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That's certainly one opinion.
Maybe an atheist could notice the enormous mental differences between people and animals and then determine that people have great moral worth and animals very little.
For instance: A dust mite has no moral worth at all. It is not apparently the equal to a person.
We are still experiencing the philosophical implications of the Darwinian Revolution. The implication being that humans are not apart from nature, but part of and a product of nature. Therefore the special status of humanity is questionable, we are no different from animals. We may be very sophisticated animals, but we are animals nevertheless.
We might say, as you have, that humans still have a special status by virtue of our higher intelligence, that we far more powerful and capable of changing and enacting our will on our environement and therefore have higher moral value than animals. But this is a questionable argument and presents a fleeting kind of moral superiority. Does a stronger, smarter man have more moral value than than a weaker, stupider man? That superior men should be held to different standards than inferior men? Some people seem to think so. Nietzsche certainly thought this was the inevitable outcome of the death of God. This is Raskolnikov's theory of the superior man.
We might also retreat into the safety of consciousness, that humans have unique qualia that gives us a special status. But the materialist/naturalist outlook has no reason to give special status to consciousness. Consciousness is merely just the complex interaction of chemicals in your brain. It's as much as part of nature and mechanistic as any other evolutionary biological development, one of many tools in the toolbox. Ultimately, assigning special status to human consciousness (or the soul or countless other names) and humanity itself requires some belief or argument from the metaphysical - whether that be God, Plato's Realm of the Forms or Kant's Reason.
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