Wednesday, December 03, 2008

What if birds or reptiles had produced the human-level brains?

This is about the most interesting thread on any blog I've seen lately (Darren Naish's blog Tetrapod Zoology is always interesting, but this entry is really really interesting). What if mammals had not produced the top intelligent species on the planet (us)? What if mammalian evolution had gone wrong, or dinosaur evolution had more time to work with? Naish tracks this idea through its original concept (a bipedal dinosaur evolved from a brainy species called Troodon) through his own "avisapiens" and some concepts by other researchers on brainy descendants of known dinos or birds. Someone ought to collect all these and do a book on them.

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