Ward says that when dinosaurs first evolved during the Mesozoic --- the era spanning some 250 to 65 million years ago --- Earth's atmospheric oxygen levels were much too low for large brains to have developed. “To have enough energy for intelligence is going to require oxygen,” said Ward.
Just this week, paleontologists described a long-necked dinosaur as big as two elephants with a brain the size of a lime. The smartest dinosaurs were about as smart as birds (which, after all, are descendants of dinosaurs), and the smartest dinosaurs then were not as smart as the smartest birds today, such as crows.
Troodon is believed to be the smartest dinosaur ever, with an EQ of 5.8. This small coelurosaurian dinosaur (similar evolutionary group to modern birds) had a huge brain, especially considering its size, making it the smartest among dinosaurs.
No animal will develop human-like intelligence if its circumstances don't become similar to those that required our ancestors to develop bigger brains.
And T. rex, with its brain weighing one-third of 1 kilogram, had an estimated 3.3 billion cortical neurons—a higher density than baboons, Herculano-Houzel reports.
rex, which had fangs as long as bananas, if you include the roots. However strong, that armor couldn't have stopped bullets, says Philip Senter, a paleontologist at Fayetteville State University. “It's still bone; it's brittle,” he tells The Verge.
Oddly, T. Rex appears to have been sexually dimorphic in another way: many paleontologists now believe that the females of this species were significantly larger than the males, over and above the size of their hips.
Chimpanzees
We share 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, so it comes as no surprise that countless hours of research have been dedicated to understanding the intelligence and behavior of our sister species. This research has firmly established that chimps are one of the most intelligent species on earth.
Humans have certainly had a profound effect on their environment, but our current claim to dominance is based on criteria that we have chosen ourselves. Ants outnumber us, trees outlive us, fungi outweigh us. Bacteria win on all of these counts at once.
Unsurprisingly, chimpanzees are one of the most intelligent animals on this planet—next to humans, of course. Similar to how humans inherit their intelligence from their mother, a chimpanzee's intelligence also greatly relies on their genes.
In fact, not only was T. rex roughly as intelligent as a chimp, but it had enormous olfactory bulbs that imparted a strong sense of smell, elongate and looping inner ear canals that coordinated rapid eye movements and quick reflexes, and an elongate cochlea that could hear low-frequency sounds.
Children with an 'intense interest' in dinosaurs may have a higher intelligence level, a report has found. If you know a little one that is obsessed with prehistoric animals, then it may be that they're an extremely smart child.
Did you know that the Velociraptor has an I.Q. of 0.20 wh...
Combined with a powerful memory, these abilities make the chimpanzee the most intelligent (non-human) animal on Earth.
1: Chimpanzee
Chimpanzees can learn sign language to communicate with humans. Topping our list of smartest animals is another great ape, the chimpanzee. The impressive intellectual abilities of this animal have long fascinated humans.
In the 1880s a well-preserved Stegosaurus braincase allowed Othniel Charles Marsh to get a cast of the brain cavity, which gave an idea of the brain size. The endocast showed that the brain was indeed small: relative to body size, maybe the smallest among the dinosaurs.
New genetic findings suggest that early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction. The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population—an indicator of genetic diversity—of early human species back then, including Homo erectus, H.
Genetic studies have demonstrated that humans are still evolving. To investigate which genes are undergoing natural selection, researchers looked into the data produced by the International HapMap Project and the 1000 Genomes Project.
Horseshoe crabs are, arguably, the most successful animals on earth, having survived for 445 million years. That's 440 million years longer than humans and 130 million years longer than the über-survivor cockroach.
According to several behavioral measures, Coren says dogs' mental abilities are close to a human child age 2 to 2.5 years. The intelligence of various types of dogs does differ and the dog's breed determines some of these differences, Coren says.
Ever since researchers sequenced the chimp genome in 2005, they have known that humans share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.
The new research shows that dolphins have the longest memory yet known in any species other than people. Elephants and chimpanzees are thought to have similar abilities, but they haven't yet been tested, said study author Jason Bruck, an animal behaviorist at the University of Chicago.
Dinosaurs must have had sex to reproduce. As in nearly all modern-day reptiles, males would have deposited sperm inside females, which would later lay fertilized eggs containing developing dinosaur embryos.
Based on the size of the egg clutches and the bones of the parent, Varricchio thinks that it was the males that cared for the babies. And given that small, predatory dinosaurs were the ancestors of modern birds, fatherly care was probably also the norm for the earliest members of our feathered friends.
As tyrannosaurs and their theropod cousins evolved larger heads and a bipedal posture, they used their forelimbs less. They started to use their heads more for catching and killing prey. As a result, the forelimbs didn't grow as much as the rest of their bodies did, according to this idea.