Just wondering...if the dinos had survived, would they have evolved higher intelligence and complex societies or would they be similar to modern reptiles/crocs/turtles and fish(which are as old no?) in terms of intelligence?
Some birds arguably have higher intelligence and form complex societies. But it was the primate group that developed the "most complex" society. This despite the fact that birds like primates are visually oriented, highly vocalized, take extensive care of their young, and many are already adopted to live in complex societies. It could be that the manual dexterity of primates, as well as the mammalian gestation period ('pregnancy') and its ability to have more developed children at birth could be further required factors that led to societies of human complexity.
You never know what 65 million years of uninterrupted evolution would have produced, but based on the way birds evolved I don't believe we would have had a dinosaur Hacker News in this alternate history.
I'm not trying to suggest that. I'm just saying that we don't know enough, but that based on the limited things we do know (birds never got to primate level societal complexity), we can hypothesize that dinosaurs would never have made it.
It could well be that some other dinosaur subfamily could have taken a turn towards becoming a complex society, but I wouldn't have bet on the ankylosaurs, the sauropods or the ornithopods either for this.
Maybe not a fact but Macaws click their talons much like a dino, atleast in the way the Dino's were presented in Jurassic Park. But they do the head bobbing motion too.
A talking bird can have a sense of humor. My macaw would call the dog to the cage. Throw food at him and then laugh. Sometimes in a British accent. I have no idea where that came from.
And they are pretty territorial. I have a scar to prove it.
Granted this is mostly anecdotal from having a macaw for thirty years
Thanks for incorrecting me
intelligence doesn't seem to be correlated with the age of the species or recent lineage from what i understand.
in the water, sharks are extremely old, almost reaching back to the dinosaur ages, but they are wrecked in intelligence by orcas, who came much later.
plus, intelligence, or at least the further development of society and technology is solely due to the ability to manipulate objects. for example, i strongly believe that if you took an orca brain and gave it human-like manipulation tools and moved it to land that you would have a homosapiens competitor.