Was Tyrannosaurus as smart as a baboon? 

The idea of a Tyrannosaur smacking an unsuspecting Hadrosaur with a big stick that it held with its mouth instead of bitting is comical.

Even if you took the lower estimate, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with the mental capacity of a large dog sounds terrifying lol

Primate like intelligence is one thing, but did any dinosaurs have arms that could throw poop?

I'm not sure how many of those comments are serious or just in jest, but in case some of them are based on a real misunderstanding: Tool use doesn't necessarily include an incredibly complex motion limited to the forelimbs. Just like in the case of crocs it could also pertain preparing a sort of cover from materials. Or it could mean dropping something heavy, or grabbing a stick with the jaw and use it for additional reach.

Neurons in birds are tightly packed, making them far smarter than they should be for their brain sizes compared to other extant animals (especially corvids & psittacines). I do wonder though if this feature evolved to save weight in an animal that needs to be able to fly efficiently. In which case tightly-packed Neurons may well have not evolved in non-avian dinosaurs.

I think at the very least this paper will get people re-evaluating the idea that dinosaurs were stupid based on encephalization quotient and maybe even consider if EQ has a mammal bias.

I've been saying for a long time that animal behaviourists should get together with palaeontologists, especially after watching some of the older cgi documentaries about dinosaurs. T.rex definitely did not confront and roar at its prey before attacking lol

Never considered any of the reptiles I've kept as smart except for the Nile monitor. It hunted in the house methodically. If there was was something to find (never was) it was gonna find it. Had the harness for it outside, if you set it down on a super rotten log it would tear it apart like it was it's job. It relentlessly harassed my chick at the time and eyed me with suspicion unless I was feeding it.

Somebody: "T rex could use tools!" T Rex: *wiggles tiny arms*

Thanks so much for commenting on this. I couldn’t find anything talking about what as assumed and if the approach taken was actually viable or a case of someone assuming they knew all they needed to know even though they come from another discipline

I would be inclined to assume many therapods are smarter than we give them credit for...Buuut with that said humans have kinda tainted the way we view intelligence since we compare everything to us and if it doesn't operate in the same or a similar way our first reaction is to just assume it's not to smart. I would imagine that tool use probably wasn't super prolific in dinosaurs just due to how specialized alot of them are there probably wouldn't be a need for that tool use. Instead i would imagine just general problem-solving skills and hunting tactics would be the primary ways for it to manifest in therapod dinosaurs along with perhaps some more complex social behavior. That said i have a hard time thinking that of all things one of the largest predatory dinosaurs in the form of T-rex would form any sort of "society" just due to the logistics of it all, how are you going to feed a troop of two dozen rexes? Even if they are constantly migrating nomadic creatures they are going to be hunting areas dry in a matter of a month with that many huge stomachs to feed.

Any predator that successfully targets a lawyer taking a dump has a high level of intelligence.

To quote Darwin: "The brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man." It's not about the size or mass but how well you use it.

Oh, if only there were a peer review process to make suggestions to authors of scientific papers!

Tyrannosaurus continues to be the most overpowered thing that ever existed.

Maybe an interesting of T. rex tool use, or at least problem solving, would be maybe collecting nest materials during some hadrosaur or Triceratops nesting season, setting up an ambush spot nearby, and attacking whatever comes too close. Like the crocodiles

Never knew about crocs using tools. That puts a nice bracket around dinos and opens up some interesting thought experiments. If a croc can use tools with its croc brain that also begs the question of how we can even qualify intelligence at all. Its swiftly becoming an almost useless metric for determining behavior IMO.

Moral of the story: nothing is conclusive, and scientists of different fields need to cooperate closely.

From the start it was obvious that this paper wouldn't make any hard revelation on dinosaur intelligence. But it does provide us with a good thought experiment. Historically dinosaurs were just dismissed as a clade of dim-witted oversized lizards. And that's because they had a quote: "walnut-sized brain" and small brains equal stupid. But there is a lot more to intelligence than just measuring sizes. As we've seen, even crocodilians have shown a lot more complex behaviour in past studies.

Imagine, you're just standing there with a Tyrannosaurus in front of you, with it's eyes shining with intelligence as it watches you. Absolutely terrifying.

IMO, it would require some brains and teamwork to hunt the T-rex main prey, the triceratops. it's quite a challenging meal...

Now I just can't unsee a T-Rex poking a log with his mouth inside of a prey lair just to make it get out while the rest of the pack watches.

I think there’s a decent argument that some dinosaurs probably constructed large structures, at least for nests and mating rituals. However, there definitely weren’t tyrannical robber barons around in the Cretaceous, so unfortunately no Maastrichtian Industrial Revolution or prehistoric Gilded Age. The K-pg explosion saw an increase in the distribution of Earth’s crust throughout the atmosphere and the deposition of an iridium rich clay layer, rather than any significant economic growth.

I had wondered if the intelligence of therapod dinosaurs might be underestimated since I read that their surviving corvid cousins have brains more densely packed with neurons than those of mammals.

YOU!!! You're AWESOME, dude! Whoever you are, wherever you are, thank you for your level headed, no nonsense, straight up good sense! Ugh!!! It's very very very difficult to REALLY know something, if we can even really know anything at all. I'm glad people like you are on RU-vid reminding everyone that just because there's an idea out there, doesn't mean it's accurate, even if it's very cool

The idea of a trex using tools seems a bit strange for his physiology. But maybe they were developing what can be called "social skill". Maybe complex groups or something similar

So . . . Tyrannosaurs couldn’t be that intelligent because they’re more “ Primitive “ than modern birds. MEANWHILE, cephalopods, the humble mollusks use tools, solve complex problems, engage in play, show self awareness, and even perspective taking. So perhaps neither side should be quick to generalize.

Heard bout it yesterday and was sceptical. Good to have neutrality and NOT jumping to conclusions. Like i said: evolution favours those, who can hold a gun. How has tyrannosaurus made and used tools? With its hands, or the fantastically dextrous lips?

All I can imagine is a rex sharpening a stick or rock to sheer bits of meat off bones to eat or to feed their babies with

I really hope the next revolution in paleontology is expanding our knowledge of dinosaur behavior. There could data out there that jus TVrequires cross disciplinary work and different approaches to be found.

THANK you, those headlines have been driving me batty too. god bless restrained science education

I think that we don't really need to look too far back in order to figure out the behaviors of dinos. I think that present-day animals who have grown into certain niches can answer a lot of questions we have about ancient life. I always equated t-rex to having a behavior closely resembling that of a Kodiak bear. Smart enough to be the apex for its environment. I feel like suggesting that it was as smart as a baboon is a little overreaching. I'm probably wrong, though. I'm no nuero scientist.

Smart means its decision making processes, not mechanical capabilities. A Trex being as smart as a baboon does not mean that it does what a baboon does, it means it can make decisions on the same level as a baboon. It won't engage in tool use beyond maybe nest construction if they made nests, but it WILL be able to rationalize a LOT better than yoir general animal. This will help in everything in life, as intelligence is the most OP stat in the game of life. Hunting, maybe they set traps, maybe they could calculate good ambush routes and pinpoint the best risk/reward target within a herd. Communication between different Trexs was probably very complex, like crows (Trexs could also communicate with eachother over extremely long distances with low-frequency noise). There are so many uses for intelligence beyond picking up sticks and swinging them around. 65 million years is the max possible time it took for us humans to get as intelligent as we are, it's not so far-fetched to assume that the hundreds of millions of years of dinosaur evolution produced at least some highly intelligent creatures. And further incidental evidence is that pretty much every single apex predator (and apex animal in general) has a higher intelligence than a lot of the animals below it.

A chicken can fly and run around for a few seconds after its head has been cut completely off. A lot of brain mass in birds is in the torso, not the head. If theropods are similar in that regard, this study is leaving out a lot of brain mass by concentrating only on the skull...

Funny enough, if dinosaurs had produced a sapient species that achieved civilization, we might never know. Geologic time might be enough to scatter even civilizations of our size to the wind in a handful of millions of years. The Silurian Hypothesis makes for a fun thought experiment; though I personally don't believe other technological civilizations have existed on this planet before us.

I really don't think we can make many honest inferences about the intelligence of T-rex with the information we have. Frankly I think we're bad enough at evaluating the intelligence of extant animals, let alone animals so vastly different from even their closest living relatives

T-Rex's built the temple of Giza

Thank you for explaining this!!!

If I become a Paleontologist, which I want to, and I'm only 14, but I'd love to figure how these prehistoric creatures actually sounded like. And how they acted around their family, and possibly friends.

W thumbnail,I don't know what else to say. I just love this channel

Yes and the T rex used those two finger hands like tweezers!😱

Grouping owls (one of the dumbest birds) with parrots (the smartest) is an interesting choice

T rex being somewhat intelligent is an interesting idea. This could mean that T rex could form some social bonds, uses branches to scratch its body, and probably planned out hunts/traps. However, I wouldn't believe it to be as intelligent as primates. Maybe more discussion on this matter will highlights how smart T rex and other dinosaurs were.

Also , the one thing that is rarely discussed when we talk about dinosaurs and "other" civilizations is ... How large are the time gaps between even the lives of animals which fossils we find. Because, lets be real here - we find only scraps, few lucky exceptions as fossils - there were thousands and thousands of species, remains of Which we will never find - because there is none. And now, consider this - our species exists for a very limited time. The time gaps between some of the dino fossils is so vast, that even if there were great artificial buildings like the whole New York city, it would be completely erased at the time the creature-holder of next fossil would walk the land it was build on. And even if there were some primitive civilizations at that time, it would take few thousand years to completely destroy all their tools and buildings.

this just in: 'head line' and 'head lice' are 7/8's the same! journalists declare they are same

What i got from this is in the future the show Swamp People could see alligators using camouflage to hunt the humans who are in turn hunting the alligators.

Birds have more compact (smaller but similarly efficient) neurones than mammals and even primates (which are intermediate in size). That explains the high intelligence of some birds like parrots or corvids. But the question remains: how were the neurones of non-avian dinosaurs?

I'm not convinced they were primate level of intelligent, that is really high for any animal, but I could believe as smart as a Crow. They were smart enough to survive as a species around 2 million years, that's a pretty good run.

Well I never expected to hear of a T Rex using tools.

I suspected for a long time that non-avian theropods were just as cognitive advanced as avian theropods. This study also found some ornithischians scored well too which is awesome. sauropods were fairly low though as i suspected. This study was bombarded with criticism on the net but it will open the door for more questions and more studies to be made on the paleoneurology of non-avian dinosaurs.

What kind tools could a T-rex possibly use?

Ayy thats my professor!

Great video

The problem is that today you can publish anything in open access journals without proper peer review. So now serious paleontologists will have to spend 20 years in convincing public that "clever girl" wasn't actually that clever

Another thing we don't know is the number of glial cells. One of the things you notice in mammals as you move to smarter animals is that the number of astrocytes per neuron goes way, way up. Maybe the number of neurons isn't as critical as we think it is.

T. Rex must have been smart; one of them is wearing glasses in the thumbnail! 😊

I imagine many dinosaurs were probably smarter than we give them credit for, but my first thought when I saw the clickbaity articles going around about this was "how could you possibly ascertain that?". It's foolish to try and make claims about how intelligent an extinct animal was based purely on a brain to body size ratio. I would guess that Tyrannosaurus probably had crocodilian levels of intelligence, which are hardly stupid animals, but they aren't exactly primate level either.

I am nearly bursting at the seams holding back on the data you wouldn't believe. Instead of dribbling clues I simply recommend the Distant Origin episode of Voyager. Star Trek got so many things right. That episode doesn't reflect my version of dino evolution but it opens a lot of doors. Season 3, episode 23.

now that's a gentleman

Callaghan, 2023 Paleontology is here, Chilean Dinos and Titanosaur Eggs in India.

Who was the artist of the Dilophosaurus behind you? It's beautiful. Also, great video!

I had a Great Pyrnees. VERY smart dog. Imagine a Trex that can communicate With a different Species, Acknowledge when your helping, or simply. Bark

If that's the case, then Troodontids are as smart as a human.

T-Rex arms actually make more sense now that we know they were pretty smart.

i know you likely didnt mean for the this image to pup in my brain when you mentioned that some crocdilians pile sticks ontop of themselves to atract birds but i got the mental image of a t rex doing the same just this massice creature hidinf under this hill sized piled of sticks got a chuckly out of me

Thanks for this vid, already seeing videos with click-baitey thumbnails going around citing this paper

Crocodilians also have high-neuron density, so…🤷‍♂️

Next thing we know Someone discovers t-rex Atlantis

croc brain confirmed

Great video! It is important to say that yes, elephants have many more neurons than we do (about 3 times as many), but the difference is not simply due to synapses, but to where those neurons are located. 97% of elephant neurons are in the cerebellum, not the cortex (they have about 1/4 of our number of neurons there). I'm pretty sure the Herculano-Houzel paper can be improved (e.g. by using a more recent data source), but there's a big misunderstanding among palaeontologists (and many comparative cognition experts) about the importance of having more neurons in the pallium. Herculano-Huzel has great articles on this. Both fields can learn a lot from each other.

even if it did have a crocodile brain, crocodiles are pretty smart all things considered. Not society-building but pretty good

There’s no reason to assume dinosaurs had the small-sized, highly connected brain neurons seen in some more intelligent modern birds. As you point out, their brains were not the same shape as birds’ brains either. Overall, this sounds like someone who jumped into a different field assuming their own expertise would solve problems. In fact, the subject of brain size and function and relative metabolic levels in dinosaurs have already been intensively studied for many years, with many different types of data analyzed. Judging by relative brain size and morphology, tyrannosaurs were not the brightest dinosaurs. Some of the dromeosaurs, for example were probably cleverer and were certainly more agile hunters. But media pieces about T rexes maybe using tools and possibly being as smart as baboons certainly will get a lot of attention.

The author of the study never claimed that T. rex was smarter than a baboon. She simply presented her data, which indicated that T. rex possibly had more neurons in its brain than baboons. This video even states that elephant brains contain more neurons than human brains. If anything, it's clickbait headlines like the one used for this video that confuse the general public on what the science actually says.

I doubt animals like T. Rex had primate like intelligence. But I believe it could problem solve. Same with other large therapods. They had to hunt to survive so I would think that would be part of it. Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought they had found some T. Rex specimens grouped together. (I could be wrong here.) If that's the case perhaps they may have developed small social groups? It's not hard to imagine really.

I saw someone arguing in another video that one of the problems with the study is that in its conclusion it claimed that the sexual maturity of the T.Rex would be at 5/6 years (10 years earlier that is the current consensus) and the maximum age of 40/50 years, also higher than currently speculated. Does anyone have any comments on these points?

Principal to the conversation, evolution doesn't care. It does not "move in a direction". It is merely doctrinal conviction related to survival of species after global or local disaster. When folks write as if evolution has purpose I get angry. Check the comments to see what I mean.

I could see a Trex leaving some of a carcass to eat any scavengers.

This is the second YT vid I've seen regarding this new paper; as is all too frequent, the findings are overblown, misinterpreted and grossly misapplied and generalised Well, a word of caution. This is highly speculative, inference-based investigation still at an early stage. It's far from persuasive, let alone conclusive. Nonetheless, as was the case with that T. rex collagen protein paper that ultimately lead to the press ridiculously reporting chickens are the closest living T. rex descendants. This will end up in mainstream press as 'dinosaurs are just as smart as us' in a few weeks.

@Raptor Chatter I agree with many of the points you’re making about tyrannosaur brains looking more like croc brains and the paper’s author scaling up bird brains. However, we have a growing amount of evidence of social behavior in tyrannosaurs. There are several mass tyrannosaur burial sites with young and old animals, all killed in the same flood. There are also tyrannosaur walkways with multiple tyrannosaurs moving together. The evidence is there for Albertasaurus, Gorgosaurus, and Daspletasaurus to have hunted in packs. Probably it was an adaptation to their prey: various Centrosaurs and Ceratopsians and Hadrosaurs moving in vast herds at this time.

I can, off the top of my head, think of one "most probable" thing that T-Rexes would be using tools for; nest building.

Most birds build things, nests. Some are big, some are quite sophisticated. We have needed tools for at least 5M years. A group of humans carrying pointy sticks could defend themselves. No stick they're bipedal cat-food.

small arm BIG SPEAR

Lol. T-Rex trying to use any tool with it’s tiny arms. Lol. I know that is not the point but such a lovely image. Is nest building tool use?

Pretty sure my parrots are as smart as a baboon. Love those guys. Nacho and Honey.

I wanted to write something about this theory being wild but then got overwhelmed by the subjectivity of inteligence and existance

*Sad media T-rex noises*

Trex as smart as a Corvus is scary

Did you just suggest that the people who made the pyramids are traingle shaped?

The author of the study made a video explaining a point of the work: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8eAlBm6RCao.html

The T Rex pyramids are in Agartha, we must immediately send an expedition to Antarctica to find the passage to the land of our people.

Imagine being smart enough to use tools and then Nature gives you useless arms like a T-Rex. The poor things must have been constantly annoyed.

I thought troodon and some raptor species where the ones that were developing intelligence. Not once would I of ever expected Trex to be the smart one.

Without knowing the actual gyrification index of the Tyrannosaur it's intelligence could range from that of a Cassowary to that of a Brown Bear. This paper is all guesswork.

we can not know the iq of an extinct animal

Idk much biology..and so on... But I like channels like this and the comments where educated people dicuss these ideas in a public fashion. Sure, I do not have that level of specialized education, but from how I understand it, a big point is that indeed many things are not at all certain and ever changing with every new link that is found, eg in palaeontology. Like, there are as many different ideas about the "tree of life", about families and species and genera as there are people and samples that reorganize it every second day or so. It is all really not at all easy to understand and translate for a broader audience, is how it looks to me. Let alone the different possibilities and implications of different hypothesis(hypothesi?!) I think an interesting question here would be how/why an apex predator or maybe a carrion eater or sth in between would utilze raised intelligence. It is big and fast and strong and has a huge jaw already. Doesn´t seem like it would really have much "need" to be very clever in most constellations.

Crocodiles also look after their young.

He needed huge computing power just to stay or slowly run on his two legs. Every fall coud have been fatal for T-Rex.

I dunno about it being as smart as a primate or using tools, that seems a little bit extreme. Forming small groups like a lion pride or a wolf pack and hunting large prey together would make more sense

Pyramids aren't human shaped either but I get the joke lol

A T-Rex shaped pyramid would have eroded. Granite erodes at 1/10 an inch per 1000 years, so a 541 foot tall T-Rex pyramid would be gone today. The question about intelligence would be could the average human be smart enough to avoid becoming food. Doubtful given what I see on twitch.