Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Land, and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. Joe, what was your favorite dinosaur when you
Speaker 1: were a child. That is an impossible question. It's impossible,
Speaker 1: you know. I think my favorite was actually the fake
Speaker 1: velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which are you know? The philociraptors
Speaker 1: in Jurassic Park are not really much like real velociraptors.
Speaker 1: There are more number of reasons. Yes, they're probably closer
Speaker 1: to the dinosaur Dinonicus, right, but I was really into
Speaker 1: them as far as real dinosaurs go. You know, your
Speaker 1: triceratops as a fan favorite, it seems kind of like
Speaker 1: the the workhorse protagonist of your dinosaur paleo art scene
Speaker 1: where you've got a predator attacking and a triceratops defending
Speaker 1: and volcanoes erupting in the background. So it always made
Speaker 1: the triceratops look like the good guy, like the would
Speaker 1: one while there was a ferocious tyrannosaur. It's also, I
Speaker 1: don't know, predators are fun. It's it's hard to turn
Speaker 1: down a Tyrannosaur. Well, I like your point about it
Speaker 1: being impossible to pick a favorite, because ultimately, for a child,
Speaker 1: dinosaurs are are less a roster of prehistoric creatures or
Speaker 1: or a tree of prehistoric creatures. They're they're more a pantheon.
Speaker 1: You know. They have different energies to them, they have
Speaker 1: different roles, and you have to sort of love them
Speaker 1: all because they all embody this this sort of wild
Speaker 1: nature that I think the child, more than any of us,
Speaker 1: certainly I mean more than us adults, is in touch with. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that they do have a character, Like I was saying,
Speaker 1: the tri Saratops very much has this kind of, uh straightforward, goodhearted,
Speaker 1: working class hero kind of vibe. And the Dynonicus or
Speaker 1: the velociraptor they're kind of sneaky, aren't they. Then how
Speaker 1: would you classify the star of today's episode, the Mighty
Speaker 1: Stegasaurus good natured, dimwitted sidekick from psychick, Yeah, sidekick, not
Speaker 1: psychicked sidekick? No, Like the character out of this has
Speaker 1: got to be an archetype in some movies, like the
Speaker 1: character who's on the good side, who's friends with the protagonist,
Speaker 1: who's maybe not too bright and like has some malapropisms, okay,
Speaker 1: but I can also easily see the stegosaurs taking the central, dimwitted,
Speaker 1: strong hero role of say a like a Hercules or
Speaker 1: a or a Samson Conan. Yeah, oh that I've never
Speaker 1: thought about it that way, but the tiny headed stegosaurus
Speaker 1: very much could be the conan, the barbarian of the
Speaker 1: prehistoric world, you know, like Chrome. I've never prayed to
Speaker 1: you before. I have no tongue for it, but if
Speaker 1: you let me thagomize my enemies, Yeah, indeed. And he's
Speaker 1: got the armor, he's got the muscles, and he's got
Speaker 1: that awesome weapon that he swings around. I want to
Speaker 1: run some true dinosaur facts by you today because we
Speaker 1: are going to be talking about some some dinosaurs pseudoscience
Speaker 1: in the in the probably the second half of the
Speaker 1: episode for sure. Yeah. So these are all one true facts.
Speaker 1: I'm about to state. It can be proved that dinosaurs
Speaker 1: are still alive today. They exist on every continent on
Speaker 1: the Earth. There are literally even millions of dinosaurs currently
Speaker 1: living in Antarctica. Thousands of people are maybe millions of
Speaker 1: people for all I know, actually even keep dinosaurs as pets.
Speaker 1: You might not have ever known about this, that they
Speaker 1: keep dinosaurs as pets in cages, and sometimes they can
Speaker 1: even train these dinosaurs to speak modern languages and repeat
Speaker 1: phrases like poly wanna cracker. Those statements again a true
Speaker 1: and certainly you can you can take them all in
Speaker 1: kind of a dinatopia, uh spirit, where we imagine this
Speaker 1: fantastic world full of antarctic dinosaurs and and pet velociraptors.
Speaker 1: But uh, but but this is this is all a
Speaker 1: much more mundane fact of our reality. Right. I'm actually
Speaker 1: being pedantic and obnoxious because these are all true acts.
Speaker 1: Because birds are dinosaurs. Modern birds are biologically considered dinosaurs
Speaker 1: in terms of phylogenetic analysis. Uh So hate me if
Speaker 1: you want, but it's true. And because we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about the concept of modern or recent dinosaurs today
Speaker 1: and some pseudo scientific beliefs associated with that, I have
Speaker 1: to say, as a precaution against getting a lot of
Speaker 1: potential pedantic emails, I'll go ahead and be pedantic for you.
Speaker 1: When we talk about dinosaurs in this episode, we're talking
Speaker 1: about the classic kind, the non avian dinosaurs, the last
Speaker 1: of which went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous
Speaker 1: period about sixty six million years ago. But modern day
Speaker 1: birds are the descendants of the only dinosaurs that survived
Speaker 1: this horrible mass extinction, in which about three quarters of
Speaker 1: Earth's plant and animal species suddenly disappeared. Those dinosaurs that
Speaker 1: survived became birds, and thus birds of today are dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: So when someone says, hey, I wonder what what would
Speaker 1: what it would have been like if dinosaurs had survived
Speaker 1: into modern times, they did. They did. Behold here they
Speaker 1: are dinosaurs poop on your car. It's just true. They
Speaker 1: build nests in your shed, They fly into your home
Speaker 1: depot and eat bird seed out of the home and
Speaker 1: garden section. Yeah, there's a dinosaur stuck in the home depot,
Speaker 1: going back and forth between the aisles. My cat is
Speaker 1: out in the backyard hunting dinosaurs. And this is all
Speaker 1: fun to say for multiple reasons, mainly maybe because we
Speaker 1: all love us some flint stones right where humans and
Speaker 1: dinosaurs they exist at the same time, And dinosaurs are
Speaker 1: brutally enslaved to serve as household appliances. So you've got
Speaker 1: a dinosaur garbage disposal. Is there a dinosaur TV? Do
Speaker 1: they just watch a dinosaur acting out TV shows or something?
Speaker 1: I don't remember. I feel like they probably did have
Speaker 1: a TV, but I can't. I can't instantly picture it
Speaker 1: in my head. I think even most elementary school children
Speaker 1: these days are aware that humans and dinosaurs, the non
Speaker 1: avian dinosaurs actually never existed at the same time. That
Speaker 1: that's like something that was maybe a little bit blurrier
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, but I think that generally
Speaker 1: made clear to children today. Yeah, my son has no
Speaker 1: doubt about it. I mean part of it. I think
Speaker 1: it's because he watched a lot of dinosaur trains, so
Speaker 1: it might be possible then that dinosaurs spoke and had
Speaker 1: a rail system that was able to travel back and
Speaker 1: forth in dinosaur history, but they certainly did not live
Speaker 1: alongside humans, right, So, as we were just saying, the
Speaker 1: non avian dinosaurs all in extinct before or during the
Speaker 1: Cretaceous paleo gene extinction event sometimes known as the KPg
Speaker 1: or the KT extinction about sixty six million years ago,
Speaker 1: and human beings have existed for far less than a
Speaker 1: million years. If you want to get more specific than that.
Speaker 1: There there are actually some interesting questions there, like it
Speaker 1: can prove difficult to say exactly when Homo sapiens appeared, because,
Speaker 1: of course, the transition from earlier species of bipedal hominids
Speaker 1: to the anatomically modern human didn't happen overnight. But our
Speaker 1: best guess is that Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa
Speaker 1: roughly two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand years ago roughly.
Speaker 1: And that's a difference of about sixty five million years
Speaker 1: or so. It's a big difference, right, It's not like
Speaker 1: you could fudge the numbers a little bit one way
Speaker 1: or another and say, maybe there's a little bit of overlap. Like,
Speaker 1: it's a big enough difference that there's no way to
Speaker 1: do that. Based on all the evidence available to us,
Speaker 1: there is pretty much zero chance of human interaction with
Speaker 1: non avian dinosaurs. So what are we to make of
Speaker 1: stories and and little bits of art and things like
Speaker 1: that that people sometimes present to say, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you're wrong. Humans have seen living dinosaurs and here's the proof. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And as the title of this episode does suggests, one
Speaker 1: bit of proof that we're discussing here today but also
Speaker 1: using as just an excuse to talk about the stegosaurs,
Speaker 1: is this idea that there is a twelveth century carving
Speaker 1: in modern day Cambodia all the Stegosaurus, again, fossils of
Speaker 1: which were not officially discovered until eighteen seventy seven during
Speaker 1: the so called Bone Wars in North America. So that
Speaker 1: is the evidence that is presented. Um, we're not buying it,
Speaker 1: but we will discuss it a little bit later in
Speaker 1: the show. Right, So before we get to the twelfth
Speaker 1: century Cambodian carving of a supposed Stegasaurus, we should look
Speaker 1: at the stegosaurus itself, this powerful cone in of the
Speaker 1: prehistoric world, this fascinating old herbivore with its plates and
Speaker 1: its spikes and its tiny little head. I want to
Speaker 1: know all about it, Robert, let's go in alright. Well,
Speaker 1: like I said earlier, Stegasaurus was certainly one of my
Speaker 1: favorites as a as a child. And my son, by
Speaker 1: the way, he likes the stegosaurus, but he actually prefers
Speaker 1: the Kintrasaurus, which is a smaller contemporary from East Africa.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I believe, as far as I know, that's
Speaker 1: the only one that was ever found in Africa, right
Speaker 1: I believe. So yeah, So this one, if you're unfamiliar
Speaker 1: with the with what this specimen probably looked like the
Speaker 1: illustrations and the fossil reconstructions tend to show it with
Speaker 1: typical bony plates roughly halfway down its back, and then
Speaker 1: it has spikes, so it looks like a cross between
Speaker 1: a proper stegasaurus and a pin cushion. But now I
Speaker 1: should say that even though the Controsaurus was smaller, it
Speaker 1: was still sixteen ft or five meters long, which is
Speaker 1: still pretty enormous. A proper Stegasaurus Stegasaurus ungladas would have
Speaker 1: reached thirty ft or nine meters in length and would
Speaker 1: have weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of five point three
Speaker 1: to seven tons. So this was a herbivore, and it
Speaker 1: lived in what is now North America during the late Jurassic,
Speaker 1: so roughly one sixty three five million years ago. Carnegie
Speaker 1: Quarry at the US Dinosaur National Monument is a is
Speaker 1: one of the places where you'll find a wealth of
Speaker 1: Stegasaurus fossils. In fact, I was reading where one prominent
Speaker 1: paleontologist had even complained at one point that the Stegasaurus
Speaker 1: fossils were in the way of the sauropod fossils that
Speaker 1: he wanted to to to fully examine. Oh, like, can
Speaker 1: we get somebody in here to sweep all these stegasaurs
Speaker 1: out the way? I just have we have a nuisance
Speaker 1: Stegosaurus is here. So stegosaurians were part of a branch
Speaker 1: of dinosaurs that were the ornithiscans. Right now, what does
Speaker 1: that mean, Robert bird hip? Dinosaurs bird hips. So they're
Speaker 1: sometimes classified in terms of the orientations of their hip bones.
Speaker 1: Right now, it does not mean slender hips or slender
Speaker 1: thighs exactly, because if you've looked as Stegosaurus, it's it's
Speaker 1: thighs are enormous, it has these enormous hind legs. It's
Speaker 1: a meat on the bones. Yes. Now, unlike their ornithopod
Speaker 1: relatives such as iguanadons and the duck bill dinosaurs, uh,
Speaker 1: they couldn't run on their hind legs. Their hind legs
Speaker 1: were far larger than their front legs, meaning that they
Speaker 1: these creatures actually sloped forward with their hips higher than
Speaker 1: the rest of their bodies, kind of leaning down. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: and they also had tall spines at the base of
Speaker 1: the tail. They probably helped anchor powerful muscles that helped
Speaker 1: it actually lift its four legs up off the ground,
Speaker 1: aid and feeding. So whin white couldn't run on its
Speaker 1: hind legs. It's it could probably lift itself up and
Speaker 1: you know, pull some branches down, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And those spikes on the back of the stegosaurs tail
Speaker 1: have a special name, right. Oh, yes, Now this is
Speaker 1: a this is an informal name, but it is informal
Speaker 1: even among paleontologists that they'll use it. I've read that
Speaker 1: all paleontologists now called the spikes the phagomizer, the thagomizer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh, this is great because this is an
Speaker 1: ode to Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon one one in particular,
Speaker 1: in which you had a number of caveman or Neanderthals,
Speaker 1: you know, the typical Gary Larson Far Side caveman, always
Speaker 1: depicting dinosaurs and uh and cave dwelling humans alongside each other. Right,
Speaker 1: and one is giving a presentation on the hind quarters
Speaker 1: of a Stegasaurus and he's saying, now, this end is
Speaker 1: called the thagomizer after the late Fags Simmons, and so
Speaker 1: now we call it the thagomizer, which feels appropriate because
Speaker 1: it looks like uh an instrument for thagamizing something. The
Speaker 1: word thagamizer even fits so well with our Conan motif.
Speaker 1: You can imagine Conan saying it. Yeah. And again you
Speaker 1: can also imagine Conan wearing some heavy armor into battle
Speaker 1: as well, at least, you know, not so much that
Speaker 1: he covers all of the muscles, but you know, just
Speaker 1: to strengthen him up a little bit. Okay. And indeed,
Speaker 1: the Stegasaurs did have these very fascinating plates on its body, right,
Speaker 1: And there's actually some interesting debate over what role those
Speaker 1: plates played, right, Yeah, Because when you I mean, one
Speaker 1: of the things about the Stagasar says, you look at
Speaker 1: it and it even even if it's an action pay
Speaker 1: a bit of paleo art. You know, there's some sort
Speaker 1: of a battle going on. It is hard to really
Speaker 1: nail down what the plates are supposed to be doing, right,
Speaker 1: I mean the easy thing to say, which you've seen
Speaker 1: a Stagasur, it's got these plates poking up off of
Speaker 1: its back. Um, you could say, well, of course they're
Speaker 1: armor there for protection, and there's no way to rule
Speaker 1: out that they might have played some role along those lines.
Speaker 1: But also, I mean, imagine a person running into battle
Speaker 1: with like sheets of steel sticking straight out from behind
Speaker 1: their back. You mean generally you'd want the plates more
Speaker 1: oriented along the surfaces of the skin to protect from attacks, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean these things were big. They were kind of
Speaker 1: arrowhead shaped, were more than two ft or sixty centimeters high,
Speaker 1: and and the I mean, one of the reasons for
Speaker 1: such confusion even just about the placement of the plates
Speaker 1: is that we have many well preserved specimens of the segasurist,
Speaker 1: but there's never been one where the plates are still
Speaker 1: attached to the skeleton. So there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: discussion over how they might be arranged, so that the
Speaker 1: vertical arrangement tends to be the one that you see,
Speaker 1: the one that is accepted. Even then, it's uncertain if
Speaker 1: we're looking at um two parallel rows of these or
Speaker 1: there's a zig zagging pattern down the creature's spine. I
Speaker 1: think the one layered zigzag is the favored today. Is
Speaker 1: now I think out that there were paleontologists that argued
Speaker 1: that they were actually in or on the skin more
Speaker 1: like armor plating. But again, the popular theory now is
Speaker 1: that there's a vertical arrangement. But if they were to
Speaker 1: just be purely body armor, it would seem to make
Speaker 1: more sense, at least to our our our human minds,
Speaker 1: that they would be UH laid across its back like
Speaker 1: plate mail, cover more of the body. Yeah, so they
Speaker 1: were likely covered in tough horn, but some paleontogists have
Speaker 1: theorized that you would have a layer of thin skin
Speaker 1: that could have covered them as well, and this would
Speaker 1: allow this would have allowed the place to serve as
Speaker 1: heat exchangers. And then there's there are others who theorized
Speaker 1: that it might have been brightly colored and used for
Speaker 1: mating purposes. There's actually a cool fairly recent study to
Speaker 1: back this up. At two thousand fifteen Princeton study argue
Speaker 1: that stegasaurusmotsi actually featured differing male and female plate arrangements,
Speaker 1: and this would certainly back up the mating theory and
Speaker 1: also provide some different interpretations of UH stegasarian plating in general. UH.
Speaker 1: They also argue that this sort of sexual dimorphism could
Speaker 1: be widespread among non avian dinos. It means it's possible
Speaker 1: that all three of these different theories are somehow involved.
Speaker 1: But but one can imagine a scenario where some sort
Speaker 1: of what was originally armor plating becomes increasingly involved in
Speaker 1: mate selection and does just get out of control. So
Speaker 1: they're just they're sticking up, they're they're less protective. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're they're brightly colored. And then you know, millions and
Speaker 1: millions of years later, a new species of super intelligent
Speaker 1: apes just has a hard time figuring out what it
Speaker 1: was all about. Now, when it comes to the tail
Speaker 1: of the Stegasaurus, there's there's a lot less doubt about
Speaker 1: what it was for. Yeah, it seems pretty clear that
Speaker 1: it was used for defense, right, Yeah, everyone's pretty certain
Speaker 1: that these were used just like the sort of medieval
Speaker 1: morning star weapon that it resembles, that the stegosaurus would
Speaker 1: have would have swung this thing around in battle to
Speaker 1: protect itself from carnivores. And to one of the cool
Speaker 1: things is that we actually have some fossil evidence, fossil
Speaker 1: evidence of spike wounds on on on Alosaurus is to
Speaker 1: back this up exactly. So the Alosaurus was a predator
Speaker 1: that would have been around to prey on the stegosaurus,
Speaker 1: and inteen there emerged a really awesome, fantastic example of this.
Speaker 1: So inteen, the famous paleontologist Robert Backer, who if you'll recall,
Speaker 1: he actually gets a name drop in Jurassic Park. You
Speaker 1: remember that little the kid Tim who's following around Alan Grant.
Speaker 1: He's like, I read this other book by this guy
Speaker 1: named Backer. Yeah, that's him. Spells his name like our
Speaker 1: Scott Baker. But h but Robert Backer. So he announced
Speaker 1: a discovery ineen that the Geological Society of America that
Speaker 1: the fossil remains of an Allosaurus. This predator in a
Speaker 1: Wyoming museum showed signs of having been killed in combat,
Speaker 1: with the stegosaurus, specifically being spiked to death in the
Speaker 1: groin O man crosthagamized to death. There you go that.
Speaker 1: If that's not some some con conan the barbarian behavior,
Speaker 1: I don't know what is I know. So, what's the
Speaker 1: evidence of this? Right? The allosaur skeleton has this deep
Speaker 1: conical whole punctured right in its pubic bone. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine how strong a blow would have to be to
Speaker 1: punch a hole right through the bones of a massive
Speaker 1: prehistoric predator. Wow? Yeah, that's some serious punch. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: apparently this wound would have left shattered bone fragments and
Speaker 1: all kinds of dirt and contaminants in a deep wound
Speaker 1: like this, and then it appears what happened is the
Speaker 1: wound got infected. So Backer says, quote a massive infection
Speaker 1: ate away a baseball sized sector of the bone. Probably
Speaker 1: this infection spread upwards into the soft tissue attached here,
Speaker 1: the thigh muscles and adjacent intestines and reproductive organs, and
Speaker 1: the wound. They are sure that it killed the allosaur
Speaker 1: because the wound does show any signs of having healed over,
Speaker 1: which is usually a sign that the animal died from
Speaker 1: the wound, or maybe just coincidentally died right after receiving it.
Speaker 1: But it probably died from this horrible wound, right. So
Speaker 1: Bocher is talking about the specific weaponized qualities of the
Speaker 1: thagomizer and the stegosaur's tail in general, and he says, quote,
Speaker 1: most dinosaur tails get stiffer towards the end, but the
Speaker 1: joints of a stegosaur tail look like a monkey's tail.
Speaker 1: They were built for three dimensional combat. And the way
Speaker 1: I've seen this explained was that Baker's team says, we
Speaker 1: often think about the combat behaviors of stegosaurs as in
Speaker 1: like they can just sort of wave their tail back
Speaker 1: and forth like we see in cartoons, right, I mean
Speaker 1: they probably would have been able to wave their tail
Speaker 1: back and forth. But Baker and colleagues instead argue that
Speaker 1: the stegosaur was not limited to this motion, but could
Speaker 1: make these powerful stabbing thrusts with its tail like we
Speaker 1: would with a spear or a sword. Oh I love this.
Speaker 1: So so it's it's it's not just this idea that
Speaker 1: it just has to wave it back and forth, and
Speaker 1: it's just kind of a general don't approach me from
Speaker 1: the rear because there's there are spikes back there, but
Speaker 1: it's more of a strategic weapon that it can use
Speaker 1: against the offender. Yeah, it's almost like a spiked arm.
Speaker 1: Like it's got three dimensions of freedom of movement. Right,
Speaker 1: So so if it gets uh, snuck up on by
Speaker 1: an allosaurus. Allosaurs runs up on the stegosaur from behind
Speaker 1: the stegosaur, it's not like has its tail pinned down.
Speaker 1: Now it can go up and stab the allosaur and
Speaker 1: the groin. And that's what happened here. I like how
Speaker 1: Baker reminds us that the stegosaurus would not have kept
Speaker 1: its thagamizer and sterile conditions. And it also kind of
Speaker 1: makes me think, oh, what if it What if it
Speaker 1: was quite the opposite. What if this thing was just nasty,
Speaker 1: just it just it just dragged its thagamizer through its
Speaker 1: own extrements. So it was just this this sharp brutal
Speaker 1: of just feces encrusted the instrument of death, that it
Speaker 1: would that it would weave back and forth that its enemies. Gross. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's great. That would have been a
Speaker 1: really devious weapon. I don't know if you could have really,
Speaker 1: I mean, when you think about it, could they have
Speaker 1: had a selection pressure for that if like it wouldn't
Speaker 1: immediately kill the allosaur that's attacking it, but would kill
Speaker 1: it like within a few days from infection. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know. And I mean to to his actual point, though,
Speaker 1: you would not have to have a feces encrusted thagomizer
Speaker 1: to results in catastrophic infection exactly. No. Yeah, you'd stab
Speaker 1: a hole through the bones, leave a bunch of fragments,
Speaker 1: you get some dirt in there. Yeah. So, and in
Speaker 1: any case, even if it doesn't immediately kill the allosaurus,
Speaker 1: it's gonna wound it bad enough that the stegosaur is
Speaker 1: probably gonna be able to get away, right. Yeah. Oh
Speaker 1: interesting side note. If you look at older illustrations of
Speaker 1: the stegosaurus, uh, they'll often be extra spikes on the thagomizer.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Now everyone tends to agree you're looking at
Speaker 1: four spikes, but you you see older paintings where they
Speaker 1: have eight. Yeah, And in that paleo are you also
Speaker 1: see the parallel arrangement of the vertical plates on the
Speaker 1: back instead of the single line arrangement. Another side note
Speaker 1: about this fine with the groin stab from the thagomizer,
Speaker 1: it also affects an interesting debate over the basic survival
Speaker 1: niche of therapod carnivores like Allosaurus. So you've got the therapods,
Speaker 1: you know, the Tyrannosaurus type dinosaurs, the two legged walking dinosaurs, um,
Speaker 1: these therapod predators. Some have proposed that allosaurs and tyrannosaurs
Speaker 1: were actually scavengers primarily, rather than active hunters, and this
Speaker 1: wound in others like it inflicted by herbivores on carnivores
Speaker 1: seems to me to be pretty good evidence that large
Speaker 1: therapod carnivores like Allosaurus were active hunters, right, yeah, because
Speaker 1: why else are you gonna thagamize somebody right there? There
Speaker 1: would be no reason for a stegosaurus to jab an
Speaker 1: allosaurus to death unless the allosaurs was attacking it. YEA
Speaker 1: stegosaurus is not gonna walk up and be like, stop
Speaker 1: disrespecting the dead, yeah, because because the segasaurus doesn't doesn't
Speaker 1: think like that, right, And speaking of thinking, the Stegasaurus
Speaker 1: had an extremely small head, a mirror sixteen inches or
Speaker 1: forts long. The brain, it's often pointed out, would have
Speaker 1: been roughly the size of a walnut. I like this,
Speaker 1: but I also like because that's an often cited fact.
Speaker 1: The paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter, who's director of the U. S
Speaker 1: U Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Utah, has said that despite
Speaker 1: the despite the common comparison of the stegosaurus brain to
Speaker 1: the walnut, he makes an even more specific comparison, which
Speaker 1: is to say, quote, actually, it's brain had the size
Speaker 1: and shape of a bent hot dog. I really like
Speaker 1: this this interpretation because it kind of implies that all
Speaker 1: the Stegasurians were we're deviance. You know, they had a
Speaker 1: real bent hot dog of a brain. All right, I
Speaker 1: think we should explore some facts and some controversies about
Speaker 1: that bent hot dog when we come back from a break.
Speaker 1: Thank thank alright, we're back. So we were talking about
Speaker 1: the particularly low brain to body ratio that you would
Speaker 1: have found in the stegasarians. Right, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: crown worshiper. It's got a big weapon, that's got a
Speaker 1: tiny head and a tiny, tiny little brain often compared
Speaker 1: to a walnut, sort of like a bent hot dog.
Speaker 1: In the words of one paleontologist, Why so small though, Well, ultimately,
Speaker 1: if you're walking tank, if you're walking Jurassic tank, uh,
Speaker 1: how much thinking do you need to do? Right? You're
Speaker 1: you're essentially a grazing herbivore. If something attacks you, you
Speaker 1: fight back viciously with your thagomizer, but you're not engaging
Speaker 1: and probably a lot of rich social behavior. You're not
Speaker 1: doing any pack hunting or anything of that nature. You're
Speaker 1: not you don't have a like a diverse diet that
Speaker 1: you're having to to deal with. So a lot of
Speaker 1: the behavioral reasons that you would have a more highly
Speaker 1: evolved uh brain are just not present in the Steaga stars.
Speaker 1: I know some people throughout history, and will will present
Speaker 1: counters to this in a minute. But some people throughout
Speaker 1: history looked at the tiny brain and said, wow, that's
Speaker 1: so small. How could it even control its body? Right?
Speaker 1: Would that even have enough processing power to move its
Speaker 1: body parts around? Yeah? Well, this we get into an
Speaker 1: interesting theory that that I understand it is less popular now,
Speaker 1: but that the idea was that, well, the stegasaurs had
Speaker 1: a second brain in its hips to control the movements
Speaker 1: of its hind quarters, sort of like a rear steering
Speaker 1: wheel and a fire truck. Oh I like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And now, of course nobody was arguing that this would
Speaker 1: have been a true brain, but rather a cluster of
Speaker 1: nervous tissue. Uh, the idea of say, neural canal in
Speaker 1: the syncrum, and it just would have been a lot
Speaker 1: larger in the in the stegosaurs, because the stegosaurs has
Speaker 1: such large hind quarters. Yeah, a lot of bones, a
Speaker 1: lot of less space between the bones, a lot of
Speaker 1: meat on the bones, right, so there's a lot of stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So as beautiful as the stegastar butt brain idea is,
Speaker 1: because it would be kind of beautiful to find a
Speaker 1: creature with a brain in its butt. Unfortunately, it looks
Speaker 1: like the evidence did not pan out for the butt
Speaker 1: brain theory, and it's not accepted anymore. This hypothesis first
Speaker 1: came from the nineteenth century paleon hoologist oath Neil Charles Marsh,
Speaker 1: who wrote in eighteen eighty one that the cavity for
Speaker 1: the expansion of the neural canal, which is what you
Speaker 1: were just mentioning, was a quote, posterior brain case, and
Speaker 1: that that's also a good insult to keep in your bank,
Speaker 1: you know, posterior brain case. We're getting them all. So
Speaker 1: it's like you call somebody a bent hot dog brain,
Speaker 1: you call somebody a posterior brain case. But paleontologists do
Speaker 1: not believe this anymore, mainly because there's no evidence for it,
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's a pretty good reason for thinking
Speaker 1: that this cavity was for something else. And I found
Speaker 1: a good, clear explanation of this in a blog post
Speaker 1: by a Western you paleontologist named Matt wood Dell that
Speaker 1: clearly explains what's going on here, and funny enough, as
Speaker 1: a side note, in the context of him mentioning this,
Speaker 1: was complaining about being featured in a wildly inaccurate Science
Speaker 1: Channel documentary in two thousand nine. I wonder what it was,
Speaker 1: What is it like? Uh Stegasarian's Walk among Us. I
Speaker 1: don't remember the name of it, but he's he's talking
Speaker 1: about how he claims that it misleading. He cut his
Speaker 1: interview to make it seem like he was advocating this
Speaker 1: outdated brain butt hypothesis, and he wasn't. So instead, he
Speaker 1: rights that there were actually two different things in the
Speaker 1: body of a stegasur that get referred to as the
Speaker 1: sacro lumbar expansion, this cavity you're talking about. One is
Speaker 1: a swelling of the spinal cord around the pelvis, which
Speaker 1: is actually present in most vertebrates and is apparently there
Speaker 1: to control motor function. Right. One of the weird things
Speaker 1: that a lot of people don't know is that it
Speaker 1: is thought that much of your body's motor function, like
Speaker 1: the less executively controlled things sort of like automatic continuous
Speaker 1: motion like say walking just walking, some of that doesn't
Speaker 1: come directly from the brain, but is controlled by central
Speaker 1: locomotion function. Like there's a cluster of nervous tissue in
Speaker 1: the spinal cord that says legs keep walking unless something
Speaker 1: goes wrong. Now, the other thing that potentially gets called
Speaker 1: a sacro lumbar expansion. This, this cavity is a real expansion,
Speaker 1: a cavity in the acroll vertebrae, or is kind of
Speaker 1: a gap in the bones back there. But it's not
Speaker 1: unique to the Stegosaurus, and paleontologists are pretty confident that
Speaker 1: it was not the side of a brain, but actually
Speaker 1: the site of a glycogen body, which is a massive
Speaker 1: glucose energy storage, which is still seen around the same
Speaker 1: location in bird skeletons today. And of course birds are
Speaker 1: the descendants of the dinosaurs that had them. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was reading about this, this theory. This was actually in
Speaker 1: um uh In, an older dinosaur text from the nineties,
Speaker 1: So I'm not sure to what extent this holds up,
Speaker 1: but one possible interpretation was that this could have given
Speaker 1: the hind quarters an energy boost when it was I
Speaker 1: guess chlaubra in time. Oh yeah, well, uh, obviously that
Speaker 1: is one thing to consider. I guess people don't know
Speaker 1: for sure yet. I mean when the most recent stuff
Speaker 1: I've read, people don't know for sure what the glycogen
Speaker 1: body is for even in modern birds. But yeah, interesting mystery.
Speaker 1: Another side note, if this discredited hypothesis had been true,
Speaker 1: like if there were a second brain in the stegosaurs.
Speaker 1: But what would the consciousness of an organism like that be,
Speaker 1: like if if it was capable of being conscious, what
Speaker 1: would the consciousness of an organism with two separate brains
Speaker 1: connected by a single nervous system be Like? Huh would
Speaker 1: it be a brain that has not two houses but three?
Speaker 1: Would you have a tricameral mind? I don't know, No,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, could you, I mean, imagine it for
Speaker 1: a second. Would it be that you'd have two minds
Speaker 1: in the same body, or would somehow one mind be
Speaker 1: split across the two different brains connected by nervous tissue.
Speaker 1: I guess I would tend towards the second. But I
Speaker 1: also can't help, but but think about some of I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't help, but think about Julian James and the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind interpretation where you have one half speaking to
Speaker 1: the other and uh and yeah, so I kind of
Speaker 1: jokingly mentioned the idea of a tricameral mind, but it's
Speaker 1: it's one help can't help. But wonder, like, how would
Speaker 1: communication among these three regions of cognition, how would they
Speaker 1: be experienced as conscious thought? And of course it's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: We're talking about this with a stegasaurus, which were multiple
Speaker 1: levels pretty far from from from from modern consciousness to
Speaker 1: this creature. But but no, it's it's a fascinating idea.
Speaker 1: It also makes me think of of the various models
Speaker 1: of chakra in um in Eastern and New Age thought,
Speaker 1: the idea that you have these different centers of cognition
Speaker 1: throughout the body or there's one, right, Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: maybe it would sort of be like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't help but but but but someone that that
Speaker 1: that idea when I'm trying to imagine a brain in
Speaker 1: the butt. Okay, let's get back to the tail. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, we're we're we're we're headed that way anyway,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the the idea of a rear brain.
Speaker 1: Let's just head on all the way back to the
Speaker 1: thagomizer because here's a here's a fun question that I
Speaker 1: don't I don't think i'd really thought about this before,
Speaker 1: but it's it's a pretty natural question to ask, why
Speaker 1: don't modern vertebrates have weaponized tails like we see with
Speaker 1: the stegasarians or with the ankliosaurus, you know, the the
Speaker 1: other kind of famous armored dinosaur. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: ball tail, right, yeah, kind of like very blunt looking spikes,
Speaker 1: but very much this enormous like dwarf and warhammer of
Speaker 1: a tail, a little even more conan he maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then among among among mammals, pretty stark mammals, you
Speaker 1: had the glyphodonts, which also had a weaponized tail. So
Speaker 1: you're saying, like, where are all the thagomizers today? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you look around that our our modern verbet organisms,
Speaker 1: and you just do not see them. So a two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen North Carolina State University study actually looked into
Speaker 1: this because because they think about it, we have all
Speaker 1: of these creatures that have horns on their head at
Speaker 1: antlers on their head, and they're going around using these
Speaker 1: either offensively and some sort of mating behavior against other males,
Speaker 1: or they're using them defensively against predators. But that's up
Speaker 1: there where the brain is exactly the most pivotal part
Speaker 1: of the of the organism. Why are they fighting with that?
Speaker 1: For a while now, I've been wanting to do a
Speaker 1: whole episode on this question of weaponized heads and why
Speaker 1: you would have so so commonly evolved weaponized heads. You're
Speaker 1: putting the most important part of your body right out
Speaker 1: front as a weapon. Yeah, yeah, why not use the tail?
Speaker 1: The tail that is, you know in many organisms that
Speaker 1: this is a part that can be lost. It's a
Speaker 1: part that is brightly colored or or otherwise ornamented so
Speaker 1: that it will attract the attention of predators, and not
Speaker 1: the front end, not the business end of the organism. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so what's the deal here, Well, it's indeed, it's indeed
Speaker 1: topic we could probably go into in more depth, but
Speaker 1: in this case, the researchers they look for commonality among
Speaker 1: weapon tailed four legged organisms, both living in extinct, and
Speaker 1: their guiding question was simply like, why don't turtles have
Speaker 1: spiked tails? You know, it's a it's a they're big
Speaker 1: armored creatures in many cases. Why is there no they
Speaker 1: have tails? Why are there no spikes back there? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: they determined that these are the necessary factors that you
Speaker 1: need in place four weaponized tails to emerge. First of all,
Speaker 1: they said, you need to be at least two hundred
Speaker 1: pounds or a hundred krams in weight, and next, you
Speaker 1: need to be armored and boast a thoracic stiffness enough
Speaker 1: to swing the tail and counteract the swing force, So
Speaker 1: no windmilling. You know, the stegasaurus is not going to
Speaker 1: just spin in circles. It needs to be able to
Speaker 1: move it around back and forth, or or at least
Speaker 1: to strike and recoil. Right. You can't have like a
Speaker 1: you know, a ten foot long arm to hit somebody with, right,
Speaker 1: because you wouldn't be able to control it. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you need like a base of operations there. Right. And
Speaker 1: then finally you need to be a herbivore. And the
Speaker 1: reality is that large armored herbivores are rare, and additional
Speaker 1: head or tail ornamentation is generally an energy expenditure beyond
Speaker 1: what natural selection will support. Uh. So they described the
Speaker 1: tales of beasts like the stegosaurus is being kind of
Speaker 1: a perfect storm of traits. So which makes them all
Speaker 1: the more special. You know that you realize in this
Speaker 1: vast history of a varied of organisms and varied defensive forms, uh,
Speaker 1: the stegosaurians, the glyphodonts, and Angliosaurus, they have something special
Speaker 1: going on totally. The stegosaurs are beautiful, fascinating creatures to study.
Speaker 1: But now that we've taken a look at them by chrom,
Speaker 1: I think it's about time to get back into the
Speaker 1: claim that somebody saw a living stegosaurus and carved it
Speaker 1: into a temple in Cambodia. So let's let's go to
Speaker 1: this claim. What's up with it? What's going on? Well,
Speaker 1: what should we do first, Joe? Should we talk about
Speaker 1: the carving itself or should we talk about the location
Speaker 1: of the carving? Well, let's set the scene first and
Speaker 1: then we'll talk about the carving. Okay, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: the place is u is a temple complex known as
Speaker 1: Ta prom Uh. This is the place where allegedly we
Speaker 1: find a carving of a stegasuris. So it's a temple
Speaker 1: in modern day Cambodia. It's a relic of the Camir
Speaker 1: Empire and located in its then capital of Angkor. Now.
Speaker 1: The Camera Empire lasted from a roughly the ninth to
Speaker 1: the fifteenth century see and it ruled the entire met
Speaker 1: Kong River valley, but then ultimately declined as empires tend
Speaker 1: to do. And there are a number of different attributed reasons.
Speaker 1: Uh within with as with the fall of any empire. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a complex thing, but historians and anthropologists can't help
Speaker 1: but tease various possibilities apart. Right, So one idea is
Speaker 1: that you know, you simply had Thai conquests going on
Speaker 1: that that whittled them down. Or one idea that's particularly
Speaker 1: engaging is the idea that widespread religious conversion, uh, kind
Speaker 1: of destabilized things to some extent. Oh, do you know
Speaker 1: what the conversion from what to what would have been?
Speaker 1: It would have been Hinduism to Buddhism, particularly to uh
Speaker 1: Theravada Buddhism for instance. One idea here is that under Hinduism,
Speaker 1: the rulers of the Communite empire were divine kings or
Speaker 1: dave A raja, but with a conversion to theraved to Buddhism,
Speaker 1: they became more mortal. But ultimately there are a lot
Speaker 1: of factors to consider here. Yeah, that can undercut your
Speaker 1: divine right Huh. Yeah, it takes me back a little
Speaker 1: to our our episode on the divine rule of kings
Speaker 1: and what happens when when they've outlived their usefulness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: ritual regicide, yeah yeah, But ultimately there are a number
Speaker 1: of factors to consider here, including like maritime trade. I
Speaker 1: saw that come up in h in some papers, including
Speaker 1: a paper by anthropologist Miriam T. Stark, who also points
Speaker 1: out that Cambodia's ancient histories among the least known of
Speaker 1: of Southeast Asia. And this is due to a number
Speaker 1: of factors, including civil war and just an increasingly like
Speaker 1: colonial tradition of of attempting to understand the history of
Speaker 1: another people. But as comparatively little as we might know
Speaker 1: about it, they certainly did leave behind some amazing and
Speaker 1: beautiful relics of the civilization. Oh yeah, without doubt, Now
Speaker 1: I have I've never been to Cambodia, but but I have.
Speaker 1: But but I want to because i've I've certainly I've
Speaker 1: seen images and I've heard about the famous temp temple
Speaker 1: complex of angkor Watt. You've probably seen pictures of Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: these these are beautiful to behold. Uh. It's the nation's
Speaker 1: most popular tourist destination. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
Speaker 1: as is Ta Prom. Now these uh, these temple complexes,
Speaker 1: they would have been Hindo to Hindu temples originally, and
Speaker 1: they gradually became more Buddhist and function as this massive
Speaker 1: conversion took place within the Commi Empire when was to
Speaker 1: prom built, So this would have been built in eleven
Speaker 1: eighty six by King Jayavarman the seventh and sadly, I
Speaker 1: have to say it's also known today as the tomb
Speaker 1: Raider Temple. It was used as a location for the
Speaker 1: two thousand one film tomb Raider. The two thousand one film,
Speaker 1: which one is that the original Angelia original Angelina Jolie
Speaker 1: saw it in the theater, don't remember anything about it.
Speaker 1: I looked back at the the IMDb list for it
Speaker 1: and it has like a like a number of famous
Speaker 1: actors in it. John Void in it? Is that, right? God?
Speaker 1: Was he? I don't know. I don't know about John Void,
Speaker 1: but because he's I mean he's Angela, you know, Angelina
Speaker 1: Jolie's father, so maybe he was in it. But Daniel
Speaker 1: Craig was in it, I believe pre James Bond. Oh.
Speaker 1: I just looked it up. You know who it has
Speaker 1: in it? It's got Ian Glenn, the guy who plays
Speaker 1: Jora Mormont on Game of Thrones. Oh, yeah, and it
Speaker 1: I believe it also has uh, what's his name, Noah Taylor?
Speaker 1: Noah Taylor? Yes, He was another actor who was on
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones and has been in a number of
Speaker 1: other interesting films over the years. And it all goes
Speaker 1: back to tomb Rater. Thank you to m writer. All right,
Speaker 1: let's not turn this into tomb Rater to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: So the temple, Yes, yes, So I found a nice
Speaker 1: ride up on Lonely Planet about the top Rom. I
Speaker 1: just want to read one paragraph from it that it
Speaker 1: nicely sets the stage. Quote. Top Rom is a temple
Speaker 1: of towers, closed courtyards, and narrow corridors. Many of the
Speaker 1: corridors are impassable, clogged with jumbled piles of delicately carved
Speaker 1: stone blocks, dislodged by the roots of long decayed trees.
Speaker 1: Bass reliefs on bulging walls are carpeted with lichen moss,
Speaker 1: and creeping plants and shrubs sprout from the roofs of
Speaker 1: monumental porches. Trees hundreds of years old tower overhead, their leaves,
Speaker 1: filtering the sunlight and casting a greenish pall over the
Speaker 1: whole scene. Well, that's beautifully described. Yeah, it makes me
Speaker 1: want to go there, But I'm also I'm susceptible to
Speaker 1: this kind of setting anyway, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are right, Like it keeps showing up in
Speaker 1: our adventure movies and video games and all that. I
Speaker 1: wonder why we so love the image of the overgrown
Speaker 1: jungle temple with crumbling ancient stone archways being consumed by
Speaker 1: tree roots and vines. It's it's a singularly beautiful kind
Speaker 1: of image and setting for some reason. Well, I can't
Speaker 1: help but think there are a number of different things
Speaker 1: going on, So the more pessimistic side of me tends
Speaker 1: to think with it. Part of it is kind of
Speaker 1: like a colonial um like pulp saturated notion of the
Speaker 1: like the noble westerner walking among the ruins of fallen
Speaker 1: ancient cultures. Well, you could maybe see something like that,
Speaker 1: But I think it's equally true of ruins no matter
Speaker 1: what culture they're from, right, And you can imagine it's
Speaker 1: equally true of old cathedral ruins in Western Europe, yeah,
Speaker 1: or just old supermarket ruins here in the States. Like
Speaker 1: anywhere I go that I see some sort of ruins,
Speaker 1: you know, be they ancient or fairly recent, They're fascinating.
Speaker 1: I want to walk inside them and see what's there
Speaker 1: and or what's living inside. It's specifically the idea of
Speaker 1: the plant overgrowth of like a sacred stone building. You
Speaker 1: know that that's like the main elements that are featuring
Speaker 1: in in my picture of this in the mind. I
Speaker 1: guess maybe it's just something about like maybe maybe it
Speaker 1: indicates the folly of human projects. I don't know. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there is kind of like a memento more aspect to it, right,
Speaker 1: this this sort of ozamandi as effect that no matter
Speaker 1: how great the structure, it is going to fall with time,
Speaker 1: nature is going to going going to flow over it
Speaker 1: and take it back. Uh. And there's something like beautiful
Speaker 1: and haunting and poignant about all of that. It's like
Speaker 1: watching human built structure has become a part of the forest. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then also, I mean we're I am fascinated by
Speaker 1: by other cultures, and many of them are ancient cultures.
Speaker 1: And therefore to visit a site like this or even
Speaker 1: just look at photographs of it, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: going back in time. But how far back in time?
Speaker 1: It's a good question. Okay, Well, there's not really a
Speaker 1: question about when the temple is from. It seems you know,
Speaker 1: it's less than a thousand years old, right, right, So
Speaker 1: it's being less than a thousand years old. I think
Speaker 1: it's about eight hundred years older. So what is the
Speaker 1: argument that someone has carved a stegosaurus into the temple
Speaker 1: as a decorative motif. And I'll remind everybody here that
Speaker 1: you can see the image we're talking about at Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot Com on the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode. It's going to be the central image
Speaker 1: for the episode, the carving of the supposed Stegasaurus. Right,
Speaker 1: so there's a building, it's got a pillar, was sort
Speaker 1: of like a pillar against a wall, and there are
Speaker 1: carvings all up and down the vertical length of the
Speaker 1: pillar where they're sort of like these these abstract lines
Speaker 1: snaking around framing obviously representative carvings that are supposed to
Speaker 1: be animals and mythological beasts. Yes, and one of these,
Speaker 1: when you look at it, it's kind of it's inside
Speaker 1: of a circle, or at least a curved decorative flourish here,
Speaker 1: and it appears to be a quadruped. It has a
Speaker 1: long tail, and it has one, two, three, four, five,
Speaker 1: five or six I think maybe six perhaps bony plates
Speaker 1: on its back. It kind of looks like a stegasarian,
Speaker 1: and you could even go as far to say that, yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like it could be one of the I
Speaker 1: think three varieties of stegasarians that have been found in
Speaker 1: modern China. So you know, you don't even have to say, well,
Speaker 1: how did they get over from North America? While there
Speaker 1: were there are fossil remains of stegasarians from uh, generally
Speaker 1: that part of Asia. So I would also add that
Speaker 1: it feels a bit silly to attempt to match up
Speaker 1: a supposed dinosaur that would have evolved from these forms
Speaker 1: across a hundred and fifty million years or so. But
Speaker 1: but still we have to You have to admit, when
Speaker 1: you look at it, you can say, well, that kind
Speaker 1: of looks like a Stegasaurus. I don't buy it for
Speaker 1: a second, but I have to admit that looking at
Speaker 1: it and imagining it as a stegosaurus is kind of intriguing.
Speaker 1: So I was trying to understand the argument that this
Speaker 1: is a stegosaurus. I found an article on a creationist
Speaker 1: website called Answers in Genesis is that you got. You
Speaker 1: gotta keep an eye out for this one, because actually,
Speaker 1: when you start googling like evolutionary science topics. Somehow, this
Speaker 1: website very often tends to make it near the top
Speaker 1: of Google results, like it'll pop up your maybe you're
Speaker 1: searching should I mouthwash before I brushed my teeth afterwards?
Speaker 1: And then answers you're you're getting answer like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: answers in genesis. Maybe I shouldn't trust this. Yeah, they've
Speaker 1: got some good s c O game going whatever it is,
Speaker 1: so they get up in those Google results. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a Young Earth creationist website that is going
Speaker 1: to pedal a whole lot of pseudoscience about geology and paleontology.
Speaker 1: And they've got an article attributed to a writer named
Speaker 1: Kenneth Cole empd uh that is defending the idea that
Speaker 1: this is evidence of a young Earth, like a recent
Speaker 1: creation and humans and dinosaurs living at the same time.
Speaker 1: So Coal Rights quote. There are no mythological figures among
Speaker 1: the roundels, so one can reasonably conclude that these figures
Speaker 1: depict the animals that were commonly seen by the ancient
Speaker 1: Khmer people in the twelfth century. That means that only
Speaker 1: a little over eight hundred years ago, some dinosaurs were
Speaker 1: likely still living in that region of Cambodia. Of course,
Speaker 1: this is no surprise to biblical creationists, because we know
Speaker 1: from Genesis One that land animals such as dinosaurs and
Speaker 1: humans were living together in the beginning, and that representatives
Speaker 1: of the land animals e g. Dinosaurs were saved on
Speaker 1: the arc to repopulate the Earth after the flood only
Speaker 1: four thousand, three hundred years ago. No, I don't want
Speaker 1: to give in to excessive, unnecessary mockery, but I think
Speaker 1: this is not a tenable position, and we can explore
Speaker 1: some of the reasons for that when we come back
Speaker 1: from a break. All right, we're back. So, Joe, you
Speaker 1: just read this, this passage from this Young Earth creationists
Speaker 1: about Noah Noah's ark and uh the stegasarians ward the vessel. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would say that this actually represents one way you
Speaker 1: could take if you're going to go with the line
Speaker 1: that this carving in this Cambodian temple is actually a
Speaker 1: depiction of a stegosaurus. There are a couple of ways
Speaker 1: you could go with it, but you've got to start
Speaker 1: with the idea that there's an obvious problem here. The
Speaker 1: carving is less than a thousand years old. We mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier that all non avian dinosaurs went extinct sixty six
Speaker 1: million years ago or before that. Well, for the Stegosaurus,
Speaker 1: the problem is even worse because it's one of those
Speaker 1: that went extinct long before the KPg extinction event took place.
Speaker 1: The Stegosaurus genus apparently went extinct during the Late Jurassic period,
Speaker 1: roughly a hundred and fifty million years ago, and by
Speaker 1: the time of the KPg extinction, Stegosaurus had already been
Speaker 1: extinct for almost a hundred million years. So a way
Speaker 1: of putting this I've seen quoted before is that more
Speaker 1: time separates the Stegosaurus from the Tyrannosaurus rex than separates
Speaker 1: the Tyrannosaurus rex from us. So we're talking just a
Speaker 1: vast lengths of time that are that are that are
Speaker 1: almost incomprehensible for us neager humans right now. If you
Speaker 1: want to say, it wasn't a Stegosaurus, but it was
Speaker 1: a related stegasaurian, right, some other type of related or
Speaker 1: aiski and herb before with with plates on its back
Speaker 1: of some kind from the group Stegasauria that may have
Speaker 1: existed a little bit later, maybe into the earlier maybe
Speaker 1: Middle Cretaceous, but even those probably didn't make it to
Speaker 1: the KPg event, which in any case wiped out all
Speaker 1: of the dinosaurs except the ones that became modern day birds.
Speaker 1: So if you want to believe that it really is
Speaker 1: a live Stegasaurus that somebody saw being depicted in the carving, uh,
Speaker 1: and that the carving is original, of course there's another
Speaker 1: idea that, of course, well, what if it's a more
Speaker 1: recent hoax or something. Then I think there are really
Speaker 1: two main ways people could go. You could either say
Speaker 1: some stegosaurs managed to survive about a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: million million years longer than we thought without leaving any
Speaker 1: fossil evidence in the mean time, and we can call
Speaker 1: the believers of this hypothesis the cryptid camp. Right, This
Speaker 1: is the standard cryptozoology kind of thing. There's some isolated
Speaker 1: population of an otherwise unknown creature, right, Yeah, that we
Speaker 1: don't we we haven't explored every nook and cranny of
Speaker 1: the Earth, and it's in those nooks and crannies that
Speaker 1: we might find uh, fabulous or henceforth unrecognized species. The
Speaker 1: other one is what we heard from Kenneth Cole m d.
Speaker 1: Which is the entire timeline of Earth history is wrong.
Speaker 1: The Earth is actually less than ten thousand years old,
Speaker 1: and dinosaurs existed alongside most of human civilization throughout history.
Speaker 1: We can call this the young Earth creationist camp. And
Speaker 1: I have theological problems with that because I think God
Speaker 1: would have destroyed all the crooked, hot dog brained dinosaurs
Speaker 1: with the flood, and then they would not have been
Speaker 1: permitted to board the arc. But that's that's that's my attantion.
Speaker 1: Leave your theology aside, Robert, I won't hear of it.
Speaker 1: Uh So, I think we can say probably neither of
Speaker 1: these is plausible at all. But the creationist the hypothesis
Speaker 1: actually has more problems going for it than the cryptid hypothesis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the cryptid hypothesis at least does not require us to
Speaker 1: bend and break time. Yeah, before we get into those
Speaker 1: I would say, we don't really need to debate the
Speaker 1: visual qualities of the image, because even if it looked
Speaker 1: exactly like a stegosaurus, this would not be a reason
Speaker 1: to think that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time.
Speaker 1: But I must point out it does not look exactly
Speaker 1: like a stegosaurus. I mean, if you look at it,
Speaker 1: you might say, oh, that's a stegosaurus. Because you'd recognize
Speaker 1: the plates, right, Stegosaurus had a very small cranium with
Speaker 1: no known adornments, and this creature in the carving has
Speaker 1: a huge head with the appearance of some kind of
Speaker 1: pointed ear or horn on its face. I don't know
Speaker 1: exactly what it's supposed to be, but there's a thing
Speaker 1: on the face and the head is very large. Stegosaurus
Speaker 1: also has a huge tail with spikes, and this carving
Speaker 1: has a pretty small tail with no spikes. So to
Speaker 1: clear what I'm saying is that nothing about it looks
Speaker 1: like a Stegasaurus except that it has four legs and
Speaker 1: appears to have these lumps positioned over its back. And
Speaker 1: these lumps, by the way, might not even be parts
Speaker 1: of the animal. They there's a strong argument that these
Speaker 1: are perhaps supposed to be leaves or some other vegetative
Speaker 1: detail in the background. Oh yeah, that's true. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you look at some of the same carvings from
Speaker 1: this area of the temple, other animals are depicted with
Speaker 1: sort of like shapes in the background that I think
Speaker 1: are just sort of like supposed to be background foliage
Speaker 1: or something. Now, it's just another problem that I have
Speaker 1: with it. Either the stegosaurus or some stegasarian creature were
Speaker 1: to have survived to the point where humans either solid
Speaker 1: or just remembered it. They just had like an oral
Speaker 1: history of the stegasarians, and it made their way made
Speaker 1: their made its way into their art. Why would this
Speaker 1: be the lone example of it? Oh? Why would there
Speaker 1: not be stegasarians everywhere right where all the other ones exactly?
Speaker 1: And and also, if you're gonna look at fantastic creatures
Speaker 1: in art from that region, then what about the naga,
Speaker 1: the seven headed serpent that you see in various Southeast
Speaker 1: Asian traditions, right, I mean, so you're saying, like, why,
Speaker 1: why don't we assume that maybe that's based on a
Speaker 1: real animal they saw too. Yeah, I think you're they're
Speaker 1: really cherry picking a particular beast or fantastic beast and
Speaker 1: then saying it is real when they're if you're gonna
Speaker 1: let that one through the gates, then you have to
Speaker 1: let the Naga. You have to let every fantastic creature
Speaker 1: from from Hindu and Buddhist traditions in through the gates
Speaker 1: as well. It's only fair let them on the art too. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. I think a supporter could say
Speaker 1: the it's a Stegasaurus argument. Uh, well, it's got going
Speaker 1: for it that the Stegosaurus did exist at some point,
Speaker 1: and we don't have evidence that the Naga ever existed.
Speaker 1: But we don't have evidence that the Naga ever existed
Speaker 1: because what nobody's ever said they saw one, and there's
Speaker 1: no fossil evidence. With the Stegosaurus, nobody's ever said that
Speaker 1: they seen one in any kind of credible way, and
Speaker 1: there's no fossil evidence since a hundred and fifty million
Speaker 1: years ago or whenever the particular genus you're talking about
Speaker 1: when extinct, so within the period of the past dozens
Speaker 1: of millions of years. Actually, the evidential issue is the
Speaker 1: same for the Nauga and the Stegosaurus. Meanwhile, uh, there
Speaker 1: there's we have no doubt that there were sightings of
Speaker 1: of course bores. Uh. And the job and Rhino, which
Speaker 1: we discussed in depth in our Rhino Horn episode. The
Speaker 1: job and Rhino is is at least if you're used
Speaker 1: to just seeing the African varieties of rhino, it is
Speaker 1: a weird looking rhino and it it looks a lot
Speaker 1: like the creature in this carving. Well, yeah, the creature
Speaker 1: in the carving. It's got something strange going on in
Speaker 1: its face that looks like it could be an ear
Speaker 1: or a horn or something. Uh, and I'm inclined to
Speaker 1: think that, Yeah, that could be some kind of rhino horn. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in these again, our real beasts, it's just it's
Speaker 1: just they're far fewer leaps and bounds one has to
Speaker 1: make in logic to get there. And even if you
Speaker 1: were too ignoral the stuff we're saying, this would only
Speaker 1: go to support the cryptid argument that somehow this small
Speaker 1: population of stegasaur Is or related stegosaurids managed to survive
Speaker 1: undetected until at least eight hundred years ago or so,
Speaker 1: leaving no other traces that we've ever found. If I'm
Speaker 1: being generous, the crypted argument seems at best physically possible,
Speaker 1: but just really implausible, Like, I don't see any good
Speaker 1: reason to prefer it over a handful of rival explanations
Speaker 1: you can come up with, which include, for example, the
Speaker 1: carving is supposed to be a bore or a rhino
Speaker 1: like we've been talking about. Maybe the carving is a
Speaker 1: mythological beast of the imagination that has a superficial resemblance
Speaker 1: to something with back plates. And if you just look
Speaker 1: on the pillar in the temple, if you look just
Speaker 1: like two spaces down, there's another crazy looking mythological beast
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool, and it's got all kinds of features
Speaker 1: that you don't see in nature. Yeah, this looks like
Speaker 1: some sort of like a cross between the lorax and
Speaker 1: the and and and the monsters from where the wild
Speaker 1: things are. Well, it's sort of it sort of looks like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a fawn, but it's wearing like a magistrate's wig.
Speaker 1: And nobody's making the argument that this was a real
Speaker 1: creature that I have seen. No, but give them time.
Speaker 1: Uh So, another possibility, I I don't know that there's
Speaker 1: any evidence to support this, but then again, it's probably
Speaker 1: more plausible than a crypted thing, is that the carving
Speaker 1: is a more recent forgery. I'm not advocating that, but
Speaker 1: of course it's possible. Yeah, I think I did see. It.
Speaker 1: Brought up the idea that, oh, what if a film
Speaker 1: crew did it. Western film crew comes in and maybe
Speaker 1: they fake a stegasaurus on ancient ruins, which which seems
Speaker 1: like that would be an extreme and a reckless thing
Speaker 1: for anyone to do so. I don't know how much
Speaker 1: how much credence I give to that idea. Personally, I
Speaker 1: don't see any evidence for it at all, except to
Speaker 1: say that it would be a less extravagant thing to
Speaker 1: resort to than saying that Stegasaurus has survived an extra
Speaker 1: hundred million years or and we we haven't even mentioned
Speaker 1: this yet geo mythology. Like if you haven't heard our
Speaker 1: episode the Mystery of the myth Fleshed Fossil, We discussed
Speaker 1: the work of the Stanford historian Adrian Mayer, who has
Speaker 1: written books documenting many possible cases where ancient art, mythology,
Speaker 1: folk beliefs could have been inspired by ancient people's coming
Speaker 1: across confusing geo facts like fossils of dinosaurs and other
Speaker 1: amazing extinct animals. So you find a dinosaur fossil, you're
Speaker 1: in the ancient world. It looks like nothing you've ever
Speaker 1: seen alive today. So maybe it's some sort of monster.
Speaker 1: It's a griffin, it's a dragon, it's cyclops and so forth,
Speaker 1: and so some ancient stegasaurians, not the Stegosaurus itself, but
Speaker 1: related backplated orna. This key and herbivores did live in
Speaker 1: this area around China, as you've pointed out, at least
Speaker 1: three different stegasaurians, so there's no way to rule out
Speaker 1: that this kind of carving could also have been inspired
Speaker 1: by somebody finding a mysterious stegasaurian fossil skeleton with backplates,
Speaker 1: passing that morphology on through art and folklore, and it
Speaker 1: ending up getting carved into a temple wall. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: especially if you're digging up lot of stone to build
Speaker 1: a giant temple complex. Yeah. Now we don't know which
Speaker 1: which of these is correct, but any of them seem
Speaker 1: more plausible than huge land dwelling dinosaurs surviving millions of
Speaker 1: years after we have any fossil records of them, So
Speaker 1: I think the cryptid approach kind of falls apart. Yes. Plus,
Speaker 1: I have to think that if dinosaurs were around during
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire, they would have wound up in the Colosseum.
Speaker 1: There would have been there would have been a Stegasaurus
Speaker 1: in the Colosseum battling a gladiator. Well, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you go back into the age of emperors
Speaker 1: and kings and all that. I mean, they really did
Speaker 1: love to get some exotic animals into their into their
Speaker 1: menagerie and and trot them around for people to see. Right,
Speaker 1: they're countless tales. We could we could do a whole
Speaker 1: episode on examples of exotic creatures that were transported across
Speaker 1: continents so that royal individuals could look at them and
Speaker 1: you know, maybe have them fight another beast. Now, that's
Speaker 1: all the cryptid approach, I think. Unfortunately, the argument gets
Speaker 1: a lot worse if you try to take the young
Speaker 1: Earth approach, because the idea that the humans saw stegosaurs,
Speaker 1: because dinosaurs actually existed alongside humans for much of history,
Speaker 1: and that history is less than ten thousand years long.
Speaker 1: I have to say, I, I you know, sometimes I
Speaker 1: think people in the skeptic community have too much fun
Speaker 1: harping on the wrongness of stuff like that. Like it
Speaker 1: can Yeah, there are lots of people who have deeply
Speaker 1: untenable views like the idea of a young Earth, but
Speaker 1: it can feel excessive and unnecessary to just like keep
Speaker 1: harping on how wrong that is. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: I do feel a kind of sadness about all of
Speaker 1: the energy that goes into defending views like that, because
Speaker 1: it's similar to like the energy that would go into
Speaker 1: defending a flat earth approach. It's something that is not
Speaker 1: just disagreeing with the majority of scientists about a fact
Speaker 1: here or a fact there, but it's sort of undermining
Speaker 1: the integrity of the entire scientific enterprise. If you take
Speaker 1: a position like flat Earth or like younger, you are
Speaker 1: forced by extension to essentially deny everything. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: one way that I think about it is I I
Speaker 1: will sadly never see a living stegasaurus. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, the stegosaurus was real, and that is that
Speaker 1: is fascinating and it's amazing, and it it fills me
Speaker 1: with with wonder and awe to to to to research
Speaker 1: the creature and read about it and see these artistic
Speaker 1: depictions of it. Likewise, I will never see a unicorn,
Speaker 1: and unicorns never existed, and yet the unicorn images of
Speaker 1: the unicorn are beautiful. And when you start reading about
Speaker 1: the complex the symbolism of the unicorn, that that is
Speaker 1: beautiful and it can bring meaning to your life. And uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's no, there's no need to start bending your
Speaker 1: reality and bending your your understanding of the world so
Speaker 1: that you can make it somehow more real than it
Speaker 1: is as if the idea of it and the potency
Speaker 1: of the idea is not real it exactly. I mean,
Speaker 1: is is it really worth believing in the physical existence
Speaker 1: of a unicorn to make you essentially forced to undermine
Speaker 1: the foundations of astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, geology, radiochemistry, biology, paleontology, genetics.
Speaker 1: I mean, all of these fields are are based on
Speaker 1: predictions and consistently produce results that are in agreement basically
Speaker 1: with with a picture of an old Earth and an
Speaker 1: old universe. And all of these fields not only have
Speaker 1: successful predictive theories corroborating the old Universe, the old Earth,
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution, but they
Speaker 1: independently produce new results and overturn old misconceptions that keep
Speaker 1: further resolving the clarity of that picture rather than undermining it.
Speaker 1: And of course, you know, as we all know, some
Speaker 1: of these fields use that picture of the world to
Speaker 1: produce technologies that even Cambodian stegosaur advocates use in their
Speaker 1: daily lives end up just having to do so much
Speaker 1: mental gymnastics to make it work. And you know who
Speaker 1: didn't have time for mental gymnastics Stegasaurus. The stegosaurus was
Speaker 1: a plain dealer. Yeah yeah, if it's grain, eat it.
Speaker 1: If it tries to bite you, stab it in the
Speaker 1: groin with sagony. Is it good by crom Al? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: there you there you go. Hopefully this episode A a
Speaker 1: Minute provided us an excuse to just talk about the
Speaker 1: Stegasaurus for quite a while, and we got to discuss
Speaker 1: some of these other issues related to crypto zoology, a
Speaker 1: Young Earth, creationism and um and just a little bit
Speaker 1: of Cambodian history. Again. You can find the key images
Speaker 1: that we're talking about here at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. On the landing page for this episode,
Speaker 1: you'll also find blog posts and links out to our
Speaker 1: various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex
Speaker 1: Williams and Tary Harrison. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us to let us know feedback about
Speaker 1: this episode or any other to suggest a topic for
Speaker 1: the future, to just say hi, let us know who
Speaker 1: you are, and while you like the show, you can
Speaker 1: always email us at blow the Mind at how stuff
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