Researching intelligence is an extremely difficult task, even in animals alive today. In part that’s because much of the scientific jury is still out on what intelligence even is.
So, estimating the smarts of any creature that is now extinct is an especially tall order. In the case of dinosaurs, combine the fact that they have been gone for tens of millions of years, and this task requires … even more brains, and speculation.
Nevertheless, scholars have pursued several different methods to tackle the question of dino intelligence.
Their approaches rely on a mix of morphological proxies of intelligence like absolute and relative brain size and neuron count, or mapping dinosaurs against their relatives in the evolutionary tree.
As an added challenge, the term dinosaur itself is a broad category. These creatures spanned great diversity in their morphology, lifestyles and diets, which means that some dinosaurs were likely much smarter than others.
