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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to

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Speaker 1: Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Land, and I'm

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Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. Joe, what was your favorite dinosaur when you

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Speaker 1: were a child. That is an impossible question. It's impossible,

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Speaker 1: you know. I think my favorite was actually the fake

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Speaker 1: velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which are you know? The philociraptors

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Speaker 1: in Jurassic Park are not really much like real velociraptors.

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Speaker 1: There are more number of reasons. Yes, they're probably closer

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Speaker 1: to the dinosaur Dinonicus, right, but I was really into

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Speaker 1: them as far as real dinosaurs go. You know, your

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Speaker 1: triceratops as a fan favorite, it seems kind of like

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Speaker 1: the the workhorse protagonist of your dinosaur paleo art scene

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Speaker 1: where you've got a predator attacking and a triceratops defending

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Speaker 1: and volcanoes erupting in the background. So it always made

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Speaker 1: the triceratops look like the good guy, like the would

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Speaker 1: one while there was a ferocious tyrannosaur. It's also, I

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Speaker 1: don't know, predators are fun. It's it's hard to turn

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Speaker 1: down a Tyrannosaur. Well, I like your point about it

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Speaker 1: being impossible to pick a favorite, because ultimately, for a child,

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Speaker 1: dinosaurs are are less a roster of prehistoric creatures or

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Speaker 1: or a tree of prehistoric creatures. They're they're more a pantheon.

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Speaker 1: You know. They have different energies to them, they have

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Speaker 1: different roles, and you have to sort of love them

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Speaker 1: all because they all embody this this sort of wild

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Speaker 1: nature that I think the child, more than any of us,

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Speaker 1: certainly I mean more than us adults, is in touch with. Well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: that they do have a character, Like I was saying,

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Speaker 1: the tri Saratops very much has this kind of, uh straightforward, goodhearted,

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Speaker 1: working class hero kind of vibe. And the Dynonicus or

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Speaker 1: the velociraptor they're kind of sneaky, aren't they. Then how

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Speaker 1: would you classify the star of today's episode, the Mighty

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Speaker 1: Stegasaurus good natured, dimwitted sidekick from psychick, Yeah, sidekick, not

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Speaker 1: psychicked sidekick? No, Like the character out of this has

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Speaker 1: got to be an archetype in some movies, like the

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Speaker 1: character who's on the good side, who's friends with the protagonist,

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Speaker 1: who's maybe not too bright and like has some malapropisms, okay,

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Speaker 1: but I can also easily see the stegosaurs taking the central, dimwitted,

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Speaker 1: strong hero role of say a like a Hercules or

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Speaker 1: a or a Samson Conan. Yeah, oh that I've never

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Speaker 1: thought about it that way, but the tiny headed stegosaurus

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Speaker 1: very much could be the conan, the barbarian of the

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Speaker 1: prehistoric world, you know, like Chrome. I've never prayed to

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Speaker 1: you before. I have no tongue for it, but if

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Speaker 1: you let me thagomize my enemies, Yeah, indeed. And he's

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Speaker 1: got the armor, he's got the muscles, and he's got

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Speaker 1: that awesome weapon that he swings around. I want to

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Speaker 1: run some true dinosaur facts by you today because we

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Speaker 1: are going to be talking about some some dinosaurs pseudoscience

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Speaker 1: in the in the probably the second half of the

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Speaker 1: episode for sure. Yeah. So these are all one true facts.

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Speaker 1: I'm about to state. It can be proved that dinosaurs

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Speaker 1: are still alive today. They exist on every continent on

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Speaker 1: the Earth. There are literally even millions of dinosaurs currently

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Speaker 1: living in Antarctica. Thousands of people are maybe millions of

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Speaker 1: people for all I know, actually even keep dinosaurs as pets.

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Speaker 1: You might not have ever known about this, that they

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Speaker 1: keep dinosaurs as pets in cages, and sometimes they can

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Speaker 1: even train these dinosaurs to speak modern languages and repeat

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Speaker 1: phrases like poly wanna cracker. Those statements again a true

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Speaker 1: and certainly you can you can take them all in

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Speaker 1: kind of a dinatopia, uh spirit, where we imagine this

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Speaker 1: fantastic world full of antarctic dinosaurs and and pet velociraptors.

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Speaker 1: But uh, but but this is this is all a

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Speaker 1: much more mundane fact of our reality. Right. I'm actually

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Speaker 1: being pedantic and obnoxious because these are all true acts.

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Speaker 1: Because birds are dinosaurs. Modern birds are biologically considered dinosaurs

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Speaker 1: in terms of phylogenetic analysis. Uh So hate me if

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Speaker 1: you want, but it's true. And because we're gonna be

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Speaker 1: talking about the concept of modern or recent dinosaurs today

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Speaker 1: and some pseudo scientific beliefs associated with that, I have

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Speaker 1: to say, as a precaution against getting a lot of

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Speaker 1: potential pedantic emails, I'll go ahead and be pedantic for you.

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Speaker 1: When we talk about dinosaurs in this episode, we're talking

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Speaker 1: about the classic kind, the non avian dinosaurs, the last

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Speaker 1: of which went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous

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Speaker 1: period about sixty six million years ago. But modern day

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Speaker 1: birds are the descendants of the only dinosaurs that survived

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Speaker 1: this horrible mass extinction, in which about three quarters of

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Speaker 1: Earth's plant and animal species suddenly disappeared. Those dinosaurs that

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Speaker 1: survived became birds, and thus birds of today are dinosaurs.

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Speaker 1: So when someone says, hey, I wonder what what would

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Speaker 1: what it would have been like if dinosaurs had survived

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Speaker 1: into modern times, they did. They did. Behold here they

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Speaker 1: are dinosaurs poop on your car. It's just true. They

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Speaker 1: build nests in your shed, They fly into your home

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Speaker 1: depot and eat bird seed out of the home and

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Speaker 1: garden section. Yeah, there's a dinosaur stuck in the home depot,

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Speaker 1: going back and forth between the aisles. My cat is

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Speaker 1: out in the backyard hunting dinosaurs. And this is all

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Speaker 1: fun to say for multiple reasons, mainly maybe because we

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Speaker 1: all love us some flint stones right where humans and

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Speaker 1: dinosaurs they exist at the same time, And dinosaurs are

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Speaker 1: brutally enslaved to serve as household appliances. So you've got

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Speaker 1: a dinosaur garbage disposal. Is there a dinosaur TV? Do

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Speaker 1: they just watch a dinosaur acting out TV shows or something?

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Speaker 1: I don't remember. I feel like they probably did have

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Speaker 1: a TV, but I can't. I can't instantly picture it

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Speaker 1: in my head. I think even most elementary school children

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Speaker 1: these days are aware that humans and dinosaurs, the non

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Speaker 1: avian dinosaurs actually never existed at the same time. That

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Speaker 1: that's like something that was maybe a little bit blurrier

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Speaker 1: when I was a kid, but I think that generally

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Speaker 1: made clear to children today. Yeah, my son has no

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Speaker 1: doubt about it. I mean part of it. I think

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Speaker 1: it's because he watched a lot of dinosaur trains, so

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Speaker 1: it might be possible then that dinosaurs spoke and had

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Speaker 1: a rail system that was able to travel back and

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Speaker 1: forth in dinosaur history, but they certainly did not live

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Speaker 1: alongside humans, right, So, as we were just saying, the

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Speaker 1: non avian dinosaurs all in extinct before or during the

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Speaker 1: Cretaceous paleo gene extinction event sometimes known as the KPg

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Speaker 1: or the KT extinction about sixty six million years ago,

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Speaker 1: and human beings have existed for far less than a

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Speaker 1: million years. If you want to get more specific than that.

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Speaker 1: There there are actually some interesting questions there, like it

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Speaker 1: can prove difficult to say exactly when Homo sapiens appeared, because,

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Speaker 1: of course, the transition from earlier species of bipedal hominids

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Speaker 1: to the anatomically modern human didn't happen overnight. But our

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Speaker 1: best guess is that Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa

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Speaker 1: roughly two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand years ago roughly.

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Speaker 1: And that's a difference of about sixty five million years

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Speaker 1: or so. It's a big difference, right, It's not like

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Speaker 1: you could fudge the numbers a little bit one way

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Speaker 1: or another and say, maybe there's a little bit of overlap. Like,

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Speaker 1: it's a big enough difference that there's no way to

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Speaker 1: do that. Based on all the evidence available to us,

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Speaker 1: there is pretty much zero chance of human interaction with

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Speaker 1: non avian dinosaurs. So what are we to make of

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Speaker 1: stories and and little bits of art and things like

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Speaker 1: that that people sometimes present to say, no, no, no,

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Speaker 1: you're wrong. Humans have seen living dinosaurs and here's the proof. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And as the title of this episode does suggests, one

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Speaker 1: bit of proof that we're discussing here today but also

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Speaker 1: using as just an excuse to talk about the stegosaurs,

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Speaker 1: is this idea that there is a twelveth century carving

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Speaker 1: in modern day Cambodia all the Stegosaurus, again, fossils of

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Speaker 1: which were not officially discovered until eighteen seventy seven during

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Speaker 1: the so called Bone Wars in North America. So that

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Speaker 1: is the evidence that is presented. Um, we're not buying it,

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Speaker 1: but we will discuss it a little bit later in

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Speaker 1: the show. Right, So before we get to the twelfth

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Speaker 1: century Cambodian carving of a supposed Stegasaurus, we should look

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Speaker 1: at the stegosaurus itself, this powerful cone in of the

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Speaker 1: prehistoric world, this fascinating old herbivore with its plates and

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Speaker 1: its spikes and its tiny little head. I want to

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Speaker 1: know all about it, Robert, let's go in alright. Well,

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Speaker 1: like I said earlier, Stegasaurus was certainly one of my

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Speaker 1: favorites as a as a child. And my son, by

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Speaker 1: the way, he likes the stegosaurus, but he actually prefers

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Speaker 1: the Kintrasaurus, which is a smaller contemporary from East Africa.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I believe, as far as I know, that's

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Speaker 1: the only one that was ever found in Africa, right

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Speaker 1: I believe. So yeah, So this one, if you're unfamiliar

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Speaker 1: with the with what this specimen probably looked like the

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Speaker 1: illustrations and the fossil reconstructions tend to show it with

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Speaker 1: typical bony plates roughly halfway down its back, and then

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Speaker 1: it has spikes, so it looks like a cross between

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Speaker 1: a proper stegasaurus and a pin cushion. But now I

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Speaker 1: should say that even though the Controsaurus was smaller, it

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Speaker 1: was still sixteen ft or five meters long, which is

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Speaker 1: still pretty enormous. A proper Stegasaurus Stegasaurus ungladas would have

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Speaker 1: reached thirty ft or nine meters in length and would

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Speaker 1: have weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of five point three

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Speaker 1: to seven tons. So this was a herbivore, and it

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Speaker 1: lived in what is now North America during the late Jurassic,

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Speaker 1: so roughly one sixty three five million years ago. Carnegie

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Speaker 1: Quarry at the US Dinosaur National Monument is a is

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Speaker 1: one of the places where you'll find a wealth of

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Speaker 1: Stegasaurus fossils. In fact, I was reading where one prominent

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Speaker 1: paleontologist had even complained at one point that the Stegasaurus

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Speaker 1: fossils were in the way of the sauropod fossils that

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Speaker 1: he wanted to to to fully examine. Oh, like, can

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Speaker 1: we get somebody in here to sweep all these stegasaurs

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Speaker 1: out the way? I just have we have a nuisance

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Speaker 1: Stegosaurus is here. So stegosaurians were part of a branch

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Speaker 1: of dinosaurs that were the ornithiscans. Right now, what does

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Speaker 1: that mean, Robert bird hip? Dinosaurs bird hips. So they're

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Speaker 1: sometimes classified in terms of the orientations of their hip bones.

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Speaker 1: Right now, it does not mean slender hips or slender

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Speaker 1: thighs exactly, because if you've looked as Stegosaurus, it's it's

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Speaker 1: thighs are enormous, it has these enormous hind legs. It's

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Speaker 1: a meat on the bones. Yes. Now, unlike their ornithopod

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Speaker 1: relatives such as iguanadons and the duck bill dinosaurs, uh,

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Speaker 1: they couldn't run on their hind legs. Their hind legs

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Speaker 1: were far larger than their front legs, meaning that they

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Speaker 1: these creatures actually sloped forward with their hips higher than

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Speaker 1: the rest of their bodies, kind of leaning down. Yeah. Oh,

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Speaker 1: and they also had tall spines at the base of

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Speaker 1: the tail. They probably helped anchor powerful muscles that helped

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Speaker 1: it actually lift its four legs up off the ground,

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Speaker 1: aid and feeding. So whin white couldn't run on its

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Speaker 1: hind legs. It's it could probably lift itself up and

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Speaker 1: you know, pull some branches down, that sort of thing.

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Speaker 1: And those spikes on the back of the stegosaurs tail

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Speaker 1: have a special name, right. Oh, yes, Now this is

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Speaker 1: a this is an informal name, but it is informal

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Speaker 1: even among paleontologists that they'll use it. I've read that

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Speaker 1: all paleontologists now called the spikes the phagomizer, the thagomizer. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: this is uh, this is great because this is an

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Speaker 1: ode to Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon one one in particular,

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Speaker 1: in which you had a number of caveman or Neanderthals,

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Speaker 1: you know, the typical Gary Larson Far Side caveman, always

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Speaker 1: depicting dinosaurs and uh and cave dwelling humans alongside each other. Right,

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Speaker 1: and one is giving a presentation on the hind quarters

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Speaker 1: of a Stegasaurus and he's saying, now, this end is

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Speaker 1: called the thagomizer after the late Fags Simmons, and so

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Speaker 1: now we call it the thagomizer, which feels appropriate because

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Speaker 1: it looks like uh an instrument for thagamizing something. The

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Speaker 1: word thagamizer even fits so well with our Conan motif.

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Speaker 1: You can imagine Conan saying it. Yeah. And again you

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Speaker 1: can also imagine Conan wearing some heavy armor into battle

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Speaker 1: as well, at least, you know, not so much that

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Speaker 1: he covers all of the muscles, but you know, just

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Speaker 1: to strengthen him up a little bit. Okay. And indeed,

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Speaker 1: the Stegasaurs did have these very fascinating plates on its body, right,

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Speaker 1: And there's actually some interesting debate over what role those

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Speaker 1: plates played, right, Yeah, Because when you I mean, one

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Speaker 1: of the things about the Stagasar says, you look at

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Speaker 1: it and it even even if it's an action pay

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Speaker 1: a bit of paleo art. You know, there's some sort

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Speaker 1: of a battle going on. It is hard to really

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Speaker 1: nail down what the plates are supposed to be doing, right,

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Speaker 1: I mean the easy thing to say, which you've seen

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Speaker 1: a Stagasur, it's got these plates poking up off of

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Speaker 1: its back. Um, you could say, well, of course they're

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Speaker 1: armor there for protection, and there's no way to rule

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Speaker 1: out that they might have played some role along those lines.

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Speaker 1: But also, I mean, imagine a person running into battle

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Speaker 1: with like sheets of steel sticking straight out from behind

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Speaker 1: their back. You mean generally you'd want the plates more

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Speaker 1: oriented along the surfaces of the skin to protect from attacks, right, yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean these things were big. They were kind of

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Speaker 1: arrowhead shaped, were more than two ft or sixty centimeters high,

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Speaker 1: and and the I mean, one of the reasons for

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Speaker 1: such confusion even just about the placement of the plates

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Speaker 1: is that we have many well preserved specimens of the segasurist,

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Speaker 1: but there's never been one where the plates are still

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Speaker 1: attached to the skeleton. So there's been a lot of

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Speaker 1: discussion over how they might be arranged, so that the

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Speaker 1: vertical arrangement tends to be the one that you see,

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Speaker 1: the one that is accepted. Even then, it's uncertain if

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Speaker 1: we're looking at um two parallel rows of these or

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Speaker 1: there's a zig zagging pattern down the creature's spine. I

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Speaker 1: think the one layered zigzag is the favored today. Is

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Speaker 1: now I think out that there were paleontologists that argued

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Speaker 1: that they were actually in or on the skin more

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Speaker 1: like armor plating. But again, the popular theory now is

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Speaker 1: that there's a vertical arrangement. But if they were to

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Speaker 1: just be purely body armor, it would seem to make

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Speaker 1: more sense, at least to our our our human minds,

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Speaker 1: that they would be UH laid across its back like

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Speaker 1: plate mail, cover more of the body. Yeah, so they

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Speaker 1: were likely covered in tough horn, but some paleontogists have

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Speaker 1: theorized that you would have a layer of thin skin

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Speaker 1: that could have covered them as well, and this would

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Speaker 1: allow this would have allowed the place to serve as

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Speaker 1: heat exchangers. And then there's there are others who theorized

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Speaker 1: that it might have been brightly colored and used for

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Speaker 1: mating purposes. There's actually a cool fairly recent study to

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Speaker 1: back this up. At two thousand fifteen Princeton study argue

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Speaker 1: that stegasaurusmotsi actually featured differing male and female plate arrangements,

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Speaker 1: and this would certainly back up the mating theory and

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Speaker 1: also provide some different interpretations of UH stegasarian plating in general. UH.

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Speaker 1: They also argue that this sort of sexual dimorphism could

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Speaker 1: be widespread among non avian dinos. It means it's possible

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Speaker 1: that all three of these different theories are somehow involved.

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Speaker 1: But but one can imagine a scenario where some sort

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Speaker 1: of what was originally armor plating becomes increasingly involved in

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Speaker 1: mate selection and does just get out of control. So

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Speaker 1: they're just they're sticking up, they're they're less protective. Uh,

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Speaker 1: they're they're brightly colored. And then you know, millions and

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Speaker 1: millions of years later, a new species of super intelligent

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Speaker 1: apes just has a hard time figuring out what it

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Speaker 1: was all about. Now, when it comes to the tail

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Speaker 1: of the Stegasaurus, there's there's a lot less doubt about

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Speaker 1: what it was for. Yeah, it seems pretty clear that

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Speaker 1: it was used for defense, right, Yeah, everyone's pretty certain

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Speaker 1: that these were used just like the sort of medieval

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Speaker 1: morning star weapon that it resembles, that the stegosaurus would

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Speaker 1: have would have swung this thing around in battle to

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Speaker 1: protect itself from carnivores. And to one of the cool

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Speaker 1: things is that we actually have some fossil evidence, fossil

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Speaker 1: evidence of spike wounds on on on Alosaurus is to

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Speaker 1: back this up exactly. So the Alosaurus was a predator

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Speaker 1: that would have been around to prey on the stegosaurus,

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Speaker 1: and inteen there emerged a really awesome, fantastic example of this.

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Speaker 1: So inteen, the famous paleontologist Robert Backer, who if you'll recall,

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Speaker 1: he actually gets a name drop in Jurassic Park. You

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Speaker 1: remember that little the kid Tim who's following around Alan Grant.

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Speaker 1: He's like, I read this other book by this guy

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Speaker 1: named Backer. Yeah, that's him. Spells his name like our

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Speaker 1: Scott Baker. But h but Robert Backer. So he announced

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Speaker 1: a discovery ineen that the Geological Society of America that

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Speaker 1: the fossil remains of an Allosaurus. This predator in a

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Speaker 1: Wyoming museum showed signs of having been killed in combat,

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Speaker 1: with the stegosaurus, specifically being spiked to death in the

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Speaker 1: groin O man crosthagamized to death. There you go that.

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Speaker 1: If that's not some some con conan the barbarian behavior,

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Speaker 1: I don't know what is I know. So, what's the

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Speaker 1: evidence of this? Right? The allosaur skeleton has this deep

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Speaker 1: conical whole punctured right in its pubic bone. Can you

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Speaker 1: imagine how strong a blow would have to be to

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Speaker 1: punch a hole right through the bones of a massive

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Speaker 1: prehistoric predator. Wow? Yeah, that's some serious punch. Yeah. So

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Speaker 1: apparently this wound would have left shattered bone fragments and

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Speaker 1: all kinds of dirt and contaminants in a deep wound

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Speaker 1: like this, and then it appears what happened is the

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Speaker 1: wound got infected. So Backer says, quote a massive infection

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Speaker 1: ate away a baseball sized sector of the bone. Probably

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Speaker 1: this infection spread upwards into the soft tissue attached here,

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Speaker 1: the thigh muscles and adjacent intestines and reproductive organs, and

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Speaker 1: the wound. They are sure that it killed the allosaur

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Speaker 1: because the wound does show any signs of having healed over,

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Speaker 1: which is usually a sign that the animal died from

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Speaker 1: the wound, or maybe just coincidentally died right after receiving it.

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Speaker 1: But it probably died from this horrible wound, right. So

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Speaker 1: Bocher is talking about the specific weaponized qualities of the

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Speaker 1: thagomizer and the stegosaur's tail in general, and he says, quote,

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Speaker 1: most dinosaur tails get stiffer towards the end, but the

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Speaker 1: joints of a stegosaur tail look like a monkey's tail.

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Speaker 1: They were built for three dimensional combat. And the way

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Speaker 1: I've seen this explained was that Baker's team says, we

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Speaker 1: often think about the combat behaviors of stegosaurs as in

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Speaker 1: like they can just sort of wave their tail back

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Speaker 1: and forth like we see in cartoons, right, I mean

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Speaker 1: they probably would have been able to wave their tail

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Speaker 1: back and forth. But Baker and colleagues instead argue that

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Speaker 1: the stegosaur was not limited to this motion, but could

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Speaker 1: make these powerful stabbing thrusts with its tail like we

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Speaker 1: would with a spear or a sword. Oh I love this.

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Speaker 1: So so it's it's it's not just this idea that

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Speaker 1: it just has to wave it back and forth, and

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Speaker 1: it's just kind of a general don't approach me from

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Speaker 1: the rear because there's there are spikes back there, but

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Speaker 1: it's more of a strategic weapon that it can use

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Speaker 1: against the offender. Yeah, it's almost like a spiked arm.

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Speaker 1: Like it's got three dimensions of freedom of movement. Right,

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Speaker 1: So so if it gets uh, snuck up on by

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Speaker 1: an allosaurus. Allosaurs runs up on the stegosaur from behind

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Speaker 1: the stegosaur, it's not like has its tail pinned down.

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Speaker 1: Now it can go up and stab the allosaur and

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Speaker 1: the groin. And that's what happened here. I like how

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Speaker 1: Baker reminds us that the stegosaurus would not have kept

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Speaker 1: its thagamizer and sterile conditions. And it also kind of

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Speaker 1: makes me think, oh, what if it What if it

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Speaker 1: was quite the opposite. What if this thing was just nasty,

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Speaker 1: just it just it just dragged its thagamizer through its

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Speaker 1: own extrements. So it was just this this sharp brutal

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Speaker 1: of just feces encrusted the instrument of death, that it

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Speaker 1: would that it would weave back and forth that its enemies. Gross. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean that that's great. That would have been a

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Speaker 1: really devious weapon. I don't know if you could have really,

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Speaker 1: I mean, when you think about it, could they have

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Speaker 1: had a selection pressure for that if like it wouldn't

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Speaker 1: immediately kill the allosaur that's attacking it, but would kill

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Speaker 1: it like within a few days from infection. I don't know.

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Speaker 1: I don't know. And I mean to to his actual point, though,

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Speaker 1: you would not have to have a feces encrusted thagomizer

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Speaker 1: to results in catastrophic infection exactly. No. Yeah, you'd stab

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Speaker 1: a hole through the bones, leave a bunch of fragments,

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Speaker 1: you get some dirt in there. Yeah. So, and in

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Speaker 1: any case, even if it doesn't immediately kill the allosaurus,

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Speaker 1: it's gonna wound it bad enough that the stegosaur is

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Speaker 1: probably gonna be able to get away, right. Yeah. Oh

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Speaker 1: interesting side note. If you look at older illustrations of

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Speaker 1: the stegosaurus, uh, they'll often be extra spikes on the thagomizer.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Now everyone tends to agree you're looking at

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Speaker 1: four spikes, but you you see older paintings where they

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Speaker 1: have eight. Yeah, And in that paleo are you also

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Speaker 1: see the parallel arrangement of the vertical plates on the

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Speaker 1: back instead of the single line arrangement. Another side note

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Speaker 1: about this fine with the groin stab from the thagomizer,

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Speaker 1: it also affects an interesting debate over the basic survival

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Speaker 1: niche of therapod carnivores like Allosaurus. So you've got the therapods,

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Speaker 1: you know, the Tyrannosaurus type dinosaurs, the two legged walking dinosaurs, um,

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Speaker 1: these therapod predators. Some have proposed that allosaurs and tyrannosaurs

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Speaker 1: were actually scavengers primarily, rather than active hunters, and this

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Speaker 1: wound in others like it inflicted by herbivores on carnivores

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Speaker 1: seems to me to be pretty good evidence that large

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Speaker 1: therapod carnivores like Allosaurus were active hunters, right, yeah, because

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Speaker 1: why else are you gonna thagamize somebody right there? There

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Speaker 1: would be no reason for a stegosaurus to jab an

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Speaker 1: allosaurus to death unless the allosaurs was attacking it. YEA

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Speaker 1: stegosaurus is not gonna walk up and be like, stop

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Speaker 1: disrespecting the dead, yeah, because because the segasaurus doesn't doesn't

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Speaker 1: think like that, right, And speaking of thinking, the Stegasaurus

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Speaker 1: had an extremely small head, a mirror sixteen inches or

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Speaker 1: forts long. The brain, it's often pointed out, would have

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Speaker 1: been roughly the size of a walnut. I like this,

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Speaker 1: but I also like because that's an often cited fact.

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Speaker 1: The paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter, who's director of the U. S

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Speaker 1: U Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Utah, has said that despite

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Speaker 1: the despite the common comparison of the stegosaurus brain to

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Speaker 1: the walnut, he makes an even more specific comparison, which

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Speaker 1: is to say, quote, actually, it's brain had the size

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Speaker 1: and shape of a bent hot dog. I really like

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Speaker 1: this this interpretation because it kind of implies that all

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Speaker 1: the Stegasurians were we're deviance. You know, they had a

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Speaker 1: real bent hot dog of a brain. All right, I

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Speaker 1: think we should explore some facts and some controversies about

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Speaker 1: that bent hot dog when we come back from a break.

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Speaker 1: Thank thank alright, we're back. So we were talking about

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Speaker 1: the particularly low brain to body ratio that you would

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Speaker 1: have found in the stegasarians. Right, it's a it's a

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Speaker 1: crown worshiper. It's got a big weapon, that's got a

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Speaker 1: tiny head and a tiny, tiny little brain often compared

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Speaker 1: to a walnut, sort of like a bent hot dog.

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Speaker 1: In the words of one paleontologist, Why so small though, Well, ultimately,

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Speaker 1: if you're walking tank, if you're walking Jurassic tank, uh,

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Speaker 1: how much thinking do you need to do? Right? You're

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Speaker 1: you're essentially a grazing herbivore. If something attacks you, you

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Speaker 1: fight back viciously with your thagomizer, but you're not engaging

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Speaker 1: and probably a lot of rich social behavior. You're not

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Speaker 1: doing any pack hunting or anything of that nature. You're

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Speaker 1: not you don't have a like a diverse diet that

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Speaker 1: you're having to to deal with. So a lot of

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Speaker 1: the behavioral reasons that you would have a more highly

419
00:23:41,880 --> 00:23:46,879
Speaker 1: evolved uh brain are just not present in the Steaga stars.

420
00:23:47,640 --> 00:23:49,960
Speaker 1: I know some people throughout history, and will will present

421
00:23:50,000 --> 00:23:51,960
Speaker 1: counters to this in a minute. But some people throughout

422
00:23:52,000 --> 00:23:54,720
Speaker 1: history looked at the tiny brain and said, wow, that's

423
00:23:54,720 --> 00:23:57,480
Speaker 1: so small. How could it even control its body? Right?

424
00:23:57,520 --> 00:24:00,200
Speaker 1: Would that even have enough processing power to move its

425
00:24:00,200 --> 00:24:03,439
Speaker 1: body parts around? Yeah? Well, this we get into an

426
00:24:03,520 --> 00:24:08,920
Speaker 1: interesting theory that that I understand it is less popular now,

427
00:24:08,960 --> 00:24:11,320
Speaker 1: but that the idea was that, well, the stegasaurs had

428
00:24:11,359 --> 00:24:15,080
Speaker 1: a second brain in its hips to control the movements

429
00:24:15,080 --> 00:24:18,160
Speaker 1: of its hind quarters, sort of like a rear steering

430
00:24:18,160 --> 00:24:20,520
Speaker 1: wheel and a fire truck. Oh I like that. Yeah,

431
00:24:20,520 --> 00:24:23,040
Speaker 1: And now, of course nobody was arguing that this would

432
00:24:23,040 --> 00:24:25,399
Speaker 1: have been a true brain, but rather a cluster of

433
00:24:25,480 --> 00:24:30,000
Speaker 1: nervous tissue. Uh, the idea of say, neural canal in

434
00:24:30,040 --> 00:24:31,880
Speaker 1: the syncrum, and it just would have been a lot

435
00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:35,800
Speaker 1: larger in the in the stegosaurs, because the stegosaurs has

436
00:24:35,800 --> 00:24:38,320
Speaker 1: such large hind quarters. Yeah, a lot of bones, a

437
00:24:38,320 --> 00:24:40,119
Speaker 1: lot of less space between the bones, a lot of

438
00:24:40,160 --> 00:24:42,200
Speaker 1: meat on the bones, right, so there's a lot of stuff. Yeah.

439
00:24:42,240 --> 00:24:46,280
Speaker 1: So as beautiful as the stegastar butt brain idea is,

440
00:24:47,280 --> 00:24:49,080
Speaker 1: because it would be kind of beautiful to find a

441
00:24:49,119 --> 00:24:52,360
Speaker 1: creature with a brain in its butt. Unfortunately, it looks

442
00:24:52,400 --> 00:24:54,400
Speaker 1: like the evidence did not pan out for the butt

443
00:24:54,400 --> 00:24:58,040
Speaker 1: brain theory, and it's not accepted anymore. This hypothesis first

444
00:24:58,080 --> 00:25:02,040
Speaker 1: came from the nineteenth century paleon hoologist oath Neil Charles Marsh,

445
00:25:02,080 --> 00:25:04,760
Speaker 1: who wrote in eighteen eighty one that the cavity for

446
00:25:04,800 --> 00:25:07,879
Speaker 1: the expansion of the neural canal, which is what you

447
00:25:07,920 --> 00:25:12,080
Speaker 1: were just mentioning, was a quote, posterior brain case, and

448
00:25:12,119 --> 00:25:14,280
Speaker 1: that that's also a good insult to keep in your bank,

449
00:25:14,640 --> 00:25:17,679
Speaker 1: you know, posterior brain case. We're getting them all. So

450
00:25:17,720 --> 00:25:19,760
Speaker 1: it's like you call somebody a bent hot dog brain,

451
00:25:19,880 --> 00:25:24,040
Speaker 1: you call somebody a posterior brain case. But paleontologists do

452
00:25:24,080 --> 00:25:27,360
Speaker 1: not believe this anymore, mainly because there's no evidence for it,

453
00:25:27,560 --> 00:25:29,320
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's a pretty good reason for thinking

454
00:25:29,359 --> 00:25:32,320
Speaker 1: that this cavity was for something else. And I found

455
00:25:32,359 --> 00:25:35,440
Speaker 1: a good, clear explanation of this in a blog post

456
00:25:35,480 --> 00:25:38,800
Speaker 1: by a Western you paleontologist named Matt wood Dell that

457
00:25:38,920 --> 00:25:41,520
Speaker 1: clearly explains what's going on here, and funny enough, as

458
00:25:41,560 --> 00:25:45,040
Speaker 1: a side note, in the context of him mentioning this,

459
00:25:45,200 --> 00:25:48,840
Speaker 1: was complaining about being featured in a wildly inaccurate Science

460
00:25:48,920 --> 00:25:52,159
Speaker 1: Channel documentary in two thousand nine. I wonder what it was,

461
00:25:52,240 --> 00:25:55,040
Speaker 1: What is it like? Uh Stegasarian's Walk among Us. I

462
00:25:55,040 --> 00:25:57,399
Speaker 1: don't remember the name of it, but he's he's talking

463
00:25:57,440 --> 00:26:00,520
Speaker 1: about how he claims that it misleading. He cut his

464
00:26:00,560 --> 00:26:03,600
Speaker 1: interview to make it seem like he was advocating this

465
00:26:03,680 --> 00:26:07,919
Speaker 1: outdated brain butt hypothesis, and he wasn't. So instead, he

466
00:26:08,000 --> 00:26:11,199
Speaker 1: rights that there were actually two different things in the

467
00:26:11,200 --> 00:26:13,959
Speaker 1: body of a stegasur that get referred to as the

468
00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:17,720
Speaker 1: sacro lumbar expansion, this cavity you're talking about. One is

469
00:26:17,760 --> 00:26:20,320
Speaker 1: a swelling of the spinal cord around the pelvis, which

470
00:26:20,400 --> 00:26:23,560
Speaker 1: is actually present in most vertebrates and is apparently there

471
00:26:23,600 --> 00:26:27,320
Speaker 1: to control motor function. Right. One of the weird things

472
00:26:27,359 --> 00:26:29,480
Speaker 1: that a lot of people don't know is that it

473
00:26:29,920 --> 00:26:32,520
Speaker 1: is thought that much of your body's motor function, like

474
00:26:32,560 --> 00:26:36,440
Speaker 1: the less executively controlled things sort of like automatic continuous

475
00:26:36,480 --> 00:26:40,080
Speaker 1: motion like say walking just walking, some of that doesn't

476
00:26:40,119 --> 00:26:43,480
Speaker 1: come directly from the brain, but is controlled by central

477
00:26:43,840 --> 00:26:48,280
Speaker 1: locomotion function. Like there's a cluster of nervous tissue in

478
00:26:48,320 --> 00:26:51,960
Speaker 1: the spinal cord that says legs keep walking unless something

479
00:26:52,000 --> 00:26:54,800
Speaker 1: goes wrong. Now, the other thing that potentially gets called

480
00:26:54,800 --> 00:26:59,000
Speaker 1: a sacro lumbar expansion. This, this cavity is a real expansion,

481
00:26:59,040 --> 00:27:01,399
Speaker 1: a cavity in the acroll vertebrae, or is kind of

482
00:27:01,400 --> 00:27:04,439
Speaker 1: a gap in the bones back there. But it's not

483
00:27:04,560 --> 00:27:08,439
Speaker 1: unique to the Stegosaurus, and paleontologists are pretty confident that

484
00:27:08,520 --> 00:27:10,399
Speaker 1: it was not the side of a brain, but actually

485
00:27:10,400 --> 00:27:13,200
Speaker 1: the site of a glycogen body, which is a massive

486
00:27:13,320 --> 00:27:17,240
Speaker 1: glucose energy storage, which is still seen around the same

487
00:27:17,280 --> 00:27:20,680
Speaker 1: location in bird skeletons today. And of course birds are

488
00:27:20,760 --> 00:27:24,520
Speaker 1: the descendants of the dinosaurs that had them. Yeah, I

489
00:27:24,560 --> 00:27:27,399
Speaker 1: was reading about this, this theory. This was actually in

490
00:27:27,600 --> 00:27:31,280
Speaker 1: um uh In, an older dinosaur text from the nineties,

491
00:27:31,320 --> 00:27:33,640
Speaker 1: So I'm not sure to what extent this holds up,

492
00:27:33,840 --> 00:27:36,680
Speaker 1: but one possible interpretation was that this could have given

493
00:27:36,680 --> 00:27:39,240
Speaker 1: the hind quarters an energy boost when it was I

494
00:27:39,240 --> 00:27:43,399
Speaker 1: guess chlaubra in time. Oh yeah, well, uh, obviously that

495
00:27:43,520 --> 00:27:45,679
Speaker 1: is one thing to consider. I guess people don't know

496
00:27:45,760 --> 00:27:47,680
Speaker 1: for sure yet. I mean when the most recent stuff

497
00:27:47,680 --> 00:27:50,160
Speaker 1: I've read, people don't know for sure what the glycogen

498
00:27:50,200 --> 00:27:54,760
Speaker 1: body is for even in modern birds. But yeah, interesting mystery.

499
00:27:55,480 --> 00:27:59,960
Speaker 1: Another side note, if this discredited hypothesis had been true,

500
00:28:00,280 --> 00:28:03,680
Speaker 1: like if there were a second brain in the stegosaurs.

501
00:28:03,760 --> 00:28:07,280
Speaker 1: But what would the consciousness of an organism like that be,

502
00:28:07,440 --> 00:28:10,040
Speaker 1: like if if it was capable of being conscious, what

503
00:28:10,040 --> 00:28:13,880
Speaker 1: would the consciousness of an organism with two separate brains

504
00:28:13,920 --> 00:28:18,720
Speaker 1: connected by a single nervous system be Like? Huh would

505
00:28:18,720 --> 00:28:21,520
Speaker 1: it be a brain that has not two houses but three?

506
00:28:21,560 --> 00:28:24,480
Speaker 1: Would you have a tricameral mind? I don't know, No,

507
00:28:24,640 --> 00:28:27,919
Speaker 1: I mean, like, could you, I mean, imagine it for

508
00:28:27,960 --> 00:28:31,240
Speaker 1: a second. Would it be that you'd have two minds

509
00:28:31,280 --> 00:28:34,639
Speaker 1: in the same body, or would somehow one mind be

510
00:28:34,720 --> 00:28:38,400
Speaker 1: split across the two different brains connected by nervous tissue.

511
00:28:39,440 --> 00:28:43,400
Speaker 1: I guess I would tend towards the second. But I

512
00:28:43,440 --> 00:28:46,480
Speaker 1: also can't help, but but think about some of I mean,

513
00:28:46,520 --> 00:28:48,600
Speaker 1: I can't help, but think about Julian James and the

514
00:28:49,160 --> 00:28:53,560
Speaker 1: bicameral mind interpretation where you have one half speaking to

515
00:28:53,600 --> 00:28:57,280
Speaker 1: the other and uh and yeah, so I kind of

516
00:28:57,360 --> 00:29:01,120
Speaker 1: jokingly mentioned the idea of a tricameral mind, but it's

517
00:29:01,200 --> 00:29:04,160
Speaker 1: it's one help can't help. But wonder, like, how would

518
00:29:04,440 --> 00:29:09,440
Speaker 1: communication among these three regions of cognition, how would they

519
00:29:09,480 --> 00:29:14,080
Speaker 1: be experienced as conscious thought? And of course it's ridiculous.

520
00:29:14,080 --> 00:29:16,920
Speaker 1: We're talking about this with a stegasaurus, which were multiple

521
00:29:16,960 --> 00:29:22,240
Speaker 1: levels pretty far from from from from modern consciousness to

522
00:29:22,240 --> 00:29:25,800
Speaker 1: this creature. But but no, it's it's a fascinating idea.

523
00:29:26,040 --> 00:29:30,880
Speaker 1: It also makes me think of of the various models

524
00:29:30,960 --> 00:29:36,120
Speaker 1: of chakra in um in Eastern and New Age thought,

525
00:29:36,560 --> 00:29:39,040
Speaker 1: the idea that you have these different centers of cognition

526
00:29:39,400 --> 00:29:43,160
Speaker 1: throughout the body or there's one, right, Yeah, yeah, so

527
00:29:43,440 --> 00:29:45,920
Speaker 1: maybe it would sort of be like that. I mean,

528
00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:49,720
Speaker 1: I can't help but but but but someone that that

529
00:29:49,720 --> 00:29:53,760
Speaker 1: that idea when I'm trying to imagine a brain in

530
00:29:53,800 --> 00:29:57,320
Speaker 1: the butt. Okay, let's get back to the tail. Yes, yeah,

531
00:29:57,320 --> 00:29:59,280
Speaker 1: I mean, we're we're we're we're headed that way anyway,

532
00:29:59,280 --> 00:30:01,040
Speaker 1: we're talking about the the idea of a rear brain.

533
00:30:01,120 --> 00:30:02,600
Speaker 1: Let's just head on all the way back to the

534
00:30:02,640 --> 00:30:06,760
Speaker 1: thagomizer because here's a here's a fun question that I

535
00:30:06,800 --> 00:30:08,680
Speaker 1: don't I don't think i'd really thought about this before,

536
00:30:08,720 --> 00:30:12,200
Speaker 1: but it's it's a pretty natural question to ask, why

537
00:30:12,320 --> 00:30:16,959
Speaker 1: don't modern vertebrates have weaponized tails like we see with

538
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:20,240
Speaker 1: the stegasarians or with the ankliosaurus, you know, the the

539
00:30:20,280 --> 00:30:23,720
Speaker 1: other kind of famous armored dinosaur. It's kind of a

540
00:30:23,760 --> 00:30:26,880
Speaker 1: ball tail, right, yeah, kind of like very blunt looking spikes,

541
00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:30,520
Speaker 1: but very much this enormous like dwarf and warhammer of

542
00:30:30,520 --> 00:30:33,760
Speaker 1: a tail, a little even more conan he maybe. Yeah.

543
00:30:33,840 --> 00:30:37,080
Speaker 1: And then among among among mammals, pretty stark mammals, you

544
00:30:37,120 --> 00:30:41,360
Speaker 1: had the glyphodonts, which also had a weaponized tail. So

545
00:30:41,400 --> 00:30:44,320
Speaker 1: you're saying, like, where are all the thagomizers today? Yeah? Yeah,

546
00:30:44,320 --> 00:30:47,760
Speaker 1: because you look around that our our modern verbet organisms,

547
00:30:47,800 --> 00:30:50,200
Speaker 1: and you just do not see them. So a two

548
00:30:50,240 --> 00:30:53,840
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen North Carolina State University study actually looked into

549
00:30:53,880 --> 00:30:57,400
Speaker 1: this because because they think about it, we have all

550
00:30:57,400 --> 00:31:00,200
Speaker 1: of these creatures that have horns on their head at

551
00:31:00,240 --> 00:31:03,160
Speaker 1: antlers on their head, and they're going around using these

552
00:31:03,240 --> 00:31:07,840
Speaker 1: either offensively and some sort of mating behavior against other males,

553
00:31:08,280 --> 00:31:11,640
Speaker 1: or they're using them defensively against predators. But that's up

554
00:31:11,680 --> 00:31:15,240
Speaker 1: there where the brain is exactly the most pivotal part

555
00:31:15,280 --> 00:31:18,120
Speaker 1: of the of the organism. Why are they fighting with that?

556
00:31:18,240 --> 00:31:20,000
Speaker 1: For a while now, I've been wanting to do a

557
00:31:20,040 --> 00:31:23,440
Speaker 1: whole episode on this question of weaponized heads and why

558
00:31:23,560 --> 00:31:27,640
Speaker 1: you would have so so commonly evolved weaponized heads. You're

559
00:31:27,640 --> 00:31:30,720
Speaker 1: putting the most important part of your body right out

560
00:31:30,760 --> 00:31:34,360
Speaker 1: front as a weapon. Yeah, yeah, why not use the tail?

561
00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:37,080
Speaker 1: The tail that is, you know in many organisms that

562
00:31:37,160 --> 00:31:39,720
Speaker 1: this is a part that can be lost. It's a

563
00:31:39,760 --> 00:31:44,479
Speaker 1: part that is brightly colored or or otherwise ornamented so

564
00:31:44,520 --> 00:31:47,520
Speaker 1: that it will attract the attention of predators, and not

565
00:31:47,800 --> 00:31:51,520
Speaker 1: the front end, not the business end of the organism. Yeah. So,

566
00:31:51,520 --> 00:31:54,040
Speaker 1: so what's the deal here, Well, it's indeed, it's indeed

567
00:31:54,160 --> 00:31:56,680
Speaker 1: topic we could probably go into in more depth, but

568
00:31:56,760 --> 00:31:59,840
Speaker 1: in this case, the researchers they look for commonality among

569
00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:04,680
Speaker 1: weapon tailed four legged organisms, both living in extinct, and

570
00:32:04,880 --> 00:32:07,480
Speaker 1: their guiding question was simply like, why don't turtles have

571
00:32:07,560 --> 00:32:10,240
Speaker 1: spiked tails? You know, it's a it's a they're big

572
00:32:10,320 --> 00:32:12,920
Speaker 1: armored creatures in many cases. Why is there no they

573
00:32:12,920 --> 00:32:16,120
Speaker 1: have tails? Why are there no spikes back there? Right? Well,

574
00:32:16,160 --> 00:32:20,480
Speaker 1: they determined that these are the necessary factors that you

575
00:32:20,520 --> 00:32:23,880
Speaker 1: need in place four weaponized tails to emerge. First of all,

576
00:32:23,880 --> 00:32:25,680
Speaker 1: they said, you need to be at least two hundred

577
00:32:25,680 --> 00:32:28,680
Speaker 1: pounds or a hundred krams in weight, and next, you

578
00:32:28,720 --> 00:32:32,920
Speaker 1: need to be armored and boast a thoracic stiffness enough

579
00:32:32,960 --> 00:32:36,400
Speaker 1: to swing the tail and counteract the swing force, So

580
00:32:36,480 --> 00:32:39,360
Speaker 1: no windmilling. You know, the stegasaurus is not going to

581
00:32:39,440 --> 00:32:42,040
Speaker 1: just spin in circles. It needs to be able to

582
00:32:42,080 --> 00:32:44,880
Speaker 1: move it around back and forth, or or at least

583
00:32:44,960 --> 00:32:48,080
Speaker 1: to strike and recoil. Right. You can't have like a

584
00:32:48,240 --> 00:32:51,320
Speaker 1: you know, a ten foot long arm to hit somebody with, right,

585
00:32:51,360 --> 00:32:54,320
Speaker 1: because you wouldn't be able to control it. Right. Yeah,

586
00:32:54,320 --> 00:32:57,040
Speaker 1: you need like a base of operations there. Right. And

587
00:32:57,080 --> 00:32:59,680
Speaker 1: then finally you need to be a herbivore. And the

588
00:32:59,760 --> 00:33:04,400
Speaker 1: reality is that large armored herbivores are rare, and additional

589
00:33:04,440 --> 00:33:08,160
Speaker 1: head or tail ornamentation is generally an energy expenditure beyond

590
00:33:08,280 --> 00:33:12,440
Speaker 1: what natural selection will support. Uh. So they described the

591
00:33:12,480 --> 00:33:15,800
Speaker 1: tales of beasts like the stegosaurus is being kind of

592
00:33:15,600 --> 00:33:19,640
Speaker 1: a perfect storm of traits. So which makes them all

593
00:33:19,640 --> 00:33:21,640
Speaker 1: the more special. You know that you realize in this

594
00:33:21,840 --> 00:33:29,440
Speaker 1: vast history of a varied of organisms and varied defensive forms, uh,

595
00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:34,520
Speaker 1: the stegosaurians, the glyphodonts, and Angliosaurus, they have something special

596
00:33:34,560 --> 00:33:38,960
Speaker 1: going on totally. The stegosaurs are beautiful, fascinating creatures to study.

597
00:33:39,000 --> 00:33:41,240
Speaker 1: But now that we've taken a look at them by chrom,

598
00:33:41,400 --> 00:33:43,880
Speaker 1: I think it's about time to get back into the

599
00:33:43,920 --> 00:33:47,560
Speaker 1: claim that somebody saw a living stegosaurus and carved it

600
00:33:47,560 --> 00:33:50,920
Speaker 1: into a temple in Cambodia. So let's let's go to

601
00:33:50,960 --> 00:33:53,240
Speaker 1: this claim. What's up with it? What's going on? Well,

602
00:33:53,280 --> 00:33:55,000
Speaker 1: what should we do first, Joe? Should we talk about

603
00:33:55,200 --> 00:33:58,000
Speaker 1: the carving itself or should we talk about the location

604
00:33:58,040 --> 00:33:59,800
Speaker 1: of the carving? Well, let's set the scene first and

605
00:33:59,840 --> 00:34:02,040
Speaker 1: then we'll talk about the carving. Okay, all right, Well,

606
00:34:02,240 --> 00:34:06,000
Speaker 1: the place is u is a temple complex known as

607
00:34:06,440 --> 00:34:09,960
Speaker 1: Ta prom Uh. This is the place where allegedly we

608
00:34:10,080 --> 00:34:14,320
Speaker 1: find a carving of a stegasuris. So it's a temple

609
00:34:14,400 --> 00:34:17,520
Speaker 1: in modern day Cambodia. It's a relic of the Camir

610
00:34:17,640 --> 00:34:22,520
Speaker 1: Empire and located in its then capital of Angkor. Now.

611
00:34:22,680 --> 00:34:25,680
Speaker 1: The Camera Empire lasted from a roughly the ninth to

612
00:34:25,719 --> 00:34:29,040
Speaker 1: the fifteenth century see and it ruled the entire met

613
00:34:29,080 --> 00:34:33,080
Speaker 1: Kong River valley, but then ultimately declined as empires tend

614
00:34:33,120 --> 00:34:35,960
Speaker 1: to do. And there are a number of different attributed reasons.

615
00:34:36,360 --> 00:34:39,560
Speaker 1: Uh within with as with the fall of any empire. Um,

616
00:34:39,600 --> 00:34:43,520
Speaker 1: it's a complex thing, but historians and anthropologists can't help

617
00:34:43,520 --> 00:34:48,480
Speaker 1: but tease various possibilities apart. Right, So one idea is

618
00:34:48,520 --> 00:34:51,640
Speaker 1: that you know, you simply had Thai conquests going on

619
00:34:52,200 --> 00:34:56,440
Speaker 1: that that whittled them down. Or one idea that's particularly

620
00:34:56,480 --> 00:35:00,920
Speaker 1: engaging is the idea that widespread religious conversion, uh, kind

621
00:35:00,960 --> 00:35:03,759
Speaker 1: of destabilized things to some extent. Oh, do you know

622
00:35:03,920 --> 00:35:06,200
Speaker 1: what the conversion from what to what would have been?

623
00:35:06,239 --> 00:35:09,560
Speaker 1: It would have been Hinduism to Buddhism, particularly to uh

624
00:35:09,920 --> 00:35:14,520
Speaker 1: Theravada Buddhism for instance. One idea here is that under Hinduism,

625
00:35:14,760 --> 00:35:18,920
Speaker 1: the rulers of the Communite empire were divine kings or

626
00:35:19,040 --> 00:35:23,000
Speaker 1: dave A raja, but with a conversion to theraved to Buddhism,

627
00:35:23,040 --> 00:35:26,480
Speaker 1: they became more mortal. But ultimately there are a lot

628
00:35:26,520 --> 00:35:29,160
Speaker 1: of factors to consider here. Yeah, that can undercut your

629
00:35:29,160 --> 00:35:31,439
Speaker 1: divine right Huh. Yeah, it takes me back a little

630
00:35:31,440 --> 00:35:35,000
Speaker 1: to our our episode on the divine rule of kings

631
00:35:35,080 --> 00:35:39,160
Speaker 1: and what happens when when they've outlived their usefulness. Yeah,

632
00:35:39,239 --> 00:35:42,839
Speaker 1: ritual regicide, yeah yeah, But ultimately there are a number

633
00:35:42,880 --> 00:35:46,440
Speaker 1: of factors to consider here, including like maritime trade. I

634
00:35:46,480 --> 00:35:49,080
Speaker 1: saw that come up in h in some papers, including

635
00:35:49,080 --> 00:35:53,920
Speaker 1: a paper by anthropologist Miriam T. Stark, who also points

636
00:35:53,920 --> 00:35:57,920
Speaker 1: out that Cambodia's ancient histories among the least known of

637
00:35:57,920 --> 00:36:00,640
Speaker 1: of Southeast Asia. And this is due to a number

638
00:36:00,680 --> 00:36:04,520
Speaker 1: of factors, including civil war and just an increasingly like

639
00:36:04,640 --> 00:36:08,759
Speaker 1: colonial tradition of of attempting to understand the history of

640
00:36:08,800 --> 00:36:11,680
Speaker 1: another people. But as comparatively little as we might know

641
00:36:11,719 --> 00:36:14,520
Speaker 1: about it, they certainly did leave behind some amazing and

642
00:36:14,600 --> 00:36:17,920
Speaker 1: beautiful relics of the civilization. Oh yeah, without doubt, Now

643
00:36:17,920 --> 00:36:21,040
Speaker 1: I have I've never been to Cambodia, but but I have.

644
00:36:21,200 --> 00:36:23,719
Speaker 1: But but I want to because i've I've certainly I've

645
00:36:23,760 --> 00:36:27,160
Speaker 1: seen images and I've heard about the famous temp temple

646
00:36:27,200 --> 00:36:31,359
Speaker 1: complex of angkor Watt. You've probably seen pictures of Oh yeah, yeah,

647
00:36:31,360 --> 00:36:34,840
Speaker 1: these these are beautiful to behold. Uh. It's the nation's

648
00:36:34,880 --> 00:36:38,360
Speaker 1: most popular tourist destination. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site,

649
00:36:38,600 --> 00:36:42,200
Speaker 1: as is Ta Prom. Now these uh, these temple complexes,

650
00:36:42,239 --> 00:36:44,600
Speaker 1: they would have been Hindo to Hindu temples originally, and

651
00:36:44,600 --> 00:36:48,400
Speaker 1: they gradually became more Buddhist and function as this massive

652
00:36:48,440 --> 00:36:52,440
Speaker 1: conversion took place within the Commi Empire when was to

653
00:36:52,640 --> 00:36:55,160
Speaker 1: prom built, So this would have been built in eleven

654
00:36:55,239 --> 00:37:01,200
Speaker 1: eighty six by King Jayavarman the seventh and sadly, I

655
00:37:01,200 --> 00:37:03,680
Speaker 1: have to say it's also known today as the tomb

656
00:37:03,760 --> 00:37:07,160
Speaker 1: Raider Temple. It was used as a location for the

657
00:37:07,200 --> 00:37:10,200
Speaker 1: two thousand one film tomb Raider. The two thousand one film,

658
00:37:10,360 --> 00:37:15,080
Speaker 1: which one is that the original Angelia original Angelina Jolie

659
00:37:15,160 --> 00:37:17,839
Speaker 1: saw it in the theater, don't remember anything about it.

660
00:37:17,960 --> 00:37:20,560
Speaker 1: I looked back at the the IMDb list for it

661
00:37:20,480 --> 00:37:23,400
Speaker 1: and it has like a like a number of famous

662
00:37:23,640 --> 00:37:27,560
Speaker 1: actors in it. John Void in it? Is that, right? God?

663
00:37:27,719 --> 00:37:29,959
Speaker 1: Was he? I don't know. I don't know about John Void,

664
00:37:30,080 --> 00:37:33,000
Speaker 1: but because he's I mean he's Angela, you know, Angelina

665
00:37:33,080 --> 00:37:37,360
Speaker 1: Jolie's father, so maybe he was in it. But Daniel

666
00:37:37,360 --> 00:37:40,239
Speaker 1: Craig was in it, I believe pre James Bond. Oh.

667
00:37:40,280 --> 00:37:41,759
Speaker 1: I just looked it up. You know who it has

668
00:37:41,800 --> 00:37:44,040
Speaker 1: in it? It's got Ian Glenn, the guy who plays

669
00:37:44,080 --> 00:37:46,880
Speaker 1: Jora Mormont on Game of Thrones. Oh, yeah, and it

670
00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:50,440
Speaker 1: I believe it also has uh, what's his name, Noah Taylor?

671
00:37:50,640 --> 00:37:52,960
Speaker 1: Noah Taylor? Yes, He was another actor who was on

672
00:37:53,000 --> 00:37:54,759
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones and has been in a number of

673
00:37:54,760 --> 00:37:58,480
Speaker 1: other interesting films over the years. And it all goes

674
00:37:58,480 --> 00:38:01,440
Speaker 1: back to tomb Rater. Thank you to m writer. All right,

675
00:38:01,520 --> 00:38:03,759
Speaker 1: let's not turn this into tomb Rater to blow your mind.

676
00:38:04,040 --> 00:38:07,439
Speaker 1: So the temple, Yes, yes, So I found a nice

677
00:38:07,560 --> 00:38:10,279
Speaker 1: ride up on Lonely Planet about the top Rom. I

678
00:38:10,320 --> 00:38:12,520
Speaker 1: just want to read one paragraph from it that it

679
00:38:12,840 --> 00:38:16,040
Speaker 1: nicely sets the stage. Quote. Top Rom is a temple

680
00:38:16,080 --> 00:38:19,840
Speaker 1: of towers, closed courtyards, and narrow corridors. Many of the

681
00:38:19,840 --> 00:38:24,240
Speaker 1: corridors are impassable, clogged with jumbled piles of delicately carved

682
00:38:24,239 --> 00:38:27,960
Speaker 1: stone blocks, dislodged by the roots of long decayed trees.

683
00:38:28,600 --> 00:38:32,120
Speaker 1: Bass reliefs on bulging walls are carpeted with lichen moss,

684
00:38:32,160 --> 00:38:35,400
Speaker 1: and creeping plants and shrubs sprout from the roofs of

685
00:38:35,520 --> 00:38:40,600
Speaker 1: monumental porches. Trees hundreds of years old tower overhead, their leaves,

686
00:38:40,640 --> 00:38:43,960
Speaker 1: filtering the sunlight and casting a greenish pall over the

687
00:38:43,960 --> 00:38:47,319
Speaker 1: whole scene. Well, that's beautifully described. Yeah, it makes me

688
00:38:47,360 --> 00:38:50,160
Speaker 1: want to go there, But I'm also I'm susceptible to

689
00:38:50,239 --> 00:38:53,200
Speaker 1: this kind of setting anyway, and I think a lot

690
00:38:53,280 --> 00:38:55,680
Speaker 1: of people are right, Like it keeps showing up in

691
00:38:55,719 --> 00:38:58,920
Speaker 1: our adventure movies and video games and all that. I

692
00:38:58,960 --> 00:39:03,120
Speaker 1: wonder why we so love the image of the overgrown

693
00:39:03,239 --> 00:39:07,440
Speaker 1: jungle temple with crumbling ancient stone archways being consumed by

694
00:39:07,480 --> 00:39:11,879
Speaker 1: tree roots and vines. It's it's a singularly beautiful kind

695
00:39:11,920 --> 00:39:15,279
Speaker 1: of image and setting for some reason. Well, I can't

696
00:39:15,320 --> 00:39:17,040
Speaker 1: help but think there are a number of different things

697
00:39:17,040 --> 00:39:21,480
Speaker 1: going on, So the more pessimistic side of me tends

698
00:39:21,520 --> 00:39:22,960
Speaker 1: to think with it. Part of it is kind of

699
00:39:22,960 --> 00:39:29,600
Speaker 1: like a colonial um like pulp saturated notion of the

700
00:39:29,880 --> 00:39:33,560
Speaker 1: like the noble westerner walking among the ruins of fallen

701
00:39:33,600 --> 00:39:37,160
Speaker 1: ancient cultures. Well, you could maybe see something like that,

702
00:39:37,200 --> 00:39:39,560
Speaker 1: But I think it's equally true of ruins no matter

703
00:39:39,600 --> 00:39:42,279
Speaker 1: what culture they're from, right, And you can imagine it's

704
00:39:42,320 --> 00:39:45,960
Speaker 1: equally true of old cathedral ruins in Western Europe, yeah,

705
00:39:46,080 --> 00:39:48,960
Speaker 1: or just old supermarket ruins here in the States. Like

706
00:39:49,200 --> 00:39:51,719
Speaker 1: anywhere I go that I see some sort of ruins,

707
00:39:52,239 --> 00:39:55,480
Speaker 1: you know, be they ancient or fairly recent, They're fascinating.

708
00:39:55,480 --> 00:39:58,400
Speaker 1: I want to walk inside them and see what's there

709
00:39:58,440 --> 00:40:02,759
Speaker 1: and or what's living inside. It's specifically the idea of

710
00:40:02,840 --> 00:40:08,480
Speaker 1: the plant overgrowth of like a sacred stone building. You

711
00:40:08,520 --> 00:40:11,280
Speaker 1: know that that's like the main elements that are featuring

712
00:40:11,360 --> 00:40:14,520
Speaker 1: in in my picture of this in the mind. I

713
00:40:14,560 --> 00:40:16,880
Speaker 1: guess maybe it's just something about like maybe maybe it

714
00:40:16,960 --> 00:40:19,920
Speaker 1: indicates the folly of human projects. I don't know. Yeah, well,

715
00:40:19,960 --> 00:40:22,960
Speaker 1: there is kind of like a memento more aspect to it, right,

716
00:40:23,040 --> 00:40:25,800
Speaker 1: this this sort of ozamandi as effect that no matter

717
00:40:25,800 --> 00:40:29,720
Speaker 1: how great the structure, it is going to fall with time,

718
00:40:30,280 --> 00:40:33,560
Speaker 1: nature is going to going going to flow over it

719
00:40:33,640 --> 00:40:36,600
Speaker 1: and take it back. Uh. And there's something like beautiful

720
00:40:36,600 --> 00:40:39,680
Speaker 1: and haunting and poignant about all of that. It's like

721
00:40:39,800 --> 00:40:43,760
Speaker 1: watching human built structure has become a part of the forest. Yeah.

722
00:40:43,840 --> 00:40:48,040
Speaker 1: But then also, I mean we're I am fascinated by

723
00:40:48,320 --> 00:40:51,440
Speaker 1: by other cultures, and many of them are ancient cultures.

724
00:40:51,640 --> 00:40:53,719
Speaker 1: And therefore to visit a site like this or even

725
00:40:53,760 --> 00:40:56,239
Speaker 1: just look at photographs of it, it's kind of like

726
00:40:56,320 --> 00:40:59,200
Speaker 1: going back in time. But how far back in time?

727
00:41:00,000 --> 00:41:02,080
Speaker 1: It's a good question. Okay, Well, there's not really a

728
00:41:02,160 --> 00:41:05,080
Speaker 1: question about when the temple is from. It seems you know,

729
00:41:05,160 --> 00:41:07,719
Speaker 1: it's less than a thousand years old, right, right, So

730
00:41:07,880 --> 00:41:10,480
Speaker 1: it's being less than a thousand years old. I think

731
00:41:10,480 --> 00:41:13,640
Speaker 1: it's about eight hundred years older. So what is the

732
00:41:13,800 --> 00:41:18,800
Speaker 1: argument that someone has carved a stegosaurus into the temple

733
00:41:18,880 --> 00:41:22,040
Speaker 1: as a decorative motif. And I'll remind everybody here that

734
00:41:22,120 --> 00:41:25,120
Speaker 1: you can see the image we're talking about at Stuff

735
00:41:25,120 --> 00:41:27,000
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot Com on the landing page

736
00:41:27,000 --> 00:41:29,360
Speaker 1: for this episode. It's going to be the central image

737
00:41:29,840 --> 00:41:34,520
Speaker 1: for the episode, the carving of the supposed Stegasaurus. Right,

738
00:41:34,560 --> 00:41:37,120
Speaker 1: so there's a building, it's got a pillar, was sort

739
00:41:37,160 --> 00:41:39,600
Speaker 1: of like a pillar against a wall, and there are

740
00:41:39,640 --> 00:41:42,279
Speaker 1: carvings all up and down the vertical length of the

741
00:41:42,320 --> 00:41:46,760
Speaker 1: pillar where they're sort of like these these abstract lines

742
00:41:46,880 --> 00:41:51,440
Speaker 1: snaking around framing obviously representative carvings that are supposed to

743
00:41:51,520 --> 00:41:55,400
Speaker 1: be animals and mythological beasts. Yes, and one of these,

744
00:41:55,520 --> 00:41:58,280
Speaker 1: when you look at it, it's kind of it's inside

745
00:41:58,320 --> 00:42:03,040
Speaker 1: of a circle, or at least a curved decorative flourish here,

746
00:42:03,400 --> 00:42:06,560
Speaker 1: and it appears to be a quadruped. It has a

747
00:42:06,600 --> 00:42:10,800
Speaker 1: long tail, and it has one, two, three, four, five,

748
00:42:11,200 --> 00:42:15,200
Speaker 1: five or six I think maybe six perhaps bony plates

749
00:42:15,200 --> 00:42:19,040
Speaker 1: on its back. It kind of looks like a stegasarian,

750
00:42:19,600 --> 00:42:22,080
Speaker 1: and you could even go as far to say that, yeah,

751
00:42:22,160 --> 00:42:24,360
Speaker 1: it looks like it could be one of the I

752
00:42:24,400 --> 00:42:29,160
Speaker 1: think three varieties of stegasarians that have been found in

753
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:32,680
Speaker 1: modern China. So you know, you don't even have to say, well,

754
00:42:32,680 --> 00:42:34,879
Speaker 1: how did they get over from North America? While there

755
00:42:34,880 --> 00:42:39,840
Speaker 1: were there are fossil remains of stegasarians from uh, generally

756
00:42:39,880 --> 00:42:42,040
Speaker 1: that part of Asia. So I would also add that

757
00:42:42,080 --> 00:42:43,920
Speaker 1: it feels a bit silly to attempt to match up

758
00:42:43,920 --> 00:42:47,440
Speaker 1: a supposed dinosaur that would have evolved from these forms

759
00:42:47,440 --> 00:42:50,000
Speaker 1: across a hundred and fifty million years or so. But

760
00:42:50,000 --> 00:42:52,359
Speaker 1: but still we have to You have to admit, when

761
00:42:52,360 --> 00:42:54,879
Speaker 1: you look at it, you can say, well, that kind

762
00:42:54,880 --> 00:42:57,600
Speaker 1: of looks like a Stegasaurus. I don't buy it for

763
00:42:57,600 --> 00:42:59,920
Speaker 1: a second, but I have to admit that looking at

764
00:43:00,040 --> 00:43:04,840
Speaker 1: it and imagining it as a stegosaurus is kind of intriguing.

765
00:43:05,560 --> 00:43:08,080
Speaker 1: So I was trying to understand the argument that this

766
00:43:08,239 --> 00:43:12,000
Speaker 1: is a stegosaurus. I found an article on a creationist

767
00:43:12,040 --> 00:43:15,320
Speaker 1: website called Answers in Genesis is that you got. You

768
00:43:15,400 --> 00:43:17,280
Speaker 1: gotta keep an eye out for this one, because actually,

769
00:43:17,280 --> 00:43:22,040
Speaker 1: when you start googling like evolutionary science topics. Somehow, this

770
00:43:22,120 --> 00:43:24,640
Speaker 1: website very often tends to make it near the top

771
00:43:24,680 --> 00:43:27,480
Speaker 1: of Google results, like it'll pop up your maybe you're

772
00:43:27,520 --> 00:43:31,160
Speaker 1: searching should I mouthwash before I brushed my teeth afterwards?

773
00:43:31,680 --> 00:43:33,880
Speaker 1: And then answers you're you're getting answer like, oh, it's

774
00:43:33,880 --> 00:43:36,200
Speaker 1: answers in genesis. Maybe I shouldn't trust this. Yeah, they've

775
00:43:36,200 --> 00:43:38,480
Speaker 1: got some good s c O game going whatever it is,

776
00:43:38,520 --> 00:43:41,439
Speaker 1: so they get up in those Google results. But uh, yeah,

777
00:43:41,560 --> 00:43:44,480
Speaker 1: this is a Young Earth creationist website that is going

778
00:43:44,520 --> 00:43:48,160
Speaker 1: to pedal a whole lot of pseudoscience about geology and paleontology.

779
00:43:48,520 --> 00:43:50,719
Speaker 1: And they've got an article attributed to a writer named

780
00:43:50,800 --> 00:43:54,400
Speaker 1: Kenneth Cole empd uh that is defending the idea that

781
00:43:54,480 --> 00:43:57,840
Speaker 1: this is evidence of a young Earth, like a recent

782
00:43:57,960 --> 00:44:00,640
Speaker 1: creation and humans and dinosaurs living at the same time.

783
00:44:01,280 --> 00:44:04,680
Speaker 1: So Coal Rights quote. There are no mythological figures among

784
00:44:04,719 --> 00:44:08,120
Speaker 1: the roundels, so one can reasonably conclude that these figures

785
00:44:08,120 --> 00:44:10,920
Speaker 1: depict the animals that were commonly seen by the ancient

786
00:44:11,000 --> 00:44:14,279
Speaker 1: Khmer people in the twelfth century. That means that only

787
00:44:14,320 --> 00:44:17,040
Speaker 1: a little over eight hundred years ago, some dinosaurs were

788
00:44:17,080 --> 00:44:20,680
Speaker 1: likely still living in that region of Cambodia. Of course,

789
00:44:20,840 --> 00:44:23,799
Speaker 1: this is no surprise to biblical creationists, because we know

790
00:44:23,920 --> 00:44:26,880
Speaker 1: from Genesis One that land animals such as dinosaurs and

791
00:44:26,960 --> 00:44:30,440
Speaker 1: humans were living together in the beginning, and that representatives

792
00:44:30,440 --> 00:44:33,040
Speaker 1: of the land animals e g. Dinosaurs were saved on

793
00:44:33,080 --> 00:44:35,919
Speaker 1: the arc to repopulate the Earth after the flood only

794
00:44:35,960 --> 00:44:38,920
Speaker 1: four thousand, three hundred years ago. No, I don't want

795
00:44:38,960 --> 00:44:42,600
Speaker 1: to give in to excessive, unnecessary mockery, but I think

796
00:44:42,680 --> 00:44:46,040
Speaker 1: this is not a tenable position, and we can explore

797
00:44:46,080 --> 00:44:47,960
Speaker 1: some of the reasons for that when we come back

798
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:52,560
Speaker 1: from a break. All right, we're back. So, Joe, you

799
00:44:52,640 --> 00:44:55,480
Speaker 1: just read this, this passage from this Young Earth creationists

800
00:44:55,680 --> 00:45:01,160
Speaker 1: about Noah Noah's ark and uh the stegasarians ward the vessel. Yeah.

801
00:45:01,280 --> 00:45:04,960
Speaker 1: I would say that this actually represents one way you

802
00:45:05,000 --> 00:45:07,120
Speaker 1: could take if you're going to go with the line

803
00:45:07,200 --> 00:45:10,600
Speaker 1: that this carving in this Cambodian temple is actually a

804
00:45:10,640 --> 00:45:12,600
Speaker 1: depiction of a stegosaurus. There are a couple of ways

805
00:45:12,640 --> 00:45:14,520
Speaker 1: you could go with it, but you've got to start

806
00:45:14,560 --> 00:45:17,040
Speaker 1: with the idea that there's an obvious problem here. The

807
00:45:17,120 --> 00:45:20,120
Speaker 1: carving is less than a thousand years old. We mentioned

808
00:45:20,120 --> 00:45:23,560
Speaker 1: earlier that all non avian dinosaurs went extinct sixty six

809
00:45:23,600 --> 00:45:26,839
Speaker 1: million years ago or before that. Well, for the Stegosaurus,

810
00:45:26,920 --> 00:45:29,520
Speaker 1: the problem is even worse because it's one of those

811
00:45:29,560 --> 00:45:34,040
Speaker 1: that went extinct long before the KPg extinction event took place.

812
00:45:34,640 --> 00:45:38,760
Speaker 1: The Stegosaurus genus apparently went extinct during the Late Jurassic period,

813
00:45:38,880 --> 00:45:42,200
Speaker 1: roughly a hundred and fifty million years ago, and by

814
00:45:42,200 --> 00:45:45,680
Speaker 1: the time of the KPg extinction, Stegosaurus had already been

815
00:45:45,680 --> 00:45:49,160
Speaker 1: extinct for almost a hundred million years. So a way

816
00:45:49,160 --> 00:45:51,800
Speaker 1: of putting this I've seen quoted before is that more

817
00:45:51,840 --> 00:45:56,440
Speaker 1: time separates the Stegosaurus from the Tyrannosaurus rex than separates

818
00:45:56,480 --> 00:46:00,400
Speaker 1: the Tyrannosaurus rex from us. So we're talking just a

819
00:46:00,680 --> 00:46:03,520
Speaker 1: vast lengths of time that are that are that are

820
00:46:03,600 --> 00:46:07,719
Speaker 1: almost incomprehensible for us neager humans right now. If you

821
00:46:07,719 --> 00:46:09,799
Speaker 1: want to say, it wasn't a Stegosaurus, but it was

822
00:46:09,920 --> 00:46:14,400
Speaker 1: a related stegasaurian, right, some other type of related or

823
00:46:14,520 --> 00:46:17,279
Speaker 1: aiski and herb before with with plates on its back

824
00:46:17,320 --> 00:46:20,279
Speaker 1: of some kind from the group Stegasauria that may have

825
00:46:20,320 --> 00:46:23,439
Speaker 1: existed a little bit later, maybe into the earlier maybe

826
00:46:23,480 --> 00:46:26,680
Speaker 1: Middle Cretaceous, but even those probably didn't make it to

827
00:46:26,680 --> 00:46:29,839
Speaker 1: the KPg event, which in any case wiped out all

828
00:46:29,880 --> 00:46:33,720
Speaker 1: of the dinosaurs except the ones that became modern day birds.

829
00:46:33,760 --> 00:46:36,040
Speaker 1: So if you want to believe that it really is

830
00:46:36,200 --> 00:46:40,560
Speaker 1: a live Stegasaurus that somebody saw being depicted in the carving, uh,

831
00:46:40,840 --> 00:46:43,800
Speaker 1: and that the carving is original, of course there's another

832
00:46:43,840 --> 00:46:45,560
Speaker 1: idea that, of course, well, what if it's a more

833
00:46:45,600 --> 00:46:48,720
Speaker 1: recent hoax or something. Then I think there are really

834
00:46:48,760 --> 00:46:51,759
Speaker 1: two main ways people could go. You could either say

835
00:46:51,920 --> 00:46:55,240
Speaker 1: some stegosaurs managed to survive about a hundred and fifty

836
00:46:55,280 --> 00:46:58,480
Speaker 1: million million years longer than we thought without leaving any

837
00:46:58,520 --> 00:47:01,120
Speaker 1: fossil evidence in the mean time, and we can call

838
00:47:01,200 --> 00:47:04,799
Speaker 1: the believers of this hypothesis the cryptid camp. Right, This

839
00:47:04,880 --> 00:47:08,000
Speaker 1: is the standard cryptozoology kind of thing. There's some isolated

840
00:47:08,040 --> 00:47:11,920
Speaker 1: population of an otherwise unknown creature, right, Yeah, that we

841
00:47:11,960 --> 00:47:15,200
Speaker 1: don't we we haven't explored every nook and cranny of

842
00:47:15,239 --> 00:47:17,520
Speaker 1: the Earth, and it's in those nooks and crannies that

843
00:47:17,560 --> 00:47:24,279
Speaker 1: we might find uh, fabulous or henceforth unrecognized species. The

844
00:47:24,320 --> 00:47:26,759
Speaker 1: other one is what we heard from Kenneth Cole m d.

845
00:47:26,960 --> 00:47:30,040
Speaker 1: Which is the entire timeline of Earth history is wrong.

846
00:47:30,400 --> 00:47:32,839
Speaker 1: The Earth is actually less than ten thousand years old,

847
00:47:32,840 --> 00:47:37,200
Speaker 1: and dinosaurs existed alongside most of human civilization throughout history.

848
00:47:37,520 --> 00:47:40,160
Speaker 1: We can call this the young Earth creationist camp. And

849
00:47:40,200 --> 00:47:42,640
Speaker 1: I have theological problems with that because I think God

850
00:47:42,680 --> 00:47:45,440
Speaker 1: would have destroyed all the crooked, hot dog brained dinosaurs

851
00:47:45,880 --> 00:47:47,759
Speaker 1: with the flood, and then they would not have been

852
00:47:48,320 --> 00:47:51,360
Speaker 1: permitted to board the arc. But that's that's that's my attantion.

853
00:47:51,680 --> 00:47:54,680
Speaker 1: Leave your theology aside, Robert, I won't hear of it.

854
00:47:55,600 --> 00:47:58,440
Speaker 1: Uh So, I think we can say probably neither of

855
00:47:58,480 --> 00:48:02,440
Speaker 1: these is plausible at all. But the creationist the hypothesis

856
00:48:02,480 --> 00:48:07,040
Speaker 1: actually has more problems going for it than the cryptid hypothesis. Yeah,

857
00:48:07,040 --> 00:48:10,560
Speaker 1: the cryptid hypothesis at least does not require us to

858
00:48:10,680 --> 00:48:13,879
Speaker 1: bend and break time. Yeah, before we get into those

859
00:48:13,920 --> 00:48:16,600
Speaker 1: I would say, we don't really need to debate the

860
00:48:16,719 --> 00:48:19,800
Speaker 1: visual qualities of the image, because even if it looked

861
00:48:19,880 --> 00:48:23,360
Speaker 1: exactly like a stegosaurus, this would not be a reason

862
00:48:23,400 --> 00:48:26,280
Speaker 1: to think that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time.

863
00:48:26,800 --> 00:48:30,400
Speaker 1: But I must point out it does not look exactly

864
00:48:30,480 --> 00:48:32,879
Speaker 1: like a stegosaurus. I mean, if you look at it,

865
00:48:33,239 --> 00:48:36,040
Speaker 1: you might say, oh, that's a stegosaurus. Because you'd recognize

866
00:48:36,080 --> 00:48:39,839
Speaker 1: the plates, right, Stegosaurus had a very small cranium with

867
00:48:39,920 --> 00:48:42,680
Speaker 1: no known adornments, and this creature in the carving has

868
00:48:42,680 --> 00:48:45,000
Speaker 1: a huge head with the appearance of some kind of

869
00:48:45,040 --> 00:48:47,920
Speaker 1: pointed ear or horn on its face. I don't know

870
00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:50,359
Speaker 1: exactly what it's supposed to be, but there's a thing

871
00:48:50,440 --> 00:48:53,799
Speaker 1: on the face and the head is very large. Stegosaurus

872
00:48:53,800 --> 00:48:56,720
Speaker 1: also has a huge tail with spikes, and this carving

873
00:48:56,800 --> 00:48:59,840
Speaker 1: has a pretty small tail with no spikes. So to

874
00:49:00,120 --> 00:49:02,880
Speaker 1: clear what I'm saying is that nothing about it looks

875
00:49:02,920 --> 00:49:05,799
Speaker 1: like a Stegasaurus except that it has four legs and

876
00:49:05,840 --> 00:49:08,960
Speaker 1: appears to have these lumps positioned over its back. And

877
00:49:08,960 --> 00:49:12,080
Speaker 1: these lumps, by the way, might not even be parts

878
00:49:12,239 --> 00:49:15,560
Speaker 1: of the animal. They there's a strong argument that these

879
00:49:15,560 --> 00:49:18,839
Speaker 1: are perhaps supposed to be leaves or some other vegetative

880
00:49:19,080 --> 00:49:21,560
Speaker 1: detail in the background. Oh yeah, that's true. I mean,

881
00:49:21,560 --> 00:49:23,520
Speaker 1: if you look at some of the same carvings from

882
00:49:23,560 --> 00:49:26,640
Speaker 1: this area of the temple, other animals are depicted with

883
00:49:26,760 --> 00:49:29,319
Speaker 1: sort of like shapes in the background that I think

884
00:49:29,360 --> 00:49:32,200
Speaker 1: are just sort of like supposed to be background foliage

885
00:49:32,280 --> 00:49:34,920
Speaker 1: or something. Now, it's just another problem that I have

886
00:49:35,080 --> 00:49:39,680
Speaker 1: with it. Either the stegosaurus or some stegasarian creature were

887
00:49:39,760 --> 00:49:44,520
Speaker 1: to have survived to the point where humans either solid

888
00:49:44,640 --> 00:49:46,960
Speaker 1: or just remembered it. They just had like an oral

889
00:49:47,040 --> 00:49:49,680
Speaker 1: history of the stegasarians, and it made their way made

890
00:49:49,680 --> 00:49:52,279
Speaker 1: their made its way into their art. Why would this

891
00:49:52,360 --> 00:49:55,239
Speaker 1: be the lone example of it? Oh? Why would there

892
00:49:55,239 --> 00:49:59,719
Speaker 1: not be stegasarians everywhere right where all the other ones exactly?

893
00:49:59,760 --> 00:50:02,920
Speaker 1: And and also, if you're gonna look at fantastic creatures

894
00:50:02,920 --> 00:50:05,720
Speaker 1: in art from that region, then what about the naga,

895
00:50:05,800 --> 00:50:09,719
Speaker 1: the seven headed serpent that you see in various Southeast

896
00:50:09,800 --> 00:50:13,280
Speaker 1: Asian traditions, right, I mean, so you're saying, like, why,

897
00:50:13,400 --> 00:50:15,600
Speaker 1: why don't we assume that maybe that's based on a

898
00:50:15,600 --> 00:50:18,440
Speaker 1: real animal they saw too. Yeah, I think you're they're

899
00:50:18,440 --> 00:50:23,040
Speaker 1: really cherry picking a particular beast or fantastic beast and

900
00:50:23,080 --> 00:50:25,919
Speaker 1: then saying it is real when they're if you're gonna

901
00:50:25,960 --> 00:50:27,759
Speaker 1: let that one through the gates, then you have to

902
00:50:27,840 --> 00:50:30,720
Speaker 1: let the Naga. You have to let every fantastic creature

903
00:50:31,239 --> 00:50:35,520
Speaker 1: from from Hindu and Buddhist traditions in through the gates

904
00:50:35,600 --> 00:50:38,560
Speaker 1: as well. It's only fair let them on the art too. Well,

905
00:50:38,560 --> 00:50:40,680
Speaker 1: that's a good point. I think a supporter could say

906
00:50:40,800 --> 00:50:45,040
Speaker 1: the it's a Stegasaurus argument. Uh, well, it's got going

907
00:50:45,080 --> 00:50:47,760
Speaker 1: for it that the Stegosaurus did exist at some point,

908
00:50:48,120 --> 00:50:50,640
Speaker 1: and we don't have evidence that the Naga ever existed.

909
00:50:50,880 --> 00:50:53,400
Speaker 1: But we don't have evidence that the Naga ever existed

910
00:50:53,440 --> 00:50:56,239
Speaker 1: because what nobody's ever said they saw one, and there's

911
00:50:56,239 --> 00:50:59,680
Speaker 1: no fossil evidence. With the Stegosaurus, nobody's ever said that

912
00:50:59,719 --> 00:51:02,160
Speaker 1: they seen one in any kind of credible way, and

913
00:51:02,400 --> 00:51:05,640
Speaker 1: there's no fossil evidence since a hundred and fifty million

914
00:51:05,719 --> 00:51:08,120
Speaker 1: years ago or whenever the particular genus you're talking about

915
00:51:08,120 --> 00:51:11,000
Speaker 1: when extinct, so within the period of the past dozens

916
00:51:11,000 --> 00:51:13,799
Speaker 1: of millions of years. Actually, the evidential issue is the

917
00:51:13,880 --> 00:51:18,359
Speaker 1: same for the Nauga and the Stegosaurus. Meanwhile, uh, there

918
00:51:18,440 --> 00:51:21,600
Speaker 1: there's we have no doubt that there were sightings of

919
00:51:21,600 --> 00:51:25,279
Speaker 1: of course bores. Uh. And the job and Rhino, which

920
00:51:25,680 --> 00:51:28,200
Speaker 1: we discussed in depth in our Rhino Horn episode. The

921
00:51:28,280 --> 00:51:31,000
Speaker 1: job and Rhino is is at least if you're used

922
00:51:31,040 --> 00:51:33,640
Speaker 1: to just seeing the African varieties of rhino, it is

923
00:51:33,640 --> 00:51:36,759
Speaker 1: a weird looking rhino and it it looks a lot

924
00:51:36,840 --> 00:51:39,720
Speaker 1: like the creature in this carving. Well, yeah, the creature

925
00:51:39,719 --> 00:51:42,200
Speaker 1: in the carving. It's got something strange going on in

926
00:51:42,239 --> 00:51:44,160
Speaker 1: its face that looks like it could be an ear

927
00:51:44,320 --> 00:51:47,400
Speaker 1: or a horn or something. Uh, and I'm inclined to

928
00:51:47,400 --> 00:51:50,400
Speaker 1: think that, Yeah, that could be some kind of rhino horn. Yeah.

929
00:51:50,440 --> 00:51:53,000
Speaker 1: So in these again, our real beasts, it's just it's

930
00:51:53,040 --> 00:51:56,239
Speaker 1: just they're far fewer leaps and bounds one has to

931
00:51:56,280 --> 00:51:58,440
Speaker 1: make in logic to get there. And even if you

932
00:51:58,480 --> 00:52:00,520
Speaker 1: were too ignoral the stuff we're saying, this would only

933
00:52:00,560 --> 00:52:03,320
Speaker 1: go to support the cryptid argument that somehow this small

934
00:52:03,360 --> 00:52:07,880
Speaker 1: population of stegasaur Is or related stegosaurids managed to survive

935
00:52:08,000 --> 00:52:10,560
Speaker 1: undetected until at least eight hundred years ago or so,

936
00:52:10,960 --> 00:52:14,319
Speaker 1: leaving no other traces that we've ever found. If I'm

937
00:52:14,320 --> 00:52:18,360
Speaker 1: being generous, the crypted argument seems at best physically possible,

938
00:52:18,400 --> 00:52:21,359
Speaker 1: but just really implausible, Like, I don't see any good

939
00:52:21,400 --> 00:52:25,560
Speaker 1: reason to prefer it over a handful of rival explanations

940
00:52:25,560 --> 00:52:28,040
Speaker 1: you can come up with, which include, for example, the

941
00:52:28,120 --> 00:52:30,320
Speaker 1: carving is supposed to be a bore or a rhino

942
00:52:30,440 --> 00:52:32,960
Speaker 1: like we've been talking about. Maybe the carving is a

943
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:37,160
Speaker 1: mythological beast of the imagination that has a superficial resemblance

944
00:52:37,200 --> 00:52:40,000
Speaker 1: to something with back plates. And if you just look

945
00:52:40,040 --> 00:52:42,000
Speaker 1: on the pillar in the temple, if you look just

946
00:52:42,040 --> 00:52:45,520
Speaker 1: like two spaces down, there's another crazy looking mythological beast

947
00:52:45,600 --> 00:52:48,080
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool, and it's got all kinds of features

948
00:52:48,080 --> 00:52:50,640
Speaker 1: that you don't see in nature. Yeah, this looks like

949
00:52:50,680 --> 00:52:54,160
Speaker 1: some sort of like a cross between the lorax and

950
00:52:54,200 --> 00:52:57,720
Speaker 1: the and and and the monsters from where the wild

951
00:52:57,719 --> 00:53:00,479
Speaker 1: things are. Well, it's sort of it sort of looks like, yeah,

952
00:53:00,520 --> 00:53:04,520
Speaker 1: it's like a fawn, but it's wearing like a magistrate's wig.

953
00:53:05,280 --> 00:53:07,480
Speaker 1: And nobody's making the argument that this was a real

954
00:53:07,560 --> 00:53:10,840
Speaker 1: creature that I have seen. No, but give them time.

955
00:53:11,719 --> 00:53:14,719
Speaker 1: Uh So, another possibility, I I don't know that there's

956
00:53:14,719 --> 00:53:16,960
Speaker 1: any evidence to support this, but then again, it's probably

957
00:53:17,000 --> 00:53:19,760
Speaker 1: more plausible than a crypted thing, is that the carving

958
00:53:19,840 --> 00:53:22,440
Speaker 1: is a more recent forgery. I'm not advocating that, but

959
00:53:22,560 --> 00:53:25,880
Speaker 1: of course it's possible. Yeah, I think I did see. It.

960
00:53:25,920 --> 00:53:28,080
Speaker 1: Brought up the idea that, oh, what if a film

961
00:53:28,120 --> 00:53:30,719
Speaker 1: crew did it. Western film crew comes in and maybe

962
00:53:30,719 --> 00:53:34,840
Speaker 1: they fake a stegasaurus on ancient ruins, which which seems

963
00:53:34,880 --> 00:53:37,640
Speaker 1: like that would be an extreme and a reckless thing

964
00:53:37,719 --> 00:53:39,799
Speaker 1: for anyone to do so. I don't know how much

965
00:53:40,680 --> 00:53:44,320
Speaker 1: how much credence I give to that idea. Personally, I

966
00:53:44,560 --> 00:53:46,600
Speaker 1: don't see any evidence for it at all, except to

967
00:53:46,640 --> 00:53:48,480
Speaker 1: say that it would be a less extravagant thing to

968
00:53:48,520 --> 00:53:51,680
Speaker 1: resort to than saying that Stegasaurus has survived an extra

969
00:53:51,760 --> 00:53:55,200
Speaker 1: hundred million years or and we we haven't even mentioned

970
00:53:55,200 --> 00:53:58,640
Speaker 1: this yet geo mythology. Like if you haven't heard our

971
00:53:58,760 --> 00:54:01,800
Speaker 1: episode the Mystery of the myth Fleshed Fossil, We discussed

972
00:54:01,800 --> 00:54:04,960
Speaker 1: the work of the Stanford historian Adrian Mayer, who has

973
00:54:04,960 --> 00:54:09,120
Speaker 1: written books documenting many possible cases where ancient art, mythology,

974
00:54:09,239 --> 00:54:12,640
Speaker 1: folk beliefs could have been inspired by ancient people's coming

975
00:54:12,640 --> 00:54:16,680
Speaker 1: across confusing geo facts like fossils of dinosaurs and other

976
00:54:16,760 --> 00:54:20,239
Speaker 1: amazing extinct animals. So you find a dinosaur fossil, you're

977
00:54:20,239 --> 00:54:22,680
Speaker 1: in the ancient world. It looks like nothing you've ever

978
00:54:22,719 --> 00:54:25,800
Speaker 1: seen alive today. So maybe it's some sort of monster.

979
00:54:25,960 --> 00:54:29,280
Speaker 1: It's a griffin, it's a dragon, it's cyclops and so forth,

980
00:54:29,719 --> 00:54:33,319
Speaker 1: and so some ancient stegasaurians, not the Stegosaurus itself, but

981
00:54:33,480 --> 00:54:37,239
Speaker 1: related backplated orna. This key and herbivores did live in

982
00:54:37,280 --> 00:54:40,080
Speaker 1: this area around China, as you've pointed out, at least

983
00:54:40,080 --> 00:54:44,120
Speaker 1: three different stegasaurians, so there's no way to rule out

984
00:54:44,160 --> 00:54:46,440
Speaker 1: that this kind of carving could also have been inspired

985
00:54:46,440 --> 00:54:50,680
Speaker 1: by somebody finding a mysterious stegasaurian fossil skeleton with backplates,

986
00:54:51,160 --> 00:54:54,360
Speaker 1: passing that morphology on through art and folklore, and it

987
00:54:54,560 --> 00:54:58,520
Speaker 1: ending up getting carved into a temple wall. Yeah. I mean,

988
00:54:58,640 --> 00:55:01,200
Speaker 1: especially if you're digging up lot of stone to build

989
00:55:01,239 --> 00:55:04,759
Speaker 1: a giant temple complex. Yeah. Now we don't know which

990
00:55:04,800 --> 00:55:06,800
Speaker 1: which of these is correct, but any of them seem

991
00:55:06,880 --> 00:55:10,600
Speaker 1: more plausible than huge land dwelling dinosaurs surviving millions of

992
00:55:10,680 --> 00:55:13,560
Speaker 1: years after we have any fossil records of them, So

993
00:55:13,640 --> 00:55:17,720
Speaker 1: I think the cryptid approach kind of falls apart. Yes. Plus,

994
00:55:17,800 --> 00:55:20,640
Speaker 1: I have to think that if dinosaurs were around during

995
00:55:20,800 --> 00:55:23,759
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire, they would have wound up in the Colosseum.

996
00:55:23,880 --> 00:55:26,520
Speaker 1: There would have been there would have been a Stegasaurus

997
00:55:27,200 --> 00:55:30,560
Speaker 1: in the Colosseum battling a gladiator. Well, I mean, yeah,

998
00:55:30,600 --> 00:55:32,520
Speaker 1: I mean you go back into the age of emperors

999
00:55:32,560 --> 00:55:34,680
Speaker 1: and kings and all that. I mean, they really did

1000
00:55:34,760 --> 00:55:37,560
Speaker 1: love to get some exotic animals into their into their

1001
00:55:37,600 --> 00:55:40,759
Speaker 1: menagerie and and trot them around for people to see. Right,

1002
00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:44,000
Speaker 1: they're countless tales. We could we could do a whole

1003
00:55:44,040 --> 00:55:48,880
Speaker 1: episode on examples of exotic creatures that were transported across

1004
00:55:48,920 --> 00:55:53,319
Speaker 1: continents so that royal individuals could look at them and

1005
00:55:53,360 --> 00:55:56,200
Speaker 1: you know, maybe have them fight another beast. Now, that's

1006
00:55:56,239 --> 00:55:59,479
Speaker 1: all the cryptid approach, I think. Unfortunately, the argument gets

1007
00:55:59,480 --> 00:56:01,520
Speaker 1: a lot worse if you try to take the young

1008
00:56:01,560 --> 00:56:05,719
Speaker 1: Earth approach, because the idea that the humans saw stegosaurs,

1009
00:56:05,760 --> 00:56:09,840
Speaker 1: because dinosaurs actually existed alongside humans for much of history,

1010
00:56:09,880 --> 00:56:12,800
Speaker 1: and that history is less than ten thousand years long.

1011
00:56:14,160 --> 00:56:16,560
Speaker 1: I have to say, I, I you know, sometimes I

1012
00:56:16,560 --> 00:56:19,160
Speaker 1: think people in the skeptic community have too much fun

1013
00:56:19,280 --> 00:56:22,360
Speaker 1: harping on the wrongness of stuff like that. Like it

1014
00:56:22,440 --> 00:56:25,400
Speaker 1: can Yeah, there are lots of people who have deeply

1015
00:56:25,520 --> 00:56:28,359
Speaker 1: untenable views like the idea of a young Earth, but

1016
00:56:28,440 --> 00:56:32,279
Speaker 1: it can feel excessive and unnecessary to just like keep

1017
00:56:32,320 --> 00:56:34,680
Speaker 1: harping on how wrong that is. But at the same time,

1018
00:56:35,080 --> 00:56:37,120
Speaker 1: I do feel a kind of sadness about all of

1019
00:56:37,160 --> 00:56:40,920
Speaker 1: the energy that goes into defending views like that, because

1020
00:56:41,239 --> 00:56:43,320
Speaker 1: it's similar to like the energy that would go into

1021
00:56:43,400 --> 00:56:46,880
Speaker 1: defending a flat earth approach. It's something that is not

1022
00:56:47,000 --> 00:56:50,920
Speaker 1: just disagreeing with the majority of scientists about a fact

1023
00:56:50,960 --> 00:56:53,640
Speaker 1: here or a fact there, but it's sort of undermining

1024
00:56:53,680 --> 00:56:57,359
Speaker 1: the integrity of the entire scientific enterprise. If you take

1025
00:56:57,400 --> 00:57:01,040
Speaker 1: a position like flat Earth or like younger, you are

1026
00:57:01,320 --> 00:57:06,279
Speaker 1: forced by extension to essentially deny everything. Yeah, I mean,

1027
00:57:06,440 --> 00:57:08,759
Speaker 1: one way that I think about it is I I

1028
00:57:08,800 --> 00:57:12,600
Speaker 1: will sadly never see a living stegasaurus. But at the

1029
00:57:12,640 --> 00:57:16,480
Speaker 1: same time, the stegosaurus was real, and that is that

1030
00:57:16,640 --> 00:57:19,760
Speaker 1: is fascinating and it's amazing, and it it fills me

1031
00:57:19,840 --> 00:57:23,560
Speaker 1: with with wonder and awe to to to to research

1032
00:57:23,640 --> 00:57:26,320
Speaker 1: the creature and read about it and see these artistic

1033
00:57:26,360 --> 00:57:30,240
Speaker 1: depictions of it. Likewise, I will never see a unicorn,

1034
00:57:30,800 --> 00:57:35,000
Speaker 1: and unicorns never existed, and yet the unicorn images of

1035
00:57:35,000 --> 00:57:37,760
Speaker 1: the unicorn are beautiful. And when you start reading about

1036
00:57:37,800 --> 00:57:41,240
Speaker 1: the complex the symbolism of the unicorn, that that is

1037
00:57:41,280 --> 00:57:44,160
Speaker 1: beautiful and it can bring meaning to your life. And uh,

1038
00:57:44,600 --> 00:57:48,800
Speaker 1: it's it's no, there's no need to start bending your

1039
00:57:48,840 --> 00:57:52,200
Speaker 1: reality and bending your your understanding of the world so

1040
00:57:52,240 --> 00:57:55,520
Speaker 1: that you can make it somehow more real than it

1041
00:57:55,600 --> 00:57:58,240
Speaker 1: is as if the idea of it and the potency

1042
00:57:58,240 --> 00:58:00,560
Speaker 1: of the idea is not real it exactly. I mean,

1043
00:58:00,720 --> 00:58:04,440
Speaker 1: is is it really worth believing in the physical existence

1044
00:58:04,480 --> 00:58:09,520
Speaker 1: of a unicorn to make you essentially forced to undermine

1045
00:58:09,560 --> 00:58:17,360
Speaker 1: the foundations of astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, geology, radiochemistry, biology, paleontology, genetics.

1046
00:58:17,600 --> 00:58:22,040
Speaker 1: I mean, all of these fields are are based on

1047
00:58:22,360 --> 00:58:28,560
Speaker 1: predictions and consistently produce results that are in agreement basically

1048
00:58:28,640 --> 00:58:31,720
Speaker 1: with with a picture of an old Earth and an

1049
00:58:31,720 --> 00:58:34,240
Speaker 1: old universe. And all of these fields not only have

1050
00:58:34,360 --> 00:58:38,240
Speaker 1: successful predictive theories corroborating the old Universe, the old Earth,

1051
00:58:38,320 --> 00:58:41,320
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution, but they

1052
00:58:41,320 --> 00:58:45,600
Speaker 1: independently produce new results and overturn old misconceptions that keep

1053
00:58:45,720 --> 00:58:49,320
Speaker 1: further resolving the clarity of that picture rather than undermining it.

1054
00:58:49,800 --> 00:58:51,400
Speaker 1: And of course, you know, as we all know, some

1055
00:58:51,440 --> 00:58:53,560
Speaker 1: of these fields use that picture of the world to

1056
00:58:53,600 --> 00:58:57,680
Speaker 1: produce technologies that even Cambodian stegosaur advocates use in their

1057
00:58:57,760 --> 00:59:00,919
Speaker 1: daily lives end up just having to do so much

1058
00:59:01,600 --> 00:59:04,120
Speaker 1: mental gymnastics to make it work. And you know who

1059
00:59:04,120 --> 00:59:08,920
Speaker 1: didn't have time for mental gymnastics Stegasaurus. The stegosaurus was

1060
00:59:08,920 --> 00:59:11,760
Speaker 1: a plain dealer. Yeah yeah, if it's grain, eat it.

1061
00:59:11,800 --> 00:59:13,800
Speaker 1: If it tries to bite you, stab it in the

1062
00:59:13,800 --> 00:59:19,960
Speaker 1: groin with sagony. Is it good by crom Al? Right? Well,

1063
00:59:19,960 --> 00:59:22,680
Speaker 1: there you there you go. Hopefully this episode A a

1064
00:59:22,680 --> 00:59:24,760
Speaker 1: Minute provided us an excuse to just talk about the

1065
00:59:24,800 --> 00:59:28,440
Speaker 1: Stegasaurus for quite a while, and we got to discuss

1066
00:59:28,640 --> 00:59:32,720
Speaker 1: some of these other issues related to crypto zoology, a

1067
00:59:33,200 --> 00:59:36,320
Speaker 1: Young Earth, creationism and um and just a little bit

1068
00:59:36,320 --> 00:59:40,400
Speaker 1: of Cambodian history. Again. You can find the key images

1069
00:59:40,440 --> 00:59:42,440
Speaker 1: that we're talking about here at stuff to Blow your

1070
00:59:42,440 --> 00:59:45,680
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. On the landing page for this episode,

1071
00:59:45,920 --> 00:59:48,520
Speaker 1: you'll also find blog posts and links out to our

1072
00:59:48,600 --> 00:59:52,640
Speaker 1: various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.

1073
00:59:52,880 --> 00:59:56,520
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex

1074
00:59:56,520 --> 00:59:59,240
Speaker 1: Williams and Tary Harrison. If you would like to get

1075
00:59:59,280 --> 01:00:01,440
Speaker 1: in touch with us to let us know feedback about

1076
01:00:01,440 --> 01:00:04,440
Speaker 1: this episode or any other to suggest a topic for

1077
01:00:04,480 --> 01:00:07,000
Speaker 1: the future, to just say hi, let us know who

1078
01:00:07,040 --> 01:00:08,680
Speaker 1: you are, and while you like the show, you can

1079
01:00:08,720 --> 01:00:11,840
Speaker 1: always email us at blow the Mind at how stuff

1080
01:00:11,840 --> 01:00:24,040
Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of

1081
01:00:24,080 --> 01:00:32,840
Speaker 1: other topics. Does it, how stuff works, dot com b