Anthroposaurus Sapiens
Did the dinosaurs develop intelligence before Adam?
Some dinosaur iconoclasts have dared to ask this question, but even they have merely answered: They couldn"t have. Thus Bakker asks:
Why didn"t [the dinosaurs] evolve larger cerebral systems? Why didn"t they eventually produce super-intelligent species capable of making stone tools?
Desmond compares mammals with the superior dinosaurs and wonders:
Why did not "Man" land on the moon in the Cretaceous?
adding that by Man he meant a creature filling the ecological role of humans. Sagan asks if the dinosaurs had not all been mysteriously extinguished some sixty-five million years ago, would the saurornithoides have continued to evolve into increasingly intelligent forms?
All believe dinosaurs would have reached intelligence were it not for the Cretaceous terminal extinction. And all agree that they failed to achieve it because they died out first.
I disagree.
Some dinosaurs 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 created the mass extinction that marks the end of that geological era. Though the direct evidence is sparse—I give what little there is in the next chapter—the circumstantial evidence is compelling. 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 sixty 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?
We might find ourselves realizing simultaneously that the anthroposaur preceded us, and that we have just stumbled over the precipice of our own extinction.
Mankind has adopted its position of global domination in just five million years. The dinosaurs, we have seen, were warm-blooded, active creatures and usurped the rule of 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.
- via http://web.ukonline.co.uk/michael.magee/awwls/00/wls143.html
And now, a word from the Council On Human-Reptilian Allegiance:
Dinosaurs are not just one species like man but a vast group of creatures which lived for millions of years - the modern equivalent is the whole of the mammals. Like the mammals only one dinosaur was likely to achieve intelligence. Just as remains of the intelligent mammal are scarce, one can expect the remains of the intelligent dinosaur to be scarce. Gribbon and Cherfas assure us:
The chances of finding fossils of an evolutionary variation that lasts only a few tens of thousands of years are slim.
Writer, Brad Steiger, in his book, Worlds Before Our Own, develops the theme of the cataclysmic seven worlds legends of the Seneca indians. Much of his research supports the thesis of intelligent dinosaurs. The anthroposaurs might have been one of the seven worlds!
Discussing the question of what would remain after an advanced civilization had been destroyed, he compares our own culture and technology with that of an ancient civilization. If a catastrophe were to happen to us now, he asks, what would remain for archaeologists to unearth 15,000 years from now?
He answers:
We are builders in wood and metal. Our most majestic stone buildings are little more than facades supported by thin tendons of steel. In a thousand years, even without flood, fire or nuclear warfare, our major cities would be little more than rubble... But if we were to enter another ice age and enormous glaciers should creep down from the north, as they have several times in the past million years, everything in their inexorable path would be pulverized.
Perhaps Velikovsky is correct when he writes, "Prior civilizations are buried so deeply within the lower strata of the earth that we simply do not have any archaeological evidence of their existence." - COHRA
At the SETI conference last week I was surprised to hear NASA’s Chris McKay suggest we look for dinosaur relics on the moon. Dinos went suddenly extinct about 65M years ago, and the dino fossil record seems spotty enough that we could have missed a lineage that went from possum to human sized brains in the ~10M year period it took mammals. We could also have missed relics of a stone-tool phase that lasted only .2M years. But a dino lander left on the moon should stay visible a very long time.
Humans have apparently already dug up a substantial fraction of the richest near-surface Earth metal deposits. So a dino civilization that went much beyond our metal usage would have left a signature in reduced rich metal deposits. And since the metal doesn’t actually disappear, they would also have left "strange" metal-junkyard deposits. If modest efforts by geologists could exclude this possibility, that seems well worth the effort.
It would be very big and bad news to hear that metal-using dinos suddenly went extinct just when the other dinos did, and immediately after becoming big metal users. If so, either dinos destroyed themselves with far more power than we humans can now muster, or powerful aliens exterminated them.
- overcomingbias
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