Opinion – Suzana Herculano-Houzel: Hats off: Tyrannosaurus had a brain worthy of a primate

I wasn’t one of those dinosaur-loving kids. In retrospect, I think it was because of an inability to visualize animals as real animals that once dominated the face of the Earth. Without the ballast of this understanding, I didn’t quite understand the fascination of the majority with these giant reptiles.

A few decades and a lot of study later, not only do I gladly give my hand, but I have the honor of helping to raise at least one branch of dinosaurs, the theropods, in the Pantheon of Wronged Animals. My contribution? I’ve just demonstrated, in a preprint posted on the bioRxiv.org repository, that theropods—bipedal dinosaurs like the iconic tyrannosaurus rex— had as many neurons in the telencephalon as modern primates.

You know that big guy from “Jurassic Park”? Now imagine him with the brain of a baboon. Huge, with piercing teeth like titanium needles, and a telencephalon biologically capable of flexible reasoning and cognition, and therefore intelligent. Just an island to contain such an animal.

(“But you didn’t have a tyrannosaurus brain to study,” my mother asked, “so how can you know how many neurons they had?” I’ll answer in two weeks—or satisfy your curiosity now at bioRxiv.org and find out for yourself so serves a preprint!)

Like the vast majority of my fellow scientists, I normally wait for a scientific paper to be peer-reviewed and officially published in a journal before commenting on any findings. But this is only the norm in the biological area. Physicists have a much more practical and liberal view of preprints, the name given to reports deposited on online services such as arxiv.org and biorxiv.org, where they are available to the public, and to open scrutiny by peers, while official publication proceeds. in magazines (which can take months).

As I was about to talk about my new discoveries about dinosaur brains at a scientific meeting last week in Prague, Czech Republic, I decided to deposit the paper, already submitted for publication, on bioRxiv, where my audience could consult it. To complete the experiment, I reactivated my Twitter account, and announced the discovery — with the link to the preprint — with a message for one of today’s leading paleontologists, Steve Brusatte, author of the book that served as my dinosaur literacy primer.

Brusatte didn’t retweet, but he did respond—and within one day, two unknown paleontologists had kindly pointed out two factual errors in my paper (which I promptly verified and corrected), while praising the study and findings. In four days, the preprint has been viewed over 2,000 times, and downloaded over 500.

I’m not a paleontologist, but the combination of two digital media gave me visibility, and yet made me feel welcome in the community. Who knew: science motivates positive interactions on social networks.