Birds don’t hold and manipulate items with their wings, they do that with their feet.
My parrots are quite dextrous, with opposable digits on both lower limbs. I could totally see a race derived from bird like creatures using their feet the way we use our hands. For things that require two hands their beak holds the item and they use one foot to manipulate it while standing on the other.
That seems a LOT more awkward than the current system.
For that matter, I think that’s a good reason why flightless birds aren’t any smarter than flighted ones. Tool-using just doesn’t become all that big a part of your daily life if you have to stand/sit still every time you want to use the item in your hand.
The bird that makes and creates tools, and passes on that knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_Crow. As was mentioned, given the right circumstances, it’s possible for some species of birds to show very complex behavior.
Why is this a problem? Not all dinosaurs were herbivores, and others ate things like insects (also common in herbivorous diets since dinosaurs didn’t check their food for bugs); a few dinosaurs were also omnivorous.
Imagine a group of those Dinosaurians on a message board imagining what life would be like if a mammal had become the dominant sapient species. Even assuming they guessed that primates were the most likely candidates, how close would they have gotten to us by extrapolating from Bonobos and chimps?
It doesn’t make any sense. Raptors and other small theropods had grasping hands, not wings. The tiny species that survived the mass extinction eventually evolved into birds, but the larger, more optimal species suited for development into sapient beings has hands.
I’m not sure where you’re going with that, but my point is that there’s a very big difference between going from hands to wings versus wings to hands.
I’d say the reason no bird has ever developed anything like hands is because hands developed as a way to better climb and move through trees. Why would something that flies need to climb a tree?
Maybe one of the flightless birds might eventually evolve into a tree climber, and then from there into a opposable-thumbs-having tool user, etc.. That’s a pretty circuituous route, though. It’s also highly unlikely, given that flightless birds of the right size aren’t forest dwellers.
[nitpick] Birds are believed to have evolved prior to the Great Dinosaur Extinction, not after. It’s not that the survivors evolved into birds, but rather, those that had already evolved into birds were the survivors. [/nitpick]
Feet! Birds use their feet to manipulate their environment, as I already stated. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the most optimal solution so long as it works. Some species of birds have developed dextrous, opposable digits already.
Because sometimes climbing is less effort than flying? Even though birds can fly there are many who also climb.
I don’t get this obsession with the notion that “tree climbing” is somehow essential to intelligence. Just because that’s how we did it does not mean that is the only route to sapience. Likewise the notion that the wings have to evolve into hands somehow - no, they don’t. Plenty of birds use their feet to grasp and manipulate things. Flightless birds are actually poor candidates to develop “hands” as their forelimbs seem inevitably to atrophy into uselessness and their hind limbs then specialize for transportation. Flying birds, on the other hand, specialize their forelimbs for transportation and their hind limbs retain a more generalized configuration suitable to multiple task, such as standing, walking/hopping, and grasping.
RE: The OP’s self annihilation musing, I’d tend to think an emotional and irrational species such as ourselves would be much more likely to bring about such an event when compared to a coldly calculating and amoral reptilian people. Or I suppose you could argue that they would disregard mass death as long as they think their side can come out ahead so war would be more common. But presumably they’d want something left behind to actually conquer. Maybe they’d have figured out the benefits of mutual cooperation earlier than we did.
It’s a shame we probably won’t encounter alien intelligences in our lifetimes. I’ve always wondered how much of our thought processes or logic are universal to being a sapient creature using game theory or just us being quirky apes who play dress up.
Well, we only have a sample of one sapient species so it’s a little hard to be sure, but if we rewound time and ran history again… sure, why not? Many bird species are social, some are known to be problem-solvers, they can manipulate objects, many species have lifespans comparable to ours, are capable of learning… Why not?