Was Tyrannosaurus rex as smart as a baboon? A controversial new study says yes.
, by making “brain soup”—dissolving brains in a detergent solution—and counting the neurons in different parts of the brain.
That’s not possible with dinosaur brains. But Herculano-Houzel recognized an opportunity last year when researchers published a large database showing that, compared with reptiles, birds have much higher densities of neurons in their cortexes. Modern birds are related to extinct theropods—a group of carnivorous dinosaurs that included—so Herculano-Houzel wanted to see whether she could use some comparative anatomy tricks to estimate the neuronal density of dinos.
“It’s awesome, quite frankly, to be able to get these numbers for these amazing creatures that don’t exist anymore and to be able to add something to the puzzle of what were their lives like … before the asteroid,” Herculano-Houzel says., a 6-meter-long theropod that lived about 70 million years ago in what is now Mongolia, had just over 1 billion neurons in its cortex, similar to capuchin monkeys.
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