And Tyrannosaurus rexmouth open, waits in ambush and prepares to pounce on a Triceratops. In his edition of sSeptember 2024, the magazine Scientific American puts this scene on its front page with the title “In the skin of a dinosaur”. He wonders how the enormous dinosaur perceived the world. During a hunt, for example, did it locate its prey by smell or by sight? Or by fine hearing?
For a long time, paleontologists’ reasoning was based on the study of endocasts, that is, brain casts obtained by filling fossils with empty skulls. But today, thanks to modern imaging methods, in particular, “We can reconstruct the volume and surface area of the brain without relying on rare whole skulls,” write researchers Amy Balanoff of Johns Hopkins University and Daniel Ksepka of the Bruce Museum in Connecticut.
They continue, in a popular article published by Scientific American :
“We now have tools that allow us to learn how these long-extinct animals perceived the world around them and what really happened when a predator met its prey in the time of the dinosaurs.”
Thanks to digital endocasts that reveal precisely the brain areas involved in the different senses, it can be confirmed that tyrannosaurs were outstanding predators. Their olfactory bulbs, brain structures for decoding odors, would have been particularly developed, so that they would have been able “to sniff the wind and identify live or dead prey long before you see them.” That said, based on the size of their optic lobes, which integrate signals from the eyes, they could also count on very good vision.
As for the intelligence of this giant lizard, work published in 2023 concluded that it was comparable to that of a baboon. Amy Balanoff and Daniel Ksepka consider that “and T. rex “With the intelligence of a primate would have been terrifying.” The dinosaur would have been able to handle tools, for example. But while they cite it, the two researchers remain cautious about this work. As a general rule, they point out, researchers tend to estimate the intelligence of a vertebrate by comparing the size of its skull to that of its body, which would clearly be to the disadvantage of the tyrannosaurus.
[…] - Courrier international
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