Why Didn’t We Have Sentient Dinosaurs? A speculation by GF Willmetts (article).

Think along that line. Mammals came about 210 million years ago. Reptiles are about 315 million years further back. Dinosaurs existed for 165 million years and were very successful on land, sea, and air. As we have recently discovered, some were also warm-blooded, so they weren’t limited to sluggishness in the cold and restricted to hot climates. Looking at their forebears, the birds, today shows that there are levels of intelligence, although, granted, the lack of hands does restrict tool manipulation, but they can still use them with their beaks or talons. You would have to wonder why an intelligent dinosaur, possibly with hands, didn’t evolve, but then maybe the bigger species ate them before they sufficiently grew in numbers to escape them?

As with extraterrestrials, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we would find a sentient dinosaur species adapting a humanoid shape. All land dinosaurs have tails after all for balance, even the smaller species. Manipulative arms do make it easier to pick something up. With the raptors, arms were superfluous and shrunk, but who’s to say how long they were in the first place and when they changed from legs to arm-like?

I can probably concoct anything to make sense of the little to no evidence we have as to whether there was a sentient dinosaurid species, so treat this article as speculation rather than fact. It isn’t as though SF writers haven’t created such species before. I was going to cite examples, and a Google search revealed far more than I thought there were, even when you divide into sentient and beast. Some even allowed them to live long enough to encounter humans, although the time differential, weather conditions, and meteorite upheavals tend to work against that. With continental drift still only taking place, there would have been few places to avoid volcanic ash filling the atmosphere and hiding the sun. Although I doubt if that would have affected the warm-blooded dinosaurs, it would have made many plants dormant, which would have affected the vegetable-eating dinosaurs and disrupted the food chain.

If anything, it’s a lot easier to provide evidence that there is no evidence. Assuming they had their own cities, we also know how quickly the likes of concrete would deteriorate under poor weather conditions. A sentient species could have evolved and died off many times over in 165 million years. In comparison, mankind has been around for around 5,000 years and might not even make the next millennia with our self-destructive tendencies. We would be seen as beginners.

Assuming dinosaur sentients do not destroy each other by war, there’s plenty of time for any number to evolve and even become space travellers, especially if they thought the world would fall under an asteroid crashing into the Earth, and we know how that finally turned out.

Considering new discoveries of dinosaur skeletons are being made all the time, it might just be bad luck we haven’t encountered any signs of such a species, even pre-sentience or at least having longer arms.

Objectively, if a sentient dinosaurid developed like ourselves, then they might progress from nomadic meat-eaters to farmers, albeit still carnivores, and develop metals and power sources. They might even learn to convert pitchblende into uranium and create nuclear fuel. That is where there would be a problem, as human mining would have revealed earlier excavations. That argument can be countered because the world didn’t look like this millions of years ago. As earlier noted, the land masses were connected, much of now beneath the oceans we have now. Conceivably, we just haven’t come across any potential mining sites, although we do know pitchblende seams do exist underwater.

Of course, we are applying human standards. There’s a simple answer to why we don’t come across their cemeteries: they might simply eat their dead or feed their pets rather than waste the meat. Mankind’s own foibles have changed over the centuries. Only the mountain Tibetans feed their dead to vultures as part of the Sky Burial since the ground is too rocky to bury them.

A lot of this is trying to connect the dots when we don’t have a clear picture of all the environments in those 186 million years. Our dependency on illustrators depicting dinosaurs is down to what archaeologists told them. That’s already getting a shake-up when it’s now noted that many of them had feathers, which should be changing our image of dinosaurs, but, as witnessed by the ‘Jurassic Park’ films, it hasn’t yet. The imagery is still too strong that way.

The sentient dinosaurids would certainly not be as large as the bigger raptors, but they came in all sizes. In many respects, raptors do have a humanoid body, standing on their hind feet and balancing their weight with a tail, even if, for the most part, their arms are lacking.

Guessing which species would have had true sentience is a lot harder. I only suggest raptors because they were a dominant species across generations and would be at the top of the heap, but that’s speculation. For any species, they would need a more varied diet than just meat if they needed to encourage brain development.

The possibility that they didn’t develop an advanced civilization would also be supported. There were a lot of dinosaur predators out there who would see them as easy meals. Think of an intelligent ant proclaiming how smart it is and then dying as someone stamps on it. Any of evolution’s attempts to have a sentient dinosaurid might simply have failed many times, but it would only need one successful attempt. The developing mammal species had better advantages; they bred and grew quickly and fast enough to flee.

When you consider that it takes the likes of a Tyrannosaurus twenty years to reach adulthood, a dinosaur would likely take the same time and be comparable to our own species if its parents cared for their egg clutch, taught them the basics of survival, and developed thinking processes. A settlement might not be possible if they have to hunt all the time as well as avoid being eaten themselves. We have examples in the Amazon where this still goes on, but it is the breakaway farmers who found they had spare time that allowed some smart thinkers and imaginations to develop, even if hindered from time to time by religious zealots.

Even if it did happen, unless evidence is found, there is no way of knowing, simply because a civilization so far back would show so little evidence. You only have to look at the Incas to see how their rock buildings were fading after the 16^th century. A hundred million years wouldn’t leave much at all, especially with all the upheaval the Earth has had in that time.

Could they have reached a space age? If that were conceivable, then they would surely have visited the moon or even Mars. Unlike the Earth, any buildings or artefacts wouldn’t decay, so unless they were extremely tidy and took everything with them, it would appear that had they existed, they would never have left the Earth. That sort of destroys one SF trope unless some alternative reasons for the lack of evidence can be devised.

Even so, you would still have to wonder why, with so much time on Earth, sentience was one thing various species of dinosaurs never evolved as a niche.

Then again, when you look at how dinosaur successors, the birds, and how many niches they have filled and showed some levels of intelligence and communication skills, never went any further. Even the ground-based birds have never changed enough to develop hands.

If mankind does wipe itself out, evolution might not go in the right direction again. After all, it’s hardly that prosperous for survival if it’s so self-destructive to itself and the environment.

© GF Willmetts 2024

All rights reserved

Ask before borrowing