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Dinosaur Brains Flight-Ready Long Before They Took To the Air
An anonymous reader writes "Dinosaurs evolved the brain power for flight long before they took to the air, new evidence presented in the journal Nature suggests. Contrary to the cliche, a 'bird brain' describes a relatively enlarged brain with the capacity required for flight. However, based on high-resolution X-ray computed tomographic (CT) scans, researchers found that at least a few non-avian dinosaurs had brains as large or larger than Archaeopteryx, one of the earliest known birds, indicating that some dinosaurs already suspected of flight capability would have had the neurological tools to do so."
"How much intelligence do you need to sneak up on a leaf?"
To sneak up on a leaf? Not much. To avoid getting eaten by a lion while you're sneaking up on a leaf? Quite a bit more apparently.
The African buffalo is reportedly rather more intelligent than you might suspect. There are numerous reports of communication, team work and even engaging in vindictive group behaviour like pursuing lions and killing lion cubs.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The MSNBC journalist is reading way, way too much from the Nature paper. All the latter (and its cited sources) say is that a large brain is thought to be a prerequisite for flight, and that the overall brain morphology found in birds is also found in dinosaurs. The journalist implicitly assumes that this brain morphology has evolved for flight, but this is not a given. Bats have a different brain morphology (though there are some similarities) and are quite nimble fliers. Also, feathers are useful for flight (though bats don't have them), but they're also great for keeping warm (anyone ever tried a feather comforter?), and non-flying dinosaurs had them possibly for that purpose. I'm chalking the present finding in the same column as the feathers: turns out having a large brain with strong and fast spatial visualization ability is useful for other things than flying (who'd have thought, right?), and that avians simply inherited this trait from dinosaurs along with their brain morphology (and undoubtedly fine-tuned it). If anything, the present research adds to the (bat-brain) evidence saying that the overall brain morphology found in birds didn't specifically evolve for the purpose of flight.