:44 AM
Venusian: How rude, and inaccurate.
Posted by: Thomas M. Fozy | March 26, 2008 9:48 AM
Coincidental!?! Great minds think alike! And so do idiots!
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 26, 2008 9:49 AM
You will go look up the references anyway and report them here in detail.
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 26, 2008 9:51 AM
Rude ? Stealing Barlow's vision is rude. Inaccurate ? Not true - he's stolen Barlow's brain, and I'm sure he wants it back. If you knew Barlow's work we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Barlow - http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_gyrosprinter.htm
Ramjet - http://www.nemoramjet.com/images/noslice/snaiad/allotauruscataphractus.jpg
If you're going to argue that they are not EXACTLY the same, that is only because they are examples, and I'm sure Ramjet didn't trace it.
Posted by: Venusian | March 26, 2008 10:41 AM
http://www.nemoramjet.com/images/noslice/snaiad/hoplodermatraumachelys.jpg
Open skull head and posture-http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_daggerwrist.htm
Small head -http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_sac_back.htm
Split Feet - http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_arrowtongue.htm
I didn't say this to be mean. Okay I did, but with a reason. I'm shocked by the cut and paste plagiarism.
Posted by: Venusian | March 26, 2008 10:52 AM
http://www.nemoramjet.com/images/noslice/snaiad/hoplodermatraumachelys.jpg
Open skull head and posture-http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_daggerwrist.htm
Small head -http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_sac_back.htm
Split Feet - http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_arrowtongue.htm
I didn't say this to be mean. Okay I did, but with a reason. I'm shocked by the cut and paste plagiarism.
Posted by: Venusian2 | March 26, 2008 10:54 AM
> If you're going to argue that they are not EXACTLY the same,
> that is only because they are examples, and I'm sure Ramjet didn't
> trace it.
They are both terrestrial megafauna, but that's where the similarity ends. The gyrosprinter is a cursorial, bipedal, small to mid-sized animal with uncertain dietary habits. The golden bull is a huge, graviportal, armoured, quadrupedal megaherbivore. They are about as similar to each other as a leptictid is to a titanosaur. If you have no better examples, don't pick on Nemo.
Posted by: johannes | March 26, 2008 11:31 AM
I don't normally post here. But your talk about racial memory of dinosaurs reminded me of this comic. I thought you might get a kick out of it.
Posted by: Abby Normal | March 26, 2008 11:51 AM
Much has been made of this issue before. Wayne Barlowe did influence me greatly and I won't deny that "Expedition" directly led me into the world of speculative zoology, like many other people.
But I wouldn't say I'm plagiarizing, let alone "tracing over" Barlowe's work.
Snaiadi animals are pretty distinct from those of Darwin IV; they have a discernible evolutionary history, eyes and jaws, some have fur, etc. There are no gasbag floaters or jet propelled flyers. Hopefully, the upcoming overhaul of the Snaiad website will make this more clear than ever.
Some visual characteristics like the toe-less, club-shaped feet and angular bodies, might look a bit like Barlowian, but I wouldn't go as far to equate that with "brain theft."
Posted by: Nemo Ramjet | March 26, 2008 12:55 PM
And the grey alien on your menu page isn't just a total riff of of http://www.tobinmueller.com/artsforge/gallery_new/giger/barlowe6.html ?
You're talented, but from one artist to another - you've got to find your own vision man.
Posted by: Venusian | March 26, 2008 1:20 PM
http://www.nemoramjet.com/images/noslice/snaiad/hoplodermatraumachelys.jpg
Open skull head and posture-http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_daggerwrist.htm
Small head -http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_sac_back.htm
Split Feet - http://www.waynebarlowe.com/expedition_pages/exped_arrowtongue.htm
I was trying to post this before but was blocked.
Posted by: Venusian | March 26, 2008 1:22 PM
You're talented, but from one artist to another -
Whoa, I don't think being a b.s. artist counts. Basically all you've shown so far is that Nemo and Barlowe both draw aliens. I suppose if I drew an alien I'd be ripping off both of them.
Oh, wait! Nemo has two syllables and ends in an 'o' sound. Just like Barlowe! Even his name is plagiarized!
See, anyone can play if they lower their standards--of evidence, of fair play, of appropriate behavior in a public forum--far enough.
I'm dying to see if you've got anything better. Or a real name to post along with your "advice".
Posted by: Matt Wedel | March 26, 2008 1:43 PM
This is not plagiarism. Neither in legal sense, nor by genre standards.
You may be unfamiliar with sci-fi, but misshapen gigantic brachiosaur/elephant-like beasts are common trope. Some in Star Wars look the same. My favorites were Lem's kurdls, which were hunted by sport huntsmen getting swallowed alive and small A-bombs.
The same goes for alternative evolution and sapient maniraptors. Not that Nemo should feel down - actually, it is difficult to come up with something that was NOT already explored in several sci-fi stories.
Posted by: Jerzy | March 26, 2008 2:05 PM
Nathan-
There are lots and lots and lots of papers out there on the factors (development, metabolism, life history) that set brain/body scaling relationships out there, the Karbowski (2007) paper is a good jumping off point. Symonds (1999) looked at correlations between metabolism, life history (e.g. seasonality), body and brain mass in insectivores; might be another one for you to check out. Unfortunately all of these factors are correlated in complicated ways so untangling the causal relationships has proven pretty difficult.
Linking all of this to 'sentience' is going to be hard however, since our pool of sentient taxa has a sample size of one, on a good day. My personal suspicion is that 'sentience' has just as much to do with social structure as neural architecture. You note that many humans learn to drive cars, but very few of them do that without any assistance (and very, very few of them build their own car from scratch). Of course, brain morphology and social structure are themselves closely linked and the animals that we consider to be particularly "smart", and the ones which tend to have high intercepts on the log brain mass v. log body mass plot, (cetaceans, parrots, corvids, elephants) invariably have complex social structures. I imagine the Anthroposaurs and Biopararaptors did too, judging from the jewelry at least.
Posted by: neil | March 26, 2008 2:07 PM
Here's a proper reference for that Symonds (1999) paper, since I obviously couldn't HTML my way out of a paper bag...
Matthew R. E. Symonds (1999) Life histories of the Insectivora: the role of phylogeny, metabolism and sex differences Journal of Zoology 249 (3) , 315-337 doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.1999.tb00768.x
Possibly functional link to the abstract.
Posted by: neil | March 26, 2008 2:15 PM
I am a SF artist who has worked as an illustrator for a for a the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology.Whe