The Tyrannosaurus rex was certainly powerful and dangerous, in extreme cases up to 13 meters long and weighing almost nine tons, one of the largest land-living carnivores in the history of the earth. For an estimated 127,000 generations – more than three million years – it was at the top of the food chain. But researchers are currently discussing again how smart you actually have to be to dominate the earth? An international team led by paleobiologist Kai Caspar from the University of Düsseldorf provides a new answer in the latest issue of specialist journals The Anatomical Record : Well, T. rex could probably keep up with the intelligence of today’s lizards and crocodiles, say the scientists.
It’s a new twist in a debate that has been going on for decades. For a long time, dinosaurs were considered the losers of evolution, at least in public. Too stupid to stay alive. But that’s probably nonsense if you consider that the dinosaurs dominated this planet for a good 100 million years. That’s what people should do first. And no amount of intelligence would have saved them from the impact of the asteroid that most likely caused their demise 66 million years ago. And even this catastrophe was survived by their descendants, who today sit on the branches as birds and are actually considered to be comparatively intelligent, at least compared to lizards.
So far, shrews are not working on defense against asteroids
In fact, the dinosaurs have been more cognitively rehabilitated in recent years. This movement reached a climax with a study by neuroscientist and paleontologist Suzana Herculano-Houzel from Vanderbilt University in Nashville Journal of Comparative Neurology. Her analysis concludes that theropods like T. rex probably had cognitive abilities like baboons or similar monkeys have today, which made these dinosaurs “even more wonderful predators than previously thought,” she writes. The authors of the new study now contradict exactly this statement Anatomical Record.
Essentially, the problem with this discussion is that not a single dinosaur brain has been preserved for anatomical study, not even in fossil form. Ultimately, the question is what was going on in the now empty space that is in the petrified skulls. Herculano-Houzel measured this volume in preserved fossils using computer tomography and then calculated the presumed brain mass and number of neurons of the dinosaurs using databases on the brains of species that are still alive today, such as birds. This data, in turn, should allow conclusions to be drawn about cognitive abilities.
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In their re-analysis, the researchers led by Kai Caspar came to the conclusion that Herculano-Houzel had overestimated the size of the dinosaurs’ forebrain and thus also the number of neurons. In addition, this number only allows limited conclusions to be drawn about intelligence; other factors must be taken into account. “The intelligence of dinosaurs and other extinct animals is best estimated by considering gross anatomy and fossil evidence rather than just neuron counts,” said co-author Hady George of Bristol University in a press release.
Details of the argument can be found on 32 pages Anatomical Record read up. Apparently the relationship between brain size and intelligence is more complicated. In today’s animal world, the shrew has by far the largest brain in relation to body weight, it is four percent. It is not known that this mouse would work on asteroid defense.