Mostly due to old ideas regarding dinosaurs being reptilian, thereby meaning they cold-blooded / stupid, which results in the myth. It wasn’t until the description of Deinonychus that this perception was shattered.

Correct me if I’m wrong wrong; but wasn’t it widely believed for a time that any animal that went extinct was due to their stupidity; taking away human action and blaming the animal for their own extinction; a prime example being the Dodo slander? I remember growing up that may publications would reference dinosaur stupidity as their downfall.

Why did Mammals write a book about Mammal superiority?

I don't care how slow or fast a T. rex was, there is no way someone with an accurate understanding of how big they were could ever think a Grizzly Bear could stand a chance against it.

Technically, if the bear takes one look at the T Rex and runs like Hell, it's a demonstration of the survival value of intelligence.

Help. Why does the justification for the grizzly winning sound like a Death Battle feats read 😭

From Victorian britain's upper class, AKA the most narcisitic dolts ever.

Also, that's a small-ass T-Rex I think.

I’m curious how this fight would go if the Rex was younger and around the same size as the bear.

I mean in a realistic scenario they’d obviously just avoid each other

Mammal glazers will see this believe it

for an actual explanation: in the bone wars brain casings of dinosaurs have been found and their low brain to body ratios were noted, and because it was the late 19th century people still thought brain-size=intellect

before that point dinosaurs were actually portrayed as rather active and majestic but after the bine wars dinosaurs were often shown to be inferior to mammals

It comes from the logic that they must’ve been inferior in every way to mammals otherwise they’d still be around. We humans tend to have this idea of “linear progress.” And back then it was applied to Evolution.

I had this book when I was a kid.

Them being reptiles. Older depictions of dinosaurs see them as just big lizards, and they really just thought that reptiles in general weren’t all that intelligent so that transferred over to dinosaurs.

In addition to assumptions about them being reptilians and therefore more similar to modern reptiles than turned out not to be accurate, it was in part because of the 1800’s assumption that if a species went extinct it had to have been fundamentally weak, stupid or otherwise fatally flawed. Dinosaurs being slow, stupid lumbering beasts fit that notion of how extinction worked.

Closest analouge at times were crocs, who were sluggish mostly

I know others have said it before, but it had a lot to do with dinosaurs being seen as reptilian, lizard-like, and so slow and stupid. Which was the consensus of reptiles at the time of their discovery. Plus, paleontology was still a bit of an emerging field, so there were still plenty of misconceptions floating around like some dinosaurs still being alive. Add in the usual pro-imperialistic attitude of the Victorian era regarding anything that was associated with jungles and "violence", and you get this.

They thought they were big iguanas

Reptiles are often seen as sluggish, primitive, ugly, and monstrous creatures. So I think that’s where the idea that dinosaurs were stupid slow moving brutes came from. 

I imagine it being a leftover from the old idea that extinct creatures were simply incapable of surviving

Imagine a bear trying to fight a trex, that's wild.

I saw a person mention the skull cavities so I’ll skip that part but another reason that started the idea was that people assumed that dinosaurs had to be stupid, slow and hideous as how else could God have let one of his creations go extinct.

Now this was a very old belief that started doing its rounds just after scientists found out that the “skeletons” they found weren’t abnormally large specimens of existing creatures but instead fossils on extinct prehistoric reptiles.

This misconception started falling apart as we slowly discovered the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

Now I am probably not 100% right and stand to be corrected this is just my personal understanding on the topic.

Stupid people used to think lizards were slow and dumb, and so when they stupidly thought that they found giant lizards, they thought that they too, were slow and dumb.

From my understanding, it came party from comparisons with modern replies, which admittedly are not the sharpest tools in the shed when compared to mammals, and anatomical reasons, like how a lot of dinosaurs have extremely tiny brains when compared to the rest of their bodies. It was assumed that dinosaurs were only able to reach widespread success because they lived in a sort of idyllic eden for reptiles, as in, a hot wet world (hence why a lot of old paleo art depicts dinosaurs as living in swamps), and that their reign over earth came to an end when conditions changed (Mind you, at this time the idea of the kpg mass extinction event being due to an asteroid impact was not widely accepted and was yet to be proved with certainty).

What made scientist turn away from these views were changes in our understanding in dinosaur phylogeny, which revealed them to be more closely related to birds than to modern reptiles as well a better understanding of the mesozoic world, which was not as hot or as wet as a lot of early paleontologists initially speculated.

The concept of a 500lb bear crushing a 15,000lb T. rex with its superior intellect

Just to add some humor to this, here's an up-to-date size comparison of modern bears, a human, and some Tyrannosaurs:

https://preview.redd.it/tq0bo85y5t7g1.png?width=2865&format=png&auto=webp&s=4e30d964845da787e8f823ae207ed86f55ecadeb

It might be a fair fight for the Nanotyrannus, but the idea that a bear could have fought something that much larger than it *and won* is amusing.

okay, but what about a POLAR bear against T-rex? /s

What year is the book from?

It was not understood yet that they were endothermic. Ectothermic animals would most likely have been slower and stupider.

I had this book, loved it as a kid.

idk but a grizzly bear is incredibly fast and could run away from a t rex if nothing else

I think it also had to do with their small brain cases. When I was little, I remember reading old books that would constantly harp on stegosaurus' walnut-sized brain. The idea is that their brains were really small compared to their body size, so they had to be stumbling and dumb.

There's even a scene from the 90's Dinosaurs comedy where the T-Rex says to his buddy, "hey were have walnut-sized brains... Webcan figure this out!" And then a time lapse of them sitting there all day and night thinking

The ref just one shots a grizzly

I used to have the copy of Disney Digest this was in. It had a comic book adaption of Bambi. Alas the poor book was destroyed when the basement flooded 😢

I mean, this is pretty much straight goofy , anyway.

On a different thread the other day , I was saying that a bobcat would probably take a velociraptor. But, even a big grizzly would almost fit sideways into a Tyrannosaurus's mouth.

Early evolutionary theory back when dinosaurs were first discovered

This stems from a few factors:

.lack of understanding of modern animals, the 19th and 20th century didn't have equipment like CT scanners to study modern animals, with advanced tech and study of modern fauna, like birds, we've been able to find out more about dinosaurs, e.g. how animals like stegosaurus had small brains but since they were bird brains they had a higher density of neurons than a comparable mammal brain, and in the modern day we have a better understanding of morphology, e.g a small brain doesn't equal a dumb animal

.viewing dinosaurs as ectothermic reptiles instead of warm blooded birds, the slow lumbering view of many dinosaurs derives from how they were constantly compared to and thought of as just megafaunal reptiles with all the features that entails, slow metabolic rate, reliance on external heat sources, which would require a slow lumbering lifestyle

.fewer specimens, the palaeontologists of old had fewer, fragmentary specimens, if you have more specimens you can make more accurate assumptions

.a flawed worldview of nature, the best way to describe victorian and early 20th century attitudes is 'nature terrible in Tooth and claw' [Tennyson] all students of natural science viewed nature as a never ending, viscous fight for survival this thinking applied to dinosaurs aswell, to quote Tennyson again 'dragons of their prime, tear at eachother in their slime' e.g. herbivores are characterised as dim witted beasts and carnivores are characterised as mindless eating machines, it wouldn't be until the mid 20th century, with researchers like Jane Goodal doing extensive fieldwork, would this view be challenged and we begun to understand the intricacies animal kingdom

.a misunderstanding of natural selection and a lack of knowledge of the causes of extinction, species go extinct mostly due to extreme environmental pressures that occur to rapidly to be adapted to, but many natural scientists liked the simple explanation of 'this animal was too dumb to survive' which kinda makes sense when you realise we didn't discover the causes of the K-PG mass extinction until the 1980s where the modern consensus is that a bollide impact combined with a massive volcanism event is what killed the dinosaurs, this is a great example for why a palaeontologist should always be a geologist aswell

In Arthur Conan Doyles 'The Lost World' he describes dinosaurs as being so stupid to the point where they have very little brain function and just operate on instinct and reflex, exemplified in how it takes loads of gunshots to bring them down because they don't recognise that their being hurt

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