I’m not sure how much evidence we have that dinosaurs never developed anything like human intelligence. There’s been at least 65 million years to degrade and destroy evidence of a dinosaur civilization.
How advanced and widespread could a dinosaur civilization have been that’s consistent with our current body of evidence from geology and paleontology? For example, can we rule out a world-wide dinosaur civilization that used plastics, because we’d see evidence of it in the geologic record? Or what about a dinosaur civilization that had fire and agriculture, but was limited to one continent (perhaps Antarctica) and stone tools?
To be clear, I’m not looking for evidence that there was a dinosaur civilization, I want to know what types of dinosaur civilizations cannot be excluded by our scientific knowledge.
I’d say large scale mining or quarrying of resources would leave recognizable patterns in resource distribution. Coal and oil mostly comes from before the dinosaurs so we’d notice if they had used up lots of it.
Microplastics, definitely, would be visible if they were used at the scale we use them. Not everywhere, but in ENOUGH places.
Even oceangoing travel (which would be easier than it was for Columbus since the continents were closer then) would show biotic exchanges that would show up in the fossil record.
The non-avian Dinosaurs died out 65 million years after 165 million years on earth. They could have had pre-industrial technology on par with lets say the Romans multiple times without leaving a trace.
As to microplastics, the breakdown rate for buried plastics in under 1000 years. In fact, Googling it says only 450 years.
The earth has been scrubbed and partially resurfaced many many times over the last 230 million years. Ice Ages, flood, severe meteor strikes. Very little record would survive of our current technology. I’m sure if any of Roman technology would survive.
Pangaea was still a thing until 200 million years ago. So the biotic exchanges might not show as no ocean travel required.
Even 65 million years ago, the continents were significantly closer to each other.
While I don’t suspect there were dinosaur civilizations, I’m not sure your reasons hold up.
Although “dinosaurs” are all clustered under the clade Dinosauria or Dinosauromorpha they are really a polyphyletic group covering as vast of a range of morphologies as all existing vertebrate groups combined. There are a diverse array of species, and while in colloqual context “dinosaurs” are generally understood to be large and small carnivores like the various Dromaeosauridae (raptors) and Allosaurus and herbivores such as Triceratops and Brachiosaurus, there were dinosaurs of all sizes and existing ecological niches. Taking about the behavior and features of ‘dinosaurs’ in general is kind of like talking all fish in the ocean.
That being said, there is no sign in the fossil record of any species showing a significant increase in cranial capacity comparable to that of apes to hominids or of developing appendages for the manufacture and manipulation of tools. There are no signs of industrial or agricultural activity including any signs of intensive cultivation of agriculture species or residues of the production and use of artificial fertilizers, no evidence of industrial processes such as the smelting and refining of metals, inorganic or complex polymer chemical synthesis, or any evidence of structures or large scale modification of the landscape. The fact that precious metals in the upper crust remain undisturbed back to and beyond that era indicates that there was likely no wide scale mining or mineral extraction processes, and certainly no evidence of any nuclear fission or power generation processes.
How much of this we would find after many tens or hundreds of millions of years is certainly a topic for discussion but paleontologists and paleogeologists have looked through the strata for evidence of the environment and other conditions that would influence evolutionary processes and can tease out remarkable, if speculative, conditions with zero evidence of any industrial or advanced society. Anything that could have possibly existed would almost certainly not have developed past the regional tribal hunter-gatherer societies at the very most. It is, of course, possible that an “industrial” society could arise using more perishable technologies such as invertebrates using technology based upon the extraction and manipulation of materials using enzymes or other organic synthesis but even with that there is no evidence in the fossil record of a single species or closely related species developing to a global culture based upon the use of some kind of artificial tools or technology. This is not to say that it couldn’t have happened in such a brief time as to have been lost in gaps in the fossil record, especially for invertebrate marine life, but there is no evidence in support or even suggesting that this ever occurred.
As far as I know from anything I’ve ever read or watched on Discovery Channel, no dinosaur skull ever discovered had a shape that could accommodate the brain structure necessary for advanced intelligence. Given that and the fact that there is a complete lack of evidence indicating any kind of civilization, any postulate to the contrary can be considered nothing more than a wild hypothesis.
I think the general consensus is the Troodon is a good candidate for smartest dinosaur found. This brilliance might put it on par with modern birds, but not the high end of this scale. Not Raven or Grey Parrot smart, but smart for a dino.
Theropods are the dinosaur group that birds are descended from.
It is very unlikely that any dinos got smart enough for an iron age civilization or even stone age.
If they had gotten to the homo erectus level, with a similar population size, odds are we’d never find anything. That’s a far cry from advanced civilization, but it can’t be ruled out.
Also can’t be ruled in, of course.
The Romans rose to power in part thanks to their very industrial harvest of surface and near surface iron, silver, etc deposits, especially in their colonies such as Iberia. And geologists can date many of those precious metal deposits to before the dinosaurs.
We would expect the distribution of these resources to show if a species had been exploiting them, even millions of years ago. Now, we might miss those signs or decide to interpret them some other way because we find the idea of ancient prehuman civilizations too crazy. But someone looking for evidence would do well to study how surface deposits of iron and silver are distributed.
That’s the rate at which a plastic bottle breaks down… into microplastics. Those aren’t really biodegradable. They are just continously ground down by mechanical action until they become nanoplastics, which we are just beginning to study.
Of course, if millions of years ago a dinosaur civ rose to power and polluted the world with plastic before dying out, maybe microbial plastic eaters could have evolved, eaten all the plastic, and died out…
Thus far the fossil record hasn’t revealed a dino that would appear to be as smart as a Chimp or Raven, so homo erectus would be vastly greater than anything found.
Octopods go back about 155 million years ago, could they be a better candidate for a lost to the fossil record civilization? They are very smart, can manipulate tools. For instance opening jars and fish tanks. Could some smarter off-shoot had died off 30 million years ago? They mostly likely would have left no record at all. Though no smelting most likely either.
That’s what I’m saying. The continents were close together, so Velociphere Tyranbus would have had an easier time making the leap across, but we don’t see the level of biotic exchange that European contact with the New World brought about in our world.
Right, but to repeat my original post, I’m not interested in what evidence is lacking, but instead what the evidence cannot positively exclude.
Yeah, how quickly did apes evolve from smart to sapient? Do we have enough resolution in therapod fossils to exclude a sapient species?
Quick check shows the most recent common ancestor of Apes is about 24 million years ago. But the MRCA of African Great Apes is 8 million years ago, and they were limited to only part of one continent until recently. Seems hard to have the spatial and temporal resolution in the fossil record to positively exclude a sapient therapod species, especially if it went extinct before spreading beyond its cradle region.
And most oil was formed on the seabeds from phytoplankton dying and building up over time and later being trapped by sediments or tectronic movement. There really wouldn’t have been much available for the dinos even if they could drill for it.
It’s difficult to credit any sort of civilization, considering what we know about the cranial capacity of Saurischians and Ornithschians. That pretty much kills the whole thing, nipped in the bud. There certainly hasn’t been any evidence for pre-human civilization at any level, either.
The idea of a dino-civilization, though, has a strong appeal in science fiction, which like to play with intriguing ideas, and there have been several speculative stories about intelligent dinosaurs in some alternate reality. My favorite is Harry Harrison’s series West of Eden, Winter in Eden, and Return to Eden, where a pre-civilization human society exists side by side with a nontechnological, bio-based dinosaur civilization.
There have been others, of course. Consider the Dinotopia series, or these:
