# Advanced dinosaur civilization **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 9, 2022, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923 "2022-06-09T16:22:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/41 "2022-06-09T20:14:45Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > 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 They’d have to evolve some means to survive long periods on dry land, but their morphological constraints likely preclude such adaptations (a shell would be their best bet but cephalopod shells became internalized a long time ago-maybe a mollusk a la a nautilus or the now-extinct ammonites). Elephants might be the best bet after us-all they’d need would be dextrous finger-like extensions of their trunks. The real barrier tho for anything would be circumstances leading to the kind of runaway cranial capacity increase that we benefited from. It may be that the variables that would need to all converge require a very fluky set of circumstances. This has implications for SETI of course, as in the Drake Equation. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/42 "2022-06-09T20:17:54Z")
I wouldn’t want to be glib, but even the earliest hominids had opposable thumbs, fairly large brain capacity, some level of socialization. Even with those advantages, they didn’t get much more civilized than living in groups. Dinosaurs had even less than that, so how could they have achieved more than that? We should have _at least_ seen evidence of stone tools, flint knapping, etc, but there’s none of that. It’s not well established that dinosaurs had _any_ level of socialization greater than what we see in birds. So put me down for a “no” on this one. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/43 "2022-06-09T20:32:02Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > Want to keep this alive? Lets speculate that one civilization arose and it was on what is now Antarctica. Our fossil record of Antarctica is the most sparce. Howard Phillips Lovecraft beat you to the punch: > **[At the Mountains of Madness](https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness#Plot)** > > At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in February and March 1931 and originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous... > [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > That last suggests–to me at least–that it has a theory of mind, especially that of the aquarium keeper’s. At any rate it goes well beyond opening a tank and crawling out. Octopuses almost certainly have a “theory of mind” (to the extent possible for one marine invertebrate species to comprehend the motives and thoughts of a land-dwelling biped) and unquestionably able of solving elaborate puzzles and problems in often unexpected ways. However, they lack both the social instinct (octopuses will cluster around a viable food source but tend to be territorial and in general only seek out other members when they breed) or any means to rear and transfer information to offspring, which puts into doubt their ability to evolve into an advanced society. Squid are perhaps somewhat more likely being social pack hunters but while we don’t understand enough about their neurophysiology at a functional level to make any credible attempt at estimating their intelligence, there is not indication that any species of squid is or has developed the kind of larger scale organization or permanence of knowledge bases to become an established society. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/44 "2022-06-09T20:35:20Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > I would think we could compare the idea of that against our own fossil record. For example, early human civilizations left trash middens that hold a treasure trove of evidence for how they lived, and the middens themselves are evidence of civilization. I would think a civilized dino trash midden could provide clues about tool use, animal husbandry, and possibly art, communication and organization. So far, all dino fossils appear to just be random deaths by nature, with no evidence of organization, tools or created materials. Yes, we haven’t found organized dino-graveyards, or such. And one of the most common human sites we find are the foundations and fire pits of even early settlements. If they got any further, we’d see evidence of walled cities or such (assuming they figured out war), we’d see carvings and stacked blocks buried in the mud. Our railroad cuts though hills, raised roadways, canals, not to mention mines thousands of feet deep, will leave an indelible record that tens of millions of years will not hide, even if (especially if) buried under sediment. The lack of such traces pushes back the level of technology that any such civilization would have achieved. One of the major reasons we find dinosaur fossils is that in the days before grass evolved, there were plenty more mudslides and sediment carried by high rainfalls to cover dead carcasses. Plus our tool use and ability to modify our environment to suit us, rather than needing to be appropriate to our environment - fire, clothes, agriculture, omnivorous - is why humans spread all over the globe, even millennia ago before metalwork was common. One would expect an equally successfully adaptable intelligent tool-using dinosaurs species to be equally widespread, even if they left no other traces. ---
**Author:** ![filmstar-en](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/50afbb/32.png) [@filmstar-en](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmstar-en)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/45 "2022-06-09T20:35:38Z")
If it was an advanced civilisation, it would use money. Gold is a very rare and unreactive metal and is commonly used for money and precious objects. Would it not last through geologic time? Albeit, a big squashed. Would we not surely find gold coins showing the heads of dinosaur emperors if we looked hard enough? Maybe it is better to look to the stars and try to detect dino satellites floating around in space. Or lying in some undisturbed place like the moon that does not have an geologically active crust. I expect the various machines humans have left on the moon there would be around for many millions of years. Of course that does assume that an advanced civilisation would inevitably start launching themselves into space. Looking around at human civilisation. The ‘advanced’ bit is quite problematic. How to define ‘advanced’? ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/46 "2022-06-09T20:38:03Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > The “Intelligent Dinosaur of the Gaps” argument I thought that was the exact point of this thread? What are the gaps, and how big of a civilization could hide in them? The answer could be that the gaps are too small too hide anything we would recognize as a civilization. I don’t think our current knowledge does anything to address how sophisticated the social order was in family groups or herds. But having complex herd hierarchies is far from a civilization. Is there room for found-object tool use, like we see in corvids? If we’d found bones that had healed from incapacitating injuries, that would suggest they cared for their injured. I don’t think that’s happened. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/47 "2022-06-09T20:38:26Z")
There is **absolutely no reason** to expect a civilization from over 65 million years ago to use gold. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/48 "2022-06-09T20:39:31Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I believe that the question comes from the lack of understanding of the scope and depth of modern paleontology, a multidisciplinary set of sciences that has vastly advanced in the last few decades. Right, but paleontology has data only in the locations where the right sort of rocks of the right ages are accessible. There’s a lot times and locations of the Mesozoic era that we have little to no information about. African Great Ape evolution took place in about 8 million years over about 3 million square miles (ballpark of one quarter of Africa). How much of the Mesozoic land area do we have information with that time and space resolution? ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/49 "2022-06-09T20:41:25Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > There is **absolutely no reason** to expect a civilization from over 65 million years ago to use gold. Beyond that, there is no particular reason that they would organize around human economic principles or systems, either. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![filmstar-en](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/50afbb/32.png) [@filmstar-en](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmstar-en)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/50 "2022-06-09T20:50:07Z")
I think you then have to try to think what would constitute an advanced civilisation and what durable artifacts they might leave behind as evidence that they did, in fact exist. Given that we know of only human civilisation up to its current state, that might require some imagination. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/51 "2022-06-09T20:55:01Z")
As far as resources go, meteoric iron would have been available, and any use would probably leave no trace in the fossil record. It’s recycled rapidly on the timescales we’re talking about (on the order of tens of thousands of years, not tens of millions). That’s doesn’t get you an advanced civilization, but it would make some types of advanced tool use possible. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/52 "2022-06-09T20:58:40Z")
The OP asks > [@Pleonast](#): > > 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. Animals move big quantities of stuff around for mating and nesting and making lairs all the time, so your basic benchmark has to be something more complex than say a brush turkey nest or beaver dam. It has to show patterned and communicated non-natural behaviour [which is our basic definition of culture]. Given that we have the fossil survival of dinosaur feathers with their pigmentation cells, as well as bones more fragile than a canary’s, you can’t use the simple ‘so old all the evidence has eroded away argument’ as a general get-out clause. Unless they harnessed the power of marshmallow and vape smoke, it will survive in the palaeontological record. Some palaeontologists believed that early hominids had an ‘osteodontokeratic’ [bone, teeth and horn] level of pre-tool use - see the cave man scene in 2001 for how that might be realised. Even though that is just a fantasy concept in popular science, IF dinosaurs had that as entry level non-natural evolved behaviour we would have evidence from breakage patterns on bone and use-wear marks, all of which survive well and are readily interpretable. That’s pretty much getting back to them doing everything with perishable organics, but not significant earthmoving or land-shaping or breaking rocks. And unless they had writing, doing origami with big leaves was pretty much all that is left. You might also want to read the novels of Robert Sawyer about intelligent dinosaurs which very quickly lapses into Flintstonian levels of silliness. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/53 "2022-06-09T20:59:09Z")
> [@filmstar-en](#): > > Looking around at human civilisation. The ‘advanced’ bit is quite problematic. How to define ‘advanced’? I don’t know how to answer that, but I can say that if there’s no evidence of tool use, that pretty much eliminates all possibility of civilization. Nobody’s found so much as a sharpened stone around a dinosaur fossil. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/54 "2022-06-09T21:12:37Z")
You’re getting into advanced special pleading. Seriously, you’re asking if a dinosaur civilization could be hidden in places where we don’t have dinosaur fossils because no rocks from that period exist? Well, sure. Along with advanced unicorn civilizations, advanced bigfoot civilizations, advanced chupacabra civilizations, and anything else you want to posit, including a whole race of literal gods on literal mountain tops throwing literal lightning bolts at literal worshippers. ---
**Author:** ![Crane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crane/32/3495_2.png) [@Crane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crane)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/55 "2022-06-09T21:18:02Z")
> [@Pleonast](#): > > I want to know what types of dinosaur civilizations cannot be excluded by our scientific knowledge. You are addressing civilization. That doesn’t require technology. Apparently some dinosaurs migrated together, built aggregations of nests and made sounds for social interaction. Nest building may be a learned activity and there may have been some order to it. Kind of organized chaos like a bird rookery. I believe **[John R. Horner](https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geJaPWYqJir4wAF05XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1654838102/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fJack_Horner_%28paleontologist%29/RK=2/RS=QC4ZxtzmrklPMdIXC_pMZROua.8-)** has presented evidence along these lines. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/56 "2022-06-09T21:26:30Z")
> [@eburacum45](#): > > I’m imagining a cephalopod civilisation farming electric eels for their generating purposes. Without metal conductors, though, their technology would be restricted. > Perhaps the cephalopods, or archosaurs, could create a civilisation entirely made up of cultural elements, with no physical artefacts at all. They could tell each other stories, sing songs, and debate philosophy. This sort of civilisation would leave no trace; maybe most of the civilisations in our galaxy are like this, with no tools or constructions - which may explain why they haven’t contacted us yet. > > Maybe the songs of whales and dolphins constitute such a civilisation on our world - one we haven’t recognised yet. This would leave no trace. This is what I was thinking, some kind of social intelligence that we possibly could not even relate to. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/57 "2022-06-09T21:50:07Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > You’re getting into advanced special pleading. Seriously, you’re asking if a dinosaur civilization could be hidden in places where we don’t have dinosaur fossils because no rocks from that period exist? > > Well, sure. Along with advanced unicorn civilizations, advanced bigfoot civilizations, advanced chupacabra civilizations, and anything else you want to posit, including a whole race of literal gods on literal mountain tops throwing literal lightning bolts at literal worshippers.   No need to be snarky. Science is understanding what we know and what we don’t. We think neutrinos don’t have mass, and our data puts a limit on how high it could be. Are you going to complain about people asking about that? We think dinosaurs didn’t have an advanced civilization. In this thread I’m trying to understand the upper limit of what a dinosaur civilization could have been, given our data. Our geology and paleontology has limited data. Maybe it’s good enough now that we can rule out any “pop up” sapient dinosaur species. But maybe it’s not; I don’t know, so I’m asking. And it’s not special pleading. Our species evolved into sapience within a limited time frame within a limited area. So we have that as an estimate of how much time and space it takes. If our data can’t even cover that, then we have no busy generalizing to the entire Mesozoic over all the land masses with the data we have. ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/58 "2022-06-09T21:52:55Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > If they got any further, we’d see evidence of walled cities or such (assuming they figured out war), we’d see carvings and stacked blocks buried in the mud. Our railroad cuts though hills, raised roadways, canals, not to mention mines thousands of feet deep, will leave an indelible record that tens of millions of years will not hide, even if (especially if) buried under sediment. Agree. Even outside of the speculation of how long artificial objects and material could last, we know for certain that fossilized bone withstands this sort of time test. Granted certain conditions need to be met for bone to be fossilized, and perhaps the civilized dinosaurs did not live in/near those environments, but until we find something in their fossil bones indicating something beyond dying a random natural death and/or being killed or scavenged by other critters, the working assumption is the era of dinosaurs was just a world with wild animals. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/59 "2022-06-09T22:03:29Z")
I’m pointing out that you are going beyond science to ask what science would say. That’s not legitimate inquiry. You’ve been given dozens of reasons why everything science says is antithetical to the notion of a past civilization. Postulating events where science can say nothing is not science. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923/60 "2022-06-09T22:04:01Z")
Termites, ants, bees and many other creatures in the animal world have developed types of intelligence that require no logic. The Dinasaur had a very long run at 165 million years. There had to have been mass collapses of species during that period as they lost out to other species. We know animals use things like lures and they interpret body language even from very different animals. It is not hard to imagine some survival niche not based on physical ability alone. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/advanced-dinosaur-civilization/965923.md?page=4)