How Dolphins Got Their Large Brains

As a rule, larger animals tend to have larger brains, just as they have larger hearts, livers, and other internal organs. But the relationship is not a linear one, partly because, unlike the liver, there's a minimum size below which the brain doesn't have room for the basic housekeeping functions that keep the body ticking over, so that small animals have proportionately larger brains than large ones. If we want to know whether a particular creature has a larger, or smaller, brain than we'd expect then, as I've described before, we use a mathematical formula called the encephalisation quotient to determine what the size of the brain "should be". 

By definition, an average mammal should have an EQ of 1. The formula breaks if we try to apply it to non-mammalian animals, such as birds, probably because their brain architecture is different from ours at quite a fundamental level. Even for mammals, there is some debate as to exactly what formula we should be using; most older studies have determined that brain size typically rises as the 2/3 power of body size (that is, as the cube root of the square) but a 2019 study argued that it's perhaps more accurate to base it on the 3/4 power and this seems to be a growing consensus.

Brains of the Monster-Teeth

Dissopsalis, another member 
of the "monster-tooth" family

Among the distinguishing features of mammals, as compared with other vertebrates are the larger relative size and greater structural complexity of the brain. It's worth pointing out at the outset that many birds are as capable as mammals of complex behaviour despite not possessing the brain structures we'd otherwise associate with such things so that we can't solely use brain anatomy as a proxy for things like 'intelligence'. But, if we're looking only at mammals, brain anatomy can tell us quite a bit and it's probably fair to say that it does distinguish us from, say, reptiles.

Fossilised Squirrel Brains

The fossils of mammals, and, indeed, other vertebrates, tend to consist largely of bones. That's not an absolute rule, of course, and occasionally other parts do fossilise, and there are also remains of things like footprints and poo. But, generally speaking, it's much harder to get an idea of the soft anatomy of a long-extinct mammal than it is of what its skeleton looked like.

There are many soft organs that we'd really like to understand the evolution of, but, while we can make inferences on other grounds, direct fossil evidence is always likely to fall short for most of them. The brain, however, is something of an exception, and this is perhaps fortunate, given the importance we tend to attach to it.

This is not to say, of course, that finding direct fossil evidence of brain structures in long gone mammals is particularly easy. But the brain sits inside the skull, and is fairly tightly wrapped within it. Which means that if we can get some idea of the shape of the hollow bit on the inside of a skull, we've got a pretty good idea of the shape and size of the brain it once housed. This has, in fact, been done for a number of fossil mammals, but, generally only of large ones. For smaller mammals, such as rodents, the evidence is much more patchy.

Sonar and the Fossil Brain

Most species of large, placental herbivore belong to a group broadly defined as the "ungulates". There are exceptions; animals such as elephants, which were once thought to be related to the ungulates, but later turned out to have a completely different origin, some of the larger primates, and the occasional oddity such as the panda. In general though, outside of Australia, the ungulates have been the most successful of the large mammalian herbivores. The group includes two, related, orders of mammals. The even-toed ungulates, including antelopes, cattle, deer, and pigs, among others, are by far the larger group today, while the odd-toed ungulates, which include horses, rhinos, and tapirs, are less numerous, but just as familiar.

Both of these groups, and possibly some of the weird-looking prehistoric herbivores of South America, are descended from a general type of animal called "condylarths". The condylarths are probably not a real evolutionary group of animals, in that they aren't all necessarily closely related, and even if they were, they would just be a rough assemblage of things related to the modern groups, rather than a group in their own right. They may well be what is called a "wastebasket taxon" - a handy place to put some animal whose relationship to other animals you aren't really sure of yet.