The "Dinosaur Man" - Stenonychosaurus Inequalis
A small meat-eating dinosaur, if it had not become extinct some 63,000,000 years ago, according to scientists at Canada's National Museum of Natural Sciences at Ottawa, would very probably have envolved into a manlike creature 4,5 feet tall, with a large brain, green skin, and yellow reptillian eyes.

Are Reptoids related to dinosaurs?
Dale Russell (Visiting Professor, Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and Senior Curator of Paleontology, North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences) once published a professional "Thought Experiment" in which he projected what the dinosaurs may have possibly evolved into if they had survived the, so called "extinction event" that took place 65 million years ago. Using the known morphology of the Troodon dinosaur, the image that he arrived at is identical to that which has been recorded through history by the ancients (on rocks) and modern UFO eywitnesses and contactees. This is a startling relelation!





We also know now that some of the dinosaurs did, in fact survive and their descendants became avians or BIRDS!

Birds are morphologically diversified bipedal, saurian descendants (coelurosaurs) whose scales transformed into hair follicles over millions of years, that learned to fly and to eventually demonstrate rudimentary intelligence by mimicking other animals attempts to communicate. Other than mankind, what other animal has come as close to reproducing human communication?

If one group of dinosaurs could have survived and evolved into animals that attempt to reproduce human speech, then it stands to reason that another group of dinosaurs may have also survived the extinction event 65 millions years ago and also developed a certain degree of intelligence and learned unique communication skills.

The "Thought Experiment" that Dale Russell formulated, demonstrating how the some of the dinosaurs were becoming more human-like,  is a road sign in evolutionary thinking. It shows us that our previously considered human form is not as unique as we previously thought.

If the human form is a clear expression of a physical trend shared with the dinosaurs, it's possible that that same genetic trend or course may have extended itself  into the brain and it's destiny towards intelligence. And, if humans became intelligent somewhat recently in geologic time,  we then we can only imagine how intelligent the dinosaur's descendants might be now if they had millions of year to get a 'head' start in developing their species.

The Evolution of Grays
In the early 1980’s, the American paleontologist Dale Russell theorized that the raptor dinosaur called Troodon, with its huge brain and grasping hands could have evolved into a humanoid being (which he named the “dinosauroid”) if dinosaurs did not go extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.

This picture shows Troodon slowly evolving into the dinosauroid-like creatures just like Dale Russell suggests. But what if they kept evolving to the present time? 65 million years is plenty of time for a highly advanced civilization of dinosaurs to evolve. What if the “Gray” aliens we are seeing are not extra-terrestrials at all? But extra-universal? Ones from the same Earth and the same time, but in a time where dinosaurs did not die out. This would explain why they have 2 eyes, 2 arms, 2 legs, can breathe our atmosphere and are so advanced.

Fossils of Troodon are found in North America, and the Roswell crash was also in America. Would it be so much of a stretch that an advanced extra-universal faculty made by these “Grays” would not “pop out” in our universe in the region of New Mexico? Some string theorists think that there could be a vast “multiverse” out there-- moving between universes may be much easier or even more probable than trying to travel across the universe you're in and are limited to the speed of light. I have no doubt that there is other life in the universe, but have they actually been able to get to us when the universe is so big? Just something to think about.



Dinosaurs, intelligent



"Dinosauroid." Sculpture by Dale Russell and Ron Seguin, 1982, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Canada

Troodon (Stenonychosaurus unequalis)

What would have happened if the asteroid that supposedly hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period (see Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary), 65 million years ago, had missed? One possibility is that the dinosaurs would not have become extinct, advanced mammals would subsequently not have appeared, and some of the descendants of dinosaurs might have evolved to become intelligent in our place. It's clear that some of the dinosaurs were getting smarter at the time the asteroid hit the Yucatan and handed the gauntlet to the mammals (fortunately for us). One of the brainiest dinosaurs we know about at the end of the Cretaceous was Troodon (a.k.a. Stenonychosaurus inequalis) a 1.2-m-tall, 70-kg carnivorous dinosaur with perhaps the intelligence of an opossum. What if Troodon had survived and continued to evolve and get brainier? In the early 1980s, paleontologist Dale Russell, curator of vertebrate fossils at the National Museums of Canada, in Ottowa, explored this possibility;1 for more on Russell go here (DinoData). Had the dinosaurs survived, argued Russell, and a species like Troodon grown smarter, it would eventually have needed to stand upright to balance its heavy head. A shoulder structure would have evolved to allow the "dinosauroid" to throw objects. Projecting how other characteristics of this species might have developed he came up with a model of a large-brained, reptilian biped with enormous eyes, three-fingered hands, an absence of external genitalia (typical of reptiles), and a navel (since a placenta is found in some modern reptiles and may have been needed to enable the birth of young with big brain cases).



Was Troodon the last word on dinosaur intelligence or are there fossils of even smarter species waiting to be found? Visit this website for a cogently argued case that some dinosaurs may have got to be really brainy—to the point of hominid intelligence. We've no evidence for this, of course, but it isn't such an outrageous hypothesis. At least, it's an interesting point when thinking about alternative evolutionary scenarios. The dinosaurs were around for a very long time—from about 225 to 65 million years ago. Consider how far mammals have progressed since the end of the Cretaceous (a period less than half as long): from creeping around in trees to launching Jupiter probes! Consider how rapidly humanoid intelligence has advanced in the past 3 million years. 

Dinosaurs certainly had time to grow big brains and even develop a culture and civilization. Did they? Probably not, but it isn't out of the question. After all, what clues will be left to our own civilization and technology after 65 million years of erosion and earth movements? In the Star Trek Voyager episode "Distant Origin", a sentient race of space-faring dinosaurs on the far side of the Galaxy discover they may have originated on Earth (see picture at lower right from this show). Also in science fiction, Harry Harrison explored the consequences of saurian intelligence in his West of Eden series



The Voths

Name
  Troodon
 

Meaning
  wounding tooth
 

 
How to say it
  TROH-oh-don

Where found
  USA

Length
  2 m

Height
  1.3 m

Mass (weight)
  40 kg

How it moved
  on 2 legs

Teeth
  curved, flattened teeth with coarse serrations

Type of feeder
  CARNIVOROUS

Food
  small vertebrates, lizards, mammals

Period
  Upper Cretaceous

When it lived
  74-65 mya

Type of hip
  lizard-hipped

Dinosaur group
  Theropoda

Other info
  Had a relatively large brain, large eyes and stereoscopic vision.

"The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations."
Intelligent Dinosaurs?
Did the dinosaurs develop intelligence before Adam?

Some dinosaur iconoclasts have dared to ask this question, but even they have merely answered: They couldn"t have. Thus Bakker asks:

Why didn"t [the dinosaurs] evolve larger cerebral systems? Why didn"t they eventually produce super-intelligent species capable of making stone tools?

Desmond compares mammals with the superior dinosaurs and wonders:

Why did not "Man" land on the moon in the Cretaceous?

adding that by Man he meant a creature filling the ecological role of humans. Sagan asks

if the dinosaurs had not all been mysteriously extinguished some sixty-five million years ago, would the saurornithoides have continued to evolve into increasingly intelligent forms?

All believe dinosaurs would have reached intelligence were it not for the Cretaceous terminal extinction. And all agree that they failed to achieve it because they died out first.

I disagree.

Some dinosaurs did develop intelligence and by so doing caused the Cretaceous terminal extinction, just as an insensitive ape developed intelligence at the end of the Tertiary and created the mass extinction that marks the end of that geological era. Though the direct evidence is sparse—I give what little there is in the next chapter—the circumstantial evidence is compelling. The thesis is not self-evidently false, as, say, the idea of a flat earth is. Today we consider it evident that the earth is round and revolves round the Sun—but these ideas have only become accepted in the last few hundred years.

The movement of the continents, continental drift, noted by Wegener sixty years ago seems obvious to us all now, indeed it was probably obvious to any child studying a map of the world decades before Wegener, but because continents were so massive and the experts could not think of a mechanism by which they could move, no one was willing to ask the question must not South America and Africa once have been joined?

We might find ourselves realizing simultaneously that the anthroposaur preceded us, and that we have just stumbled over the precipice of our own extinction.

Mankind has adopted its position of global domination in just five million years. The dinosaurs, we have seen, were warm-blooded, active creatures and usurped the rule of the thecodonts in only five million years. Mechanisms exist for species to evolve at astonishingly fast rates. On average a species of dinosaur did not last for more than two or three million years before becoming extinct or evolving into a new species. There is no reason why one of the dinosaurs should not have evolved intelligence during the last five million years or so of the Cretaceous Period.

Brain and Intelligence
Dinosaurs evolved quickly and there was a spate of dinosaur evolution just prior to their final decline. Bakker says that the stenonychosaurs were evolving quickly in many of their adaptive compartments and with their bulky pair of mid-brain lobes they were probably every bit as endowed as the Late Cretaceous mammals.

Fossil dinosaurs have been found with quite remarkably large brains... for dinosaurs. One authority says that triceratops had a brain weighing a kilogram, a fair size compared with our 1.5 kilograms, though its body weight was 9000 kg compared with our 70 kg. Struthiomimus had a brain to body ratio similar to that of a modern day ostrich—1:1000. And, though brain size is obviously a general measure of intelligence, there is no way of telling whether the brain of an extinct class of animals functioned in quite the same way as those of animals with which we are familiar. We cannot be certain that modern creatures with larger brains are more intelligent than the smaller brained dinosaurs. A higher metabolic rate, more active brains, faster synapses, sharper nerve impulses could all contribute to greater efficiency of the brain even though it were smaller than ours.

Of course, size is presumably directly related to memory capacity but, for humans, much of the brain seems redundant, evolution looks to have overshot—a result, perhaps, of sexual selection or a saltagen in a high quantum state. It might not have done for dinosaurs whose memory capacity could have been better adjusted to the capabilities of their brains overall.

Then again the nature of their intelligence might have differed from ours. Many cold-blooded animals do very well in the world of the mammals by using abilities other than intelligence. In South America, farmers use marine toads to suppress mice and rats which otherwise would make a feast of their crops and seeds. A ponderous toad successfully preying on wily rats? Yet they do. The toads, weighing five pounds wait with infinite patience for the cleverer victim to traverse its usual path, it pounces and the rat is gulped whole into the frog"s maw, rendered insensible by poisonous saliva then swallowed. The abilities of dinosaurs might also have developed rather differently from mammals.

Explosive Evolution
But even if dinosaur and mammalian evolution were truly parallel and dinosaurs had to evolve big brains to become intelligent, fast evolution could have done it in a relatively short time. You do not have to believe me. Witness this remarkable paragraph by Adrian Desmond:

The most intriguing Late Cretaceous inhabitants were the intelligent mimics unearthed in recent years—wide eyed ostrich dinosaurs, and dromaeosaurids like deinonychus and the saurornithoides with stereo-vision functionally mated to opposable thumbs. These dinosaurs, capable of more skilful behavioral feats than any other land animal hitherto, were separated from other dinosaurs by a gulf comparable to that dividing men from cows: the disparity in brain size is staggering. The potential in dromaeosaurs and coelurosaurs for an explosive evolution as the Tertiary dawned cannot be doubted—who knows what new peaks the sophisticated "bird-mimics" would have attained had they survived into the "Age of Mammals". Yet apparently not a breeding population of these beautiful, alert dinosaurs outlived the comparatively cumbersome and dim-witted giants.

Desmond almost proposes that the dinosaurs became intelligent but he pulls up at the final hurdle.

Yes the explosive evolution did occur. Mankind has evolved from being a user of crude rock tools to our present level of civilization in just one million years. It must be possible that these alert creatures did the same. How would that have looked in the fossil record, especially bearing in mind that the chosen habitat of these dinosaurs made their remains scarce, just as remains of early man are scarce and, of modern chimpanzees, non-existent?

Dale Russell and the Dinosauroid
Dale Russell, discoverer of stenonychosaurus, has also postulated that late Cretaceous dinosaurs were well on the way to becoming intellectual animals, and would have succeeded if the dinosaurs had not suffered extinction, stenonychosaurus had an opposable thumb, stood upright about three feet tall and had binocular vision. Russell commented:

It had all the ingredients of success that we see later in the development of the apes.

He believes that stenonychosaurs were the chief predators on Cretaceous mammals and that there must have been quite a lot of them because, by the end of the Cretaceous, there were a lot of mammals, though they were small. Nevertheless few have been found as fossils, just as complete fossil mammals from that period are also rare. The fossil record is so limited that it is a pitiful reflection of past life, as Norman Myers puts it. 



Russell deduced the appearance of a stenonychosaurus that had evolved unhampered by disasters until the 20th century. A model of the creature, a dinosauroid, is on display in Ottawa. The conception of the dinosauroid was based upon convergent evolution. Russell extrapolated trends observable in the dinosaurs like stenonychosaurus to beyond their extinction. By the 20th century, Russell believes their brain size would have been within the human range. To accommodate it its skull would have expanded and its face would probably have flattened. The long dinosaur neck would have shortened to bear more comfortably the weight of its brain. Consequently its tail would have been lost since it would not have been needed to counterpoise the neck and head.

Russell deduced the appearance of a stenonychosaurus that had evolved unhampered by disasters until the 20th century. A model of the creature, a dinosauroid, is on display in Ottawa. The conception of the dinosauroid was based upon convergent evolution. Russell extrapolated trends observable in the dinosaurs like stenonychosaurus to beyond their extinction. By the 20th century, Russell believes their brain size would have been within the human range. To accommodate it its skull would have expanded and its face would probably have flattened. The long dinosaur neck would have shortened to bear more comfortably the weight of its brain. Consequently its tail would have been lost since it would not have been needed to counterpoise the neck and head.

He assumed live births and, rather illogically, that the dinosauroid would therefore have needed a navel. The young, though, were thought likely to have been fed on regurgitated food and the creature would not have had any mammalia. Communication would have sounded similar to birdsong. Besides these conjectured features he supposes there would be characteristics typical of dinosaurs such as scaly skin, large oval eyes with vertically slit pupils, ... and a three fingered hand, one digit of which would be opposed.

...

A Model of the Possible
We considered some possibility of major differences in the structure of the brain of the dinosauroid and man. In mammals the brain grew by expansion of the cerebral lobes but in birds it was the corpus striatum that expanded. A great deal of visual information processing in reptiles is done in the retina rather than being passed on to the brain. The ostrich mimic dinosaur had enormous eyes protected by bony plates. That is usually attributed to a nocturnal lifestyle but it could indicate that the parts of the brain of the dinosauroid that were to develop were associated with vision.

Russell was almost at pains to emphasize that his guesses were conservative—and that must be true. 65 million years, even in a thought experiment, seems too long for an active, warm-blooded creature already up and running to need to develop what mammals did in the same period of time from a standing start. With the mechanisms for rapid change at the disposal of evolution such a long time scale seems unnecessary if not silly. It is more likely that intelligence evolved before the whole dinosaurian dynasty came to an end.

Russell"s conjectures give us a model, not of the impossible but of the possible. Not of the hypothetical dinosauroid today but the actual anthroposaur of 65 million years ago.

Within a few million years of the extinction of the dinosaurs, the neocortex of the early primates had begun to develop. Quite ordinary mammals now exhibit astonishingly sophisticated behavior that denotes the working of sophisticated brains. Consider three quick examples.

Compared with the hoofed animals of the veldt, hyenas are slow creatures. They can run at about 40 mph compared with 50 mph for a wildebeest. They have therefore learned to be clever team hunters. Often lions scavenge from hyenas rather than the other way around. The hyaena seems to decide upon the type of prey it wants in advance then uses appropriate tactics for that creature. David Attenborough tells us that they are happy to hunt wildebeest but will ignore them if they have decided that today"s dinner is to be zebra. Prairie dogs, communal animals that live in towns go in for horticulture. They cut down certain plants, not to eat—they do not like the taste of them—but to create more space for those they do like. Every now and then they leave a territory for no other reason than to let it lie fallow to recover, then they return to it. Finally Sea otters are intelligent enough to use a tool, such as a suitable pebble, to break shellfish from the rocks and to crack open their shells. All evolved since the death of the dinosaurs.

Yet surely the selective pressure on the mammals in the world of the dinosaurs would have been more favorable to the development of the mammalian neocortex. Intelligence is a weapon in the evolutionary arms race between predator and prey. The mammals were the oppressed animals, oppressed by the superior dinosaurs. Plainly, if the mammals were more intelligent than the dinosaurs then they should have been able to outwit them and usurp the dinosaur"s dominant status. They didn"t so they weren"t. The mammals, including the primates, could not capitalize on intelligence in the Cretaceous because there already were intelligent creatures around quite capable of holding their own against other dinosaurs let alone the pretensions of early primates or any other mammal. Just as mankind eliminated the intelligent opposition, the anthroposaurs would have eliminated any other animal, dinosaur or mammal, that seemed likely to become a rival.

Where were the Primosaurs?

What of the niche later occupied by the primates. Was it occupied in the Cretaceous by primosaurs, dinosaur equivalents of the primates, and only when they died was the mammalian version able to develop? If convergent evolution is anything to go by, perhaps the intelligent dinosaur had to descend, like the intelligent mammal, from the trees or, perhaps, emerge from the water.

What was in the trees when the dinosaurs were on the ground? From the fossil record there seem to be no dinosaurs adapted for tree dwelling in the sense that such creatures as monkeys, apes or even squirrels are today. Yet, if there were no dinosaurs in the trees, the mammals would have had a perfectly safe niche, would surely have evolved into it and, if they merely had to find a place free of dinosaurs to realize their destiny, developed brains much earlier.

Fossils of predatory dinosaurs are rare—Robert Bakker claims that he only came across a few fragments of them in six years of field work—but fossils of forest species are rarer. Fossil chimpanzees, from much closer times, are totally non-existent. We have only five fossil skeletons of Archaeopteryx which presumably spent some of its time in trees. Fossils of pterosaurs are mainly of marine species which swooped around the edges of the sea.

The problem with tree dwellers is that their dead bodies drop to the forest floor where they are most unlikely to leave a fossil record. The forest is rich in fungi and bacteria that thrive in the damp and the shade and the little that is not eaten by scavengers decays in a short time. And the bones?—the forest floor is acidic so that even the bones do not survive long enough to leave a trace. So there is no fossil evidence to suggest what was in the trees when dinosaurs roamed the ground.

Experts tell us that, since mammals, like tree shrews, were there, dinosaurs were not—otherwise trees would not have been safe for them. But, if the dinosaurs were afraid of heights, how did the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx learn to fly? It is absurd that dinosaurs should not have adapted to life in the trees and the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx prove it.

Lagosuchus, thought to be an ancestor of the pterodactyls, was a primitive dinosaur that must have climbed trees. Today, Komodo dragon hatchlings live in trees to avoid predators. Many other cold-blooded animals climb trees, the many species of tree frog for instance. Why should there not have been hosts of dinosaur monkeys and dinosaur apes? Perhaps there were but, as we have seen, because of their habitat they did not fossilize easily: a whole fauna of advanced dinosaurs about which we know nothing. Is it so stupid then to guess that one of them might have followed a pathway to intelligence just as we did?

The Importance of Flowers

There is a parallel between the explosive radiation of dinosaurian grazers like hadrosaurs and ceratopsians from the middle Cretaceous and the explosion of mammalian grazers about 11 million years ago.

The mid-Cretaceous explosion was a result of the breakthrough of the flowering plants about 117 million years ago just as the more recent case was due to the emergence of the grasses 24 million years ago. Along with the antelopes, horses, cows and elephants of the latter period, taking advantage of the new food stuff, came the intelligent mammal, man. Lucy walked by that East African lakeside just as cattle and horses were evolving 3.7 million years ago. Since then, man has continued to evolve rapidly, though the animals that originally shared the savannah with him, such as the antelopes, have not.

Can the parallel be extended? Did an intelligent dinosaur emerge from the Cretaceous forests, a part of the explosive radiation of dinosaurs resulting from the earlier emergence of the flowering plants as a new source of food, and, like man, evolve exceedingly rapidly? If an aquatic phase gave man many useful features during his development, is it possible that some dinosaurs lived aquatically for awhile and developed a comparable streamlined shape and upright stance as well as other useful features?

With the plucking of the hadrosaurs from the experts‘ approved place in the swamps, to be placed in herds on mossy plains, there seemed to be no semi-aquatic dinosaurs remaining at the end of the Cretaceous. Animals such as the ichthyosaurs and the plesiosaurs, which the experts do not classify as dinosaurs, were fully aquatic, and the ichthyosaurs might have died out before then anyway. Yet, for 20 million years, sea-levels had been higher than at any time in the last 200 million years. There were vast areas of shallow continental seas. Surely a lot of species must have dipped their toes in the water and some of them must have tarried awhile.

Cycles of Inundation
Lots of shallow seas imply lots of small, perhaps transient, islands ideal for evolutionary experiments like those described by Elaine Morgan—but 65 million years earlier. Suggestive also is Bakker"s idea that the archaeopteryx was possibly able to use its primitive wings to swim rather as a hoatzin fledgling does. Both archaeopteryx and deinonychus had wrists with a semicircular joint which permitted accurate movement of the fingers and exceptional ability to flex them. It is conceivable that, while the archaeopteryx was evolving into birds that some other members of the family turned to brachiating and developed along the lines of first the modern primates, and then the aquatic ape, to yield Anthroposaurus sapiens.

Gribbon and Cherfas attribute the growth of intelligence in man to the succession of ice ages over the last few million years. This sequence of glacials and interglacials subjected the hominid apes to repeated intense selective pressure putting a premium on adaptability, versatility and intelligence. Though there were no ice ages at the end of the Cretaceous period, we noted that the sea level was high. It fell considerably and quickly 95 million years ago and again 67 million years ago, but over several million years, about 80 million years ago, there was a shallower dip. With large amounts of the continental shelves covered in water, fluctuations of only a few meters could successively expose then inundate large areas of land.

The normal tidal range today can make the sea disappear over the horizon at low tide in those places where the beach shelves at only a slight angle. The slow shallow dip observed in the sea level when it was at its height possibly signifies thousands of such incursions of the ocean. Imagine a Spring tide that went out for ten thousand years before it returned. Then it stayed in for ten thousand years. This would put strong selection pressure on the species living on the flat coastal lowlands or on low islands.

Possible confirmation is the formation of oil bearing rocks at that time. Half of our present oil reserves stem from that period, the result of organic matter settling to the bottom of shallow stagnant seas. Incursions of the ocean would have trapped the organic layers between thin layers of mud eventually giving rise to oil shales from which oil was squeezed under pressure.

Further evidence of such cycles comes from the striated appearance of Cretaceous chalk cliffs. Is it possible that fluctuations in sea level provided the evolutionary stimulus for the anthroposaurs that Gribbon and Cherfas argue was provided by ice ages in the evolution of mankind? Did the same fluctuations force a brachiating dromaeosaur to turn to the water temporarily, giving it a range of advantages just as Morgan argues for mankind"s predecessor?

A Final Mystery
A final mystery looms large in the story of [dinosaur] predator and prey, Robert Bakker tells us. It is that, unlike the ankylosaurs and the ceratopsians, the hadrosaurs had no obvious means of defence against ferocious predators like the tyrannosaurs. They

had no whiplike tails, long claws, or any type of spike or plate. And their limbs were shorter and designed for lower top speeds than were those of their gracefully long-legged hunters. How did these normally slow moving, unarmed browsers escape their enemies?

An intriguing question.

Obviously the various weapons of the other creatures were advantageous or they would not have evolved. Why then did the hadrosaurs not need them? Orthodoxy has it that they were caring parents and apparently moved about in herds, traits that could have given them sufficient advantage. Their strong social sense and protective instinct would have allowed them to proliferate into immense herds wandering the continents. There is safety in numbers as we see on what remains of the African veldt. Perhaps they just sacrificed the old, the infirm and the weak for the benefit of the rest.

Hadrosaurs showed explosive diversification shortly after descending from the iguanodonts towards the end of the Cretaceous. Extreme diversification depends on genetic variation. The greater the extremes, the more variation is implied and vice versa. Dinosaur extremes indicated great genetic variation which accounted for their ability to adapt and to radiate into vacated niches.

The reason they could not cope with the events of 65 million years ago whereas they had successively coped splendidly with previous mass extinctions, the so-called Kimmeridgian turnover of 145 million years ago, the Aptian turnover of 117 million years ago and the Cenomanian turnover of 95 million years ago, was that in the few million years before the final act they had lost variation and had become inflexibly standardized.

The last few million years of the Cretaceous showed a marked reduction in diversity of dinosaur species: the earlier vigorous adaptive radiation of the hadrosaurs and the ceratopsians similarly gave way to a yielding of variety. For the last two million years of the Period, a single genus of each—saurolophus and triceratops respectively—dominated the landscape, although they did so in vast numbers.

No gradual environmental change is going to eliminate genetic variation in genus after genus of dinosaurs. That very variation will guarantee adaptation to the changes by natural selection before genetic variation has been significantly pruned. The motive power of evolution is expansion of diversity with environmental change. The dinosaurs" loss of variety is much more characteristic of the loss of variety in species we are seeing today—by unnatural selection—at the hand of man.

Caches of bones of a single species are regarded by paleoanthropologists as suggesting husbandry. In the development of man, various cultures seemed to concentrate on ibex, horses, reindeer and so on. Could it be that ceratopsians and hadrosaurs were actually domestic animals like cows and sheep kept for food?

Is it possible that hadrosaurs were the cattle of the Cretaceous period, herded on the great plains before being shipped to a Cretaceous Chicago for making into meat pies and hamburgers? Is it impossible?

What you saw was really Casual Rex.  It was ALOT different from the book.  The more i read the book (i have Casual and Anonymous in a duet), the more i hated the way SciFi butchered it.
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if troodons did survive to evolve, then where did they hide?
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http://www.coasttocoastam.com/timages/page...sapien0224a.jpg



the last one looks like chupa. maybe part dino and eats sheep?
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In the summer and fall of 1933, a Los Angeles mining engineer named G.Warren Shufelt was surveying the L.A. area for deposits of oil, gold and other valuable materials, using a new device which he had invented. Shufelt had designed and built a radio-directed apparatus which he claimed was able to locate gold and other precious resources at great depths. He believed that the radio device worked on a newly discovered principle involving electrical similarities of matter which had the same chemical, physical and vibrational character. His device appeared to consist of a large pendulum suspended in a cylindrical glass case which was housed in a black box with compasses on it.

The pendulum would trace a line directly from a piece of ore broken from a vein to the vein it was originally taken from. Hair taken from a test subject would lead investigators to the person who had donated the hair sample. It was said to have worked even at a distance of many miles.

Although he would not tell exactly what was in the box, Shufelt believed that by tuning into the individual frequency of a particular material, he could locate similar matter. He believed that the emanations and gravitational factors of matter influenced the pendulum and that, in principle, no two separate things were exactly alike.

Shufelt was extremely puzzled when one day, while taking readings near downtown Los Angeles, his instruments showed him what seemed to be a pattern of tunnels which led from what is now the Public Library in the heart of L.A. to the top of Mount Washington and the Southwest Museum to the north in Pasadena. He proceeded to draw a map and had it copyrighted.

What he discovered appeared to be a well planned underground labyrinth with large rooms located at various points, and deposits of apparently man made gold in the chambers and passage ways. Some of the tunnels ran west for 20 miles under the Santa Monica Bay, which he believed were only used for ventilation.

Unfortunately, Shufelt had no idea that they were connected to the older ruins of an even greater city which was covered by the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago during a tremendous earth-quake and subsequent flood.

The subterranean complex he had discovered was used for emergencies and was only designed to accommodate 5,000 people or less. Food supplies of imperishable herbs were stored in sufficient quantities which would enable the survivors to live underground until it was safe to come back to the surface. Valuable personal belongings and utensils were also brought into the complex along with historical records and gold treasures.

During his research, he met a Hopi Indian named Chief Little Green Leaf, who told him about the legend of an ancient race of "Lizard People". The legends said that about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, an enormous meteor shower fell on the western coast covering an area hundreds of miles wide.

Winslow crater in northern Arizona is only one of the pieces that fell from the sky at that time. Thousands of people were killed, their crops wiped out, dwellings destroyed, and the forests set on fire. The surviving members of the medicine lodge, which had remained on the west coast, met to make plans for constructing safe areas. The sentinels of the sky gave their warning that it was time to enter the shelters and seal the shafts behind them-selves. They were forced to go underground to save them selves from a gigantic meteor shower which devastated most of the west coast of the US . The "Lizard People" of Los Angeles survived the meteor shower, but were killed by natural gas leaking into their bunkers.

Shufelt believed that they had built 13 such underground facilities in different areas for such a purpose. One was located in the eastern section of Arizona in a small town called Springerville and was only discovered recently. Another was located under a hill which was surrounded by a curving ridge of mountains like the middle of a horse's hoof. This is exactly the type of terrain seen in downtown L.A. in the area that is now the Board of Education, which is built over the ruins of the old Willis Estate on top of Fort Moore hill.

Shufelt and his partner Chief Little Green Leaf were both convinced that the ancient legends and the readings from Shufelt's mystery machine were true. They decided to obtain a permit to sink a shaft down into the ruins of the subterranean city. They located a vacant lot at 518 North Hill Street, directly above one of the largest rooms. On 21st February 1933, the County Board of Supervisors approved a contract with Rex McCreary, Warren Shufelt and Ray Martin to search for buried treasure there. The permittees were to bear all expenses, to leave the property in its original condition, and to share 50% of all discoveries and treasure with the city of L.A.

The county originally only allowed them to dig up to depths of 50 feet for fear of cave-ins. On 27th March 1933 they requested additional time and depths on their permit, believing that the labyrinth of tunnels was at least 1,900 feet in length, with rooms containing 9,000 square feet which contained valuable gold treasure in at least 16 places. On 10th April 1933 the contract was renewed. By the end of November in 1933, the main shaft was at a depth of 200 feet. Shufelt was determined to drill to a depth of 1,000 feet if necessary. On 29th January 1934, the first stories regarding the leg-end of the "Lost Land of the Lizard People" made the L.A. newspapers. By this time, one of the five shafts was already 250 feet deep.

According to the legend and the radio surveys, the underground city was laid out in the shape of a lizard, with its tail under the Main Library at Fifth and Hope, and the body extending Northeast, with the head being at Lookout and Marda near North Broadway. The key room to the city was located under Second and South Broadway. The leg-ends state that the key room is the directory to the rest of the city, and to the historical gold record tablets. These gold tablets were slabs of gold, 4 feet long and 14 inches wide. The tablets were believed to contain the records of the origins of the human race, and the history of modern man in the Americas, including details regarding the history of the mysterious Mayan people.

Shufelt's radio-wave machine mapped the rooms and tunnels as subsurface voids, with the gold slabs as dark areas, showing perfect geometric angles.

The rooms, seven of which occurred within an area of six square city blocks, varied in size from 23' x 23' to 34' x 42'. The room below the first shaft was 31' x 42', and the key room was the smallest. Water had seeped into some of the tunnels, and several of the rooms including the largest were flooded. Shufelt was prepared to use divers to explore the submerged areas when they finally broke into the subterranean city. Chief Little Green Leaf claimed that the "Lizard People" had been able to predict earthquakes and that he had also been able to do so. He had accurately predicted the destruction of the Long Beach quake on 10th March 1933, a month in advance.

He believed that it was easy for anyone to tell 96 hours in advance when an earthquake was coming, because the needle on a compass would become demagnetized and refuse to point north.

By the beginning of February 1934, the first shaft had reached a depth greater than 250 feet and was still being dug, despite difficulty caused by the water encountered in its path. Several newspaper articles featured updates on the project.

Shortly after all the media attention was focused on this search for the lost city under L.A., the project was suddenly stopped and abandoned. On 5th March 1934, the shafts had been filled in and the contract with the city was canceled. Neither gold nor any other treasure was ever turned over to the County of Los Angeles.

Mr Arche Dunning of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce stated in December of 1947 that, "It is quite possible, of course, that the supposed labyrinth really exists. But in view of the fact that the overlaying area is the immediate Civic Center area where an important building program is to be carried out, including federal, state, county and city building, there is little probability of any further excavations."

This is really not a true statement because it is necessary to excavate many hundreds of feet into the ground before a high-rise building can be constructed. Also, one should consider that sewage systems are all underground. And let's not forget the new Metro Rail System, which rises up from many feet below the Civic Center before it speeds commuters on their way.

Long ago even the Chinese dug tunnels around the area which is now the train yard. These red brick subsurface tunnels were used for their safe passage, from one end of Old Chinatown to the other and are now an historic landmark found preserved at Alvera Street.

It is quite possible that there is another city below the L.A. Civic Center which only a small
number of people have access to. The question is, who?

(Source: Unicus magazine 2/92.1142 Manhattan Avenue, Suite 43, Manhattan Beach, CA
90266. USA)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LIZARD PEOPLE UPDATE
Dear Duncan,
Here is a reptilian relic that was found in Los Angeles in 1954 that neatly fits into the "Lost Land of the Lizard People" article [see NEXUS 2/19]. Enclosed is a photo of an artefact that is definitely very old, depicting a full-bodied dragon. The upper section of the medallion is made of pure silver that was somehow fused to a copper-alloy base which is composed of over 40 different types of metal. The medallion's actual dimensions are 7/8" (width) x 1/4" (length) x 1/l6" (depth). The man who found it, Mr G., was an aerospace engineer who lived and worked for the US Government in Chatsworth, California. The artefact was found while Mr G. was helping a friend, who lived on the northern shore of Lake Chatsworth, repair the wooden stairway to the front porch. Mr G. dropped his hammer, which fell into a soft sandy area, and when he reached to pull his hammer out he noticed this small metal medallion. Mr G. still has the artefact in his possession, and after much research feels that it belonged to an ancient race of space people named ALTEC, who left behind their influence on this world long ago. The Friendly or Sleeping Dragon is a very old symbol, one which has definite connections to UFO's. I once had the opportunity to show a picture of a Pleiadian -style UFO to a man from Bhutan (near Tibet) and asked if he had ever seen such a thing. He replied that yes, they did see them often and that they were called "Friendly Dragon". Chatsworth is located in Los Angeles County near the north-west border of the city and county lines. It is likely that a Chinese laborer lost this artefact while working in Chatsworth on railroad construction, around the turn of the century. There is a rail-road tunnel that was cut by the Chinese through a solid red rock ridge called the Santa Suzana Pass near the Chatsworth Lake.

Old Chinatown is located in downtown Los Angeles and was built where the new rail-yard now sits. New Chinatown is built over much of the old tunnel systems that the first Chinese leaders had constructed for their 'safety' when they first arrived in the area. It is possible that engineer/inventor G. W. Shufelt did not know what he had stumbled onto electronically, and it is also logical that Chinese people would not admit to the existence of a secure system of tunnels and rooms they had worked so hard to build in secret. There may even have existed a series of older tunnels and rooms that the Chinese discovered during their own excavations and construction.

However, the Federal Government definitely stepped in during the '50s and took control of the entire underground tunnel system for their Cold War operations, adding many new paranoid-influenced improvements over the years that followed. In the '9Os, suspicious arson fires prevented well-equipped - ONI - intelligence operatives from gaining access to the secret entrance that was located in the basement of the so-called 'public' library. There is more to this story than can be told at this time.

THis was...a unique perspective. The reptiles living in a multiverse. I saw Super Mario Bros the movie.

If the Troodonts had evolved like us and survived, why would they surrender the earth to us?
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They wouldn't necessarily evolve into birds. Some crocodilians, chelonians and salamanders are virtually unchanged from the ones found in the fossil records.
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