Original airdate: April 9, 2019
This week, we’re joined by Blake de Pastino from the YouTube channel PBS Eons to talk about how plants, animals, and geologic events used to be so… huge. There are still blue whales and massive natural disasters, but the days of the Megalodon have passed. So were those big tunnels in South America really dug out by giant ground sloths? Where is the largest impact crater in the Solar System? And did humans really huddle under the skeletal remains of the giant armadillo-like Glyptodon?
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While you’re at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen
[Truth or Fail]
https://natural-history.uoregon.edu/collections/web-galleries/saber-toothed-salmon
https://cals.arizona.edu/classes/ento596c/topic/session9.html
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10420940.2016.1223654?scroll=top&needAccess=true&
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/03/28/paleoburrows-south-america/#.XFC3uc9Khxz
http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/044_Paleotocas_ING.pdf
[Ask the Science Couch]
Glyptodon carapaces:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/ancient-armadillos-grew-big-vw-beetles
https://books.google.com/books?id=kUAKgNfiAvoC&pg=PA184#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.jstor.org/stable/971990?read-now=1&seq=6#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/2055556315Z.00000000031?journalCode=ypal20
https://books.google.com/books?id=2tk_AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223
[Butt One More Thing]
Stegosaurus butt brain misconception:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-double-dinosaur-brain-myth-12155823/
#scishow #podcast #comedy #science #education #scishowtangents
hello and welcome to sa show tangents the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the Geniuses that make the YouTube series SI show happen joining us this week is a very special guest editor and chief of Si show and a host of the YouTube series eons Blake de pastino hello Hi how are
00:22:you oh that no one ever asks me I'm fine my sinus infection is mostly cured oh thanks antibiotics yeah actually boy they work uh and and I'm here to ask you your tagline I'm allergic to penicillin oh bummer that wasn't the one I was going to use but it's actually true and
01:38:we've also got our normal except for we're missing one we've got stepan chin hey how are you I'm allergic to Amoxicillin oh Caitlyn too I'm allergic to sulfa antibiotics so I have a whole other class that I'm allergic too was that your tagline uh I don't know no my tagline is moon cheese
01:60:very Riley is also here hello how are you doing uh I'm okay got rid of my moon cheese so excellent is that your tagline sure s Riley got rid of a moongi and I'm Hank Green and my tagline is full body rash so if you're unfamiliar with sow tangents every week we get together we
01:20:try to oneup amaze and Delight each other with facts about the universe uh we are playing for Glory but we're also playing for Hank bucks and they will be awarded by how we do on the different activities that we we will been introducing throughout the show we do
02:35:everything we can to stay on topic here at sow tangents but it is called tangents so uh if we do diver divert from our topic at hand and head down a path to treachery it's possible that we will decide that we must deduct a hank Buck from you if we deem your tangent
02:52:unworthy and to start the podcast off with a traditional science poem we've got Stefan throughout the history of the planet many times creatures bodies have expanded their sizes increase sometimes exponentially as they fill their Niche giving us so many of these mega-sized
02:09:beasts from host's Eagle to Megalodon from titanoboa to the marsupio lion and who could forget the terror bird terrifying there's no better word but eventually in the late pla scene humans began to arrive on the scene and whether it was from hunting climate change or
02:27:just disease these species were under siege there was a mass extinction of creatures with great mass as human activities began to surpass and they could never recover what a huge fail but I guess at least we still have the blue whale yeah what a huge fail I love it so I was
03:48:told that this was various large ancient things not just flora and fauna and now I'm worried about my fact mine is not aive neither is mine okay good yeah it's old big old and big okay mine is old and big okay why is everything like before the Hol scene everything was huge
03:07:insects were bigger like other fa there was a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere which is part of the reason like insects could be very big cuz the oxygen concentration was way up I think the world before the holos scene was directed by Michael baay I think that it
03:21:might have more to do with oxygen that's my working hypothesis we haven't carbon dated him so we don't know how old he is true so Siri have you brought us sub explanation for what the thing is we're talking it's a pretty broad category I don't know it's old and Big Stuff uh I think it's
04:35:more than oxygen though that makes things big when they were older because that that was like specifically insects in the Carboniferous period but I think when it comes to megap mhm I feel like it's more than oxygen involved I didn't bring anything yeah yeah I definitely
04:52:agree with you the evolutionary pressures that make something get very very big are weird and also like it's very hard to say anything with certainty about the ecosystems of you know hundreds of millions of years ago one thing that comes up a lot with eons is that things will grow or Shrink to
04:11:accommodate whatever Niche is available right so if there's a niche that's wide open to be like a large herbivore uh and there's like no big predators around then your body size can expand to that role yeah but then if it no longer confers an advantage and then if
04:27:you're say like a Giant armadillo that doesn't move very fast and there are people with Spears chasing you it becomes very bad yeah yeah I mean one of the so one of the sort of untalked about advantages of being large is that you can eat food that is less nutritious
05:43:because you have more space in your body to extract the nutrition which is weird you don't think about that but like your intestines are just longer or you can have multiple stomachs and like your digestive system can be longer and so if there is a lot of unut triti food it
05:59:tends to make animals like the herbivores that eat those un nutritious Foods very big it's true of elephants a bison are quite big but we think like those large sorap pods for example ate like really unut triti swampy stuff uh a couple was it two summers ago I went to a paleontology conference in the
05:17:beautiful town of eaka Montana and paleontologists gave a talk about why we can ride horses and not other animals and his hypothesis is because they're hind gut fermenters so don't unlike cattle they don't have four stomachs they can eat grass and still digest it because they have a hind gut that
06:36:ferments it it's less efficient but they could eat more of it just like you were talking about made me think about it but in order to have a hind gut they have to have a really robust basically lower back whatever you call that when you're a four-legged animal and so it's able to
06:50:support weight and you could write it but then zebras are the same way you can't Rite a zebra just cuz they're jerks and now to start off our episode of tangents here Siri is going to lead us in a round of she has prepared three science facts for education and enjoyment but only one
06:09:of them is real the other two are lies and the rest of us have to figure out which one is the truth and if we do we get a hank Buck if we don't Siri gets the HK Siri what are your facts number one in South America there are some unusual looking tunnel networks that can stretch up to 2 m in height and
06:25:tens of meters deep into and through Hills because of big grooves in the walls researchers believe giant ground sloths like the genus leadon dug them out fact number two along the Pacific coast of the US scientists have found huge fossilized fish eggs and Hollow Chambers in now dried up river banks
07:43:that look like they were scratched out they think that these were the spawning sites of sabertooth salmon which were over 2 met long okay keep going at number three in what used to be swamp land in Europe researchers have Unearthed big hexagonal petrified wood chunks that are around 10
07:00:cm or 4 in in diameter formed from mineral Rich groundwater they believe these are the giant Nest structures built by an ancestor of wasps in the order mean isoptera so we've got South American tunnel networks made by giant ground sloths uh spawning sites of sabertooth salmon that the salmon I
07:20:guess dug out of the bank with their giant saber teeth or hexagonal nests of ancient European wasps how big were these hexagons 10 cm or 4 in in diameter so not huge huge but like but big for a wasp hexagon are the eggs supposed to be of the salmon or are they eaten by the
08:41:salmon the eggs are of the salmon much like modern salmon dig out little gravel pits in the bottom of rivers they just dug them out in the side of rivers instead and they are called Sabertooth salmon and then we've got we've got uh you say tunnel networks made by giant
08:57:ground sloths M now I know that there were Giant ground SLS in South America I do not know that there are saber-tooth salmon so these were networks of tunnels yeah so they were mostly one big tube of tunnel but they had offshoots okay and they they just dug in there to live not
08:14:get rained on mhm most of these for all three of these like these structures exist and we're guessing at what they were used for so we presumably the tunnels the slaws lived in or used as shelter presumably these Chambers were spawning sites for the salmon presum
09:30:these petrified wood chunks were nests at some point okay the network of tunnels part sounds fake to me yeah I feel like if I'm a giant ground sloth I might scratch my way a little bit into the bank of the river but maybe not make like a little cave for yourself but not
09:47:like a city a city of wow now that's adorable yeah maybe they're still there maybe they're down yeah and they just they got dug deeper and deeper what did giant ground sloth eat riddle me that uh what a sths eat now anybody sir leaves yeah I feel like they're like they eat leaves yeah
09:10:whatever is handy I think they're another example of animals that manage to exploit not very nutritious food right but they're the only ones who want to eat it and can eat it and they got big and then they I think they went extinct not maybe when I think either
09:23:when people arrived or when the big cats arrived in South America which were sort of like separated by a pretty big distance but the big the big mass extinctions in recent South American history yeah Great American biotic interchange when North and South America
10:37:finally connected yeah and then there is a flow of animal life and there the cats were like oh my gosh you guys are just made of gooey blood I love it you're so slow and dumb and delicious and Terror birds were the only large predators in South America before they connected oh and the terror Birds
10:54:went up north and I'm like oh no this ain't good you you guys have got it going on yeah you are way ahead uh I'm a bird I I'm leaning towards sloths myself oh really I have a question about the Petrified Wood so the Petrified Wood the hexagons it's the pieces of wood are
10:13:like 10 cm across on average right and so there are things like Burrows in there that the Wasps used they are like roughly the shape of I think they're called cells within a nest so presumably like we only have small fragments of what okay were the big nest and so this
10:29:is like a small fragment of petrified wood pulp that has been mineralized so this this is a petrified wasp nest yes petrified fragment of a wasp nest okay you seem very like you know a lot about that one yeah I mean that's the one that sounds the most realistic to me I think
11:48:that a network of ground sloth tunnels is the most realistic I don't know I just don't think large things make networks that's true maybe they had a maybe they had a queen and there was just little worker worker sloths all right stepan uh I'm going with the Wasps
11:04:wasps Blake I know saber 2 salmon are a real thing oh you can't change you can't change I know drawing ground sloths are real okay I could think that the whatever the Feria was it the giant wasp they probably existed yeah but I have a hard time believing that there are big pieces
11:25:of petrified wood that they would have bed into because I feel like there's a very specific thing so I think is the LIE oh no there's two lies there's two lies there's one true oh the one that's true for sure then is giant ground sloths I'm also going with giant ground sloths it is giant ground
12:41:sloths I feel like Blake had heard of that one you hosted a script about that one I had also heard of that okay I should have checked E on some more this is my big worry I didn't want to say out loud that I knew it for sure but I knew I'm pretty I was pretty sure that that was a thing
12:59:Network I was like I don't know if they were networks but I knew that we had found these big tunnels with Sloth like sloth fingers on them I hard to believe until I saw photos of yeah the Burrows and they're not like little wombat Burrows they're like toer than you are I
12:16:could walk into them that's so awesome yeah uh so Sarah what is the truth behind your lies very little saber-tooth salmon exist they were actually over 2 MERS long they were big salmon with Fang type things I don't think we know anything about their spawning sites or where they they
13:35:existed and how how they bred except for probably behaved similarly to salmon and then I just made the WASP thing up I knew that petrified wood was a thing and I was trying to think of another weird engineering structure and so I thought uh were there giant wasps I don't think
13:50:wasps existed in the Carboniferous all the giant insects at the time were similar to mayflies or dragon flies I think wasps evolved around 150 million years ago to 70 million years ago that's when all the hotra started specializing into social insects like bees and wasps
13:10:huh and things like that but before that insects were just simpler I don't know maybe that that's not that's an overgeneralization maybe it's mean maybe it's inaccurate who knows they just have big old wings and ate each other and breathe in a lot of oxygen I don't know
13:26:what else do you got for me about these ground saws tell me about these Networks um they're called paleo burrow they look unnatural so the the reason why researchers discovered them was because they they've been studying caves in the area and they know what a naturally
14:40:eroded cave looks like like when water has worn it away but these are exceptionally smooth they're like a round passageway they found claw marks all over them grouped in two or three Claws and they found them with tens to even hundreds of meters long that Branch
14:56:out in several directions and they found over 1,500 them in southeast Brazil over around 15 years which is seems like a lot of very intense huge tunnels there are a lot of questions that we still have about them because we don't know why they're so big so the the whole idea
14:15:of like why would slaws live in such a big tunnel system is a question to paleontologists too their hypothesis that they needed them for predator protection to like to hide or for warmth and protection from the climate which was colder and drier 10,000 plus years ago that's true because they had very
15:34:low metabolisms yeah and so it could have been like a more communal place because so many of the Burrows were clustered in southeast Brazil but also a big question is why they weren't across the whole South American continent and why they weren't in North America cuz we
15:47:had ground sloths everywhere but they found a really high concentration of them in this one region of Brazil because they had a city they had a city they became intelligent they were they had and did what did what else did they build just dig a Little Deeper they found a
15:03:monolith and they were sensient but only a few of them and then the cats ate them before we find out what the scores look like let's go to our advertising break welcome back Hank Buck total s you got one delivered straight from Stefan chin Stefan you got one thanks to your
16:34:poem and Blake and I also have one thanks to our the fact that we did a script on on the very subject now it is time for the fact off two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds the preses each have a hank Buck to award to the fact they
16:54:like the most and we today have facts about giant old things from Blake and Hank yes I'm very excited to present we're going to go first how are we're going to go first who who's eaten the oldest piece of food oh okay Sarah suggests who's eaten the oldest piece of
16:14:food my lunch today was Chinese that I ordered on what day today on Saturday but that was just the rec that's the oldest thing you've ever eaten I I found like some macaroni and cheese under the couch and when I was in college once and I ate it you in I don't know how old it
17:31:was no it wasn't like under the couch cushion it was under the couch I don't think that matters still that's like when you go through your mom's Minivan and you find leftover french fries from like years ago and you're like oh they still look good oh that's a French fry
17:45:yeah that seems like a very specific anecdote there Stephan no I have never done that I could at least fix a date to my meal and you yours I mean have to radiocarbon date the I used to I used to like do exploratory bites in college I'd be like well I'm going to eat one bite
17:59:of this chicken and if in 6 hours I'm okay I'm going to eat the rest of it I used to do that too there was a email list called free food where people would just post free food around campus and so you'd walk around and sometimes just pick it up sometimes Dunkin Donuts would
17:12:leave just a sack of donuts outside on the table go wouldn't know how old they were hopefully from the morning but I think probably yeah I think that's fine all right so I guess I'm going first right sir I have to ask you to do a thing for me I apologize for for this
17:28:for for invol with a visual aid um because you can't see this picture but s this is a topographic map of Mars I'll show our our other panelists here and uh can you describe some of like the main features of this topographic map of Mars it's blue where it's low elevation red
18:46:where it's high elevation okay so there appears to be a cliff that that crosses the whole image there are two craters one's really pretty deep one's medium deep and there's a mountain uh with four is white extremely high elevation like four spires on it and what's sort of like a main main Trend as
18:10:well the fact that there's like a low elevation on the southern hemisphere it's very low or very high and on the Northern Hemisphere it's very low so that's sort of like the main like look of Mars that's what's up with it now uh Mars has on it the largest crater in the
18:27:solar system can you point to it for me I pointed to the screen and I touched the big blue dot touch the big blue dot that's helis plena or the helis Basin that is the fifth or fourth largest crater in the solar system oh the largest crater in the solar system we
19:45:think maybe is a little easier to see if you look at the polar map of Mars and in fact we think that the in it is possible this is the the Prime explanation for this weird giant area of very low Mars that is relatively young it does not have a lot of craters in it is the
19:09:entire North Polar Basin is a crater 40% of the surface of Mars if uh you put it on the surface of Earth it would stretch from San Francisco to Poland 10,000 km wide crater now definitely if that isn't a crater because we would have to be on the surface of Mars to do some some like
20:33:geology to figure that out for sure the largest crater is definitely what's called Utopia plena which is inside of that massive crater the north polar Basin and Utopia plena is this hole right here you can can't see very well because it's so freaking big but we think basically that like if you follow
20:53:this topographic map there's a bit of a dip that comes and that has been obscured by the explosion of the tharsus Bulge volcanoes uh that that would actually be part of this massive crater that is probably around 4.1 billion years old so like very early in the late
20:15:heavy bombardment or even before the late heavy bombardment when the biggest crater in history happened uh so that's 40% of the planet but the largest confirmed impact crater is Utopia Pena which is big that the entire United States could fit inside I never really
21:31:thought about it but it feels unusual for things to come in like to come into contact with bodies from that angle because most things are in the plane would alter the orbit of Mars that seems like somebody that would knock it off its whatever yeah I don't know that it
21:46:would necessarily alter its orbit um and it's possible that like it came in on the plane of the solar system it didn't like come down from the top it came in on the plane but it like fell onto the top made aof off Landing yeah and that's actually part of the hypothesis is that
21:02:it made it it was going relatively slowly which had a lot of different weird impacts on Mars and possibly led to its magnetic field shutting down because it oh that's interesting created an opportunity for a lot of the heat from the interior of the planet to exit
21:19:that's interesting because that's one of the big puzzles is why we know it used to have that magnetosphere does anymore yeah so so how Longo we're talking about like before 1900 yeah this was this was so there's a period called the late heavy bombardment Administration or um the late heavy
22:34:bombardment is between like 3.8 and 4.1 billion years ago and that happened we think probably when some of the gas giants shifted in their orbits and threw a lot of outer solar system and even some asteroid belt stuff into the inner solar system and that's why the Moon is
22:54:covered in craters it's why Mars is covered in craters and a lot of those craters like date back to the exact same time but we think this that this big impact might have actually been before that so very early in the formation of the solar system okay that's pretty good
22:08:mine is I'm interested in uh geology and I'm actually it came to mind because we did a script uh that involved the burg Shale which I've never been to it's in British Columbia supposed to be amazing Y and it was caused by a Mudslide about 500 million years ago covered you know dozens of square
22:25:kilometers maybe more again I've never been there of all this ancient life exquisit L preserved right and I was interested in like how big were these phenomena what was the biggest landslide that ever happened on Earth and then I immediately ran into a problem because
23:39:Landslide is not like a word that scientists use it's not a cromulent term that could include mudslides or walk slides or volcanic flows MH and those are all just the ones on land but then there are the underwater ones so those of us in the profession we call them mtds mass transport deposits ooh
23:58:whenever there's a bunch of geologic material that goes from one place to another on its own that's an MTD and the world's largest MTD was known as the agulis slump I'm going through an agulis slump right now my mid 20s midlife crisis but it's very big a slump seems like it's small uh it was not
23:21:small it was actually geologically very huge it happened about 2.6 million years ago which was the very beginning the pene epoch off the coast of South Africa uh and it changed its part of the world forever how big is it you're asking so the flow of material this mudslide that
24:38:happened was it guess like a flow of sediment underwater was 160 km wide so it's about 100 miles wide it traveled about 750 km about 460 465 miles uh and the most impressive part was its volume because it released 20331 cubic kilm of rock and debris all at once and the hard part for me was
24:59:figuring out like what's the sheer mass of rock that was moved in this incident because you could talk about square kilometers of rock but that's not really meaningful so the best comparison I could find was what was once thought to be the largest Landslide on land called
24:11:the SED Mara landslide in Southwestern Iran happened 10,000 years ago it moved 20 cubic kmers of rock and that was measured at 50 billion tons so what we're talking about here the agulla slump which I just enjoy saying now was 20,300 Cub km of rock which means I did
25:31:the math it moved 50 trillion tons of rock sand and sediment which was enough to fill all of the Great Lakes oh and it caused a tsunami that would have inundated what's now Cape Town uhhuh and contributed to the formation of the aalis bank which is what brings cold
25:46:nutrient-rich water up from the seaf Flor and it creates what is now one of the most fertile ocean environments off the coast of South Africa because all it creates an upwelling uh of the cold and tasty AR Pi Waters uh so should we do this more then if it's so good for the
25:03:fish we got to slump it more got to Nuke the ocean yeah where are the oceans not nutritious enough we just nuke it create a SL I mean I've tasted California ocean that's not doesn't taste good at all bad you water tastes good at all that tasty Arctic water is this so all of this rock
25:22:that moved is it's still underwater that didn't become like land for that's right yeah slumped from underwater to underwater did you say this already but did you talk about what dislodged this do we know what like the triggering event was it appears to have been triggered by seismic activity because
26:39:the slump sits on two major faults okay one's called the cape fold belt which sounds like something that Batman would wear and the other is the agulis marginal fracture Zone which I don't have a joke for uh so this is where the continental crust of Africa which is
26:54:lighter and less dense meets the denser oceanic crust so apparently when the earthquake struck a huge plate of sediment that apparently dated from the Cretaceous gave way and tumbled down toward what they call the basement rock which is sort of the granitic mhm billions of year old rock uh good slump
26:10:Blake so who do you like better Stefan I'm disappointed that there was no fauna involved at all I was told it was about big ancient things it's a giant 4.1 billion year old crater both were very interesting uh I'm going to give it to Blake all right a thanks slump what do you got sir I'm
27:31:going to give it to Hank because I didn't know anything about Mars's craters it's such a big crater it's a really big I feel like this is a fun fact that's now in my brain that I'll be able to use like you know where that big crater is Mars yeah the entire 40% of the surface of the planet the entire
27:49:northern hemisphere is a crater that's a good superlative and now it's time for ask the science couch where we get some listener questions for our couch of finally home scientific mind an influential David asks were glyptodon shells really used as makeshift shelters or were they just slow and
27:13:delicious so sari what is a glyptodon uh a glyptodon it's a Genus that lived in the pine in South America they are relatives of armadillos so they're just like these giant armored mammals that got up to 2,000 kg they're beefy Lads an influential David is specifically asking
28:34:about their carace so the Bony covering that has been described in many science articles as big as a Volkswagen Beetle for for scale and what's really interesting about this question is that this fact seems to be one of those things that's been passed along on internet telephone so a lot of Articles
28:53:have some variation of the phrase uh there are records of indigenous South American people using a fossil carrese for shelter and and like it kind of makes sense because it's like a big bony Dome it's as big as a car crawl under it protect yourself but I like went digging
28:11:for the original source and it's apparently just one specific paper and discovery that has spawned all of this like misconception so so what the evidence is in 1881 a paleontologist named Santiago Roth uncovered human remains in Argentina it's called called the fonua skeleton after the region and
29:32:the bones he found like a femur and a pelvis and toe bones and a skull kind of in a rangement kind of scattered and on top of these bones was an upside down carrase of a glyptodon so instead of like over it like a shelter it was upside down like a bowl if that makes
29:50:sense on top of it yes in the layers of dirt so be like being buried under a w so I can Beetle upside down yes so maybe he was writing the glip to and then he flipped got crushed CSI investigator I saw like a I watched a documentary about ancient megap and they were talking about the
29:11:terror Birds flipping these things over I it might have just be like hypothesizing but you got to get at that juicy inside somehow and so that is basically what people thought at the time in the late 1800s early 1900s they thought that these like the human remains and the on were both from the
29:30:pine so they they coexisted and so maybe they were using it somehow maybe they covered the body or did something another group of scientists were like we didn't date either of these remains so it's possible that they use the carapace afterward as and and just put it on top
30:47:the body had already been buried been settled or just like was left there and naturally got covered in 2011 people actually dated the skeleton and they found that it was about 1800 to 1900 years old so it wasn't the same time as the glyptodon the body was there the the
30:06:glyptodon died like 8,000 plus years before the body was there and so the literature that I can find now is pretty much like this is a very weird case where the body was there buried most likely then somehow this carrase was put on top of it we don't know how or why it
30:28:could just been natural flooding natural like weather pushing it along and mixing it up with the dirt it could have been uh there are some people who still think that humans used these carapaces as some sort of windshield or protection so it's possible that they like dragged it to an
31:48:area that just so happened to be on top of this body but there's not really any other evidence for that that I could find one book cited just like in General Argentine paleontologists had said that humans especially indigenous South American peoples use the carapaces in
31:06:some way but like I could not find any other thing so it seems like all this this talk this general internet idea that humans use these big shells as shelter came from this one body caras situation that has gotten uned yeah it sounds like the thing was so big people
31:27:used it as a house well thank you for debunking that myth cuz there a lot of them out there if you want to ask the science couch follow us on Twitter at sow tangents where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week thank you to Rose Oria and everybody
32:40:else who tweeted us your questions this week now time for our final score Siri and Stefan you tied with one Blake you tied with me for the win be sure to check out more from Blake and me over at PBS eons at youtube.com/ eons and if you like this show and want to help us out
32:58:you you can leave us a review wherever you listen that's super helpful and helps us know what you like about the show cuz who knows we might change some things up second you can follow us on Twitter we got a Twitter now @so tangents and tweet us your favorite moment from the show finally just tell
32:11:people about us thank you for joining us I have been Hank Green I've been Siri Riley I've been Stephan chin I remain Blake depastino saot tangents is a co-production of complexity and WNYC Studios it's produced by all of us and Caitlyn Hoffmeister our art is by hokam
32:26:matsushima and our sound design is from Joseph tuna medish our social media organizer is Victoria bonjourno and we couldn't make any of this stuff without our patrons on patreon thank you and remember the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lighted but one more thing did you know
33:55:that the stegosaurus had one of the lowest brain body ratios of any known dinosaur in that it was about 9 M long but it had a brain the size of a puppies about 60 Cub CM so for a long time in 1800s paleontologists thought that it must have had a second brain in its butt
33:11:oh but then they were wrong and there's a cavity in the in the sac room where the SP spine meets the pelvis and they're like obviously that's where second brain was turns out there wasn't enough nervous tissue for there to have been any kind of bundle of butt nerves
33:22:or whatever down there but they do think that that space was used for something and it might have been for storing glycogen and that's the starchy compound that animals use for fuel
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