Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25118285-20160327152206/@comment-25118285-20160414020958

PCAwesomeness wrote: Alexthe666 wrote: About the intelligence of these animals: Wouldn't a creature that's smart enough to travel in packs be at least as smart as a wolf or cat? OK, I feel so bad for saying this...

The smartest dinosaur, Troodon, would have been as smart as only an emu or an opossum, which is not very smart, to say the least.

This means that dinosaurs were a bunch of dumbcluck reptiles, and that all the other reptiles (save for pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and non-pliosauroid plesiosaurs) were smarter than them... The thing with that is, a creature is only as intelligent as it needs to be, and you can't really compare intelligence between species (no matter how much people try to do it). You can't really compare a stegosaurus to an emu or an opossum (or even an emu and an opossum) because they have totally different environments. Put an emu in the artic and it would look pretty dumb. Put a stego out of its environment and it would also look pretty dumb. No species is "dumb." Especially since we're looking at all of this from a human standpoint: if it doesn't match with our views of intelligence, it isn't intelligent.

Artistic representation:

https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f60cae383b688d46b6f6424ab4c35b70?convert_to_webp=true