# dumb dinosaur question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 10, 2016, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346 "2016-11-10T10:31:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/1 "2016-11-10T10:31:20Z")
ok in kids shows and movies with dinosaurs there’s usually a character that’s adopted by another dinosaur that’s totally different species (dinosaur train has a flying dino hatching a t rex egg land before time has spike…) Wouldn’t the mother kill the hatchling that wasn’t hers or would it be like the squirrel that raised a kitten as her own ? in the fact she seemed to think the cat was just a mutant … ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/2 "2016-11-10T11:05:25Z")
Meadow pipits, dunnocks and reed warblers seem not to notice that a cuckoo has taken over the nest, but the behavior of modern animals is no indicator of how dinosaurs might have behaved. ---
**Author:** ![DrFidelius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drfidelius/32/3447_2.png) [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/3 "2016-11-10T12:09:48Z")
Children’s shows are one of the least reliable sources of science information, especially speculation about behavior. Note: most paleontologists doubt the any known dinosaur or pterosaur species actually spoke English. ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/4 "2016-11-10T13:12:10Z")
> [@bob\_2](#): > > … the behavior of modern animals is no indicator of how dinosaurs might have behaved. Given that birds are basically modified dinosaurs, it might be. More generally, animals (especially female) that tend their offspring have a notable tendency to accept what they are given and get on with the job. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/5 "2016-11-10T15:39:04Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > Children’s shows are one of the least reliable sources of science information, especially speculation about behavior. > > Note: most paleontologists doubt the any known dinosaur or pterosaur species actually spoke English. Also, no reliable paleontologist has ever proposed or furnished evidence that any saurian species ever developed rail travel. Even primitive steam-powered rail travel, as is depicted in that “documentary.” 😕 I have some reservations about the scientific accuracy of that piece of educational programming. ---
**Author:** ![Mollie\_Magill](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mollie_magill/32/20882_2.png) [@Mollie\_Magill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mollie_Magill)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/6 "2016-11-10T16:02:22Z")
Even given the famous large brain of the Troodon, it is highly unlikely unlikely they were able to develop either the physics or the energies required for Time Tunnel Technology. ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/7 "2016-11-10T16:05:32Z")
> [@gnoitall](#): > > no reliable paleontologist has ever proposed or furnished evidence that any saurian species ever developed rail travel. Current thinking is that they were handicapped by an inability to count past 1 - monorail trains being regarded as much tougher to develop than those that use 2 rails. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/8 "2016-11-10T16:07:37Z")
Since this is a question about dumb dinosaurs, with brains the size of walnuts, they didn’t know any better. Didn’t they even have an auxiliary brain in their tail, to run the other half of their body, because the brain in their head didn’t reach that far? ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/9 "2016-11-10T16:31:43Z")
Whenever I watch Dinosaur Train (yes, I watch Dinosaur Train) I think about the implications to the visited dinosaurs. “Hello, I’m visiting from a time when your entire species is extinct and your very existence is nothing more than a historical curiosity. How do you do?” > [@jtur88](#): > > Since this is a question about dumb dinosaurs, with brains the size of walnuts, they didn’t know any better. Didn’t they even have an auxiliary brain in their tail, to run the other half of their body, because the brain in their head didn’t reach that far? [Nope](https://www.google.com/#q=dinosaur+two+brains+myth). (ETA [a good specific link](https://svpow.com/2009/12/15/lies-damned-lies-and-clash-of-the-dinosaurs/) from one of the better paleontology blogs.) ---
**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:** [November 10, 2016, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/10 "2016-11-10T16:34:16Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > Since this is a question about dumb dinosaurs, with brains the size of walnuts, they didn’t know any better. Didn’t they even have an auxiliary brain in their tail, to run the other half of their body, because the brain in their head didn’t reach that far? Nobody has believed this since you were in grade school. It’s bizarrely hard to kill as a [myth](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jul/20/persistent-dinosaur-myths), though. > [@](#): > > Stegosaurus had two brains > > Please not this one. They just didn’t. What they did have is an enlarged nerve cluster at the base of the spine like lots of vertebrates including humans. To see just how pervasive this myth is for dinosaurs as a whole (though poor old steggy generally gets picked out) and how hard this idea is to kill, read [this sorry tale](https://svpow.com/2009/12/15/lies-damned-lies-and-clash-of-the-dinosaurs/) by a friend of mine and his interaction with TV producers and editors (starts a way down). ETA. Weird. Same link as above. ---
**Author:** ![dracoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/11 "2016-11-10T16:54:46Z")
I don’t think the intelligence of a dinosaur is the key issue here. Looking around the animal kingdom, you see a wide variety of behaviors that don’t seem to correlate to intelligence. Most likely, parents are responding to certain hard-wired cues. Things like the noises made by the baby and its color or body proportions. These cues are fairly basic and if you imitate them just right, you trigger the parenting response. There’s an interesting opposite example in fish. Apparently, many fish start off life with different coloration than the adults, and the adults often eat both their own eggs and their own fry. After the fry get big enough, they adopt the adult coloration and join the school. It really isn’t an example of intelligence, but of pattern matching. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/12 "2016-11-10T17:22:44Z")
Also there is the issue of parental care in dinosaurs. Did the parents feed them in a nest for a period, or were they on their own from the moment of birth? Since absolute facts about behavior (rarely) fossilize, scientists are stuck with making their best guesses based on the physiology of any juvenile skeletons they can find and on comparison to modern species. With pterosaurs, it seems pretty unlikely that the hatchlings would be able to fly and capture food immediately after hatching, so they likely had parental care and feeding for some time after birth. For dinosaurs, though, it was probably more of a mixed bag of strategies. For example, sauropods are thought to have been migratory herd animals (bones are found in large groups, nesting sites are known to cover miles, they _couldn’t_ have stayed in one place for long without stripping it clean) and skeletons of very young sauropods were proportioned very similar to adults. so young sauropods probably had to start walking along with the herd very soon after birth, like modern horses, and cattle and the like, but without the possibility of nursing, giving them less reason to be tied to a parent (though they may have been guarded as a whole by the adults as a whole, as long as they avoided being stepped on.) But other groups of dinosaurs may have had different strategies. The hatchlings of carnivorous dinosaurs may have been fed chunks of meat in a nest by one or both of it’s parents. On the other hand, they may have got the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible to avoid becoming food for the parents (as happens with many non-mammalian or avian species.) Reality was probably a mix of both systems depending on individual species. (ETA not implying that pterosaurs are dinosaurs, just grouping them in because they are included in the premise of Dinosaur Train.) ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/13 "2016-11-10T17:35:05Z")
> [@Mollie\_Magill](#): > > Even given the famous large brain of the Troodon, it is highly unlikely unlikely they were able to develop either the physics or the energies required for Time Tunnel Technology. Humans couldn’t even get it right in 1968. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/14 "2016-11-10T17:37:28Z")
It’s also possible that sauropods were able to go very long periods without feeding. A creature that size has vast reserves. So during breeding season it’s possible they spent a long time at the nesting sites, that would turn into barren wastelands as every scrap of plant material was consumed, and the sauropods lived off their body fat. Then the eggs hatch and in a few days everyone is walking to greener pastures, including the hatchlings. And there were probably millions of hatchlings, overwhelming the ability of predators to eat them all. Anyway, nobody knows how much parental care dinosaurs provided. Any reproductive model that modern reptiles and birds exhibit could have been present, along with others that have no modern analogue. Nest parasitism only works if the hosts provide some sort of parental care, like modern birds do. I’d bet almost all theropod carnivores provided parental care along the lines of birds. But others might have been more like crocodiles, where they lay eggs and hang around but don’t actually feed the offspring. Others might have ignored or even predated on the offspring. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/15 "2016-11-10T17:47:59Z")
BTW, related to my comment “nesting sites are known to cover miles”, [this](https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Eggs-Astonishing-Discovery-Thousands/dp/0743212118) is an excellent general-audience book on the subject. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2016, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/16 "2016-11-11T03:35:39Z")
> [@nightshadea](#): > > Wouldn’t the mother kill the hatchling that wasn’t hers or would it be like the squirrel that raised a kitten as her own ? in the fact she seemed to think the cat was just a mutant … How would we possibly know? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2016, 7:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/17 "2016-11-11T07:28:11Z")
To what extent do we know that dinosaurs (specific species or in general) provided long-term nurture of their young? Infant mammals need to be suckled and weaned - hatchling birds need to fledge - I’m sure that some species of dinosaur probably had a requirement for the parent to nurture the young, but I imagine a lot of them were pretty independent as soon as they hatched. A parent dinosaur isn’t going to ‘adopt’ offspring of a different species if it doesn’t even do that for its own. ---
**Author:** ![Pilgrim\_Shadow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f4b2a3/32.png) [@Pilgrim\_Shadow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pilgrim_Shadow)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2017, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/18 "2017-05-28T05:27:44Z")
> [@nightshadea](#): > > ok in kids shows and movies with dinosaurs there’s usually a character that’s adopted by another dinosaur that’s totally different species (dinosaur train has a flying dino hatching a t rex egg land before time has spike…) > > Wouldn’t the mother kill the hatchling that wasn’t hers or would it be like the squirrel that raised a kitten as her own ? in the fact she seemed to think the cat was just a mutant … I don’t zombie lightly, but I objected to “The Land Before Time” on account of anthropocentric representation of predators. I see this frequently in popular culture. A crocodile has no free will, only instinct. Of course, Dinosaurs probably didn’t speak English either… Do you think that’s a fair argument, though? I have an innate phobia of snakes, and their representation as EVIL in Western Culture hasn’t helped. Anyway, I think children must be taught the difference between instinctual and malicious behavior. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2017, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/19 "2017-06-01T05:07:20Z")
It’s a children’s cartoon. ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2017, 9:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346/20 "2017-06-01T09:07:23Z")
> [@Larry\_Borgia](#): > > It’s a children’s cartoon. Which then raises the question of how far from known scientific fact is it acceptable for children’s entertainment to go. I would imagine that most of us would allow animals to talk; kids would soon become bored with cartoons where all the animals used grunts, growls, roars and squeals and they had no idea what was going on. Parents would probably object at too much red-in-tooth-and-claw realism, but at what point/age do children realise that that nice leg of lamb they had for Sunday dinner actually come from those cute little lambs bouncing about in the fields, or that big dinosaurs ate little dinosaurs for breakfast. I suspect that most of us here expect out children’s toys to have some educational value, and out children’s entertainment to have at least a nodding acquaintance with scientific accuracy. Is that too much to ask? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dumb-dinosaur-question/771346.md?page=2)