Dave Hone

It's like this five-foot dinosauroid.

That was it there on the screen.

Oh, Dorchester.

That's in England.

Yeah, I knew there was a couple of copies of it.

Trudon always comes back as the most intelligent dinosaur because it has really quite a big brain for its size.

It does have a high encephalization quotient, so it's always been...

like tagged as like a very good candidate for being the smartest dinosaur and basically he just hybridized that with the human but of course why would these things end up as like plantigrade quadrupeds and why would they go back to five fingers and actually i think he's only got three to be fair he's got very human like feet why has it got no tail what why would those things suddenly disappear there's no real reason other than just kind of human exceptionalism but like i mean you could argue that

Some parrots, some crows are phenomenally intelligent and show extremely clever behaviors on a par with apes.

So at some level, some dinosaurs were extremely intelligent.

Yeah, and sociality and predation pressure and then the changing environment.

I mean, the shrinking of the forest, pushing apes out of the trees into the environment or into the open environment.

Yeah, I mean, if you have 160 million years in a global domination, I mean, this is the thing.

You talked about lost behaviors, but the lost lineages.

I wrote about this in one of my books.

You want a weird animal, you go to a volcanic island.

You go to New Zealand, you go to Hawaii, you go to the Galapagos, and yet those are the places that basically don't really form fossils.

So you think the dinosaurs we know about are strange.

What was the stuff knocking around there?

We're never going to know, sadly, but for everything you think birds are cool, think about penguins compared to your average bird.