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Re: [dinosaur] Advanced dinosaurian species?



On Wed, Dec 23rd, 2020 at 3:16 PM, kimba4evr@aol.com wrote:

> Since no fossils have been found displaying the dexterity of our hands, any
> type of tools except crude stone tools would not have been developed. Even
> more intricate stone tools like arrowheads would not have been possible with
> the "hands" of any dinosaur I am familiar with, but that does not prevent the
> development of advanced communication and cooperation, a society of a sort.
> So lacking manual dexterity, can anyone think of anything else that might
> have survived?
> Am I correct there is no known dinosaur that had forelimbs that were capable
> of possibly creating things that could have survived?

There are several things to consider:

  - We don't have a complete manus for every known fossil dinosaur species.
  - Not every dinosaur species that ever existed would have left fossils, so 
there are some we will never 
know about.
  - Not every dinosaur species that *did* leave fossils has been discovered.
  - Not every dinosaur fossil that formed has survived to the present.

So there's plenty of scope for dinosaur species (most likely fully bipedal 
non-volant species) to have 
developed dexterous hands despite what the current fossil record tells us.

Keep in mind that of all extant primates, only our species is capable of a 
precision grip (although it was 
probably once present in most, if not all, species in the genus Homo). Other 
extant primates can bash 
nuts with rocks or poke things with crude sticks, but that's about the limit of 
their manual dexterity. 

Fully bipedal species that don't use their forelimbs for locomotion at all are 
the most likely to develop the 
degree of manual dexterity seen in humans. Dinosaurs had plenty of fully 
bipedal and non-volant body 
plans to act as evolutionary fodder for an atypical tool-using species to have 
arisen, that also managed to 
slip through the cracks of the fossil record. That leaves fertile ground for 
speculative fiction.

-- 
Dann Pigdon