I think the future of intelligent life will be all about the maggots. 8)

(go us!)

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

The Dinosauroid

For explanation, see

Reconstructions of the Small Cretaceous Theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a Hypothetical Dinosauroid
Syllogeus, Vol. 37, 1982
Dale A. Russell, R. Séguin

Check your PM's

Anyways, I think that idea is plausible

Modern reptiles are classified as ectotherms, meaning that they have little ability to control body temperature by internal processes (although extremely sophisticated behavioral processes), as opposed to birds and mammals, classified as endotherms. Each strategy has advantages and disavantages. But one should note that there are more species of reptiles than there are of mammals currently alive.

The question of heat output vs. body size is solved by tissue generating less heat per cubic cc; an elephant generates less than 1/10 the heat, per unit mass, that a mouse does. It has been speculated that in a generally warmer enviornment as existed through much of the mesozoic that the larger dinosaurs (e.g., bronts) could have stayed warm by mass endothermy, shedding heat so slowly that their thermal inertia could keep them fairly warm.

There is a tendency to see all 'dinosaurs' as alike, when they were a very diverse group. More and more evidence (a lot form China recently) says that at least some smaller dinosaurs were feathered (I'd say this is now firmly proven). Many of the feathers look more like ostrich feathers, and the main functions are speculated to be insulation, display, or both. Examination of bone-growth rings seems to show mammal-like growth patterns in some genera, not so in others.

I would say the majority opinion now is that Aves is an offshoot of Dinosauria, although to be fair this is still being furiously debated. Just recently evidence was presented that theropods like T.rex grew very quickly (maturation in ca. 15-20 yrs) which would be awfully fast for a classical reptile.

As to human-level intelligence, by the best evidence we have it has evolved exactly once in one genus and only a few of species of that genus. In the better part of 500 million years (rough time for complex multicellular life). This suggests that human-level intelligence is not necessarily strongly selected for.

And while cehpalpods, especially octopi, have large brains for their size, they face the problem that they have very short life spans. Training a brain seems to take a lot of time.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

It is entirely possible that a dinosaur-like creature evolved human-equivalent intelligence in the 65 million years of the time period in question. It only took humans, what, between 3 and 10 million years to gain something we call intelligence?

What if these animals/creatures were something that hasn't been found, or didn't fossilize? Our knowledge of the dinosaur era is of course limited to what has been found, and that is all we can speculate on.

A past civilisation that covered its tracks would be nearly impossible to find, unless they come back for a visit. That's actually been the premise of more than one scifi story.

In other words, we can't rule it out, but we can't prove it, either. The fossils we have found to date, and our understanding of biology, pretty well rule out past intelligence.

Well, like humans, they would leave very few traces of intelligence that would endure 65 million years, and the short period of civilization - 12,000 years from agriculture to interstelar space travel - could have been erased by the last space-faring generation to touch the Earth, in order to preserve the earth as a natural reservation and undo the environmental damage of the industrial age.

Later the Dinos would populate the galaxy and then evolve into something we cannot imagine - for it all started happening more than 65 million years ago, a lot of time to go on...

Than they came back and built the pyramids for the Egyptians!

I think that it is highly unlikely that some dino species obtained human-like intelligence but I think it is possible for some dino species to had been on the way there, like the Velociraptor, some say. Maybe the dino's pace was just extremely slow.

Oh Lord, I have one of Russell's book that talks about that thing.. Forgot how creepy Russell's monograph on the dinosauroid was. But Russell was the smartypants that guided Bakker, and Bakker's the smartypants that wrote the book that got Crichton thinking, and Crichton wrote Jurassic Park, and Spielburg made a great movie out of it.

Yay, Russell. Your dinosaroid may be creepier than sin, but Jurassic Park more than makes up for it. I wonder if you're even still alive.

Arent they like "super" experts when it comes to dino's

Yeah. Russell's claim to fame was Deinonychus, a cute little american raptor that predated the whole "raptor" craze of the 1980's and 1990's. He discovered them back in the 1960's, as I recall. I think some of Bakker's illustrations from The Dinosaur Heresies (which you can still find in bookstores!) showed Deinonychus in neato poses.

Somebody once told me if you took all the full-time dinosaur paleontologists in the whole world and put them together, they would number something like 40 people. Apparently the vast bulk of dino scientists are either part-timers, or volunteers. We don't have any strict dino researchers at Texas A&M, and we're one of the biggest public universities in the U.S.! Fossils lying all over the place, too... it's criminal. We can have a FEW HUNDRED geneticists, but not one lousy dinosaur paleontologist.

Oops, I think I hijacked the thread.

Uh... theropods. Let's see, raptors are all from that stock of carnivorous dinosaur, which popped up in the early Cretaceous I *think*. They were all pretty fancy as dinosaurs go, with reasonable evolution rates. Troodon showed up near the end of the Cretaceous, and it had one of the biggest (if not the biggest) brain relative to body size of any reptile. Russell's construction of the dinosauroid I believe was inspired by a what-if notion of Troodon-derivatives persisting into the Cenozoic. Troodon was assumed bright by dino standards, but not by most bird or mammal ones. Then again, all we have are crummy fossils to look at. If we didn't have living cephalopods to observe, I doubt anyone would've ever considered ammonites as being smart. But a lot of us invert folks certainly believe it.

Time machine. Gotta build a time machine.

Good luck on that one.

But yeah, that dinosauroid looked pretty freaky...imagine them running around amongst us.