The Cambodian Stegosaurus

Do Cambodian temple ruins speak to a time when humans and dinosaurs coexisted? Absolutely not, but it’s a great excuse for Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick to talk about the armored stegosaurus, Ta Prohm temple, young Earth creationism and avian evolution. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Land, and I'm
Joe McCormick. Joe, what was your favorite dinosaur when you
were a child. That is an impossible question. It's impossible,

(00:23):
you know. I think my favorite was actually the fake
velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which are you know? The philociraptors
in Jurassic Park are not really much like real velociraptors.
There are more number of reasons. Yes, they're probably closer
to the dinosaur Dinonicus, right, but I was really into
them as far as real dinosaurs go. You know, your

(00:44):
triceratops as a fan favorite, it seems kind of like
the the workhorse protagonist of your dinosaur paleo art scene
where you've got a predator attacking and a triceratops defending
and volcanoes erupting in the background. So it always made
the triceratops look like the good guy, like the would
one while there was a ferocious tyrannosaur. It's also, I
don't know, predators are fun. It's it's hard to turn

(01:05):
down a Tyrannosaur. Well, I like your point about it
being impossible to pick a favorite, because ultimately, for a child,
dinosaurs are are less a roster of prehistoric creatures or
or a tree of prehistoric creatures. They're they're more a pantheon.
You know. They have different energies to them, they have
different roles, and you have to sort of love them

(01:27):
all because they all embody this this sort of wild
nature that I think the child, more than any of us,
certainly I mean more than us adults, is in touch with. Well, yeah,
that they do have a character, Like I was saying,
the tri Saratops very much has this kind of, uh straightforward, goodhearted,
working class hero kind of vibe. And the Dynonicus or

(01:48):
the velociraptor they're kind of sneaky, aren't they. Then how
would you classify the star of today's episode, the Mighty
Stegasaurus good natured, dimwitted sidekick from psychick, Yeah, sidekick, not
psychicked sidekick? No, Like the character out of this has
got to be an archetype in some movies, like the
character who's on the good side, who's friends with the protagonist,

(02:11):
who's maybe not too bright and like has some malapropisms, okay,
but I can also easily see the stegosaurs taking the central, dimwitted,
strong hero role of say a like a Hercules or
a or a Samson Conan. Yeah, oh that I've never
thought about it that way, but the tiny headed stegosaurus
very much could be the conan, the barbarian of the

(02:32):
prehistoric world, you know, like Chrome. I've never prayed to
you before. I have no tongue for it, but if
you let me thagomize my enemies, Yeah, indeed. And he's
got the armor, he's got the muscles, and he's got
that awesome weapon that he swings around. I want to
run some true dinosaur facts by you today because we
are going to be talking about some some dinosaurs pseudoscience

(02:55):
in the in the probably the second half of the
episode for sure. Yeah. So these are all one true facts.
I'm about to state. It can be proved that dinosaurs
are still alive today. They exist on every continent on
the Earth. There are literally even millions of dinosaurs currently
living in Antarctica. Thousands of people are maybe millions of

(03:17):
people for all I know, actually even keep dinosaurs as pets.
You might not have ever known about this, that they
keep dinosaurs as pets in cages, and sometimes they can
even train these dinosaurs to speak modern languages and repeat
phrases like poly wanna cracker. Those statements again a true

(03:37):
and certainly you can you can take them all in
kind of a dinatopia, uh spirit, where we imagine this
fantastic world full of antarctic dinosaurs and and pet velociraptors.
But uh, but but this is this is all a
much more mundane fact of our reality. Right. I'm actually
being pedantic and obnoxious because these are all true acts.

(04:00):
Because birds are dinosaurs. Modern birds are biologically considered dinosaurs
in terms of phylogenetic analysis. Uh So hate me if
you want, but it's true. And because we're gonna be
talking about the concept of modern or recent dinosaurs today
and some pseudo scientific beliefs associated with that, I have
to say, as a precaution against getting a lot of

(04:20):
potential pedantic emails, I'll go ahead and be pedantic for you.
When we talk about dinosaurs in this episode, we're talking
about the classic kind, the non avian dinosaurs, the last
of which went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous
period about sixty six million years ago. But modern day
birds are the descendants of the only dinosaurs that survived
this horrible mass extinction, in which about three quarters of

(04:43):
Earth's plant and animal species suddenly disappeared. Those dinosaurs that
survived became birds, and thus birds of today are dinosaurs.
So when someone says, hey, I wonder what what would
what it would have been like if dinosaurs had survived
into modern times, they did. They did. Behold here they
are dinosaurs poop on your car. It's just true. They
build nests in your shed, They fly into your home

(05:07):
depot and eat bird seed out of the home and
garden section. Yeah, there's a dinosaur stuck in the home depot,
going back and forth between the aisles. My cat is
out in the backyard hunting dinosaurs. And this is all
fun to say for multiple reasons, mainly maybe because we
all love us some flint stones right where humans and
dinosaurs they exist at the same time, And dinosaurs are

(05:28):
brutally enslaved to serve as household appliances. So you've got
a dinosaur garbage disposal. Is there a dinosaur TV? Do
they just watch a dinosaur acting out TV shows or something?
I don't remember. I feel like they probably did have
a TV, but I can't. I can't instantly picture it
in my head. I think even most elementary school children
these days are aware that humans and dinosaurs, the non

(05:52):
avian dinosaurs actually never existed at the same time. That
that's like something that was maybe a little bit blurrier
when I was a kid, but I think that generally
made clear to children today. Yeah, my son has no
doubt about it. I mean part of it. I think
it's because he watched a lot of dinosaur trains, so
it might be possible then that dinosaurs spoke and had

(06:13):
a rail system that was able to travel back and
forth in dinosaur history, but they certainly did not live
alongside humans, right, So, as we were just saying, the
non avian dinosaurs all in extinct before or during the
Cretaceous paleo gene extinction event sometimes known as the KPg
or the KT extinction about sixty six million years ago,

(06:34):
and human beings have existed for far less than a
million years. If you want to get more specific than that.
There there are actually some interesting questions there, like it
can prove difficult to say exactly when Homo sapiens appeared, because,
of course, the transition from earlier species of bipedal hominids
to the anatomically modern human didn't happen overnight. But our
best guess is that Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa

(06:55):
roughly two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand years ago roughly.
And that's a difference of about sixty five million years
or so. It's a big difference, right, It's not like
you could fudge the numbers a little bit one way
or another and say, maybe there's a little bit of overlap. Like,
it's a big enough difference that there's no way to
do that. Based on all the evidence available to us,
there is pretty much zero chance of human interaction with

(07:18):
non avian dinosaurs. So what are we to make of
stories and and little bits of art and things like
that that people sometimes present to say, no, no, no,
you're wrong. Humans have seen living dinosaurs and here's the proof. Yeah,
And as the title of this episode does suggests, one
bit of proof that we're discussing here today but also

(07:40):
using as just an excuse to talk about the stegosaurs,
is this idea that there is a twelveth century carving
in modern day Cambodia all the Stegosaurus, again, fossils of
which were not officially discovered until eighteen seventy seven during
the so called Bone Wars in North America. So that
is the evidence that is presented. Um, we're not buying it,

(08:04):
but we will discuss it a little bit later in
the show. Right, So before we get to the twelfth
century Cambodian carving of a supposed Stegasaurus, we should look
at the stegosaurus itself, this powerful cone in of the
prehistoric world, this fascinating old herbivore with its plates and
its spikes and its tiny little head. I want to
know all about it, Robert, let's go in alright. Well,

(08:26):
like I said earlier, Stegasaurus was certainly one of my
favorites as a as a child. And my son, by
the way, he likes the stegosaurus, but he actually prefers
the Kintrasaurus, which is a smaller contemporary from East Africa.
Oh yeah, I believe, as far as I know, that's
the only one that was ever found in Africa, right
I believe. So yeah, So this one, if you're unfamiliar

(08:47):
with the with what this specimen probably looked like the
illustrations and the fossil reconstructions tend to show it with
typical bony plates roughly halfway down its back, and then
it has spikes, so it looks like a cross between
a proper stegasaurus and a pin cushion. But now I
should say that even though the Controsaurus was smaller, it

(09:08):
was still sixteen ft or five meters long, which is
still pretty enormous. A proper Stegasaurus Stegasaurus ungladas would have
reached thirty ft or nine meters in length and would
have weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of five point three
to seven tons. So this was a herbivore, and it
lived in what is now North America during the late Jurassic,

(09:30):
so roughly one sixty three five million years ago. Carnegie
Quarry at the US Dinosaur National Monument is a is
one of the places where you'll find a wealth of
Stegasaurus fossils. In fact, I was reading where one prominent
paleontologist had even complained at one point that the Stegasaurus
fossils were in the way of the sauropod fossils that

(09:53):
he wanted to to to fully examine. Oh, like, can
we get somebody in here to sweep all these stegasaurs
out the way? I just have we have a nuisance
Stegosaurus is here. So stegosaurians were part of a branch
of dinosaurs that were the ornithiscans. Right now, what does
that mean, Robert bird hip? Dinosaurs bird hips. So they're

(10:14):
sometimes classified in terms of the orientations of their hip bones.
Right now, it does not mean slender hips or slender
thighs exactly, because if you've looked as Stegosaurus, it's it's
thighs are enormous, it has these enormous hind legs. It's
a meat on the bones. Yes. Now, unlike their ornithopod
relatives such as iguanadons and the duck bill dinosaurs, uh,

(10:38):
they couldn't run on their hind legs. Their hind legs
were far larger than their front legs, meaning that they
these creatures actually sloped forward with their hips higher than
the rest of their bodies, kind of leaning down. Yeah. Oh,
and they also had tall spines at the base of
the tail. They probably helped anchor powerful muscles that helped

(10:58):
it actually lift its four legs up off the ground,
aid and feeding. So whin white couldn't run on its
hind legs. It's it could probably lift itself up and
you know, pull some branches down, that sort of thing.
And those spikes on the back of the stegosaurs tail
have a special name, right. Oh, yes, Now this is
a this is an informal name, but it is informal

(11:19):
even among paleontologists that they'll use it. I've read that
all paleontologists now called the spikes the phagomizer, the thagomizer. Yeah,
this is uh, this is great because this is an
ode to Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon one one in particular,
in which you had a number of caveman or Neanderthals,

(11:40):
you know, the typical Gary Larson Far Side caveman, always
depicting dinosaurs and uh and cave dwelling humans alongside each other. Right,
and one is giving a presentation on the hind quarters
of a Stegasaurus and he's saying, now, this end is
called the thagomizer after the late Fags Simmons, and so
now we call it the thagomizer, which feels appropriate because

(12:00):
it looks like uh an instrument for thagamizing something. The
word thagamizer even fits so well with our Conan motif.
You can imagine Conan saying it. Yeah. And again you
can also imagine Conan wearing some heavy armor into battle
as well, at least, you know, not so much that
he covers all of the muscles, but you know, just
to strengthen him up a little bit. Okay. And indeed,

(12:22):
the Stegasaurs did have these very fascinating plates on its body, right,
And there's actually some interesting debate over what role those
plates played, right, Yeah, Because when you I mean, one
of the things about the Stagasar says, you look at
it and it even even if it's an action pay
a bit of paleo art. You know, there's some sort
of a battle going on. It is hard to really

(12:45):
nail down what the plates are supposed to be doing, right,
I mean the easy thing to say, which you've seen
a Stagasur, it's got these plates poking up off of
its back. Um, you could say, well, of course they're
armor there for protection, and there's no way to rule
out that they might have played some role along those lines.
But also, I mean, imagine a person running into battle

(13:05):
with like sheets of steel sticking straight out from behind
their back. You mean generally you'd want the plates more
oriented along the surfaces of the skin to protect from attacks, right, yeah,
I mean these things were big. They were kind of
arrowhead shaped, were more than two ft or sixty centimeters high,
and and the I mean, one of the reasons for

(13:26):
such confusion even just about the placement of the plates
is that we have many well preserved specimens of the segasurist,
but there's never been one where the plates are still
attached to the skeleton. So there's been a lot of
discussion over how they might be arranged, so that the
vertical arrangement tends to be the one that you see,
the one that is accepted. Even then, it's uncertain if

(13:48):
we're looking at um two parallel rows of these or
there's a zig zagging pattern down the creature's spine. I
think the one layered zigzag is the favored today. Is
now I think out that there were paleontologists that argued
that they were actually in or on the skin more
like armor plating. But again, the popular theory now is

(14:09):
that there's a vertical arrangement. But if they were to
just be purely body armor, it would seem to make
more sense, at least to our our our human minds,
that they would be UH laid across its back like
plate mail, cover more of the body. Yeah, so they
were likely covered in tough horn, but some paleontogists have
theorized that you would have a layer of thin skin

(14:30):
that could have covered them as well, and this would
allow this would have allowed the place to serve as
heat exchangers. And then there's there are others who theorized
that it might have been brightly colored and used for
mating purposes. There's actually a cool fairly recent study to
back this up. At two thousand fifteen Princeton study argue
that stegasaurusmotsi actually featured differing male and female plate arrangements,

(14:54):
and this would certainly back up the mating theory and
also provide some different interpretations of UH stegasarian plating in general. UH.
They also argue that this sort of sexual dimorphism could
be widespread among non avian dinos. It means it's possible
that all three of these different theories are somehow involved.
But but one can imagine a scenario where some sort

(15:16):
of what was originally armor plating becomes increasingly involved in
mate selection and does just get out of control. So
they're just they're sticking up, they're they're less protective. Uh,
they're they're brightly colored. And then you know, millions and
millions of years later, a new species of super intelligent
apes just has a hard time figuring out what it
was all about. Now, when it comes to the tail

(15:38):
of the Stegasaurus, there's there's a lot less doubt about
what it was for. Yeah, it seems pretty clear that
it was used for defense, right, Yeah, everyone's pretty certain
that these were used just like the sort of medieval
morning star weapon that it resembles, that the stegosaurus would
have would have swung this thing around in battle to
protect itself from carnivores. And to one of the cool

(16:00):
things is that we actually have some fossil evidence, fossil
evidence of spike wounds on on on Alosaurus is to
back this up exactly. So the Alosaurus was a predator
that would have been around to prey on the stegosaurus,
and inteen there emerged a really awesome, fantastic example of this.

(16:21):
So inteen, the famous paleontologist Robert Backer, who if you'll recall,
he actually gets a name drop in Jurassic Park. You
remember that little the kid Tim who's following around Alan Grant.
He's like, I read this other book by this guy
named Backer. Yeah, that's him. Spells his name like our
Scott Baker. But h but Robert Backer. So he announced

(16:43):
a discovery ineen that the Geological Society of America that
the fossil remains of an Allosaurus. This predator in a
Wyoming museum showed signs of having been killed in combat,
with the stegosaurus, specifically being spiked to death in the
groin O man crosthagamized to death. There you go that.

(17:05):
If that's not some some con conan the barbarian behavior,
I don't know what is I know. So, what's the
evidence of this? Right? The allosaur skeleton has this deep
conical whole punctured right in its pubic bone. Can you
imagine how strong a blow would have to be to
punch a hole right through the bones of a massive

(17:26):
prehistoric predator. Wow? Yeah, that's some serious punch. Yeah. So
apparently this wound would have left shattered bone fragments and
all kinds of dirt and contaminants in a deep wound
like this, and then it appears what happened is the
wound got infected. So Backer says, quote a massive infection
ate away a baseball sized sector of the bone. Probably

(17:47):
this infection spread upwards into the soft tissue attached here,
the thigh muscles and adjacent intestines and reproductive organs, and
the wound. They are sure that it killed the allosaur
because the wound does show any signs of having healed over,
which is usually a sign that the animal died from
the wound, or maybe just coincidentally died right after receiving it.
But it probably died from this horrible wound, right. So

(18:10):
Bocher is talking about the specific weaponized qualities of the
thagomizer and the stegosaur's tail in general, and he says, quote,
most dinosaur tails get stiffer towards the end, but the
joints of a stegosaur tail look like a monkey's tail.
They were built for three dimensional combat. And the way
I've seen this explained was that Baker's team says, we

(18:32):
often think about the combat behaviors of stegosaurs as in
like they can just sort of wave their tail back
and forth like we see in cartoons, right, I mean
they probably would have been able to wave their tail
back and forth. But Baker and colleagues instead argue that
the stegosaur was not limited to this motion, but could
make these powerful stabbing thrusts with its tail like we

(18:52):
would with a spear or a sword. Oh I love this.
So so it's it's it's not just this idea that
it just has to wave it back and forth, and
it's just kind of a general don't approach me from
the rear because there's there are spikes back there, but
it's more of a strategic weapon that it can use
against the offender. Yeah, it's almost like a spiked arm.
Like it's got three dimensions of freedom of movement. Right,

(19:13):
So so if it gets uh, snuck up on by
an allosaurus. Allosaurs runs up on the stegosaur from behind
the stegosaur, it's not like has its tail pinned down.
Now it can go up and stab the allosaur and
the groin. And that's what happened here. I like how
Baker reminds us that the stegosaurus would not have kept
its thagamizer and sterile conditions. And it also kind of

(19:36):
makes me think, oh, what if it What if it
was quite the opposite. What if this thing was just nasty,
just it just it just dragged its thagamizer through its
own extrements. So it was just this this sharp brutal
of just feces encrusted the instrument of death, that it
would that it would weave back and forth that its enemies. Gross. Yeah,

(19:57):
I mean that that's great. That would have been a
really devious weapon. I don't know if you could have really,
I mean, when you think about it, could they have
had a selection pressure for that if like it wouldn't
immediately kill the allosaur that's attacking it, but would kill
it like within a few days from infection. I don't know.
I don't know. And I mean to to his actual point, though,
you would not have to have a feces encrusted thagomizer

(20:19):
to results in catastrophic infection exactly. No. Yeah, you'd stab
a hole through the bones, leave a bunch of fragments,
you get some dirt in there. Yeah. So, and in
any case, even if it doesn't immediately kill the allosaurus,
it's gonna wound it bad enough that the stegosaur is
probably gonna be able to get away, right. Yeah. Oh
interesting side note. If you look at older illustrations of

(20:39):
the stegosaurus, uh, they'll often be extra spikes on the thagomizer.
Oh yeah, Now everyone tends to agree you're looking at
four spikes, but you you see older paintings where they
have eight. Yeah, And in that paleo are you also
see the parallel arrangement of the vertical plates on the
back instead of the single line arrangement. Another side note
about this fine with the groin stab from the thagomizer,

(21:02):
it also affects an interesting debate over the basic survival
niche of therapod carnivores like Allosaurus. So you've got the therapods,
you know, the Tyrannosaurus type dinosaurs, the two legged walking dinosaurs, um,
these therapod predators. Some have proposed that allosaurs and tyrannosaurs
were actually scavengers primarily, rather than active hunters, and this

(21:24):
wound in others like it inflicted by herbivores on carnivores
seems to me to be pretty good evidence that large
therapod carnivores like Allosaurus were active hunters, right, yeah, because
why else are you gonna thagamize somebody right there? There
would be no reason for a stegosaurus to jab an
allosaurus to death unless the allosaurs was attacking it. YEA

(21:44):
stegosaurus is not gonna walk up and be like, stop
disrespecting the dead, yeah, because because the segasaurus doesn't doesn't
think like that, right, And speaking of thinking, the Stegasaurus
had an extremely small head, a mirror sixteen inches or
forts long. The brain, it's often pointed out, would have

(22:05):
been roughly the size of a walnut. I like this,
but I also like because that's an often cited fact.
The paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter, who's director of the U. S
U Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Utah, has said that despite
the despite the common comparison of the stegosaurus brain to
the walnut, he makes an even more specific comparison, which

(22:26):
is to say, quote, actually, it's brain had the size
and shape of a bent hot dog. I really like
this this interpretation because it kind of implies that all
the Stegasurians were we're deviance. You know, they had a
real bent hot dog of a brain. All right, I
think we should explore some facts and some controversies about
that bent hot dog when we come back from a break.

(22:46):
Thank thank alright, we're back. So we were talking about
the particularly low brain to body ratio that you would
have found in the stegasarians. Right, it's a it's a
crown worshiper. It's got a big weapon, that's got a
tiny head and a tiny, tiny little brain often compared
to a walnut, sort of like a bent hot dog.
In the words of one paleontologist, Why so small though, Well, ultimately,

(23:10):
if you're walking tank, if you're walking Jurassic tank, uh,
how much thinking do you need to do? Right? You're
you're essentially a grazing herbivore. If something attacks you, you
fight back viciously with your thagomizer, but you're not engaging
and probably a lot of rich social behavior. You're not
doing any pack hunting or anything of that nature. You're

(23:32):
not you don't have a like a diverse diet that
you're having to to deal with. So a lot of
the behavioral reasons that you would have a more highly
evolved uh brain are just not present in the Steaga stars.
I know some people throughout history, and will will present
counters to this in a minute. But some people throughout
history looked at the tiny brain and said, wow, that's

(23:54):
so small. How could it even control its body? Right?
Would that even have enough processing power to move its
body parts around? Yeah? Well, this we get into an
interesting theory that that I understand it is less popular now,
but that the idea was that, well, the stegasaurs had
a second brain in its hips to control the movements

(24:15):
of its hind quarters, sort of like a rear steering
wheel and a fire truck. Oh I like that. Yeah,
And now, of course nobody was arguing that this would
have been a true brain, but rather a cluster of
nervous tissue. Uh, the idea of say, neural canal in
the syncrum, and it just would have been a lot
larger in the in the stegosaurs, because the stegosaurs has

(24:35):
such large hind quarters. Yeah, a lot of bones, a
lot of less space between the bones, a lot of
meat on the bones, right, so there's a lot of stuff. Yeah.
So as beautiful as the stegastar butt brain idea is,
because it would be kind of beautiful to find a
creature with a brain in its butt. Unfortunately, it looks
like the evidence did not pan out for the butt
brain theory, and it's not accepted anymore. This hypothesis first

(24:58):
came from the nineteenth century paleon hoologist oath Neil Charles Marsh,
who wrote in eighteen eighty one that the cavity for
the expansion of the neural canal, which is what you
were just mentioning, was a quote, posterior brain case, and
that that's also a good insult to keep in your bank,
you know, posterior brain case. We're getting them all. So
it's like you call somebody a bent hot dog brain,

(25:19):
you call somebody a posterior brain case. But paleontologists do
not believe this anymore, mainly because there's no evidence for it,
and in fact, there's a pretty good reason for thinking
that this cavity was for something else. And I found
a good, clear explanation of this in a blog post
by a Western you paleontologist named Matt wood Dell that
clearly explains what's going on here, and funny enough, as

(25:41):
a side note, in the context of him mentioning this,
was complaining about being featured in a wildly inaccurate Science
Channel documentary in two thousand nine. I wonder what it was,
What is it like? Uh Stegasarian's Walk among Us. I
don't remember the name of it, but he's he's talking
about how he claims that it misleading. He cut his
interview to make it seem like he was advocating this

(26:03):
outdated brain butt hypothesis, and he wasn't. So instead, he
rights that there were actually two different things in the
body of a stegasur that get referred to as the
sacro lumbar expansion, this cavity you're talking about. One is
a swelling of the spinal cord around the pelvis, which
is actually present in most vertebrates and is apparently there
to control motor function. Right. One of the weird things

(26:27):
that a lot of people don't know is that it
is thought that much of your body's motor function, like
the less executively controlled things sort of like automatic continuous
motion like say walking just walking, some of that doesn't
come directly from the brain, but is controlled by central
locomotion function. Like there's a cluster of nervous tissue in

(26:48):
the spinal cord that says legs keep walking unless something
goes wrong. Now, the other thing that potentially gets called
a sacro lumbar expansion. This, this cavity is a real expansion,
a cavity in the acroll vertebrae, or is kind of
a gap in the bones back there. But it's not
unique to the Stegosaurus, and paleontologists are pretty confident that

(27:08):
it was not the side of a brain, but actually
the site of a glycogen body, which is a massive
glucose energy storage, which is still seen around the same
location in bird skeletons today. And of course birds are
the descendants of the dinosaurs that had them. Yeah, I
was reading about this, this theory. This was actually in
um uh In, an older dinosaur text from the nineties,

(27:31):
So I'm not sure to what extent this holds up,
but one possible interpretation was that this could have given
the hind quarters an energy boost when it was I
guess chlaubra in time. Oh yeah, well, uh, obviously that
is one thing to consider. I guess people don't know
for sure yet. I mean when the most recent stuff
I've read, people don't know for sure what the glycogen
body is for even in modern birds. But yeah, interesting mystery.

(27:55):
Another side note, if this discredited hypothesis had been true,
like if there were a second brain in the stegosaurs.
But what would the consciousness of an organism like that be,
like if if it was capable of being conscious, what
would the consciousness of an organism with two separate brains
connected by a single nervous system be Like? Huh would

(28:18):
it be a brain that has not two houses but three?
Would you have a tricameral mind? I don't know, No,
I mean, like, could you, I mean, imagine it for
a second. Would it be that you'd have two minds
in the same body, or would somehow one mind be
split across the two different brains connected by nervous tissue.

(28:39):
I guess I would tend towards the second. But I
also can't help, but but think about some of I mean,
I can't help, but think about Julian James and the
bicameral mind interpretation where you have one half speaking to
the other and uh and yeah, so I kind of
jokingly mentioned the idea of a tricameral mind, but it's

(29:01):
it's one help can't help. But wonder, like, how would
communication among these three regions of cognition, how would they
be experienced as conscious thought? And of course it's ridiculous.
We're talking about this with a stegasaurus, which were multiple
levels pretty far from from from from modern consciousness to

(29:22):
this creature. But but no, it's it's a fascinating idea.
It also makes me think of of the various models
of chakra in um in Eastern and New Age thought,
the idea that you have these different centers of cognition
throughout the body or there's one, right, Yeah, yeah, so

(29:43):
maybe it would sort of be like that. I mean,
I can't help but but but but someone that that
that idea when I'm trying to imagine a brain in
the butt. Okay, let's get back to the tail. Yes, yeah,
I mean, we're we're we're we're headed that way anyway,
we're talking about the the idea of a rear brain.
Let's just head on all the way back to the
thagomizer because here's a here's a fun question that I

(30:06):
don't I don't think i'd really thought about this before,
but it's it's a pretty natural question to ask, why
don't modern vertebrates have weaponized tails like we see with
the stegasarians or with the ankliosaurus, you know, the the
other kind of famous armored dinosaur. It's kind of a
ball tail, right, yeah, kind of like very blunt looking spikes,

(30:26):
but very much this enormous like dwarf and warhammer of
a tail, a little even more conan he maybe. Yeah.
And then among among among mammals, pretty stark mammals, you
had the glyphodonts, which also had a weaponized tail. So
you're saying, like, where are all the thagomizers today? Yeah? Yeah,
because you look around that our our modern verbet organisms,

(30:47):
and you just do not see them. So a two
thousand eighteen North Carolina State University study actually looked into
this because because they think about it, we have all
of these creatures that have horns on their head at
antlers on their head, and they're going around using these
either offensively and some sort of mating behavior against other males,

(31:08):
or they're using them defensively against predators. But that's up
there where the brain is exactly the most pivotal part
of the of the organism. Why are they fighting with that?
For a while now, I've been wanting to do a
whole episode on this question of weaponized heads and why
you would have so so commonly evolved weaponized heads. You're
putting the most important part of your body right out

(31:30):
front as a weapon. Yeah, yeah, why not use the tail?
The tail that is, you know in many organisms that
this is a part that can be lost. It's a
part that is brightly colored or or otherwise ornamented so
that it will attract the attention of predators, and not
the front end, not the business end of the organism. Yeah. So,

(31:51):
so what's the deal here, Well, it's indeed, it's indeed
topic we could probably go into in more depth, but
in this case, the researchers they look for commonality among
weapon tailed four legged organisms, both living in extinct, and
their guiding question was simply like, why don't turtles have
spiked tails? You know, it's a it's a they're big
armored creatures in many cases. Why is there no they

(32:12):
have tails? Why are there no spikes back there? Right? Well,
they determined that these are the necessary factors that you
need in place four weaponized tails to emerge. First of all,
they said, you need to be at least two hundred
pounds or a hundred krams in weight, and next, you
need to be armored and boast a thoracic stiffness enough

(32:32):
to swing the tail and counteract the swing force, So
no windmilling. You know, the stegasaurus is not going to
just spin in circles. It needs to be able to
move it around back and forth, or or at least
to strike and recoil. Right. You can't have like a
you know, a ten foot long arm to hit somebody with, right,
because you wouldn't be able to control it. Right. Yeah,

(32:54):
you need like a base of operations there. Right. And
then finally you need to be a herbivore. And the
reality is that large armored herbivores are rare, and additional
head or tail ornamentation is generally an energy expenditure beyond
what natural selection will support. Uh. So they described the
tales of beasts like the stegosaurus is being kind of

(33:15):
a perfect storm of traits. So which makes them all
the more special. You know that you realize in this
vast history of a varied of organisms and varied defensive forms, uh,
the stegosaurians, the glyphodonts, and Angliosaurus, they have something special
going on totally. The stegosaurs are beautiful, fascinating creatures to study.

(33:39):
But now that we've taken a look at them by chrom,
I think it's about time to get back into the
claim that somebody saw a living stegosaurus and carved it
into a temple in Cambodia. So let's let's go to
this claim. What's up with it? What's going on? Well,
what should we do first, Joe? Should we talk about
the carving itself or should we talk about the location
of the carving? Well, let's set the scene first and

(33:59):
then we'll talk about the carving. Okay, all right, Well,
the place is u is a temple complex known as
Ta prom Uh. This is the place where allegedly we
find a carving of a stegasuris. So it's a temple
in modern day Cambodia. It's a relic of the Camir
Empire and located in its then capital of Angkor. Now.

(34:22):
The Camera Empire lasted from a roughly the ninth to
the fifteenth century see and it ruled the entire met
Kong River valley, but then ultimately declined as empires tend
to do. And there are a number of different attributed reasons.
Uh within with as with the fall of any empire. Um,
it's a complex thing, but historians and anthropologists can't help

(34:43):
but tease various possibilities apart. Right, So one idea is
that you know, you simply had Thai conquests going on
that that whittled them down. Or one idea that's particularly
engaging is the idea that widespread religious conversion, uh, kind
of destabilized things to some extent. Oh, do you know

(35:03):
what the conversion from what to what would have been?
It would have been Hinduism to Buddhism, particularly to uh
Theravada Buddhism for instance. One idea here is that under Hinduism,
the rulers of the Communite empire were divine kings or
dave A raja, but with a conversion to theraved to Buddhism,
they became more mortal. But ultimately there are a lot

(35:26):
of factors to consider here. Yeah, that can undercut your
divine right Huh. Yeah, it takes me back a little
to our our episode on the divine rule of kings
and what happens when when they've outlived their usefulness. Yeah,
ritual regicide, yeah yeah, But ultimately there are a number
of factors to consider here, including like maritime trade. I
saw that come up in h in some papers, including

(35:49):
a paper by anthropologist Miriam T. Stark, who also points
out that Cambodia's ancient histories among the least known of
of Southeast Asia. And this is due to a number
of factors, including civil war and just an increasingly like
colonial tradition of of attempting to understand the history of
another people. But as comparatively little as we might know

(36:11):
about it, they certainly did leave behind some amazing and
beautiful relics of the civilization. Oh yeah, without doubt, Now
I have I've never been to Cambodia, but but I have.
But but I want to because i've I've certainly I've
seen images and I've heard about the famous temp temple
complex of angkor Watt. You've probably seen pictures of Oh yeah, yeah,
these these are beautiful to behold. Uh. It's the nation's

(36:34):
most popular tourist destination. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
as is Ta Prom. Now these uh, these temple complexes,
they would have been Hindo to Hindu temples originally, and
they gradually became more Buddhist and function as this massive
conversion took place within the Commi Empire when was to
prom built, So this would have been built in eleven

(36:55):
eighty six by King Jayavarman the seventh and sadly, I
have to say it's also known today as the tomb
Raider Temple. It was used as a location for the
two thousand one film tomb Raider. The two thousand one film,
which one is that the original Angelia original Angelina Jolie
saw it in the theater, don't remember anything about it.

(37:17):
I looked back at the the IMDb list for it
and it has like a like a number of famous
actors in it. John Void in it? Is that, right? God?
Was he? I don't know. I don't know about John Void,
but because he's I mean he's Angela, you know, Angelina
Jolie's father, so maybe he was in it. But Daniel
Craig was in it, I believe pre James Bond. Oh.

(37:40):
I just looked it up. You know who it has
in it? It's got Ian Glenn, the guy who plays
Jora Mormont on Game of Thrones. Oh, yeah, and it
I believe it also has uh, what's his name, Noah Taylor?
Noah Taylor? Yes, He was another actor who was on
Game of Thrones and has been in a number of
other interesting films over the years. And it all goes
back to tomb Rater. Thank you to m writer. All right,

(38:01):
let's not turn this into tomb Rater to blow your mind.
So the temple, Yes, yes, So I found a nice
ride up on Lonely Planet about the top Rom. I
just want to read one paragraph from it that it
nicely sets the stage. Quote. Top Rom is a temple
of towers, closed courtyards, and narrow corridors. Many of the
corridors are impassable, clogged with jumbled piles of delicately carved

(38:24):
stone blocks, dislodged by the roots of long decayed trees.
Bass reliefs on bulging walls are carpeted with lichen moss,
and creeping plants and shrubs sprout from the roofs of
monumental porches. Trees hundreds of years old tower overhead, their leaves,
filtering the sunlight and casting a greenish pall over the
whole scene. Well, that's beautifully described. Yeah, it makes me

(38:47):
want to go there, But I'm also I'm susceptible to
this kind of setting anyway, and I think a lot
of people are right, Like it keeps showing up in
our adventure movies and video games and all that. I
wonder why we so love the image of the overgrown
jungle temple with crumbling ancient stone archways being consumed by

(39:07):
tree roots and vines. It's it's a singularly beautiful kind
of image and setting for some reason. Well, I can't
help but think there are a number of different things
going on, So the more pessimistic side of me tends
to think with it. Part of it is kind of
like a colonial um like pulp saturated notion of the

(39:29):
like the noble westerner walking among the ruins of fallen
ancient cultures. Well, you could maybe see something like that,
But I think it's equally true of ruins no matter
what culture they're from, right, And you can imagine it's
equally true of old cathedral ruins in Western Europe, yeah,
or just old supermarket ruins here in the States. Like
anywhere I go that I see some sort of ruins,

(39:52):
you know, be they ancient or fairly recent, They're fascinating.
I want to walk inside them and see what's there
and or what's living inside. It's specifically the idea of
the plant overgrowth of like a sacred stone building. You
know that that's like the main elements that are featuring
in in my picture of this in the mind. I

(40:14):
guess maybe it's just something about like maybe maybe it
indicates the folly of human projects. I don't know. Yeah, well,
there is kind of like a memento more aspect to it, right,
this this sort of ozamandi as effect that no matter
how great the structure, it is going to fall with time,
nature is going to going going to flow over it
and take it back. Uh. And there's something like beautiful

(40:36):
and haunting and poignant about all of that. It's like
watching human built structure has become a part of the forest. Yeah.
But then also, I mean we're I am fascinated by
by other cultures, and many of them are ancient cultures.
And therefore to visit a site like this or even
just look at photographs of it, it's kind of like
going back in time. But how far back in time?

(41:00):
It's a good question. Okay, Well, there's not really a
question about when the temple is from. It seems you know,
it's less than a thousand years old, right, right, So
it's being less than a thousand years old. I think
it's about eight hundred years older. So what is the
argument that someone has carved a stegosaurus into the temple
as a decorative motif. And I'll remind everybody here that

(41:22):
you can see the image we're talking about at Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot Com on the landing page
for this episode. It's going to be the central image
for the episode, the carving of the supposed Stegasaurus. Right,
so there's a building, it's got a pillar, was sort
of like a pillar against a wall, and there are
carvings all up and down the vertical length of the

(41:42):
pillar where they're sort of like these these abstract lines
snaking around framing obviously representative carvings that are supposed to
be animals and mythological beasts. Yes, and one of these,
when you look at it, it's kind of it's inside
of a circle, or at least a curved decorative flourish here,

(42:03):
and it appears to be a quadruped. It has a
long tail, and it has one, two, three, four, five,
five or six I think maybe six perhaps bony plates
on its back. It kind of looks like a stegasarian,
and you could even go as far to say that, yeah,
it looks like it could be one of the I

(42:24):
think three varieties of stegasarians that have been found in
modern China. So you know, you don't even have to say, well,
how did they get over from North America? While there
were there are fossil remains of stegasarians from uh, generally
that part of Asia. So I would also add that
it feels a bit silly to attempt to match up
a supposed dinosaur that would have evolved from these forms

(42:47):
across a hundred and fifty million years or so. But
but still we have to You have to admit, when
you look at it, you can say, well, that kind
of looks like a Stegasaurus. I don't buy it for
a second, but I have to admit that looking at
it and imagining it as a stegosaurus is kind of intriguing.
So I was trying to understand the argument that this

(43:08):
is a stegosaurus. I found an article on a creationist
website called Answers in Genesis is that you got. You
gotta keep an eye out for this one, because actually,
when you start googling like evolutionary science topics. Somehow, this
website very often tends to make it near the top
of Google results, like it'll pop up your maybe you're
searching should I mouthwash before I brushed my teeth afterwards?

(43:31):
And then answers you're you're getting answer like, oh, it's
answers in genesis. Maybe I shouldn't trust this. Yeah, they've
got some good s c O game going whatever it is,
so they get up in those Google results. But uh, yeah,
this is a Young Earth creationist website that is going
to pedal a whole lot of pseudoscience about geology and paleontology.
And they've got an article attributed to a writer named
Kenneth Cole empd uh that is defending the idea that

(43:54):
this is evidence of a young Earth, like a recent
creation and humans and dinosaurs living at the same time.
So Coal Rights quote. There are no mythological figures among
the roundels, so one can reasonably conclude that these figures
depict the animals that were commonly seen by the ancient
Khmer people in the twelfth century. That means that only
a little over eight hundred years ago, some dinosaurs were

(44:17):
likely still living in that region of Cambodia. Of course,
this is no surprise to biblical creationists, because we know
from Genesis One that land animals such as dinosaurs and
humans were living together in the beginning, and that representatives
of the land animals e g. Dinosaurs were saved on
the arc to repopulate the Earth after the flood only
four thousand, three hundred years ago. No, I don't want

(44:38):
to give in to excessive, unnecessary mockery, but I think
this is not a tenable position, and we can explore
some of the reasons for that when we come back
from a break. All right, we're back. So, Joe, you
just read this, this passage from this Young Earth creationists
about Noah Noah's ark and uh the stegasarians ward the vessel. Yeah.

(45:01):
I would say that this actually represents one way you
could take if you're going to go with the line
that this carving in this Cambodian temple is actually a
depiction of a stegosaurus. There are a couple of ways
you could go with it, but you've got to start
with the idea that there's an obvious problem here. The
carving is less than a thousand years old. We mentioned
earlier that all non avian dinosaurs went extinct sixty six

(45:23):
million years ago or before that. Well, for the Stegosaurus,
the problem is even worse because it's one of those
that went extinct long before the KPg extinction event took place.
The Stegosaurus genus apparently went extinct during the Late Jurassic period,
roughly a hundred and fifty million years ago, and by
the time of the KPg extinction, Stegosaurus had already been

(45:45):
extinct for almost a hundred million years. So a way
of putting this I've seen quoted before is that more
time separates the Stegosaurus from the Tyrannosaurus rex than separates
the Tyrannosaurus rex from us. So we're talking just a
vast lengths of time that are that are that are
almost incomprehensible for us neager humans right now. If you

(46:07):
want to say, it wasn't a Stegosaurus, but it was
a related stegasaurian, right, some other type of related or
aiski and herb before with with plates on its back
of some kind from the group Stegasauria that may have
existed a little bit later, maybe into the earlier maybe
Middle Cretaceous, but even those probably didn't make it to
the KPg event, which in any case wiped out all

(46:29):
of the dinosaurs except the ones that became modern day birds.
So if you want to believe that it really is
a live Stegasaurus that somebody saw being depicted in the carving, uh,
and that the carving is original, of course there's another
idea that, of course, well, what if it's a more
recent hoax or something. Then I think there are really
two main ways people could go. You could either say

(46:51):
some stegosaurs managed to survive about a hundred and fifty
million million years longer than we thought without leaving any
fossil evidence in the mean time, and we can call
the believers of this hypothesis the cryptid camp. Right, This
is the standard cryptozoology kind of thing. There's some isolated
population of an otherwise unknown creature, right, Yeah, that we

(47:11):
don't we we haven't explored every nook and cranny of
the Earth, and it's in those nooks and crannies that
we might find uh, fabulous or henceforth unrecognized species. The
other one is what we heard from Kenneth Cole m d.
Which is the entire timeline of Earth history is wrong.
The Earth is actually less than ten thousand years old,

(47:32):
and dinosaurs existed alongside most of human civilization throughout history.
We can call this the young Earth creationist camp. And
I have theological problems with that because I think God
would have destroyed all the crooked, hot dog brained dinosaurs
with the flood, and then they would not have been
permitted to board the arc. But that's that's that's my attantion.
Leave your theology aside, Robert, I won't hear of it.

(47:55):
Uh So, I think we can say probably neither of
these is plausible at all. But the creationist the hypothesis
actually has more problems going for it than the cryptid hypothesis. Yeah,
the cryptid hypothesis at least does not require us to
bend and break time. Yeah, before we get into those
I would say, we don't really need to debate the

(48:16):
visual qualities of the image, because even if it looked
exactly like a stegosaurus, this would not be a reason
to think that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time.
But I must point out it does not look exactly
like a stegosaurus. I mean, if you look at it,
you might say, oh, that's a stegosaurus. Because you'd recognize
the plates, right, Stegosaurus had a very small cranium with

(48:39):
no known adornments, and this creature in the carving has
a huge head with the appearance of some kind of
pointed ear or horn on its face. I don't know
exactly what it's supposed to be, but there's a thing
on the face and the head is very large. Stegosaurus
also has a huge tail with spikes, and this carving
has a pretty small tail with no spikes. So to

(49:00):
clear what I'm saying is that nothing about it looks
like a Stegasaurus except that it has four legs and
appears to have these lumps positioned over its back. And
these lumps, by the way, might not even be parts
of the animal. They there's a strong argument that these
are perhaps supposed to be leaves or some other vegetative
detail in the background. Oh yeah, that's true. I mean,

(49:21):
if you look at some of the same carvings from
this area of the temple, other animals are depicted with
sort of like shapes in the background that I think
are just sort of like supposed to be background foliage
or something. Now, it's just another problem that I have
with it. Either the stegosaurus or some stegasarian creature were
to have survived to the point where humans either solid

(49:44):
or just remembered it. They just had like an oral
history of the stegasarians, and it made their way made
their made its way into their art. Why would this
be the lone example of it? Oh? Why would there
not be stegasarians everywhere right where all the other ones exactly?
And and also, if you're gonna look at fantastic creatures
in art from that region, then what about the naga,

(50:05):
the seven headed serpent that you see in various Southeast
Asian traditions, right, I mean, so you're saying, like, why,
why don't we assume that maybe that's based on a
real animal they saw too. Yeah, I think you're they're
really cherry picking a particular beast or fantastic beast and
then saying it is real when they're if you're gonna

(50:25):
let that one through the gates, then you have to
let the Naga. You have to let every fantastic creature
from from Hindu and Buddhist traditions in through the gates
as well. It's only fair let them on the art too. Well,
that's a good point. I think a supporter could say
the it's a Stegasaurus argument. Uh, well, it's got going
for it that the Stegosaurus did exist at some point,

(50:48):
and we don't have evidence that the Naga ever existed.
But we don't have evidence that the Naga ever existed
because what nobody's ever said they saw one, and there's
no fossil evidence. With the Stegosaurus, nobody's ever said that
they seen one in any kind of credible way, and
there's no fossil evidence since a hundred and fifty million
years ago or whenever the particular genus you're talking about
when extinct, so within the period of the past dozens

(51:11):
of millions of years. Actually, the evidential issue is the
same for the Nauga and the Stegosaurus. Meanwhile, uh, there
there's we have no doubt that there were sightings of
of course bores. Uh. And the job and Rhino, which
we discussed in depth in our Rhino Horn episode. The
job and Rhino is is at least if you're used

(51:31):
to just seeing the African varieties of rhino, it is
a weird looking rhino and it it looks a lot
like the creature in this carving. Well, yeah, the creature
in the carving. It's got something strange going on in
its face that looks like it could be an ear
or a horn or something. Uh, and I'm inclined to
think that, Yeah, that could be some kind of rhino horn. Yeah.
So in these again, our real beasts, it's just it's

(51:53):
just they're far fewer leaps and bounds one has to
make in logic to get there. And even if you
were too ignoral the stuff we're saying, this would only
go to support the cryptid argument that somehow this small
population of stegasaur Is or related stegosaurids managed to survive
undetected until at least eight hundred years ago or so,
leaving no other traces that we've ever found. If I'm

(52:14):
being generous, the crypted argument seems at best physically possible,
but just really implausible, Like, I don't see any good
reason to prefer it over a handful of rival explanations
you can come up with, which include, for example, the
carving is supposed to be a bore or a rhino
like we've been talking about. Maybe the carving is a
mythological beast of the imagination that has a superficial resemblance

(52:37):
to something with back plates. And if you just look
on the pillar in the temple, if you look just
like two spaces down, there's another crazy looking mythological beast
that's pretty cool, and it's got all kinds of features
that you don't see in nature. Yeah, this looks like
some sort of like a cross between the lorax and
the and and and the monsters from where the wild

(52:57):
things are. Well, it's sort of it sort of looks like, yeah,
it's like a fawn, but it's wearing like a magistrate's wig.
And nobody's making the argument that this was a real
creature that I have seen. No, but give them time.
Uh So, another possibility, I I don't know that there's
any evidence to support this, but then again, it's probably
more plausible than a crypted thing, is that the carving

(53:19):
is a more recent forgery. I'm not advocating that, but
of course it's possible. Yeah, I think I did see. It.
Brought up the idea that, oh, what if a film
crew did it. Western film crew comes in and maybe
they fake a stegasaurus on ancient ruins, which which seems
like that would be an extreme and a reckless thing
for anyone to do so. I don't know how much

(53:40):
how much credence I give to that idea. Personally, I
don't see any evidence for it at all, except to
say that it would be a less extravagant thing to
resort to than saying that Stegasaurus has survived an extra
hundred million years or and we we haven't even mentioned
this yet geo mythology. Like if you haven't heard our
episode the Mystery of the myth Fleshed Fossil, We discussed

(54:01):
the work of the Stanford historian Adrian Mayer, who has
written books documenting many possible cases where ancient art, mythology,
folk beliefs could have been inspired by ancient people's coming
across confusing geo facts like fossils of dinosaurs and other
amazing extinct animals. So you find a dinosaur fossil, you're
in the ancient world. It looks like nothing you've ever

(54:22):
seen alive today. So maybe it's some sort of monster.
It's a griffin, it's a dragon, it's cyclops and so forth,
and so some ancient stegasaurians, not the Stegosaurus itself, but
related backplated orna. This key and herbivores did live in
this area around China, as you've pointed out, at least
three different stegasaurians, so there's no way to rule out

(54:44):
that this kind of carving could also have been inspired
by somebody finding a mysterious stegasaurian fossil skeleton with backplates,
passing that morphology on through art and folklore, and it
ending up getting carved into a temple wall. Yeah. I mean,
especially if you're digging up lot of stone to build
a giant temple complex. Yeah. Now we don't know which

(55:04):
which of these is correct, but any of them seem
more plausible than huge land dwelling dinosaurs surviving millions of
years after we have any fossil records of them, So
I think the cryptid approach kind of falls apart. Yes. Plus,
I have to think that if dinosaurs were around during
the Roman Empire, they would have wound up in the Colosseum.
There would have been there would have been a Stegasaurus

(55:27):
in the Colosseum battling a gladiator. Well, I mean, yeah,
I mean you go back into the age of emperors
and kings and all that. I mean, they really did
love to get some exotic animals into their into their
menagerie and and trot them around for people to see. Right,
they're countless tales. We could we could do a whole
episode on examples of exotic creatures that were transported across

(55:48):
continents so that royal individuals could look at them and
you know, maybe have them fight another beast. Now, that's
all the cryptid approach, I think. Unfortunately, the argument gets
a lot worse if you try to take the young
Earth approach, because the idea that the humans saw stegosaurs,
because dinosaurs actually existed alongside humans for much of history,

(56:09):
and that history is less than ten thousand years long.
I have to say, I, I you know, sometimes I
think people in the skeptic community have too much fun
harping on the wrongness of stuff like that. Like it
can Yeah, there are lots of people who have deeply
untenable views like the idea of a young Earth, but
it can feel excessive and unnecessary to just like keep

(56:32):
harping on how wrong that is. But at the same time,
I do feel a kind of sadness about all of
the energy that goes into defending views like that, because
it's similar to like the energy that would go into
defending a flat earth approach. It's something that is not
just disagreeing with the majority of scientists about a fact
here or a fact there, but it's sort of undermining

(56:53):
the integrity of the entire scientific enterprise. If you take
a position like flat Earth or like younger, you are
forced by extension to essentially deny everything. Yeah, I mean,
one way that I think about it is I I
will sadly never see a living stegasaurus. But at the
same time, the stegosaurus was real, and that is that

(57:16):
is fascinating and it's amazing, and it it fills me
with with wonder and awe to to to to research
the creature and read about it and see these artistic
depictions of it. Likewise, I will never see a unicorn,
and unicorns never existed, and yet the unicorn images of
the unicorn are beautiful. And when you start reading about

(57:37):
the complex the symbolism of the unicorn, that that is
beautiful and it can bring meaning to your life. And uh,
it's it's no, there's no need to start bending your
reality and bending your your understanding of the world so
that you can make it somehow more real than it
is as if the idea of it and the potency

(57:58):
of the idea is not real it exactly. I mean,
is is it really worth believing in the physical existence
of a unicorn to make you essentially forced to undermine
the foundations of astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, geology, radiochemistry, biology, paleontology, genetics.
I mean, all of these fields are are based on

(58:22):
predictions and consistently produce results that are in agreement basically
with with a picture of an old Earth and an
old universe. And all of these fields not only have
successful predictive theories corroborating the old Universe, the old Earth,
hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution, but they
independently produce new results and overturn old misconceptions that keep

(58:45):
further resolving the clarity of that picture rather than undermining it.
And of course, you know, as we all know, some
of these fields use that picture of the world to
produce technologies that even Cambodian stegosaur advocates use in their
daily lives end up just having to do so much
mental gymnastics to make it work. And you know who
didn't have time for mental gymnastics Stegasaurus. The stegosaurus was

(59:08):
a plain dealer. Yeah yeah, if it's grain, eat it.
If it tries to bite you, stab it in the
groin with sagony. Is it good by crom Al? Right? Well,
there you there you go. Hopefully this episode A a
Minute provided us an excuse to just talk about the
Stegasaurus for quite a while, and we got to discuss
some of these other issues related to crypto zoology, a

(59:33):
Young Earth, creationism and um and just a little bit
of Cambodian history. Again. You can find the key images
that we're talking about here at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. On the landing page for this episode,
you'll also find blog posts and links out to our
various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.
Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex

(59:56):
Williams and Tary Harrison. If you would like to get
in touch with us to let us know feedback about
this episode or any other to suggest a topic for
the future, to just say hi, let us know who
you are, and while you like the show, you can
always email us at blow the Mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of

(01:00:24):
other topics. Does it, how stuff works, dot com b