In an interview conducted some 18 years later, Dale Russell confessed, “I very nearly decided not to publish the exercise because of the damaging effects it might have had on the credibility of my work in general. Most people remained polite, although there were hostile reactions from those with ‘ultra-quantitative’ and ‘ultra-intuitive’ world views.”
The Canadian paleontologist’s thought experiment is mostly forgotten now. It does, however, live on in the form of a commissioned sculpture created by taxidermist and model maker Ron Senguin, as well as in the nightmares of the decades of school children who have passed it by on the edges of museum dinosaur exhibits throughout the world.
Detailed in the 1982 paper, “Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauriod,” the creature a speculative attempt to extrapolate the continued evolution of the troodontidae some 65 million years after three-quarters of all plant and animal life on Earth went extinct.
Russell, who was among the first paleontologists to suggest an extraterrestrial role in the mass extinction event (a supernova, per a 1971 paper), found a prime candidate for continued evolution in the form of the stenonychosaurus. A member of troodontidae family, the three-foot-tall, bird-like theropod had one of the largest brain-to-body ratios of any dinosaur. It ranked somewhere between a modern reptile and bird and around six times that of other dinosaurs.
Russell had discovered, to date, the most complete skeleton of the animal during a 1969 expedition to Alberta’s Dinosaur Park Formation. To the paleontologist, the dinosaur represented the apex of dinosaur intelligence, the height of an on-going evolutionary trend that found the animals’ brain size continuing to increase over time. Of further interest were the big binocular eyes and a thumb-like enlarged claw on second of three toes now understood to be a fixture on bipedal paravians from the Late Jurassic.
The dinosauroid conceived by Russell and birthed by Senguin is alien-like in all meanings of the term. The skull is large and bulbous, housing a human-sized brain. Two massive yellow eyes monopolize the face, sporting big, sharp elliptical pupils. Below them, a small nose juts out slightly, housing a pair of nostril slits. The mouth perhaps most closely resembles that of a turtle, running the width of the face and tapering off into a slight frown. Models of the skull created for publication really drive home the turtle comparison.
The shortened face is the result of the enlarged cranium, while the entirety of the head was based on the proportions of a chicken embryo. The creature continued to evolve the bipedal posture of its ancestors, eventually dropping the tail, as it learned to walk fully upright. There are still three fingers on each hand, but they’ve grown quite long, while one has evolved into a thumb. The toes, meanwhile, were modeled on those of a tree kangaroo.
In the text, Russell describes a lack of mammaries and external genitalia, describing the latter as something more akin to the cloaca found in reptiles, birds and amphibians. There is, however, a navel, owing to the presence of “well-developed placenta” found in certain reptiles like skinks. The skin is leathery, its texturing and coloring adapted from what the paleontologist believed to be true about the stenonychosaurus at the time. The creature feeds its young through food regurgitation and has developed its own language that closely resembles a bird song.
It’s clear that, above all, Russell is having fun here. He refers to the process of speculation as “entertaining,” playing god as he adjusts the proportion of certain body parts in order to make room for others. He employs the same skill set paleontologists use reconstruct a dinosaur skeleton from fragments, only here applying it for his own bit of speculative fiction filtered through the language of science.
Russell closes the paper out by scrutinizing his own claims. “The body form of Homo sapiens is possible because it exists,” he writes. “To the extent that it is approach by that of the dinosauroid, the latter also became a plausible biophysical configuration. But can this resemblance better be explained as a result of an ‘orthogenetic’ bias? Perhaps.”
This final point has been the foundation of most subsequent criticism of the dinosauroid thought experiment. Coined in 1893, “orthogenesis” is a combination of the Greek words for “straight” and “origin.”
Discussing the concept a year the publication of the dinosauroid paper, Rutgers history professor Susan Schrepfer notes, “The term varied in meaning from the overtly vitalistic and theological to the mechanical. It ranged from theories of mystical forces to mere descriptions of a general trend in development due to natural limitations of either the germinal material or the environment.”
Tasked with designing the natural evolutionary end point for the dinosaur, perhaps it shouldn’t come as any surprised that the creature so closely resembled the one that designed it.
Sources:
Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauriod https://archive.org/details/syllogeus37nati/page/4/mode/2up
Dinosauroids revisited, revisited https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/dinosauroids-revisited-revisited/
Troodon sapiens?: Thoughts on the "Dinosauroid" https://www.wired.com/2007/10/troodon-sapiens-thoughts-on-the-dinosauroid/
The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of the Environmental Reform, 1917–1978
What's going on with troodon https://dinomuseum.ca/2019/02/11/whats-going-on-with-troodon/