'Enigmatic' footprints reveal prehistoric crocodile that walked on two legs
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Children are attached to their parents for years to learn culture. A bondage that to some extend is formed in the womb. How would dinosaurs have a 'natural' way for education when they hedge from eggs and are left to themselves? All their culture has to be encoded in DNA which most likely takes up more brain tissue and much more time to evolve.
There are breeding birds, so some form of attachment is possible. But that needs another limit. Birds need feathers before they can live on their own. Which limit could exist for dinosaurs? Crocodiles and turtles have kept on non-evolving for quite some time.
(And there is no place for sapiened birds because the head is too heavy.)
It's the other way round: hatching from eggs means being able to fend for oneself which means that they don't learn that they have to stick around.
I suspect some paleontologists extrapolate too much from small data points. Which is somewhat safe in their field, hows it going to be disproven?
"We ruled out swimming because the trackways are so regular," said Martin Lockley, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Colorado and an author of the study.
"Modern crocs sometimes use hind feet to punt along, but the tracks are irregular incomplete, washed out splayed and not in a regular one foot in front of the next trackway pattern."
In the parallel universe of this novel, Earth was not struck by an asteroid 65 million years before the present. Consequently, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event which wiped out the dinosaurs and other related reptiles never happened, leaving the way clear for an intelligent species to eventually evolve from mosasaurs, a family of Late Cretaceous marine lizards closely related to the modern monitor lizards.
The intelligent reptiloid species is called the Yilanè, and represents the dominant life form on most of the planet. However, during the evolutionary process, the species became non-viable on the North American continent and Caribbean area, leaving them free of Yilanè for millions of years and opening an ecological niche for a top predator. A human-like species, the Tanu, evolved to fill the niche in North America, but are only found on that continent. Unlike humans, which evolved from African primates, the Tanu have evolved from a lineage of New World monkey. By the time the novel begins, the humanoids have reached a late stone age level of technology and culture, with a number of societies having developed farming skills.
The Yilanè, having had millions of years of civilization, have a very advanced society primarily based on a mastery of the biological sciences, especially genetic engineering, so much so that almost every tool and artifact they use is a modified lifeform. Their boats were originally squids, their submarines are enhanced ichthyosaurs (here called uruketos), while their guns are modified monitor lizards which eject projectiles using pressurised gas.
If you see it when it is later, then it is an alligator. But if you see it after while, then it is a crocodile.
Easy peasy!