An Anthroposaur envisioned by Joe Petagno
Anthroposaurs
Dr Brian Stableford is a biology graduate and lecturer in sociology at the University of Reading, England, but is better known as a writer of science fiction. He writes in The Science in Science Fiction that:
…certain difficulties stand in the way of the ever popular lizard-men who figure so frequently as science fictional villains. Reptiles, having no internal temperature control, are rather limited in the amount of brain activity they can indulge in…
That may be true of lizard-men or Reptoids, but not of dinosaur-men or dinosauroids, to use the word coined by Dale Russell of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Ottawa, Canada. Dinosauroids are intelligent creatures evolved from dinosaurs, and because dinosaurs had a physiology superior to lizards and in many ways superior to mammals, Dr Stableford’s complaint does not hold water. Our anthroposaur and Russell’s dinosauroid are Dr Stableford’s lizard-men precisely because they are all lizard-men could be.
Anthroposaur is the better term: it is more descriptive than Russell’s word, and Russell’s conception of dinosaur evolution was vastly different from that considered here. Russell imagined how dinosaurs might have evolved had they survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction and remained alive until today. They didn’t survive, so they couldn’t evolve. But the anthroposaurs could have evolved before the K-T catastrophe, as we shall see.
Stableford informally lists the characteristics of an intelligent organism.
If human beings did not walk upright, freeing their forelimbs to develop hands instead of paws, they could not have developed the kind of intelligence they have. Similarly intelligent beings must be sociable, because intelligence arises out of the need to communicate. The fact that most mammals and birds show a degree of intelligence not seen in reptiles is connected with the fact that they generally have more complicated social relationships, especially in connection with the rearing of young. The more sociable animals are, and the more able they are to interfere with and transform their environment, the more intelligent they become.
Stableford’s characteristics tally respectably with those deduced from our study of mankind’s emergence.
The ones which we have some chance of assessing rationally 65 million years after the death of the dinosaurs other than warm-bloodedness, are that intelligent terrestrial animals:
- are bipedal, have an erect stance
- have grasping hands having sensitive fingers and opposable thumbs
- have binocular vision
- have a large brain
- are subject to social and parental guidance in childhood
- are able to speak
- are aggressive.
How do the dinosaurs measure up?
Related posts:
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- What is the Dinosaur Heritage? 1 Do we suffer from the same affliction as the anthroposaurs...
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