Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures

[Xenodog]

More good posts Vertigo!
On their intelligence I remember in the 'Science and Making of' of BBC The Ballad of Big Al documentary (if you're in the US you may have seen it under the title of just 'Allosaurus' or something?) they had a brain scan of a theropod dinosaur and I think it resembled a crocodile brain more than a bird's. But both this and my memory of it are dated  - the programme over 10 years old.
That's also very interesting, though I guess when you think about it not that surprising, on how warmth may affect reptile performance in tests. Monitor lizards too are very intelligent with some capable of counting.

I agree with a lot of your speculation. Considering the prey most theropods had to deal with may have been large, dangerous or hard to catch learning behaviour from parents would be hugely beneficial and also present in practically all mammalian and avian predators today.

[OmegaZilla]

This thread is better than diamonds.

[Greedo]

Old news but just found it and its incredible

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17687174

[Bat Chain Puller]

I wish they'd find something preserved that doesn't so much resemble something we already see plenty of at this point in time on earth. Because that just looks like a baby elephant. A Giant Sloth, howbout? Suckers were like 20 feet tall with massive claws.

[UFO-Man]

There is another option. Rather than producing mammoth DNA from scratch, you could tweak DNA from an African elephant. The genomes of the two species differ by just 0.6 percent, half the difference between us and chimpanzees. By identifying and swapping the different sequences, you could potentially rewrite an elephant genome so that it reads like a mammoth one.

Palaeontologist Jack Horner is trying something similar by rolling back a chicken's genes into a state more like its extinct dinosaur ancestors, and scientists like Harvard University's George Church are developing techniques that can rewrite vast swathes of DNA at once. But even if the technology catches up with the ambition, Schuster says: "That's not making a mammoth. It's 'mammothifying' an elephant." The resulting creature may be a more mammoth-like version of today's pachyderms, but it won't be the real deal.

I think mammothifying an elephant would be cool, Yes I know it would not be a Woolly Mammoth.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/12/mammoth-deextinction/

Anyone atleast want a Mammoth-ish Elephant.

[Bat Chain Puller]

Rolling back life forms on a genetic level to earlier incarnations seems like 'a way' to achieve what cloning can not at the moment. It's more like reverse engineering. But it will never be the same as producing something that once lived from ancient materials.

[UFO-Man]

The woolly mammoth genome has been mapped, looks like a complete strand of DNA may be synthesised in the future.

May be a little outdated for this picture on the genome..

Spoiler

[close]

During his session, George Church confidently stated that enough of the mammoth genome is now known that biologists could sufficiently alter living elephants into mammoth hybrids capable of living in the Arctic. That's easy enough to say offhand, but later the same day Beth Shapiro laid out how little we actually know about mammoth genetics and the hurdles involved in using DNA scraps to reinvent a mammoth.

But let's say that researchers really are able to create a shaggy elephant they present to the world as a cloned woolly mammoth. Based on last Friday's presentations, that creature is going to be a hybrid created by tweaking Asian elephant biology into mammoth form, and that undoubtedly adorable baby will not have any true mammoth role models from which to learn how to be a mammoth. And if such an animal was introduced to the wild, its habitat would most likely be a proxy of Ice Age ecology not quite like what it used to be.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/19/reinventing-the-mammoth/

Want the new update.

http://www.sunad.com/index.php?tier=1&article_id=29012

So what's your view on this.

[Vertigo]

More good posts Vertigo!
On their intelligence I remember in the 'Science and Making of' of BBC The Ballad of Big Al documentary (if you're in the US you may have seen it under the title of just 'Allosaurus' or something?) they had a brain scan of a theropod dinosaur and I think it resembled a crocodile brain more than a bird's. But both this and my memory of it are dated  - the programme over 10 years old.

Why thank you!

I'm English, so yup, it's Big Al to me too. I'm not particularly fond of Walking With Dinosaurs but I remember loving that special.
It's funny how ten years is now enough to form an era gap in palaeontology, when the science is two centuries old. The rate of discovery over the past few decades has been increasingly scorching. But that research still sounds right - most dinosaur brains were reptilian in structure, and even maniraptoran brains were a bit closer to those of crocs than of birds (if memory serves, they reached about 30% of the way to the latter). Allosaurus is just outside of Coelurosauria, so it'd be at around 1%.

I also think the same of carnosaurs like Allosaurus or Mapusaurus. They had longer arms, one extra claw (three vs. two), and serrated teeth designed for slicing because if you're tackling large sauropods, you aren't going to stand your ground and fight tooth and nail. It's easier to take nips here and there and wait for it to bleed out.

I'd just like to add, I like this theory. Also adds reason for the allosaurs to team up (regardless of whether they were mobbing or organised), as it would take forever for a single predator to bleed out a sauropod - and the more bites it took, the greater the risk of injury to the attacker.

[Xenodog]

Oh really, how come you didn't like it? 4 year old me certainly did. 

And yeah that's really interesting too. It's also cool just how fast ideas come and go and how the evolve. When paleontologists first discovered these animals who'd have thought they could be nimble and bird-like?
That and other cool chunks of the history of this science like 'The Bone Wars', feather discoveries and the debate of whether large theropods just scavenged or not.

[maledoro]

This should be part of the prehistoric creatures thread.

[Ratchetcomand]

Any love for the Gojirasaurus? I always like the design of the dino and that's he is named after Godzilla.

[Greedo]

So they have got the DNA , there going to revive those things.

[WinterActual]

Old news but just found it and its incredible

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17687174

I can't believe how human like this thing is. Its like I am looking at real human being.

[Ratchetcomand]

How do we know it's a normal elephant?

[DoomRulz]

Certainly true, predators tend to evolve in response to their prey (herbivores are less tied to their predators' evolution, as generally the percentage taken by predation isn't large. Then again, most herbivores in history haven't had to contend with Tyrannosaurus rex...). The question is why the herbivores needed to grow so huge, and why many smaller animals became marginalised or extinct in the last age of the Cretaceous (the Maastrichtian).
My guess is that it had something to do with their diet. I know certain types of grasses appeared at some point in the Cretaceous, but am not sure exactly when. A larger stomach aids digestion, so if the Maastrichtian herbivores were needing to cope with a wider variety of food, or just tougher stuff, then it might explain the growth spurt.

I think you answered your question of need when you said, "most herbivores in history haven't had to contend with Tyrannosaurus Rex". Large carnivores dictate that prey need to evolve to defend themselves on equal footing, even though carnivores do need to be ahead in that arms race. I think diet combined with an incessant appetite is what fueled their growth. If you all do for a 12-hour period (perhaps more) is eat nutrient-rich food, you'll grow enormous.

Dinosaur intelligence is an incredibly tricky subject, I ranted about it a little while ago. Probably fair to assume that any dinosaur with a lower EQ than a crocodile wasn't terribly bright, and many of the groups may be comparable to each other, but other than that, the only accurate assumption is that we don't really have a clear impression of what they could do. My two-minute bout of googling suggests that avian intelligence is governed by a region of the brain called the nidopallium caudolaterale, and I've never seen a study of this in dinosaurs.
But no dinosaur brain is entirely comparable to that of a bird, and they probably aren't comparable to crocodiles either, so until we put a Compsognathus through a maze to find some cheese, I wouldn't put faith in any assessment of dinosaur intelligence.

Intelligence aside though, it's true that the modern avian brain structure was constantly developing throughout Coelurosauria and well into the early birds, so the 'primitive' label is indeed accurate as a comparator to their descendants. I seem to have lost my notes, but I dimly remember that a tyrannosaur brain is around 5% of the way from reptile brain structure to bird.
It's important to make the distinction that this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with intelligence though, some reptiles can be surprisingly smart. I remember reading a study in which a heated-up tortoise was put around the same maze as a rat, and it solved it more efficiently - whereas it fared poorly in rooms below its peak operating temperature, the state that all previous reptillian studies had been performed.

Anyway. Specialisation is a result of learned behaviour, so I suppose a lot of it depends on how long theropods were raised by their parents. Aside from this resulting in parental teaching of hunting techniques, animals with extended rearing periods tend to have more flexible behaviour, less programmed by instinct (this is just me speculating based on animals I'm familiar with, so feel free to call bullshit on that one). But I see learned specialisation in animals as disparate as great white sharks, lions, orcas and harris hawks, so it wouldn't surprise me to see it in dinosaurs.

The bottom line is that any predator needs to be just smarter than the prey it's going after. I don't imagine dinosaurs were particularly cunning in the way they would bring down prey but I do believe that on some level, they might have had basic reasoning to know when something is working and when something isn't. Of course, I don't have any facts to back this up but I imagine a tyrannosaurid facing down a ceratopsian head-on knows that it likely won't eating that night.