What Do We Actually Know About Dinosaur Brains?

With recent papers on dinosaur brains how much do we actually know about them? There's a lot actually. Studies over the last 20 years have allowed new looks into the skulls of dinosaurs, letting researchers see the shapes and structures in the brains of dinosaurs. So the answer is actually, quite a lot.

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[laurachapple]

"Brains are super, super important" - sounds like something your *brain* would tell your mouth to say.

[sampagano]

I'm just going to go with "very little" because even studying the brains of living animals is still very new and full of unknowns.

[sampagano]

The garter snake thing was genuinely so interesting that I kind of want to focus my masters on that.

[benmcreynolds]

When I see high intelligence from Crows and complexity from other birds vocalisation capabilities.. I can't help but wonder if some dinosaur's developed similar unique abilities?

[flightlesslord]

Also, not to mention on the scavenger thing, unless Im very much mistaken, theres no large bodied, non flying, terrestrial carnivore known to be a pure scavenger, or even a medium sized one. And definitely not an endothermic one with a high metabolism like the rex, because they simply wouldnt get enough food whilst using massive amounts of energy to get between carcasses. Primarily a scavenger in its later stages of life maybe, an obligate scavenger though? Most likely, definitely not. It would be completely capable of hunting and has adaptations to do so (as well evidence for predator-prey relationship on said prey animals), so to assume it was a pure scavenger wholeheartedly has always seemed like a rather baseless claim. I think its more likely that rex was like all carnivorous animals and opportunistic. If a free meal was in feasible walking distance it would have gone to it, but if it wasnt and it was hungry, live game would be its only option, and it was more than equipped to handle it.

And of course, its adaptations for scavenger, are also useful for hunting, but as you said are also so seen in many active predators also.

[highfive]

Hello, it would be important to know if they have scanned the cranium areas and found dense gyri and sulci patterns etched into the bone. The more dense would show changes in behaviors and learning might have been happening. Great show.

[bkjeong]

Given how smart crocodilians are, I would expect quite a few archosaurs (not just dinosaurs) to have been decently intelligent.

[jeremycraft]

🎶Dinosaur brains! We’re gonna ride, ride, ride, ride, ride 🚂🚂 the dinosaur brains 🎵

[bjorsam]

Brain evolution is fascinating. There are many videos imagining modern animals forced to compete with the mesosic ones. Most of these videos are brain-dead themselves and they often forego the impact of intelligence and sensory develompents. But it raises the question why animals didn't evolve bigger brains earlier? The only jumps come after catastrophies and later in during cold spell some 30 mya.

We all know brains are fragile and calorie intensive devices, so the case for a smaller brain is easy to make. But still, for larger animals we have seen a tendency that the land species with bigger brains have done better.

We can imagine various developmental constraints prohibiting brain evolution. As an example: big brains need quality nutrition - especially when growing. So it's conceivably tough for a newly hatched herbivore, without access to milk, to pull it off.

But surely we could think of other stuff, like brain structure, established behaviours trapping the species in an "evolutionary landscape valley", mesosoic environmental stability slowing all evolution down and so on.

Any of you guys thought of this?

[thorstenkrug]

I imagine that Spinosaurus had skin bumps around the maw area similar to the ones crocodiles have now. They detect movement in the water surounding them with that sensoric structure. So Spinosaurus stood at a riverbank his maw slightly dipped into the water, waiting to ambush unsuspecting prey. His teeth were build in a way that made him great at catching slippery fish. And his noistrils where high on top so he could breathe without problems ln that hunting position.

[mayajade]

My extremely amateur conjecture is that an animal's ecology and environmental requirements are probably a better predictor of behaviors than superficial brain anatomy, and that dinosaurs were probably comparable in intelligence and behavior to modern animals in similar niches.

[davidfoss]

Regarsing stegosaur butt brains: I understand humans have a fairly large nerve complex in our abdomen which controls our digestive systems et. al. Considering the size of herbivore dinosaurs' digestive systems I'd expect them to have a similar adaptation.

[QUIRK]

Stegosauruses had all the brains they ever needed. If a larger brain offered any survival or breeding advantage, 80 million years is enough time for that to have developed.

[jdmj]

Thank you for putting your advertisement at the end instead of interrupting the content for it 🙏🏻

[dennismason]

I like your re-interpretation of T-Rex. When listening to your descriptions I get a vivid and unique feel for the animal waaaay different than Spielberg's version. I see the baboon vid in the list Imma check it out.

[barrybarlowe]

T-Rex likely had a loosely fitted brain to its skull. This creature, when it hunted, used its head as a weapon to drive its banana teeth through its preys muscle and bone. The shock would have been tremendous. A tightly fitted brain would have meant concussions almost every time it hunted.

[TragoudistrosMPH]

It's great to see a well measured approach to describing dinosaurs!

[johnmanno]

That shirt you're wearing is awesome and it looks great on you.

Of course, you're absolutely brilliant and your videos are top notch. But I had to say that anyway.

[ryuuguu]

Most of the neurons outside the brain are not in the spine they are in the digestive tract. Most of the neurons that run between the brain and the stomach send information from the stomach to the brain. In general, the digestive tract controls itself with its own neurons and sends info up to the brain.

[barrybarlowe]

Even crocodiles don't use a strategy of impact with their Jaws. They snatch and death roll. Essentially it would be like grabbing something with a glove with spikes and shaking it till it breaks up. They don't need a lot of space in their skulls. A T-Rex is like a sledge hammer with teeth.