"Could Sentient Saurians Have Evolved And Died With Dinos?" Topic

I think the main points and problems surrounding this have already been covered in previous posts on this topic.

The problem is finding good evidence, that has lasted in a recognisable state for over 65 million years.

The hypothesis however plausible (…or not) is unprovable until someone discovers almost unrefutable evidence of tools / technology, habitation, or art etc… that could only have been made by something from that time – that wasn't reworked from more recent geological deposits. Afterwards someone else needs to find evidence ideally somewhere else to show it wasn't a fluke.

If you find a theropod dinosaur skeleton with a mobile phone please let me know it would make a great research PhD project!

I know different locations globally have different preservation, but in my local hotspot getting good stratigraphy on many specimens is hard enough with the cliff exposed erosion. as many isolated bones are found on the beach or lower down the cliff than the level they were deposited.

With Stone age deposits at the top layer of the cliff and dinosaur beds half way down, it wouldn't be impossible to discover a flint tool next to dinosaur remains.

However flint is originally from the chalk circa 90 million years ago and the Dinosaur beds are circa 125 million years old. Yet the flint tool actually came from a layer at the very top of the cliff which is only 8000 years old!

Molts from Dave Drake's Slammers stories are humaoid lizards – I based some of the design spec for the sculptor (Martin Baker) on illustrations of 'what if' type dinos that had developed culture/civilisation etc.

Available with guns and so forth from GZG in 28mm

John Treadaway
hammers-slammers.com

Good point JT !!!

Not in 15mm?

Dan

Dan,
they don't have to be human-sized, so just see them as a *very huge* (as compared to man) species and call the range 15mm :)

Sadly, they are only in 28mm – I ran out of sculpting money to do them in 15mm (any offers? )

John T

How nice it would be to have a range of these, but done 15-18mm tall:

Dan

Similar to these:

Source:

link

More:

Source:

link

Dan

Lets say they existed i always think they could have been small maybe flyers or have at least many feathers to aid in warmth/communication etc like one group of Dinos, most 'Dino men' i have seen look like they are based on what we knew about dinosaurs 70 years ago not from what we know now, in the past ten years alone we have learned more than any other point on the subject of Dinosaurs.

Great thread! One of the best in a long time. Thanks for starting it.

regarding your query: possible, but not probable.
Possible candidates – troodontids or possibly some weaker cousin, but NOT raptors. Raptors were already superbly designed killing machines. They had no biological impetus to evolve intelligence. (Same reason there are no races of super intelligent Tigers walking around today) Look to some of the scrawnier, weaker theropods lower in the food chain…
Still, for gaming purposes, why not? Somebody else mentioned the Harry Harrison "West of Eden" trilogy -- it is a very entertaining read.

If I were commissioning a race like this, I'd want:

Bird-like raptor features, including feathers. Toothed beak. General skeksis look. Horizontal body plan (NOT humans in rubber suits) and sleek, bird-like build. Oversized legs relative to a humanoid design, but in scale for a raptor. long, very thin, but very dextrous arms. Forward-facing eyes (this is probably a prereq for developing tool use). No long toe claw like you'd find on a raptor, just normal but somewhat wicked claws.

The arms would be good for manipulation, but not lifting and carrying. Evolution just didn't end up merging these two tasks in the same body part for my dinos. They use their mouths and heads for work requiring strength and stamina. Guns would therefore be strapped to the back or braced against the base of the neck… either way, they are aimed and fired by moving the neck. (Much like terror birds, the balance organ and brain centers are over-developed, so balance, strength and accuracy are actually enhanced by the arrangement).

How did such creatures develop intelligence? The same way that humans probably did. A series of rapid waves of climate change selected for adaptability over specialization. Once rudimentary tool use began, these pack creatures started to use intellect as a sexual selection mechanism (the equivalent of bright crests and other metabolically expensive courtship rituals you see in birds).

Agriculture developed early because they already needed to protect their eggs from predators (high parental investment as a k-type reproductive strategy). It was a short leap to domesticating animals (and fortifying their eggs, too). Incubation and hatching fortresses remain a potent part of their culture and social organization.

Their tools would be very different from humans. They'd still start with stone axes, but while they used their arms to craft them, they wield them in their beaks, so the shapes would quickly follow their own weird evolutionary path. Ungainly? Sure, but humans are pretty ungainly, too. My sauroids are, like humans, the only intelligent race on their planet, so either way they dominate their planet… until they encounter humans.

Psychologically, they are less abstract than humans. This isn't necessarily driven by biology or evolution, just a feature I like. They are creative and obsessive craftsmen, inventors and tacticians (a legacy of their sexual selection mechanism?), but are less excited by theory, ideology and strategy. They have it, it just comes less easily to them than it does to humans. Not having had an arboreal phase, zero g combat is harder for them. Plus, their enhanced sense of balance makes them far more susceptible to space-sickness.

I can imagine them building and living in exotic houses, perhaps something that looks like this:

Or maybe something like this?

Or this?

Or this?

link

Dan

Man,

I wish I could read Russian and find out the real source and explanation for this "Neolithic" artefact. Without a context it is just a curiosity of course:

link

Weird, isn't it?

Dan

I think I tracked it down (purely by accident, I tell ya):

link

link

Wow. What were those people smoking back then?

Still, just think of the cool figures and gaming scenarios that could come from stuff like that!!!

TMP link

Dan

How about Rebel Minis Chupacabras? I'd not heard of them until that crazy lackey guy put some up, painted, for auction bird/lizard vibe off of them.

Doug

That weird prehistoric head carving:

Martians:

Coincidence? I think not!!! :)

Dan

Just found out about this book, called Inherit The Stars, where confusing evidence is found on the Moon:

link

(Cover illustration by Darrell Sweet)

"The man on the moon was dead. They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was 50,000 years old -- and that meant that this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed!"
link

But what if what we find (on the Moon, Mars or elsewhere) is something else that originated on Earth but was completely unrelated to Man?

Would that be a cool gaming premise or what?

Dan

I remember "Inherit the Stars." Good series of books. Interesting premise for a prehistoric advanced civilisation: i.e., there wasn't one on Earth. We'd definitely have found evidence of one by now (unless you count pockets of not substantial advancement).

I think that carving looks more like a Little Gray Alien than a "Lizardman" … From a 6mm modeling standpoint, if I have not mentioned it, DRM and Exodus Wars makes some very nice Sci-fi Lizzymen. I even made up a Gorn type Merc for my 6mm Ork Freebooterz …

If their arms are too short to wipe their backsides then they won't have the hygiene to create viable cities and can't muster the numbers to form a civilization. It is the combined efforts of a huge number to make the technology to get to the stars so they aren't going to leave planet Earth.

Maybe the sentient dinos weren't all wiped out in the KT event, maybe some had survived on distant colonies and have returned to find another civilization infesting their homeworld…

They find that Earth is still too cool for their liking, and have established enviromental modification stations around the world, like on the seafloor in the Arctic Ocean…to help warm things up before the slow boat full of colonists arrive.

Battle scenarios around the world as the various human factions try to battle the SDs at their various outposts, EM stations, and later their beacheads in places like South America and Africa. Not only must the SDs efforts be stopped, but the various human factions are out to get the SD's tech!! The SDs tech advantages are counterbalanced by their low numbers and limited resources( this changes as more arrive and Earthside production centers go into action). Lots of potential.

Artraccoon: "have established enviromental modification stations around the world, like on the seafloor in the Arctic Ocean…to help warm things up before the slow boat full of colonists arrive."

I like how you think!

TMP link

Dan

Artraccoon

The McDonalds and KFC factions may also be interested if they were tasty and low fat!

<q.If their arms are too short to wipe their backsides then they won't have the hygiene to create viable cities and can't muster the numbers to form a civilization.

So they invented the bidet before the wheel…

Arms capable of wiping backsides are only necessary when you have a posterior anatomy as on a human.

We are the only animal on the planet that needs to wipe its butt.

This is because we have HUUUUUGGGGGEEEEE Glutial muscles that flop around over our anus.

Other animals don't have this problem.

AAAAANNNDDD…

Reptiles and Birds have projectile feces (often mixed with their urinary track as well), so that they shoot everything clear of their nests.

OR…

They have such dried out poop that it isn't as dangerous to them, bacterially, as is human poop (which is much more bacteria laden than others'. At least harmful bacteria. Most birds are immune to their own intestinal bacterial flora. Not so humanity, whose intestinal bacterial flora can kill us if it gets anywhere but our gut).

Maybe gladiatorial games were part of their entertainment:

TMP link

Dan

Not on Earth. In other parts of the galaxy, reptilians have flourished. But being with FEMA, you already know that.

@Artraccoon Larry Niven was consulted during the waning years of the original V series. He suggested precisely this plot: that the aliens were actually evolved from dinosaurs and were returning to re-take their homeland. So who's to say WHO the earth rightly belongs to?

It also explains why the aliens are so biologically compatible with us, and why they'd bother with earth (if all they'd wanted to do was eat us, they could kidnap some people, clone a few and then farm-raise them).

The networks hated the idea and went with something else.

OK, I'll say it.

The earth rightly belongs to the sentient beings that can live on it, maintain it, and hold it. I guess that leaves humans way out in the void.

Well said, brother!

Dan

Yeah,

My kids used to get grossed out every time our iquana evacuated her system. It sounded like a clogged Super Soaker squirt gun.

-Eli

I heard an argument put forth hat the basic humanoid body plan is requisite for sentience. Binocular colour vision, opposable thumbs, bipedal stance to free hands for tool use, large brains at birth, etc.

I am not sure I entirely buy it, but it is an interesting thought. Some popular Sci-fi tropes like man-sized insects are biological impossibilities, not just from a mechanical pov but also metabolically.

My own personal bet for non-humanoid, sentient, tool users is Cephalopoda. They have nanupulative digits, colour vision, and comparatively smart brains already.

As for intelligent or sentient theropods, if they were in a West of Eden type setting using biological rather than non-biological technologies it is not only possible but likely that we would not find fossil evidence. After all our sum total knowledge of T Rex comes from less than a score of individuals, and most of them are incomplete.

If taxonomists had one fragmentary chihuahua and one fragmentary great Dane in fossilized form is likely they would be assigned to different genrera, certainly not to he same species.

65 million years is a long time for anything to survive. Mountain destroying mining could well have occurred and vanished without trace. Much of the landscape we see today is formed of rock and soil that did not exist 65 MYA. At the KT extinction boundary the continents did not even have the shapes they do today.

Of course the evolution of sapient theropods require an evolutionarily selective advantage for survival coupled with the development of sapience. It is quite possible that no such pressure applied to theropods and that none evolved sapience as a consequence.

Imagine this caption:
"Dude, with that big asteroid coming in fast, I say we get out of here as quickly as we can. This planet is toast. We'll come back later, when things get back to normal, and reclaim it."

Caption:
"Are we missing anyone?"

Caption:
"See! Staying behind wasn't so bad after all."

Dan

Why would dino take a form more humanoid? Because if you're going to have this debate at some point a physical form that can only use a spear will lose to a form that can make use of a bow or atlatl.

Humans are pretty much at the top of the food chain because we excel at killing things. The gorilla maybe stronger, the elephant is bigger, the cheetah is faster. But as humans we have found a way to kill every thing we come across. Maybe a lot of human don't have this killer instinct in them any more, but there are those of us that still do. No matter what advantage any animal may have over us, we can make the tools needed and even use our knowledge to kill it.

By that it only seems logical that an animal at the top of the food chain would still have a physical form and structure and mentality to that of ours. You can have variation to that form, but there has to be a logical leap that makes them take that jump from rock throwers and spear chuckers to bows to crossbows and rifles.

Well, we've had a lot of practice doing that. And you know what they say, "practice makes perfect".

And killing has slowly bred us into a better problem-solving species!

Even so, I like images like this:

We may have kindred spirits out there. Warlike and lovers of flesh!

Dan
groups.yahoo.com/group/cavewars

Caption:
"You all know the drill, right? If you must reveal yourselves at all, make sure it is only to 'Rednecks'. That way no one will believe them and suspect we've been living right beneath their feet for these last 65 million years."

Dan

Way back when I was at University studying Geology we used to kick the idea of previous inteligent races around from time to time. Leaving Saurian's aside for a moment there is a very long timeline to explore. However, for the bulk of it life hadn't evolved the basic format for large mobile lifeforms. The first well evolved lifeforms that had a body model that would allow hands or similar were marine organisms such as Ammonites (good eyes and tentacles). But the problem with life in the ocean is that it is a relatively uniform environment. By that I mean that there is less "climatic" variation then on land both over time and across geographic areas. After all it is large bodies of water that moderates the worst climatic variations on land by acting as heat resevoirs. Hence less drive to get smart and start using tools to survive the environment.

So this suggests we should look at land life forms as the best chance of intelligence before humanity. The first Genus to move far enough along the evolutionary ladder are the reptiles. BUT land conditions were such that other evolutionary paths were available that meant intelligence might not have been required to be "winners"

Finally when you come right down to it, mammals were an offshoot of early reptiles so you could argue that they did evolve into intelligent life….Humanity!

The first well evolved lifeforms that had a body model that would allow hands or similar were marine organisms such as Ammonites

SimEarth had a strong tendency to produce sentient cephalopods well before the landwalkers got brains. The limits of the game were such that you couldn't have multiple sentients, but the best candidate would lurk just below sentience until you got the Cephs to emigrate off the planet…

Interesting.

Perhaps that's why the creators of the documentary "The Future Is Wild" came up with several (3 or 4?) cephalopod descendants that could develop and populate the land or, at the very least, become amphibious.

The creators of the show, however, did not project any of them to reach a stage where they would start to make tools and such.

Dan
EDIT: They came up with the "Swampus", "Megasquid", "Rainbow Squid" and the "Squibbon, a terrestrial squid that swings from tree branches; it is relatively intelligent and the likeliest ancestor for future sapient life"
link
thefutureiswild.com

"The Future is Wild" tracked cephalopods, Squids mostly with a sidetrack to hopping snails, forward through most of the ages, and had them on the cusp of sentience the whole time. The impression was that the conditions that had led them to land would always end too quickly for them to adapt to the next stage, but that the final age was lasting long enough for them to fill multiple niches, and the march to sentience was going to be harder to stop this time.

One thing I'd like to add is this: even if somehow humans found solid evidence of non-human intelligence (say stone tools or even a stone building buried in the right strata, would it be accepted as possibly legitimate?

I seriously doubt that it would be, because it would be in contradiction of current dogma. I believe there have been some pretty unusual artifacts discovered and quietly stashed away and ignored because they did not fit the current paradigm. While I'm not an advocate for these guys, they did write an interesting book that seemed well researched: forbiddenarcheology.com

Billcio,

Wouldn't it be something, though! Specially if there was a big find, with unquestionable non-primate origins, perhaps in a country with professionals less inclined to follow conventional thinking.

Perhaps remains of a town or city, with clear signs of cut stone and with numerous other day-to-day artifacts, made at a time when primates were still small and shy of the big lizards? :)

That's why I've always enjoyed this pic, even though upright humans wouldn't really be around 65 MYA:

Finding irrefutable evidence of a non-primate settlement or city would certainly be a cool twist to what we've always been taught. And I like cool twists. Keeps human hearts humble and human brains flexible.

Dan

Hey! Mi querido amigo Cacique Caribe, how about those models for your thread?

From
link

Do you like them?
I hope so.

Amicalement
Armand

Good thread and very entertaining. After seeing the arguments I'd buy the line that intelligence evolves with a combination of attributes . So the animal would need language, an opposed thumb, a big brain, to be omnivorous, to have a cooling system that maintained the big brain, to have live birth and a long childhood, to be weak enough to need to cooperate.
So dolphins may be pretty bright, but they cannot develop tools and just hunting fish… well a shark is an apex marine predator and not that bright.
Whoever it was said earlier that intelligence evolves because it is needed hit the nail on the head. If an animal can survive without extra brainpower then why evolve further?
A recent piece on dinosaurs suggested that they had a problem in that there were few mid sized dinos because these niches were occupied by the young of the large dinosaurs because they took so long to grow. That makes good sense really. Now intelligence is not going to evolve in big animals because they get big by being really well adapted rather than being versatile. A blue whale is just fantastic at eating tiny organisms in the ocean, a T Rex is just great at predating.
As to human civilizations before the ones we know about. it could have happened to a level because it took , for example, about 6000 years?? in S America to get to reasonably sophisticated cultures however, getting beyond a sort of accelerated stone age appears to be hard. Aztecs and Inca were going nowhere, no wheel. no Iron, no art or literature. Human civilisation is the resuklt of the interconnexion of many cultures so it has to be very widespread to draw on lots of different centres of invention. A set of interconnected civilizations would be widespread and would leave lots of traces .
So yes, there's just a chance that somewhere there is a pyramid or two and some carrvings, but nothing very impressive.

Roy

Good thread and very entertaining. After seeing the arguments I'd buy the line that intelligence evolves with a combination of attributes . So the animal would need language, an opposed thumb, a big brain, to be omnivorous, to have a cooling system that maintained the big brain, to have live birth and a long childhood, to be weak enough to need to cooperate.
So dolphins may be pretty bright, but they cannot develop tools and just hunting fish… well a shark is an apex marine predator and not that bright.
Whoever it was said earlier that intelligence evolves because it is needed hit the nail on the head. If an animal can survive without extra brainpower then why evolve further?
A recent piece on dinosaurs suggested that they had a problem in that there were few mid sized dinos because these niches were occupied by the young of the large dinosaurs because they took so long to grow. That makes good sense really. Now intelligence is not going to evolve in big animals because they get big by being really well adapted rather than being versatile. A blue whale is just fantastic at eating tiny organisms in the ocean, a T Rex is just great at predating.
As to human civilizations before the ones we know about. it could have happened to a level because it took , for example, about 6000 years?? in S America to get to reasonably sophisticated cultures however, getting beyond a sort of accelerated stone age appears to be hard. Aztecs and Inca were going nowhere, no wheel. no Iron, no art or literature. Human civilisation is the resuklt of the interconnexion of many cultures so it has to be very widespread to draw on lots of different centres of invention. A set of interconnected civilizations would be widespread and would leave lots of traces .
So yes, there's just a chance that somewhere there is a pyramid or two and some carrvings, but nothing very impressive.

Roy

Everything I'd read and heard about dolphin intelligence had me convinced they were not only self-aware, but intelligent enough to be deserving special status as a co-species dominating Earth. (Although they don't actually dominate).

Then I met a few in Cuba. I am certain I was not anthropomorphising when I say that I saw real intelligence behind those eyes as they turned to look right at me.

If each one of them can pick up on the other's sound signals, then they could constitute a collective mind. There's alot of material out there to read. I can't wait for computers to become intelligent enough (as ANOTHER life form) that they can take over trying to communicate with dolphins/cetaceans on their own terms – using 3D sonar pretty much.

I have a pet cockatiel. He is intelligent to some degree; more than my mother's idiot -zus and less than my previous Shiba Inu. I know that actual large parrots are much more intelligent still.

An intelligent dinosaurian species having evolved is probably science fiction, but it's fun to speculate what could have been. Furthermore, intelligent dinosaurs are currently evolving (just go to your local pet store and acquaint yourself with a cockaTOO) and we can hope they eventually arrive to a position where they will be yet another fully sentient and autonomous civilization as well. A little DNA manipulation would get them there alot faster.

Nothing I can add here, as it all seems pretty good to this biologist – Just one question; Where do those saurians with the Tau weaponry come from?

What if something like this had survived the KT event 65 million years ago?

link

If given 65 million years to evolve … who knows, right?
Dan

Looking at those mask carvings, they remind more of a Praying Mantis, I believe they would have evolved with feathers as part of their features, like the birds, but with out the beak more like the dromaeosaurs group

Where do those saurians with the Tau weaponry come from?

Dunno, but a) one of the piccies has an 'Eastern Empire' logo, and I found a blog at eastern-empire.com, b) I found a TMP thread mentioning conversion bits at 'Eastern Empire', but only finding suggestions of resources so far on that site.

Damn interesting, though!

my mother's idiot Bleeped text-zus

It's spelled Shih Tzu. I've been known to use the other spelling, and you're lucky. We had an intelligent one, and a more devious, self-serving wench I've never known.

Sad thing is, I actually miss it.

Doug