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Two neurobiologists from the University of Alberta have joined an international team of scientists to refute a study in 2023 claiming that Tyrannosaurus rex was as smart as primates.
The team, which includes associate researcher Cristian Gutierrez-Ibanez and Doug Wylie, professor of neuroscience with the U of A’s department of biological sciences, has published new findings refuting a 2023 study that claimed dinosaurs like the T. Rex could have been as smart as baboons and could share information and use tools.
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“There were a lot of people who thought the record needed to be set straight,” Gutierrez-Ibanez said in a news release Monday. “Especially because it has reached the press. You get this popular idea that T. Rex is super smart and can use tools and have culture and you go, ‘Whoa.'”
In a new study published in the journal The Anatomical Record, the team examined the techniques used by the author of the 2023 study, neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, to estimate the size of a dinosaur and the number of neurons it had. The Herculano-Houzel assumptions were found to be unreliable.
“She’s focused on the neuron numbers, and they’re too high anyway,” Wylie said in the statement.
The new study explains that. Although all birds are dinosaurs, many other dinosaurs were reptiles with brains much different from those of mammals and birds. Most notably, their brains do not fill their skulls like the brains of mammals and are less densely packed with neurons than mammals and birds. The structure of the reptilian brain also limits the complexity of their social behaviour.
The team concluded that the T. Rex was probably only as smart as a crocodile, not a baboon.
“We don’t rule out T. Rex,” Gutierrez-Ibanez said. “We’re saying that claiming that T. Rex has the intelligence of a baboon and culture might be taking it too far.”
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