The Cambodian Stegosaurus

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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.

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 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 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

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 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, 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,

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, 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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.

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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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? 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 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 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 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.

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

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

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 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

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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 other topics. Does it, how stuff works, dot com b