12/21/2023 0 Comments Mastodon animal age![]() All these are features that we associate with intelligent animals today. When Dale described the skeleton of this dinosaur, there were a number of features that stood out to him, including the relatively big brain, the large eyes, the bipedal stance, and what he thought was an opposable thumb. Seven times more brainy than an alligator of the equivalent body size. Dale was the first one to make a case that some dinosaurs, particularly small theropod dinosaurs, like Stenonychosaurus as we called it then-I guess it’s Troodon today-was in fact very brainy. When Dale examined the braincase, he noticed that the brain was relatively large-about the size of that of an ostrich.Īt the time, scientists thought dinosaurs were small-brained and dim-witted like most lizards.īut the braincase of Troodon showed that that wasn’t true of all dinosaurs. In 1968, he was shown the braincase of a small meat-eating dinosaur called Troodon in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. When he became interested in a topic, he had to know all about it, from the outside in, frontwards and backwards.ĭale started with the museum back in 1965, and soon after he started thinking about dinosaur intelligence. This concept of interrupted evolution was at the heart of a controversial thought experiment that took the world of palaeontology by storm in the early 1980’s. When the Chicxulub meteorite hit our planet, it drastically altered the course of life on Earth.īut what if the meteorite had missed our planet, and the dinosaurs had been allowed to evolve undisturbed?ĭale Russell, former paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, was fascinated by the idea of the evolution of intelligence in dinosaurs. Have you ever wondered what would have happened if the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct 66 million years ago?
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