The King-sized World of Gigantism

but it's it's not. I mean, it's a little inconvenient. I do bump my head a lot and forget a lot of things as a result. But but it's it's not. It was a little more than I would just I would just have terminal brain injuries from running into things. Yeah. Is My family would say, it looks like you got some Dutch in you, Dutch because the Dutch are tall. Well, there you go. But some people are taller than others, for some people and for many things. Uh, we're really

getting into the area of gigantism. We're getting into areas where it's amazing, into areas where it's it's kind of sad, but well, And keep in mind too that humans are already considered megafauna to some degree, right, Like we're pretty much dominating the mammal um species here, So when you think of the ability to grow even larger, it seems a bit odd, but it does happen. Um. This is known as acromegaly and uh. It is usually a disorder

of the tuitary gland. Usually there's a tumor that grows there and it causes UM the body just to continue growing, particularly in puberty when you are growing anyway, so your bones get very very large, a lot of human growth hormone pumping out, increasing the bone sizes, which of course makes the body bigger. This isn't corrected, which we're gonna talk about in a minute. Again, you actually end up having or or organ omegaly, wit which case you have

the organs getting bigger in size too. And yes, you end up with an individual that's very tall or can be very tall. Not everyone with this condition ends up becoming a legit giant, right, particularly if you get this

condition as an adult already. So which you find is that, like, for instance, your tongue starts to swall get very large, and that can lead to a host of problems, problems like hypertension, high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep atna, breathing and stops during sleep, carpal tunnel syndrome UM and then and then again as as organ omegaly, hits sets in even more problems, you know, especially a higher incidence of heart disease. So sadly you see these a lot of these individuals,

they they they are giants. They become they reach these this great stature and uh and especially with with the individuals that have have a gigantism that involved themselves and in the entertainment industry, we end up getting this, uh, this grandiose vision of them as just superman, you know, strong men. And in many cases they are very strong individuals.

But but later in life, uh, it often takes a real toll on them, right, because you think about all of that blood that needs to be pumping to all those now oversized organs. It is very streshful in the body. And when you talk about superhero component of that, I instantly think of Andre the Giant. Yes, uh, Andre Rusumov,

the wrestler actor Frenchman. Uh. Yeah, he only lived to the age of forty six, but he was seven ft seven ft tall uh and five pounds at the end he was he chose not to be treated uh and died of cardiac complications from the disease. But he's definitely a legend as far as modern day TV and film era giants goes. Oh yeah, I always think of him in The Princess Pride. Yeah, because he's a wonderful movie. Yeah,

wonderful movie. He was great in that he was He was a larger than life character both on the screen and inside the ring and outside where he he allegedly had just an amazing um ability to drink alcohol. Could just I'm sure he want most of those contests out of style. And you still have individuals with gigantism that are involved in um entertainment and pro wrestling today. Pro wrestling alone, you have you have Paul White who wrestles

as his big show. You have this guy, there's an Indian gentleman by the name of of Dolph singh Arana who wrestles as the Great Kaleigue, various other individuals. So because you have stature like that, inevitably some guy with a few bucks is gonna come up to and be like, hey, have you ever considered being an entertainment? Um? And then you have. There are other characters of note as well.

There's a there was a man by the name of Maurice Killett who was who was a Russian born French professional wrestler who wrestled under the name the French Angel. And he died back in again in fifty four. Um. There's a man by the name of Rondo Hatton who was an American actor. He died in six but he became really iconic is playing these uh, these grotesque thug type characters and a lot of old B movies and

and he was he was rather iconic. In fact. Um, I believe the character of Shrek is actually based on his general physical appearance, because he had a very brutish look to her, you know. Um. And then of course there's Richard Kyle who played Jaws, and then James Bond movies, the old James. Yeah, he's he's still with us um um over seven ft tall. I think he's he's shrunk a little, just with age, you know, you kind of

end up stooping over a bit. But but the list of other individuals who've who've who've had at least treated acromegay is pretty interesting because it includes some surprises. For instance, you were surprised at Tony Robbins. Yes, actually yeah, I said that. I thought I just thought it was his oversized ego that I was perceiving. Yeah, you just thought it who was larger than life? And because he is, and he is he's six ft seven um poet Walls Stevens.

This surprised me. He was only six three So it wasn't you know, as an as noticeable a case of gigantism. But it was a pretty tall individual. This is a guy who wrote the poem The Emperor of ice Cream. Another works um the the Roman emperor um maxim Maximinus, the first who reigned from two thirty five to thirty eight. According to um Um Herodians Historia Augusta, he was eight foot six inches in height. But that's somewhat doubtful that he was actually that tall. But but still, um, there

was a giant from from the the history books. And uh and and really you can it look like a whole list of individuals you can you can find out. Yeah, I wanted to mention Sandy Allen. She was the world's largest or tallest woman at seven seven and one quarter inch. And she actually was a wonderful educator and and um a lot of her education materials centered around differences she was. She was definitely trying to promote that with other kids

and respecting other differences. So um, So, a lot of these individuals may have made a buck or two off of their stature, or it may have provided them with opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise had. But but a lot of them were really fascinating and successful individuals in their own right that had nothing to do with their height. Maybe Wall of Stevens um poetic gifts were you know, if he was a shorter man, he would have had them. But but I think that's a difficult argument. It's hard

to say that's right. But as you mentioned, there is treatment for this. One of it is one of the treatments is surgical removal of the actually get in there and remove the thing that is causing all of this and checked growth. Right, And Sandy Allen actually had that when she was twenty years old, but nonetheless, at the age of fifty three, she still passed away because again at that point, you know, she had reached such a height and her organs were so large that it did

attack her body. And then there are other methods of treating it um that you can also use medication to halt the hormone and and then also some individuals undergo

radiation treatments as well. Yeah, and we should probably I don't know if we mentioned that before, but because of the tumor on the tutary gland, what is happening is you're getting an excess amount of growth hormones that are shooting out, so that that is the root cause, right, So, and so you can't take medication to to check that, but but in many cases they often just go for the more you know, certain cure. I guess um. But we're not just here to talk about humans that are large.

We're we're also here to talk about animals that became

true giants. And of course, when you're talking about gigantic animals, you can't help but to think of our friends, the dinosaurs, Yeah, immediately, right, And most of the reason for that is because we don't really um get to see small bones of dinosaurs because they don't preserve the well, so the bones that we see exhibited in museums usually belong to the behemoth, So immediately we think about these guys um which they definitely had gigantism um or I guess you could say

in the natural world at that time. For the composition of the elements in the world that they were living in, this made most sense for them, some some animals depending on their resources and energy. Yeah, and there's a theory too that it was basically an arms race of size, because the larger the organism is, the fewer predators it has. Because you're, you know, this gigantic, hulking beast, uh not everything is going to be able to really eat you

or stand a chance of even taking you down. It's gonna come and like pulling your leg and you need to stop on it. So there's an evolutionary advantage to uh to to having a larger body and a larger statue, even if it comes with with certain negatives as well, such as obviously you have to eat more food, and then that also affects uh the rate at which young developed,

and in various other approcreative necessities. Yeah, and it said that sura pods were particularly um at an advantage for this because they could have you know, a decent size of of of young uns, and they could protect them all and then they could pretty much rapidly grow to these very huge sizes. And again another advantage of that is you can stomp out the competition literally literally. Yeah,

they're actually um. From a Scientific American article called is there any evolutionary advantage to gigantism um, They these sore pods are actually called the first true giants of the land. And they were small headed, long necked, that's probably what you're thinking of when you think about a sore pod. And they appeared at the beginning of that time, about two hundred million years ago UM and uh, some of

these predatory dinosaurs exceeded one ton. Towards the end of the Jurassic ministre pods reached ten to twenty tons, and some weighed as much as twenty or excuse me, fifty tons, and a few may have exceeded a hundred tons and a hundred and fifty feet in length, which is actually rivaling um, some of our largest modern whales because because as we've mentioned before, the blue whale is still the largest organism um the large certainly. Yeah, that's tricky too, Yeah,

because we discussed in our Largest Organism episode. Um, depending on how you defined organism, you can actually get into some even larger things that are not vertebrates, but but certainly the largest vertebrate that has ever lived, the blue whale. Um. So, and of course you think about tyrannosaurs dominant meat eaters of the late cretitious area, or scavengers whatever, the hot

theory of the moment happens to be exactly. They grew slowly until they were teenagers and they were marauding in moby um, and then they went through a growth spurt, becoming five times larger in just seven years. So again we're talking about I mean, the period of growth of here is is pretty amazing. Um, when you become five times larger. If you think about a teenager right now, they maybe have a couple more inches that they're gonna lop on, but they're certainly not going to become twenty

ft tall. Yeah, it's it's just crazy to think about the amount of Like in the Milk podcast we mentioned about about baby blue whales taking on like three pounds of body weight a day as they feed off their mother's milk. So um, Yeah, the amount of growth taking place with these gigantic organisms is just incredible. Yeah, and I wanted to to mention a couple of other advantages

to being so large before we talk about disadvantages. Your metabolic rate decreases with increasing size, so for instance, um, you only need to take in five percent of if you're an elephant, for instance, you only need to take in five percent of your own weight, whereas a shrew or a mousee needs to eat more than its weight

each day to survive. Yeah, there's a there's actually you'll hear that that that stat There are out a lot to when people make that make the point that the shrew is the most ravenous creature on the planet because it's just it has to eat so much as he

constantly to survive. And they actually made a movie ages that really horrible be movie that they they lampooda mystery signs the thousand called the Giant Shrews or was it the Killer Shrews, I can't remember, but the basic thing was that they had these giant shrews who were running around there were the size of dogs that of course

we're dogs with really bad costumes, breaped over them. And then the idea was that the shrew is just incredibly dangerous and if we're ever ever able to reach the side of like a dog, then they would be the most dangerous things ever. But of course this we've just mentioned here, the appetite really plays into their size. That the shrew became larger, they would be playing the violin under our tree, having a couple of grapes and being like, hey guys, totally chilled out. Um, was this made in

the fifties. Yes, there seems to be a real obsession with gigantism during that time period. Oh yeah, you saw they were giant scorpions, giant spiders, giant ants them what was the movie ants? There was a lot of fun these to show that on on the on the the cable channels back in the day when they were like think grandpap Monster hosted a Saturday morning Monster movie show and remember that, and they would play that, They would play Islanded Dr Moreau, these studies type of films. But

the giant ants, all all these things. Yeah, well these were also easy animals to implement in a B movie because if you have a giant ant, all you needed to just just get some ants in there. Uh, do some you know, mess with perspective, uh dubby on an actual ant and just make it look larger, although inevitably

they always have a puppet of whatever animal. Yeah, you need the head which is with the pincher so it can grab a lady and picture exactly better than that, just throw in the ants and have some people react to it. It's like early c g I. Alright, So, so other than being featured in b phones, why might

you not want to be a giant? H Really, if you are a dinosaur, for starters, all that mass that that allows you to stomp others out actually kind of hems you in because you can't fly, you can't run, you can't climb or burrow into the ground to take cover. So your your whole defensive tactic is, hey, I'm this

hulking thing and you can't take me down. But then say you have a pack of velociraptors that come around and they're like, actually we can because we can work together and we're patient, and you're not going anywhere exactly exactly. You're a very large target force, and because they're at the top of the food chain, there are less of them, and the chances for extinction actually become greater as well. Right, large organism having to depend on a lot of other

organisms underneath it, even if most of them are just grass. Uh, and then you wipe that out and there you go. Yeah. Um. And this was really interesting to Sarah de Charred, Doctoral Canada at North Carolina State has studied the plants available during the age of dinosaurs, and she thinks that during the Jurassic, when vegetation with fibrous and low nutrient, it would make sense to have a lot bigger bell eas really what we're talking about here, because they acted a

huge vat for fermentation. But she says that when flowering plants with high nutrient contents came along, it was actually a boon too smaller dinos because I gave them an evolutionary advantage because that was just the hit that they needed. Um. So it's kind of interesting to look at it that way. And I also wanted to mention too, although not dinosaurs, there is a tale of Paleozoic dragonflies that may have existed three million years ago. And how big were these things, uh,

wingspan of two and a half feet. And they think this is still a bit of a theory, but this is owing to the planets. Then oxygen makeup of more than so it was these auction levels that actually spawned this dragonfly. Wow. Well that's interesting to imagine, especially during mating season when they do their thing, you know. Yeah, I mean, can you imagine it would be debauchery if today we looked at the window and saw in such great detail and such largeness the mating. Yeah, dragonflies are great.

I love him. But you know what I love even more in this Uh. And we're moving forward a bit here from from dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs. I love them as a kid, but you kind of get I kind of got used to it at an early age. It's the idea that it used to be giant lizards, even though just as a tangent, I had to I was trying to convince, um, um, I have a kid that, like a four year old that I watched and over

a babysitting Uh. He had some toy dinosaurs and I'm and I and I told him it's like, you know those are real, right, And he's like, no, it's just a toy. It was like that's heartbreaking. Um, he'll learn. But but but I got used to the idea pretty early on. Yes, there were giant dinosaurs at one point or another, and for some reason, giant mammals that and and giant birds that was always a much more exciting idea to me, Like it it felt newer, I guess you know, it wasn't as um as uh as covered

in the childhood science literature. So so anytime, even today, when I see like a like a picture of a giant sloth or or or certainly these giant birds, I'm I'm really impressed. The giant birds are really kind of heartbreaking though, because so many of these where we're not even prehistoric creatures, they lived until very recent time. Yeah, I was gonna say, let's talk about these more modern

terrestrial animals, which gigientis um. Yeah, there was a species of bird called the host eagle um that reached a height of eight point five feet. It was a fierce predator that lived in New Zealand and U Sadly, it went to extinct about five hundred years ago due to human hunting and habitat encroachment, which again is just kind of sad because it's like, oh, we almost reached the point where we could have seen these and and photographed them and maybe conserve them, but they they blinked out

just a little too soon. And then there are others. There's the the elephant bird, which was ten feet tall that lived on Madagascar and it uh it went on sometime in seventeenth century and they think. Uh. There's also of course the moa, which was the great flightless bird of New Zealand. Uh and it probably went away about seven hundred years ago when the may always wiped them out because they're just they're these big birds. They've evolved to to to pretty much do whatever they want within

a limited environment. But then suddenly you have an invasive organism around. You have humans who are like the velociraptors we mentioned earlier. They're smart, they're patient, they're cunning, and they know that they can work together to take this animal down and eat it. And then since it's a larger organism, um that you know, they're fewer of them. Uh reproduction time plays into this as well. They're much more easily wiped out. So everyone feasts on moa for

a little bit and then there's no more. Yeah. I mean, it is mind boggling to think the amount in different types of animals that have gone extinct um, not just because of manning causes, but even something that I believe it was during the Order of Vicinian period. They're supposed to be like a just a proliferation of different species that were then wiped out at the end of that period. But anyway, it just doesn't boggle the mind to try to imagine all different types of flora and fauna. But

not all the giants went away. We stall some rather gigantic animals around today. They're worth mentioning. Oh yes, the colossal squid. Yes, and we're we're doing another podcast on intelligence of cephalopods um, so there's gonna be even more squid content there. But the colossal squid reaches some pretty phenomenal links. Yep. Actually, the squid was accidentally caught by New Zealand fisherman in two thousand and seven, weighing in

at one thousand pounds and spanning fourteen ft. Here's something that really, um, kind of rattles me a bit. It's i uh, nearly ten inches in diameter, so imagine nearly a foot long eye staring back at you. Uh So that I think, particularly rattling from squid. Eyes are amazing, um, especially when you're talking about something that big and the biggest eye of any animal really very similar to our I actually um, and we'll talk more about that in

our gigant or excuse me, in our cephalopod podcast. So when we're talking about things like like the colossal squid and and also various other giant animals that live in the deep, we're getting into the area of deep siege gigantism um. Particularly you see this uh in invertebrates, crustaceans, uh and other creatures where they'll they're they'll have cousins that live in fresh water or shallow or not fresh water but shallower waters and uh, and they'll be much smaller.

But in the deep and the cold, cold deep, they grow toal enormous size. And part of it is the cold. Scientists think they say that you look at the at the temperature and body body size, and the bigger animals have smaller surface to volume ratio, so they can more effectively conserve body heat in those cold environments. So would be to their advantage to grow bigger. Yeah, it's kind of like having a fur coat undersea fur couch. Yeah, it's just and there's more of me. So I got

that way. I can I can go down into these lightless, chilly depths and it doesn't really affect me that much. Where if I were this splender little creature than you know, not so much. There's this idea too, that we haven't quite even gotten a grasp of how large some of these creatures are. This is from Discovering News. Um It says that squid beaks found in the stomachs of sperm whales have actually dwarfed the beak on the Colossal Squid Museum specimen that we just spoke of, suggesting that even

more colossal squids work in the cold, dark deep. Yeah, we just haven't seen them yet. I mean, for the longest we had, we had never managed to capture footage of a live giant squid. And I remember the day that they that we actually had had that footage when a few years back and suddenly was on YouTube everywhere, and it wasn't really even that impressive of footage, but it felt kind of heartbreaking because you're like, oh, you know,

there's a mystery that we can check off the list. Yeah. Yeah, although I mean incredibly cooled be able to verify right. Um From the same Discovery News article by Jennifer Viegas. They were actually talking about, or she was actually talking about how these creatures may have grown to such a large size too because of the lengths that they have to go to, UM to find food. When you're a small creature, UM, even if you're eating a lot that your kingdom, um, your your domain in which you hunt

for prey is relatively small. But when you receive larger size, you're having to really really go out there and hunt. You're covering a vast underwater territory, which may be why the Humboldt squid have have shown up Monterey Bay and in various different places. They're still trying to figure out why. What's the explanation for that? But um, but it does play into morphology for for sure. All Right, and we're

gonna take a quick break. But when we get back, we're going to talk about, um what what could be horrific to some people something called a hissing cockroach. Um if the madagas art hissing cock roach and it's quite large, talk about that some other insects. All Right, we're back, UM, We're headed to the Madagascar for correct is Madagascar is one of places that you you see a lot in and UH in dealing with unique organisms, because you're talking about an island that is uh that is that is

set aside from from the rest of the continent. And of course this is where you encounter lemurs, the only place you encounter lemurs outside of a zoo. Uh and the lemur would not necessarily be able to survive elsewhere, but here they have evolved and uh and and fill the niche rather nicely that doesn't exist elsewhere. Yeah, let's talk about that. That's that lack of predators and competition that drives some the size of these creatures. And this

is called island gigantism. It is a biological phenomenon um that that is present for animals that live on isolated islands, and they tend to grow bigger and bigger again because they don't have anything running after it um and because everything is pretty plentiful, right, it's like a corny copia of food out fair for them. Yeah, I mean it's I mean it really, it comes down a lot of it comes down to them living in a protected environment.

In many of these cases, you have an ecosystem that is set aside from the rest that whatever, what other kind of predators are roaming around on the continent at large, they're not necessarily here, or that the predators that are here, um, they don't have access to the same prey. So you end up with a kind of microcosm into itself where

different rules end up applying. Yeah, and according to Pilliontologes for ginny million, uh, island species evolved faster than mainland species, particularly over shorter time intervals of years to thousands of years, So you really do get to see that the proof of the putting much faster in these environments. One example of an older island giant that I ran across in

this to Discovery News article. Um but uh, five to three million years ago, you had a creature um known as the Miraculous Rex, which lived on the small island of Minorca, and it weighed about twenty six point four pounds. It had no enemies, and it was essentially a giant bunny rabbit. Oh, I've seen pictures of this kind of like Night of the Leapist, except the other the other thing. Not only did it grow larger, but it grows larger

and has no need of predors. It doesn't need a hop, it doesn't need ginormous ears with which to hear everything. It doesn't need big eyes with which to see everything, So it kind of loses those features. Just kind of like an aging prize fighter or something, you know, just lets it the gut go and it no longer has the reflexes it needs to fight because it doesn't need them. But still it's a pretty impressive creature that you had. Essentially, rabbits I will I will say that the photo I

saw it did it did kind of look puggy. It didn't look like it had been, you know, screwing around that much because it did one like from an evolutionary point of view, it's like I don't need you know, if you if you're not working out, you don't keep the muscles. And it's kind of the similar thing as evolution rolls out, you know, uh, if you don't need

those ears and then eventually you're gonna lose them. Yeah, you can tell that it abandoned its bofe uh Managus scar hissing cockroach, as I mentioned before, found in at a guess car office of Face coast of Africa, the largest living cockroach and the only known insight capable of hissing by forcing air through its spiricles. These are breathing holes rather than rubbing their appendages together. And happy do

these guys good? About three inches long by one inch, which doesn't seem entirely huge until you actually see one in person. Yeah, I've heard of people traveling there. And uh, you know, you're you're you're sleeping through the night and then your cell phone rings and you pick it up and you're actually picking up a hissing cockroach answering it. And since you're in a you're not really all that awake.

You're not having like a five minute conversation with the abdomen of a cock right, and little do you know that hissing sound is actually mating calls, so you're being wooed? Yeah? Yeah, um, actually do. Atlanta has some hitsing cockroaches that they'll bring out every once in a while. It's a frequent a frequent exhibited zoos. I don't know if they're easy to shift or easy to keep or he's gonna handle. They're

not gonna bite you, and they're huge and grows. Some little boys just good guy got yeah yeah, and the girls they love them too, um and uh yeah, the males have horns too, so it makes them look really interesting. Now, if they flew, that would be that would be my night. But that's another thing. You get big like that, you don't need wings, right. Well, that's the other thing too.

There's the limits to morphology here and that. Um, you know, if it's to your advantage to get larger and larger, great, you're going to do it. But once it inhibits your ability. So if if the cockroach was a creature that flew in the first place, um, and I know there are some but mainly cockroaches do not fly. But let's say, for instance, a bird, if it became so large it was on the precipice of not being able to fly anymore than it would. That's that's where the constraint comes.

That's where the morphology of the outer limits of it just end. Yeah. We mentioned some of this in our Godzilla Barbie King Calling episode where we talk about giant organisms and uh and certainly the larger it's it's worth remembering that. Say, take take a beetle. You know, even like a fairly large beetle, it's a in a sense, it's a physically perfect thing. Like everything about its proportions and its size is perfect for the size at which

it exists. If you were to to somehow magically in large beetle, it wouldn't be able to function at a larger size because it's exoskeleton, right. This is more than just armoring. It's more than just a tough, shiny jacket that the beetle wears like this is a structural skeleton that that holds in its insect guts and uh and uh and and and protects it from the outside world.

And if you were to increase the size of a beetle, then you also have to really increase the thickness of the exoskeleton, and it just becomes an impossible equation rather quickly. It's just amazing, which whine you don't see really large organisms outside of the dark crystal that have a large, you know, armor like exo skeletons. Well, and to me though, it's just so such a testament to nature and how cool it is that it can adapt to that in

the first place. Um that dwarfism or gigantism can take place, the shrinking or the increasing like that. Um I also wanted to mention the giant Wetta of New Zealand Uh. It's genus name is dina Krita and it's Greek for terrible grasshopper because they look at the size of your hand right now, that is how large this little booger is. Um. It is among the heaviest insects on Earth, winging three times more than a mouse, and apparently in captivity, if you offer it a carrot, it will eat it. I

think I've seen pictures of that. Yeah, Allison, actually are the science editor Alson Ladermilk sent us a photo of That's that's where I had seen that. It was pretty funny. I thought she kept it could be. I don't know if she said, I'm assuming that this little guy could actually have a conversation with you, And remember thinking, yes, indeed, I think he could. Yeah. Um, we mentioned New Zealand again, the giant birds. It was very much a bird world

for for the longest. So again, you get into situations where you have an island or or a large body body of land that is set aside from the rest of the world, and you see a certain amount of competition fall on the wayside, and and then you can see some very unique organisms, very large organisms grow to dominance and it is this Wonderland effect. Actually, there's there's something called the Wonderland effect um in which is alluding to Alice and one pill makes you larger, one pill

makes you smaller. Well, now I'm thinking of the song one Pitt. It is a great truck. But yeah, Alison Wonderland, she she shrinks, she increases um. In nineteen sixty four, biologists J. Bristol Foster studied insular gigantism in dwarfism, and he came to the conclusion that rodents, for instance, tend towards gigantism, while carnivores uh legama forests like rabbits and hairs and rto dactyls, deers, hippos and other even towed

ungulates are more likely to become dwarfed um. And overall, amongst mammal species that colonized islands, big ones have a tendency to shrink, while small ones are able to get larger. So again it's like it's a new world and the occupants of this new world have to change their ways. And again I'm sort of personifying evolution here to a certain extent, and which for which I to some of you do apologize. But but yeah, they find themselves in this new world and they realize they're gonna have to

change their ways to survive. They're gonna have to cut the budget or they're gonna have to ramp up their activity. And uh, and so you see the smaller animals becoming bigger,

the bigger animals having to really cut down and become smaller. Yeah, and it really they really haven't quite figured out what drives um some species becoming larger and some remaining the same, or some becoming smaller on these islands, because they don't know if it's because the species arrived um there and there was already another species quite similar to it, a snake, for instance, and uh, it decided, okay, it's best here

if I just shrink or I stayed the same. One of the things that really surprised me when we were researching this was the situation with the Komodo dragon, which we generally think of as an example of island gigantism. It's the largest lizard we have. It's a ten ft

long way three pounds. Back when the show was with that stuff to blow your mind or stuff in the science claud that did the Komodo dragon episode that may have been I think from I think it was from the last Yeah, it may have been a lad episode. But at the time I remember reading all these amazing things with the Kumodo dragon. You just keep thinking, oh,

it's a giant, it's a dragon. But there's the theory that this is actually a case of the island dwarfism because Komodo dragons they live on the Isle of Komodo U in Indonesia, but they also live on the on this other island called Flores, And on Flora's they have they've found fossil evidence of a much larger um dragon, if you will, that would have been twenty three ft long and would have weighed third over thirteen hundred pounds.

And so the idea is that the Komodo is the the island dwarf of this amazing creature, which just turns everybody's thinking on it. Right, it's very interesting. It doesn't make the Komodo dragon anything less awesome or any less they living uh dinosaur in a sense, it's still a giant wizard. Yeah, yeah, you can't take that away from it. You never try and take anything away from Komodo track,

that's right. It'll take your toe all right, So there's just a nice second introduction to the world of gigantics. I'm certainly we could sit here all day and and and talk about other well known or less well known giant animals. Certainly we didn't say anything about gallops, tortoise or Japanese spider TRAbs. These are all wonderful animals in their own right and worth looking into. Definitely worth looking at a couple of pictures, especially that Japanese spider crab.

It's all legs. Um. Yeah. So, and we will talk about dwarfism another time. Dwarf is ms. That is certainly a podcast topic onto itself, is and especially if you talk about that human beings and when why are some people smaller in stature in cases of actual dwarfism among humans and other similar situations. So like that this old podcast and human morphology throughout the ages from and what extent is being tall? Uh, you know, not all that ideal anyway, Maybe we should be shorter. I don't know.

You can pick the apples really easily, so like, I mean, you have that advantage over me. Yeah, but I'm not that good at climbing the tree if I was smaller, you know, I would be a little lower to the ground that are able to climb out there and get them anyway. True, yeah, all right, well let's call the robot over here and listen to some male all right, we have a couple of bits of listener mail here that come to us from fans on Facebook. So so I guess it wasn't really email. It was more fan

messaging through the Facebook. It was communication communication. Um, this is apparently how the young kids are communicating now. Anyway, they're not using their email accounts, right, this is what I hear on the street. This st I heard this morning. Well, anyway, Abigail rights and says, I laughed when I saw your screen podcast because I put your podcast on in the car on the way home from daycare to keep my

infant from screaming. I think it might be Robert's voice because it also worked when he did a voice for the Stuff you Should Know Shark Week Special, which just published a couple of weeks ago, and go check that out. Was Josh and Shuck. Anyway, I digress. When I was in girl Scout camp, we used to play a game called roller Coaster. They line us up at the edge of the field and when the council yelled go, we'd take a deep breath and start running and screaming at

the same time. You kept running until you couldn't scream anymore. The point of the game was to get the furthest As a kid, it was such a joy to be given the freedom to unleash the screen. But the true value of the game became apparent when I became a counselor. Not only was it an amazing way to get out the frustration of managing pen kids seven, but it also tired them out, making them easier to manage. It wasn't until then that I realized one of the counselors always

won the game. New listener and always enjoy your podcast. Thank you for helping me make my ride home more peaceful. That's awesome. So that's kind of like a form of primal screen therapy. And I'm I'm glad that my voice has this effect on this job. Yeah, just maybe we'll record a track of me just uh, you know, saying nursery rhymes. I was going to say, you could you

could do that. It could be like Jack and Jill went up the Hill or not necessarily like that, but yeah, yeah, I saw a YouTube video where a kid had the same reaction but to but to uh to rap lyrics by Piggy where seen that. It's pretty pretty amazing because it's like hillbe screaming his head off and then they start playing some biggie and it just just chills that look so um but again, probably not good for the

kids u um vocabulary. Later on, maybe that's what he's going to there his nuance, So it depends what he's aiming to do in life, I guess. We also heard from Nathan on Facebook Nathan Ryton and says, I have really been enjoying your podcast. I just listened to the horror episode. I too saw the Google VHS cover art at an age when those movies uh were out of my reach. Maybe it was my age or personal phobia, but I couldn't get out of get it out of

my head. And again, for those of you were just tuning in, this was a nineties video cover that showed out grotesque little grimlin monster coming out of a toilet with like razor teeth and fancy suspenders. It was really stupid but but kind of mortifying anyway. Nathan that the fancy suspenders, well yeah, that's what makes it so ridiculous why we were in suspenders and why are they so clean?

You just came out of the toilet. Um Anyway, Nathan continues, I went through a stage in my life where I always brought some sort of weapon into the bathroom with me. I think it also has to do with the fact that everyone feels vulnerable with their pants around her ankles. Makes for a slow getaway. I've told friends about it, but usually get the you're alone there, look keep up

the great work. So indeed, I when I brought up googlies, it was because it did kind of traumatize me and did make me think twice about sitting on a toilet for fear that a suspended monster would come out of the whole and and eat me. And uh, I never even thought to bring a weapon to the toilet with me. I'm glad I didn't fall into that pattern. But you know, there's actually, uh there, there's a lot of research about this pinker effect and evolution about how you have to

feel safe. Obviously, I mean, it makes a lot of sense if you're going to avoid your bowels. Yeah, it's not something we can do on the move, really, I mean maybe you can train yourself to it, but to do it, but but generally not so much. That's right. You never knew when when a saber tooth tiger is

around the corner of Google's and your toilet. Yeah, all right, Well, hey, if you guys have something to share with us, if you have a particularly favorite example of gigantis um, be it an amazing prehistoric animal, an amazing living animal, or some individual out of wrestling or entertainment, or or just just general history, but we'd love to hear about them. I can think of one or two famous giants off hand for history that we didn't mention, but I'll leave

our listeners to come up with those, guys challenge. Yeah, you can find us on Facebook again, where we are stuff to blow your mind. You can also find us on Twitter, where our handle is blow the Mind, and you can always drop us a line at blew the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com