Dave Hone

And again, you know, birds have this thing of...

they have this weird thing of neuron folding and they can basically pack in a lot more than you'd expect.

You know, that's why crows are that smart despite having tiny brains relatively even compared to their overall size.

Um, but, uh,

I'm being obviously overly facetious, but if ultimately part of your scaling is how big is the animal versus how big is its brain, that's most of a T-Rex brain.

It's a fraction of the size of a chimp brain, and chimps don't weigh seven tons.

So...

You know, it's a kind of Hitchens-like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

But, like, you just look at it and go, that's about the proportion we'd expect for a croc.

Now, crocs are smarter than people think, but they're sure as hell not monkeys.

You're going to have to really come up with something much more convincing than, oh, well, if you just pack them and scale them this way.

A bit of a ridiculous question, but is it possible to find evidence of tool use?

I mean, in theory, it depends quite how you define a tool.

So birds building nests is arguably tool use to a certain degree.

I'm aware of... I suspect it turned out not to be the case.

I was shown a very rough, not very well-prepared fossil...

20 years ago now no 15 years ago now where someone said we think this might be a early bird nest and therefore potentially even a dinosaur nest and nothing's ever been published so my guess is once they excavated it and had a good look at it they went nah it's nothing really um

Yeah, but even then, like, you know, chimps make loads of tools, but it's mostly made of wood, and they're mostly just breaking stuff, and then the odds of that preserving are very low.

You do get things like chimps and otters, sea otters.

They have their favorite anvil and hammer stones to break stuff open, but again...