BBP, you must be a thread paleontologist, digging up the dead bones of the past!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Well, he started it, so maybe he has the right. Besides, this is an interesting thread and it's been two years so there are a lot of new folks here. I'll have to look back thru and see if anyone thinks the dinosaurs could have evolved similar intelligence and technology as humans . . .

Depends entirely on what path of evolution they took. 65 MY is a long time, dinosaurs were an extremely varied group living all over the world, and changing conditions and random mutations have a lot of room to produce alterations, so anything's possible.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

The Alvarez Theory states that the Yucatan asteroid/comet wiped out the dinosaurs and that we may owe our existence to that event but I still can't help but feel empathy/sorrow towards the dinosaurs. I know it's illogical.

maybe traces of their civilization are lying at the bottom of the ocean......

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

I'm not sure what percentage of the ocean floor has subducted under continental plates in the last 65 MY but it's enough that the Alvarez team (and those afterwards) were worried that the crater they were looking for might be forever obliterated.

I know the feeling.

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I know evolution is not fair - in fact it's downright brutal and chance is involved - but it still bothers me. I guess I shouldn't feel too sorry for the dinosaurs - the same thing could happen to us next week.

There is also the point of...
The past is past
about 65,000,000 years passed

Okay then, I won't mention the dinosaurs' extinction.
We will now use Krypton as the model for catastrophes we must avoid by moving off-world.

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Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

Well I've been away from this forum for several months and it's great to some back & see a fun thread.

It seems everyone is defining civilization as making Stuff. I think that's a narrow definition. Someone mentioned finding a stone knife next to a dino fossil and that's an example of the problem. Dinos obviously have claws and don't need stone knives. The only reason humans need Stuff is because, as someone else noted, we have almost no physical attributes to help us survive.

So, other animals don't have cars & guns so we call them stupid. However scientists have found 'languages' in lots of other animals including prairie dogs. Animals have all kinds of ways of communicating with each other and detecting information. For all we know there are other species on this earth, in the past or on other planets, that have sophisticated communication abilities we can't even imagine. None of this would show up in the fossil record and we'd never have a clue that an advanced civilization existed.

I'm especially thinking about this in connection with all those planets we're finding that wouldn't support fire, combustion, ironmongering and all those civilized things.

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Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

It's a fun idea

Unfortunately the bones do not lie, the Dinosaurs mostly had a brain the size of a grape, and most of it was dedicated to simple tasks like biting, chasing, eating. This grape sized brain was for the simpler tasks, it was not a brain for remembering complex equations and not a complex brain developed for trying to write down languages.

Now other creatures like Whales and Chimpanzees are considered to be of high intelligence, maybe one day these creatures can evolve to create their own planet of the apes

Now a dinosaur civilization isn't completely impossible. Since we are decended from large brained hunter/gatherers we expect civilizations to be built by animals like ourselves. However there are insects that engage in agriculture so it obvious that agriculture doesn't require big brains. It is possible that a small bird like dinosaur could have developed agriculture with a bird sized brain and then gone on to develop a central authority and large scale construction - the hallmarks of civilization.

Not that I think this is likely, just pointing out that a large body and brain might not be essential. Small brains adapted to agriculture might do.

Some Dinosaurs had a walnut or grape sized brain, like the Stegosaurus- This was early in Dinosaur evolution.

They were significantly larger later on- especially in the small and fast predators.

Also, birds have very small, yet very complex and intelligent brains.
Your statement seems to be a bit of a "dinosaur." Outdated.

ETA: Quite a few birds are giving chimps a run for their money.

What were the brains of our ancestors (synapsids) like at that time? Bigger? Smaller? Comparing what we've got now with what they had then fails to take into account many millions of years of lost potential for change and development.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Doesn't current theory state that birds are descended from the dinosaurs? If so, then they may yet evolve a civilization. I've read a few articles and one book on bird intelligence and, although controversial, some parrots and crows/ravens seem to demonstrate fairly high intelligence.

my bold

First, welcome back greenfeather!

Second, well, if nothing shows up in the fossil record, and past or current animals have communication methods we can not image or detect, then we are out of the realm of science. You can speculate that penguins are having conversations about seven-dimensional geometry using pulsed graviton beams, but so what.

I also don't think that communication, in and of itself, makes for intelligence and/or a civilization. For example, bees and ants have systems for communications among their members, both I don't think that either are intelligent or have civilizations. What's the difference? Where do you draw the line? I'm not sure. Human civilization and ant "civilization" seem fundamentally different to me, but I'm not sure how to define it.

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Not a myth, sorry. According to modern cladistic taxonomy, birds are dinosaurs, because it's impossible to construct an evolutionary tree for all types of dinosaur that doesn't include birds as well, just as it's impossible to construct an evolutionary tree for all types of ape that doesn't include us.

OK. Dino civilisation. One of my favourite fringe ideas I have to say, mainly because I love dinos and I think they deserved their civilisation. Why should only the wussy mammals get one?

Most of the points raised here are hard to argue with. Of course, we probably would have found SOME evidence of an advanced dinosaur intelligence, such as worked flints, since we're able to locate their nests etc. BUT...

fossilisation is a very rare event, and only occurs under very specific circumstances. Plus, fossils are only preserved in very specific locations. One of the prerequisites of being fossilised is that you have to be very stupid (for instance, falling into quicksand), so it seems unlikely that an intelligent creature would end up fossilised.

If the civilisation cremated their dead, they would only be present in the geological record as ash.

Most of what we call civilisation (the monumental skyline of manhattan etc) would be unidentifiable crushed rock within 65 million years. Any of their archeological finds would be buried deep.

But in the end I think the NO camp wins out, because of the lack of worked flints and because there was no evidence by the end of the dino's reign that anything close to human intelligence was in the offing. Which is a shame.

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It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Then how do homo sapiens, or their ancestors, get fossilized?