Given that intelligent mammals are possible, could sentient dinosaurs also have evolved? In 1982, Dale Russell – then at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa – published a paper proposing that an intelligent ‘dinosauroid’ might one day have evolved. He commissioned a life-sized model, which today looks like an alien from a dated sci-fi show, with green skin and huge eyes. His theory was that the carnivorous dinosaur Troodon had an unusually large brain and might have been the lineage from which brainy dinosaurs evolved.