We knew that they were perfectly adapted to their world, that they dominated the planet by land, sea and air, that many took care of their young, that some hunted in groups and that, on the whole, the dinosaurs already showed, before becoming extinct more than 60 years ago millions of years, many of the behaviors that currently guarantee the survival of the animals that followed them. Something special, of course, had to have these creatures to be the absolute masters of the world for more than one hundred million years... But the biologist and neuroanatomist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, from Vanderbilt University, in Tennessee, has gone much further. by suggesting in a controversial study that at least some dinosaurs had the same or even more neurons in their brains than modern primates. Which would imply that they were very intelligent, much more than anyone has been able to think until now and enough to use tools, something that only humans and a select handful of other current animals are capable of doing. Related News standard No The dinosaurs that fought with clubs J. de Jorge The ankylosaurs had powerful tails full of spikes that they used to compete for territory or during the mating season The article, published just a few days ago in the 'Journal of Comparative Neurology ', has caused a sensation in the scientific community, especially among paleontologists. Desktop Code We are going to talk about this study:https://t.co/StQ8XWm0kl
It was just published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, which is now also edited by HH herself.https://t.co/pp5KXOa1D2— Kai Caspar | @nomascus@ecoevo.social (@KR_Caspar)
January 7, 2023
Image for mobile, amp and app Mobile code We are going to talk about this study:https://t.co/StQ8XWm0kl
It was just published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, which is now also edited by HH herself.https://t.co/pp5KXOa1D2— Kai Caspar | @nomascus@ecoevo.social (@KR_Caspar)
January 7, 2023
AMP code We are going to talk about this study:https://t.co/StQ8XWm0kl
It was just published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, which is now also edited by HH herself.https://t.co/pp5KXOa1D2— Kai Caspar | @nomascus@ecoevo.social (@KR_Caspar)
January 7, 2023
APP Code We are going to talk about this study:https://t.co/StQ8XWm0kl
It was just published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, which is now also edited by HH herself.https://t.co/pp5KXOa1D2— Kai Caspar | @nomascus@ecoevo.social (@KR_Caspar)
January 7, 2023
Comments on social networks, both for and against, multiply, and the old controversy about 'animal intelligence' takes on a new dimension by now projecting itself into the remote past of life on Earth. Were dinosaurs intelligent or not? That is the question. Measuring intelligence Of course, measuring the degree of intelligence of dinosaurs, or any other extinct creature, whose behavior we cannot directly observe, is not a simple task. To do this, scientists have used for decades an indicator called 'encephalization quotient' (EQ), which is obtained by calculating the relationship between the size and body of the animal. For example, a T. Rex, one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs that ever existed, had an EQ of approximately 2.4, while a German shepherd dog has it 3.1 and a human has it 7.8. According to this, the fearsome tyrannosaurus was 'dumber' than a dog and, of course, much more than a person. But EQ can be misleading, since in many animals body and brain size evolve independently, so using this parameter to measure intelligence can lead to major errors. In search of a more reliable alternative, Suzana Herculano-Houzel decided to measure completely different: the density of neurons in the cerebral cortex, the external area of the brain, critical for the performance of most tasks related to intelligence. The method, which involves dissolving the brains in a detergent solution and then counting the neurons in the resulting 'soup', had already been used to estimate the number of neurons in many species of animals, including humans. The bad thing is that this, obviously, cannot be done with dinosaur brains, which do not withstand the passage of tens of millions of years and, therefore, never reach the hands of scientists. An indirect method Fortunately, and despite their virtual disappearance after the fall of a large meteorite 66 million years ago, dinosaurs did not completely disappear. In fact, the group of theropods, to which carnivores such as the famous velociraptors and T. Rex itself belonged, is related to current birds, which are their direct descendants. So when a large database was published a year ago showing that, compared to reptiles, birds (and mammals) have much higher densities of neurons in their cortices, Herculano-Houzel saw his opportunity: thank you to birds could make an estimate of the neuronal density of dinosaurs. If not all, at least the theropods. To do this, the researcher used last year's database and mixed it with estimates of the brain mass of dinosaurs obtained over the years with computerized tomography scans of their skulls. With this combined data, he developed an equation that relates an animal's brain mass to its approximate number of neurons. And he found that, unsurprisingly, the brains of theropods follow roughly the same rules as modern warm-blooded birds, such as ostriches, while the brains of sauropod dinosaurs, such as Brachiosaurus, are more similar to those of modern cold-blooded reptiles. By crunching the numbers and applying them to specific species, Herculano-Houzel discovered, for example, that Alioramus, a 6-meter-long theropod that lived about 70 million years ago in what is now Mongolia, had just over a billion neurons in their cortex, similar to capuchin monkeys. And that T. Rex, with a brain that weighed just over 300 g, had approximately 3.3 billion cortical neurons, a higher density than that of modern baboons. These results, the researcher says, have made her feel “a completely new respect for the Tyrannosaurus rex. "Something that big, with those teeth, and with the cognitive ability of a baboon... is something truly terrifying." For and against The study, of course, has sparked all kinds of reactions. Some, like Fabien Knoll, from the Dinópolis foundation, in Teruel, are happy to finally have "an idea of the possible number of neurons that dinosaurs could have", although he clarifies that "we would need more data from the fossil record." Others, such as Stig Walsh, senior curator of vertebrate palaeobiology at National Museums Scotland, believe it is “a bunch of conclusions or suggestions based on what is essentially a single extrapolation”. Amy Balanoff, for her part, an evolutionary biologist at Johns Hopkins University, points out that a good part of the data behind the estimates of brain mass made by Herculano-Houzel are outdated, since they are from 2013, when she herself , (Amy Balanoff) published a new updated database in 2020 that provided new data. MORE INFORMATION news Si Teresa de Pedro, precursor of the autonomous vehicle: «We put a driverless car on the road in La Coruña. We were no less than Google» news No The most distant stars in our galaxy are found, more than a million light years away. Despite these doubts, the study has been, in general, well received, since it opens the doors to a better understanding of the mental acuity that these incredible creatures had.