New study challenges view of dinosaurs as intelligent creatures
Dinosaurs were «more like smart giant crocodiles» but not as intelligent as monkeys as an earlier study had found, according to new research. In a study published in January 2023, neuroscientist and author Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, US, had said that brains of theropod dinosaurs, a species of which is T. rex, had neurons comparable to those in the brains of monkeys and baboons. Dinosaurs like T. rex, or Tyrannosaurus rex, had an exceptionally high number of neurons, «which would make these animals not only giant but also long-lived and endowed with flexible cognition, and thus even more magnificent predators than previously thought,» the author wrote in the study published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.
In the latest research, an international team of palaeontologists, behavioural scientists and neurologists re-examined the brains of dinosaurs, including T. rex, and found them to behave more like reptiles.
They were more like «smart giant crocodiles,» according to study author Darren Naish from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, UK.
The team found that the size of the dinosaur brains had been overestimated, along with neuron counts, and showed that gauging the intelligence of a species based on neuron count estimates is not reliable. The findings are published in The Anatomical Record journal.
«Neuron counts are not good predictors of cognitive performance, and using them to predict intelligence in long-extinct species can lead to highly misleading
