We might be locked into an outcome that will be nigh on impossible—might be impossible—to alter.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Case of S T Nikos

Anthroposaurus Sapiens

Did the dinosaurs develop intelligence before Adam? Several people have dared to ask this question, but though they believe that dinosaurs would have become intelligent if they had survived the terminal Cretaceous events, they all agree that they did not because they died out first. One expert writes: "The potential in dromaeosaurs and coelurosaurs for an explosive evolution as the Tertiary dawned cannot be doubted�who knows what new peaks the sophisticated bird-mimics would have attained had they survived into the Age of Mammals." Only Nikos has been bold enough to believe that they did exactly that.

Some dinosaur did develop intelligence and by so doing caused the Cretaceous terminal extinction, just as an insensitive ape developed intelligence at the end of the Tertiary and caused the mass extinction that marks the end of that geological era. The circumstantial evidence is compelling. We find ourselves realising simultaneously that Nikos�s anthroposaur preceded us, and that we have just stumbled over the precipice of our own extinction.

Nikos wrote: "The thesis is not self-evidently false, as, say, the idea of a flat earth is. Today we consider it evident that the earth is round and revolves round the Sun�but these ideas have only become accepted in the last few hundred years. The movement of the continents, continental drift, noted by Wegener seventy years ago seems obvious to us all now, indeed it was probably obvious to any child studying a map of the world decades before Wegener, but because continents were so massive and the experts could not think of a mechanism by which they could move, no one was willing to ask the question �Must not South America and Africa once have been joined?�

"Mankind has adopted its position of global domination in just five million years. The dinosaurs were warm-blooded, active creatures and usurped the rule of their forebears, the thecodonts, in only five million years. Mechanisms exist for species to evolve at astonishingly fast rates. On average a species of dinosaur did not last for more than two or three million years before becoming extinct or evolving into a new species. There is no reason why one of the dinosaurs should not have evolved intelligence during the last five million years or so of the Cretaceous Period. Dinosaurs evolved quickly and there was a spate of dinosaur evolution just prior to their final decline. Bakker [Robert Bakker, a noted expert on dinosaurs�Michaela Magi Griffiths] says that the stenonychosaurs were evolving quickly in many of their adaptive compartments and with their bulky pair of mid-brain lobes they were probably every bit as endowed as the Late Cretaceous mammals.

"Fossil dinosaurs have been found with quite remarkably large brains. Struthiomimus had a brain to body ratio similar to that of a modern day ostrich�1:1000. And, though brain size is obviously a general measure of intelligence, there is no way of telling whether the brain of an extinct class of animals functioned in quite the same way as those of animals with which we are familiar. A higher metabolic rate, more active brains, faster synapses, sharper nerve impulses could all contribute to greater efficiency of the brain even though it were smaller than ours. The abilities of dinosaurs might have developed rather differently from mammals and we cannot be certain that modern creatures with larger brains are more intelligent than the smaller brained dinosaurs. In mammals the brain grew by expansion of the cerebral lobes but in birds it was the corpus striatum that expanded. A great deal of visual information processing in reptiles is done in the retina rather than being passed on to the brain. The ostrich mimic dinosaur had enormous eyes protected by bony plates. That is usually attributed to a nocturnal lifestyle but it could indicate that the parts of the brain of the dinosauroid that were to develop were associated with vision.

"Size is presumably directly related to memory capacity but, for humans, much of the brain seems redundant, evolution looks to have overshot. It might not have done for dinosaurs whose memory capacity could have been better adjusted to the capabilities of their brains overall. But even if dinosaur and mammalian evolution were truly parallel and dinosaurs had to evolve big brains to become intelligent, fast evolution could have done it in a relatively short time. Mankind has evolved from being a user of crude rock tools to our present level of civilisation in just one million years. It must be possible that these alert creatures did the same. How would that have looked in the fossil record, especially bearing in mind that the chosen habitat of these dinosaurs made their remains scarce, just as remains of early man are scarce and, of modern chimpanzees, non-existent?

"What of the niche later occupied by the primates. Was it occupied in the Cretaceous by primosaurs, dinosaur equivalents of the primates, and only when they died was the mammalian version able to develop? If convergent evolution is anything to go by, perhaps the intelligent dinosaur had to descend, like the intelligent mammal, from the trees or, perhaps, emerge from the water. What was in the trees when the dinosaurs were on the ground? From the fossil record there seem to be no dinosaurs adapted for tree dwelling in the sense that such creatures as monkeys, apes or even squirrels are today. Yet, if there were no dinosaurs in the trees, the mammals would have had a perfectly safe niche, would surely have evolved into it and, if they merely had to find a place free of dinosaurs to realise their destiny, developed brains much earlier.

"Fossils of predatory dinosaurs are rare but fossils of forest species are rarer. Fossil chimpanzees, from much closer times, are totally non-existent. We have only five fossil skeletons of Archaeopteryx which presumably spent some of its time in trees. Fossils of pterosaurs are mainly of marine species which swooped around the edges of the sea. The problem with tree dwellers is that their dead bodies drop to the forest floor where they are most unlikely to leave a fossil record. The forest is rich in fungi and bacteria that thrive in the damp and the shade and the little that is not eaten by scavengers decays in a short time. And the bones?�the forest floor is acidic so that even the bones do not survive long enough to leave a trace.

"So there is no fossil evidence to suggest what was in the trees when dinosaurs roamed the ground. Experts tell us that, since mammals, like tree shrews, were there, dinosaurs were not�otherwise trees would not have been safe for them. But, if the dinosaurs were afraid of heights, how did the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx learn to fly? It is absurd that dinosaurs should not have adapted to life in the trees and the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx prove it. Lagosuchus, thought to be an ancestor of the pterodactyls, was a primitive dinosaur that must have climbed trees. Today, Komodo dragon hatchlings live in trees to avoid predators. Many other cold-blooded animals climb trees, the many species of tree frog for instance. Why should there not have been hosts of dinosaur monkeys and dinosaur apes? Perhaps there were but, as we have seen, because of their habitat they did not fossilize easily: a whole fauna of advanced dinosaurs about which we know nothing. Is it so stupid then to guess that one of them might have followed a pathway to intelligence just as we did?

"Indeed there is a parallel between the explosive radiation of dinosaurian grazers like hadrosaurs and ceratopsians from the middle Cretaceous and the explosion of mammalian grazers about 11 million years ago. The mid-Cretaceous explosion was a result of the breakthrough of the flowering plants about 117 million years ago just as the more recent case was due to the emergence of the grasses 24 million years ago. Along with the antelopes, horses, cows and elephants of the latter period, taking advantage of the new food stuff, came the intelligent mammal, man. Lucy walked by that East African lakeside just as cattle and horses were evolving 3.7 million years ago. Since then, man has continued to evolve rapidly, though the animals that originally shared the savannah with him, such as the antelopes, have not.

"Can the parallel be extended? Did an intelligent dinosaur emerge from the Cretaceous forests, a part of the explosive radiation of dinosaurs resulting from the earlier emergence of the flowering plants as a new source of food, and, like man, evolve exceedingly rapidly? If an aquatic phase gave man many useful features during his development, is it possible that some dinosaurs lived aquatically for awhile and developed a comparable streamlined shape and upright stance as well as other useful features?

"With the plucking of the hadrosaurs from the experts’ approved place in the swamps, to be placed in herds on mossy plains, there seemed to be no semi-aquatic dinosaurs remaining at the end of the Cretaceous. Animals such as the ichthyosaurs and the plesiosaurs, which the experts do not classify as dinosaurs, were fully aquatic, and the ichthyosaurs might have died out before then anyway. Yet, for 20 million years, sea-levels had been higher than at any time in the last 200 million years. There were vast areas of shallow continental seas. Surely a lot of species must have dipped their toes in the water and some of them must have tarried awhile. Lots of shallow seas imply lots of small, perhaps transient, islands ideal for evolutionary experiments like those described by Elaine Morgan [an author and exponent of the idea of the aquatic ape�Michaela Magi Griffiths] but 65 million years earlier. Suggestive also is Bakker’s idea that the archaeopteryx was possibly able to use its primitive wings to swim rather as a hoatzin fledgling does. Both archaeopteryx and deinonychus had wrists with a semicircular joint which permitted accurate movement of the fingers and exceptional ability to flex them. It is conceivable that, while the archaeopteryx was evolving into birds that some other members of the family turned to brachiating and developed along the lines of first the modern primates, and then the aquatic ape, to yield Anthroposaurus sapiens.

"The growth of intelligence in man has been attributed to the succession of ice ages over the last few million years. This sequence of glacials and interglacials subjected the hominid apes to repeated intense selective pressure putting a premium on adaptability, versatility and intelligence. Though there were no ice ages at the end of the Cretaceous period, we noted that the sea level was high. It fell considerably and quickly 95 million years ago and again 67 million years ago, but over several million years, about 80 million years ago, there was a shallower dip. With large amounts of the continental shelves covered in water, fluctuations of only a few meters could successively expose then inundate large areas of land. The normal tidal range today can make the sea disappear over the horizon at low tide in those places where the beach shelves at only a slight angle. The slow shallow dip observed in the sea level when it was at its height possibly signifies thousands of such incursions of the ocean. Imagine a Spring tide that went out for ten thousand years before it returned. Then it stayed in for ten thousand years. This would put strong selection pressure on the species living on the flat coastal lowlands or on low islands.

"Possible confirmation is the formation of oil bearing rocks at that time. Half of our present oil reserves stem from that period, the result of organic matter settling to the bottom of shallow stagnant seas. Incursions of the ocean would have trapped the organic layers between thin layers of mud eventually giving rise to oil shales from which oil was squeezed under pressure. Further evidence of such cycles comes from the striated appearance of Cretaceous chalk cliffs. Is it possible that fluctuations in sea level provided the evolutionary stimulus for the Anthroposaurs that was provided by ice ages in the evolution of mankind? Did the same fluctuations force a brachiating dromaeosaur to turn to the water temporarily, giving it a range of advantages just as Morgan argues for mankind’s predecessor?

"Stenonychosaurus had an opposable thumb, stood upright about three feet tall and had binocular vision. It had all the ingredients of success that we see later in the development of the apes. Stenonychosaurs were the chief predators on Cretaceous mammals and that there must have been quite a lot of them because, by the end of the Cretaceous, there were a lot of mammals, though they were small. Nevertheless few have been found as fossils, just as complete fossil mammals from that period are also rare. The fossil record is a poor indicator of past life.

"By extrapolating trends observable in the dinosaurs like stenonychosaurus to beyond their extinction, an idea of what the intelligent dinosaur might have become can be deduced. A model of such a �dinosauroid� is on display in Ottawa. They are assumed to have had scaly skin, large oval eyes with vertically slit pupils, a three fingered hand, one digit of which would be opposed, three toed feet and no external sex organs. Communication would have sounded similar to birdsong.

"But 65 million years, even in a thought experiment, seems too long for an active, warm-blooded creature already up and running to need to develop what mammals did in the same period of time from a standing start. With the mechanisms for rapid change at the disposal of evolution such a long time scale seems unnecessary if not silly. It is more likely that intelligence evolved before the whole dinosaurian dynasty came to an end.

"Perhaps only seven million years ago, the ancestors of human beings were the creatures from which also descended present day chimpanzees. From that time a line branched off the common stock that became human. Mankind apparently reached the threshold of intelligence within perhaps the last five million years. Sixty of the sixty five million years of domination of the earth by mammals elapsed before the intelligent model went into the prototype stage, but then in only about five million years technological society evolved.

"Sixty million years of mammalian evolution to arrive at the threshold of intelligence, yet the dinosaurs had 140 million years at the top�more than twice as long as the mammals. Could animals that succeeded so well for so long fail to develop an intelligent version of their own? There must be a possibility that dinosaurs too achieved thinking status. 65 million years before humans!

"The Ottawa model is a model, not of the impossible but of the possible. Not of the hypothetical dinosauroid today but the actual anthroposaur of 65 million years ago."

We give some credit to Tino Nikos and use his term for the intelligent dinosaurs. Anthroposaur is the better term: it is more descriptive than dinosauroid. And the hypothetical vision of dinosauroid evolution is vastly different from that of Tino Nikos.

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
© Copyright AskWhy! Publications 1997. Quote by all means but credit this source.