![]() ![]() The author can’t be blamed for devoting a whole chapter to the king of the dinosaurs: T. “It’s a mystery that quite literally has kept me up at night. Yet the head-scratcher remains: Why did early dinosaurs survive the hell of the Triassic extinction, leaving them - free of competitors - to multiply and dominate? “I wish I had a good answer,” Brusatte confesses. Dinosaurs could not have flourished without these dramatic events that reshaped the earth just over 250 million years ago - lava spewing from countless erupting volcanoes, smothering life wherever it flowed, greenhouse gases blanketing the planet, heating the ancient ocean and triggering a sweltering global warming that helped wipe out most living land animals. Brusatte systematically takes us through the various stages of dinosaur evolution, starting with the pre-dino Triassic Period, when a mass extinction cleared the path for their rise. That’s a whole lot smarter than the dinosaurs of stereotype.The geek in me loves the tsunami of fine details flooding the page, written in the breezy style of a rising star millennial scientist. Based on these numbers, we can say that Rex was roughly as smart as a chimp and more intelligent than dogs and cats. By comparison, our EQ is about 7.5, dolphins come in around 4.0 to 4.5, chimps at about 2.2 to 2.5, dogs and cats are in the 1.0 to 1.2 range, and mice and rats languish around 0.5. rex had an EQ in the range of 2.0 to 2.4. ![]() It’s basically a measure of the relative size of the brain compared to the size of the body (because, after all, bigger animals have bigger brains simply because of their body size: elephants have bigger brains than us but are not more intelligent). It’s called the encephalization quotient (EQ). However, there is a straightforward measure that scientists use to roughly compare the intelligence of different animals. ![]() Now, measuring intelligence is riddled with uncertainties, even for humans: just think of all of the IQ tests, exams, SAT scores, and other things that we use to try to assess how smart people are. It’s also a relatively large brain, at least for a dinosaur, which hints that T. It didn’t look anything like our brain but was more of a long tube with a slight kink at its back, surrounded by an extensive network of sinuses. Scans tell us quite a bit about our patient. ![]()
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