One of the central themes of the book Dinosauriernas död, meteoriterna och livets väg is: what would have happened to life if the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs would have missed the Earth. Would dinosaurs with time have evolved to more intelligent beings, and is there any chance that they eventually could have established some kind of civilisation? Researchers have given different answers to this question. Most famous is the reasoning by the late Dale Russell (1937-2019), an American-Canadian dinosaur researcher, who in the 1980s developed the concept of the Dinosauroid. Russell argued that if dinosaurs had evolved larger brains, they would have needed to change posture and become more like humans in shape. The British palaeontologist Darren Naish instead argues that dinosaurs with an intelligence like humans would rather have been bird-like, similar to recent hornbills. Based on Naish’s thoughts artist Cevdet M. Kösemen with Simon Roy developed the concept of Avisapiens, the wise bird, large as a horse with a human-sized brain and showing many similarities to today’s humans in its behaviour.
