Achi news desk-
Recently, Science proposed a truly terrifying thought — that T. Rex, perhaps the most terrifying predator to walk the earth, was also smart enough to use tools, hunt in packs and transmit information.
Yikes.
But a newspaper is throwing cold water on those dinosaur fever dreams.
“They were very bold claims that needed a second look,” said Cristian Gutierrez, a University of Alberta neuroscientist and co-author of a paper in the Anatomical Record that takes a skeptical view of the intelligent Tyrannosaurus theory.
Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University published research in 2023 that took data on the number of neurons in the brains of the evolutionary descendants of some dinosaurs, such as modern birds, reptiles and turtles, and applied them to fossil brain cases of ancient lizards.
In the Journal of Comparative Neurology, he concluded that T. Rex had somewhere between two and three billion neurons – equivalent to those in the brains of intelligent primates, such as baboons.
“[That] It would make these animals not only giant but also long-lived and endowed with flexible cognition and therefore even more magnificent predators than previously thought,” he wrote.
Uh, no, Gutierrez said.
He writes that Herculano-Houzel greatly overestimated the actual brain size inside the skulls of T. Rex, which was much more closely related to modern crocodiles than birds. Brain tumors contain a significant amount of non-brain fluid and tissue, with as little as 30 percent being given to gray matter.
Additionally, bird brains are much more neuron dense than reptile brains, which further contradicts the Herculano-Houzel comparison.
A new study by Canadian researchers suggests that T. Rexes likely have lips, which means they may look more like Barney than the ferocious monsters in Jurassic Park.
Then there is body size. Even if a T. Rex’s brain held as many neurons as a baboon’s or a baboon’s, that brain had a lot more body to operate.
“Larger animals obviously need more neurons,” Gutierrez said.
“A T. Rex had, let’s say, two billion neurons—about the same as a baboon—but the T. Rex weighed seven tons and the baboon weighed 40 kilos. It’s not the same, right?”
And besides, he says, more neurons don’t necessarily mean more intelligence.
Giraffes have about two billion neurons, but are not known to use tools or transmit culture. Savers, on the other hand, only have about 400 million neurons, but they play games and hold “funerals” for their dead.
In an email, Herculano-Houzel said the authors did not agree with her assumptions about the structure of dinosaur brains.
“I argued, based on raw evidence of body size and estimated brain size, that T. Rex ranks as a modern warm-blooded ostrich,” he said.
“I believe that the various lines of evidence provided in my original 2022 publication make a strong case that T. Rex was warm-blooded.”
Gutierrez said his previous research has shown that there is a correlation between behaviour, brain size and the size of different parts of the brain.
“They are not always simple relationships, but there are relationships. It’s not totally crazy to look at the shape of the T. Rex’s brain,” he said.
He said that dinosaurs that were more closely related to birds, such as the archeopteryx from the Jurassic period, had larger brains and may have had more complex, bird-like behaviour.
Fossils give some indication of how dinosaurs lived. They can show that dinosaurs take care of their young and live in groups, for example.
“But it’s always going to be limited,” Gutierrez said. “That’s the one thing that’s not going to be fossilized – behavior.”
An intelligent T. Rex is highly unlikely, Gutierrez said. Tyrannosaurs probably had smarts closer to those of a crocodile than a primate, so rest easy.
If the thought of a seven ton crocodile lets you rest easy.
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