Predecessor

Dinosaurs have arguably occupied a key slot in the imagination of millions of people since the dawn of modern archaeology. Museums, television shows, documentaries, fantasy art, fiction and science fiction genre have all been utilized to express this intense desire to see, to hear, to be frightened by, and to be fascinated by these "terrible lizards." However, dinosaurs are almost universally depicted as nearly mindless, lumbering gargantuans. Consider this: The human race has existed for perhaps 5 to 10 millions years in various final evolutionary stages of sentient emergence from the animal state. Compare this to the age of reptiles which is considered to span most of the Mesozoic era, an epoch that lasted at least 180 million years, more than ten times as long as the reign of modern man. In the long, long history of dinosaurs, would it not have been possible for just one species to have ascended into a sentient state, following...no, preceding the evolutionary path of the human race? A path that ended the reign of the dinosaur in a cataclysmic celestial event that extinguished these amazing animals. Or did it?