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The T. rex may have been smarter than previously thought
- jjtheblunt 4y agoI read the article and find myself thinking Michael Crichton made these same (supposedly now new) assertions, based on scientific evidence from research into the topic as a medical doctor himself, 30 years ago, and then based a very famous book and later movie on it.
- deafpolygon 4y agoMaybe the T.rex were farmers, cultivating livestock for their own use.
- david927 4y agoThe author of the paper, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, made a nice video that talks about it as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1tEnm53zDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1tEnm53zDs
- midoridensha 4y agoThe T.Rex, just like all the other dinosaurs of that last era when the Chuxhulub asteroid impact, wasn't very smart: it obviously was too short-sighted to bother developing a decent space program to deal with asteroid impacts. Millions of years later, the dominant species of this planet is just as short-sighted and stupid, if not more so, since we know about the T.Rex's demise by asteroid impact.
- glitchc 4y agoThat's worthy of a chuckle!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rojobuffalo 4y agoReminds of the running joke in Land of the Lost where Will Ferrel's character, Dr. Marshall, keeps slagging off the T. rex for it's small brain.
- Fezzik 4y agoComplete tangent to the article: I believe I have a bad gauge for movies because I think the Ferrel/McBride ‘Land of the Lost’ is a criminally underrated film. I have never met a single other person that had a single positive thing to say about it. And I love it.
- sogen 4y agoHolmes & Watson was great
- causi 4y agoPluto Nash was fun. Thank god HN comments can only be downvoted to -4.
- Larrikin 4y agoI just think Will Ferrell is overrated in general. Almost never laugh at his SNL skits, but never saw them live. I feel he is similarly funny like Adam Sandler is funny. They are objectively comedians but feel they just have so much material and willing to be so over the top you'll eventually laugh at something from the assault of jokes. When Ferrell is subtle like his role in The Office it all just falls totally flat. Every once in a while there's a good role, but you're usually better off looking at the other comedians surrounding them in the role. Land of the Lost was a similar assault, saw it for the first time a few weeks ago when searching for a comedy. A lot of bad jokes but enough humorous concepts to not make you want to turn it off. Never a movie I'd recommend or want to watch again
- olivermuty 4y agoRon Burgundy would like a word!
- zone411 4y agoThere is some criticism of this paper: https://twitter.com/TomHoltzPaleo/status/1611853690654150657 https://twitter.com/TomHoltzPaleo/status/1611853690654150657 https://twitter.com/antrodemon/status/1611540542269317122 https://twitter.com/antrodemon/status/1611540542269317122 https://twitter.com/AWannabeGhost/status/1611781106516492288 https://twitter.com/AWannabeGhost/status/1611781106516492288
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago>“What if the asteroid hadn’t happened?” Herculano-Houzel said, referring to the cosmic collision thought to have driven most dinosaurs to extinction. “That’s a whole other world that would have been terrifying.” I wonder if they would have developed nuclear weapons and dropped them on their fellow dinosaurs. Terrifying!
- whycome 4y agoWhat if they developed a type of, um, space-based weapon. Where it would take large chunks of rock and nudge them towards targeted areas of the earth. Except it didn't go to plan
- rcarmo 4y agoWorse, imagine if by some trick of convergent evolution they had invented JavaScript as well…
- ithkuil 4y agoI wonder what their Mozilla logo would have been
- deafpolygon 4y agoA picture of an ape.
- andrewflnr 4y agoA trilobite. Hey, it could even kind of fit in a circle.
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoI guess he hadn’t watched Dr Who ;) People don’t give animals enough credit. Cows are considered stupid animals but spend some time with them and you’ll find they have personalities, moods, preferences, friendships (certain cows like to be near each other), foes (certain cows do not like to be near each other), if they expect to be fed at a certain time of day they get fidgety and vocal if your late, etc. Crows can use tools, solve problems, and have altruistic behaviors.
- adrian_b 4y agoDownloadable research paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.20.496834v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.20.496834v3
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoTo my untrained eye, dinosaurs all look the same (generally speaking), despite being on a timescale of hundreds of millions of years. I always wondered why during such a long time they never evolved into something brighter (or their version of us). I understand evolution pressure (or lack of) and everything but still this is weird. I feel that this is something that is rarely addressed, despite being a good example of how evolution works and what drives it.
- Phrenzy 4y agoAnimals don't use DNA to reproduce. DNA uses animals to reproduce. If a particular collection of building instructions can last long enough to reproduce itself, it is good enough. Increased intelligence would be an unneeded luxury.
- dTal 4y agoThey don't look at all the same though? A triceratops looks more similar to a rhino than to a T-Rex. And neither of them look remotely like a brachiasaur.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoTrue, but they seem (again, to the untrained eye) less diverse than today's fauna. Untrained eye = know about dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. They did not seem to have evolved to use tools either, or some kind of burial process (though we do not probably know), or art-like creations (again, we probably do not know). What I meant with my comment is that we talk a lot about evolution and I find that dinosaurs spanning some 150 M years (vs 2 M for humans) are not used enough in presentations of evolution. It would probably be great to say: look, 150 M years of evolution changed this and that (say, minor changes) because of this and that (environment pressure, ...) as opposed to [something, humans for instance, or giraffes, or other examples usually used in such discussions] that only took X k/M years to go from A to B. I would find it a good message to convey, as everyone knows about dinosaurs but not that much about their time span.
- 4y ago