Neurobiologist Suzanne Herculano-Huzel, author of a study published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, says Tyrannosaurus and other theropods were actually “primates of their time” compared to the intelligence of their dinosaur companions living next to them at the time.

what is known

Because science has no surviving theropod brains to study today—soft tissues such as gray matter are rarely fossilized—it is up to the brains of its modern descendants, birds, to determine the exact number of neurons in an extinct animal.

If you can find out how many neurons a bird of a certain size has in its brain, you can also understand how large the brains of different bird-like dinosaurs were. After doing mathematical calculations, you can estimate how many neurons were in a dinosaur’s brain,
– says Erculano-Husel.

The researcher says the math is relatively simple. The main challenge was to prove the fact that the proportionality of brain and body sizes in birds also applies to dinosaurs. That’s exactly what he did in the first place. After that, the scientist used the number of neurons in some modern birds, applied the same scaling rules, and found how many neurons theropods like the T-Rex could have.

According to the research findings, Theropods had as many neurons in their brains as apes have today., and the T-Rex may have almost the most numbers – up to 3 billion. This allows it to be compared to baboons – a pretty frightening level of intelligence for a house-sized killing machine. With so many neurons, Herculano-Huzel estimates that a tyrannosaurus not only had exceptional cognitive abilities, but could have lived longer—up to 40 years. That time and mind is potentially quite enough Being a social being with a unique cultureas in primates and whales. It also allows them to have worked together. His tool-making ability is also “undoubted”, but unlikely with his small claws.