Random Thought: Has Anyone Really Looked at Dinosaur Sapience?

I was driving home from work today, and the most random question popped into my head: How do we know there weren’t any Dinosaurs species capable of creating a civilization on even a hunter-gatherer level? Has anyone taken a look to see if there’s any evidence of it? What kind of evidence would we need to look for?

A quick dive into Wikipedia provided me with two terms to consider: sentience and sapience. Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectively. Avoiding the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing can be tricky, but I would argue that any animal that can recognize itself in the mirror, or dream, or figure out a simple problem should lay some small claim to sentience. Sapience is the the trickier one: For the purposes of my essay, lets call it a combination of sentience, self-awareness, conciousness, memory and judgment.

People, all joking aside, are both sentient and sapient. Good arguments are being made that Cetaceans like whales and dolphins are pretty damned close; so are elephants. So are crows and ravens and parrots and magpies. Do I need to mention Chimps, bonobos, gorillas? We’re only just starting to come to grips with the idea that we aren’t as unique as we think we are. What separates us from the animals isn’t so much the sheer capacity of our minds as our opposable thumbs, our social nature (in that we communicate our individual experiences in a number of ways to a larger collective who can understand and process that information), and our tool making. Brains, hands, gadgets and a willingness to share and teach what we figure out to others: That’s how we conquered the world.

Who’s to say dinosaurs didn’t do the same?