SciShow Tangents - Ancient Mega with Blake de Pastino

Episode Date: 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? To learn more about this week's topic, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]https://natural-history.uoregon.edu/collections/web-galleries/saber-toothed-salmonhttps://cals.arizona.edu/classes/ento596c/topic/session9.htmlhttps://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/#.XFC3uc9Khxzhttp://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-beetleshttps://books.google.com/books?id=kUAKgNfiAvoC&pg=PA184#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttps://www.jstor.org/stable/971990?read-now=1&seq=6#page_scan_tab_contentshttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/2055556315Z.00000000031?journalCode=ypal20https://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/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Joining us this week is a very special guest, editor-in-chief of SciShow, and a host of the YouTube series Eons, Blake DePastino. Hello. Hi. How are you? Oh, no one ever asks me.

I'm fine. My sinus infection is mostly cured. Oh. Thanks, antibiotics. Yeah, actually. Boy, they work. 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 we've also got our normal, except for we're missing one. We've got Stefan Chin.

Hey. How are you? I'm allergic to amoxicillin. Oh, Caitlin too? Okay. I'm allergic to sulfa antibiotics, so I have a whole other class

that I'm allergic to. Was that your tag I have a whole other class that I'm allergic to. Was that your tagline? I don't know. No, my tagline is moon cheese. Sari Riley is also here. Hello. How are you doing? I'm okay.

Got rid of my moon cheese, so. Excellent. Is that your tagline? Sure. Sari Riley, got rid of my moon cheese. And I'm Hank Green, and my tagline is full body rash. So if you're unfamiliar with SciShow Tangents, every week we get together.

We try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with facts about the universe. 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 will be introducing throughout the show. We do everything we can to stay on topic here at SciShow Tangents, but it is called Tangents. So if we do 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 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 beasts. From Haas's eagle to Megalodon, from Titanoboa to the marsupial lion. And who could forget the terror bird? Terrifying, there's no better word. But eventually, in the late Pleistocene, humans began to arrive on the scene. And whether it was from hunting, climate change, or 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 told that this was various large ancient things, not just flora and fauna, and now I'm worried about my fact. Mine is not alive. Yeah. Neither is mine. Okay, good.

Yeah. It's old and big. Old and big. Yeah. Okay, mine is old and big. Okay. Why is everything like before the Holocene, everything was huge?

Insects were bigger, like other fauna were bigger. There was a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere. I think. Which is part of the reason, like insects could be very big because the oxygen concentration was way up. I think the world before the Holocene was directed by Michael Bay. I think that it might have more to do with oxygen.

It's my working hypothesis. We haven't carbon dated him, so we don't know how old he is. True. So, Sari, have you brought us a sub-explanation for what the thing is we're talking about? It's a pretty broad category. I don't know. It's old and big stuff. I think it's more than oxygen, though, that makes things big when they were older.

Because that was like specifically insects in the Carboniferous period. But I think when it comes to megafauna, I feel like it's more than oxygen involved. I didn't bring anything. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely 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 accommodate whatever niche is available.

Right. things will grow or shrink to accommodate whatever niche is available. So if there's a niche that's wide open to be like a large herbivore, and there's like no big predators around, then your body size can expand to suit that role. Yeah. But then if it no longer confers an advantage, and then if 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 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 unnutritious food, it tends to make animals like the herbivores that eat those unnutritious foods very big. It's true of elephants. Bison are quite big.

But we think like those large sauropods, for example, ate like really unnutritious, swampy stuff. example, ate like really unnutritious, swampy stuff. A couple, was it two summers ago? I went to a paleontology conference in the beautiful town of Ekalaka, Montana. And paleontologists gave a talk about why we can ride horses and not other animals. And his hypothesis is because they're hindgut fermenters. So they don't, unlike cattle, they don't have four stomachs. They can eat grass and still digest it because they have a hindgut that ferments it. It's less efficient, but they could eat more of it, just like you were talking about.

It's made me think about it. But in order to have a hindgut, 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 support weight. And you can ride it. But then zebras are the same way. You can't ride a zebra just because they're jerks. And now to start off our episode of Tangents here, Sari is going to lead us in a round of Truth or Fail.

She has prepared three science facts for education and enjoyment, but only one 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, Sari gets the Hank Buck. Sari, what are your facts? Number one. In South America, there are some unusual-looking tunnel networks that can stretch up to two meters in height and tens of meters deep into and through hills.

Because of big grooves in the walls, researchers believe giant ground sloths like the genus Lestodon dug them out. Fact number two, along the Pacific coast of the U.S., scientists have found huge fossilized fish eggs in hollow chambers in now dried up riverbanks that look like they were scratched out. They think that these were the spawning sites of saber-toothed salmon, which were over two meters long. Okay, keep going. And number three, in what used to be swampland in Europe, researchers have unearthed big hexagonal petrified wood chunks that are around 10 centimeters or four inches in diameter, formed from mineral-rich groundwater. They believe these are the giant nest structures built by an ancestor of wasps in the order Meganisoptera.

So we've got South American tunnel networks made by giant ground sloths, spawning sites of saber-toothed salmon that the salmon, I guess, dug out of the bank with their giant saber teeth, or hexagonal nests of ancient European wasps. How big were these hexagons? 10 centimeters or 4 inches in diameter. So not huge, but like... But big for a wasp

hexagon. Are the eggs supposed to be of the salmon, or are they eaten by the 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 saber-toothed salmon. And then we've got

a... you say tunnel networks made by giant ground swaths. Now I know that there were giant ground swaths in South America. I do not know that there are saber-toothed salmon. So these were networks of tunnels? Yeah. So they were mostly one big tube of

tunnel, but they had offshoots. And they just dug in there to live, not get rained on? Most of these, for all three of these, these structures exist but they had offshoots. Okay. And they just dug in there to live? To live. Not get rained on? Mm-hmm. Most of these, for all three of these, like these structures exist and we're guessing at what they were used for.

Okay. So presumably the tunnels the sloths lived in or used as shelter, presumably these chambers were spawning sites for the salmon. Presumably these petrified wood chunks were nests at some point. So 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 like a city. A city, wow, now that's adorable. Maybe they're still there. Maybe they're down at mine. Yeah, and they've dug deeper and deeper. What did giant ground sloths eat? Riddle me that. What do sloths eat now?

Anybody? Sari? Leaves. Yeah. I feel like they're herbivorous. Yeah, I feel like they eat leaves. Yeah, whatever's 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. I think either when people arrived or when the big cats arrived in South America, which were sort of like separated by a pretty big distance, but were the big mass extinctions in recent South American history? Yeah. Great American Biotic Interchange, wheninctions in recent South American history? Yeah. Great American biotic interchange.

When North and South America finally connected. Yeah. And then there was a flow of animal life. And the cats were like, oh my gosh, you guys are just made of gooey blood. Yeah. 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.

And the terror birds went up north and I'm like, oh, no. This ain't good. You guys have got it going on. You are way ahead. I'm a bird. 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 like 10 centimeters 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 were the big nest. And so this is like a small fragment of petrified wood pulp that has been mineralized. So 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 that a network of groundswath 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 queen and there was just tons of little worker sloths. All right. Stefan. I'm going with the wasps. Wasps. Blake. I know saber tooth salmon are a real thing. Oh.

You can't change. You can't change. I know giant ground sloths are real. Okay. I think that whatever their fricassaria, the giant wasps, they probably existed. Yeah. But I have a hard time believing that there are

big pieces of petrified wood that they would have burrowed into because I feel like there's a very specific thing. So I think that 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 sloths. I feel like Blake had heard of that one. You hosted a script about that one. I had also heard of that. I should have checked Eon's more. This is my big worry. I didn't want to say out loud that I knew it for sure, but I knew, I was pretty sure that that was a thing.

Networks, 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. And I thought they were hard to believe until I saw photos of the burrows. And they're not like little wombat burros. They're like taller than you are. You can walk into them.

That's so awesome. Yeah. So, Sari, what is the truth behind your lies? Very little. Sabertooth salmon exist. They were actually over two meters long. They were big-ass salmon with fang-type things. I don't think we know anything about their spawning sites or where they existed and 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... Were there giant wasps? I don't think wasps existed in the Carboniferous. All the giant insects at the time were similar to mayflies or dragonflies.

I think wasps evolved around 150 million years ago to 70 million years ago. That's when all the hymenoptera started specializing into social insects like bees and wasps and things like that. But before that, insects were just simpler. I don't know. Maybe that's an overgeneralization. Maybe it's mean. Maybe it's inaccurate. Who knows?

They just had big old wings and ate each other and breathed in a lot of oxygen. I don't know. What else do you got for me about these ground swaths? Tell me about these networks. They're called paleoburrows. They look unnatural. So the reason why researchers discovered them was because they've been studying caves in the area and they know what a naturally

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 out in several directions. And they found over 1,500 of them in Southeast Brazil over around 15 years, which 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 whole idea of like why would sloths live in such a big tunnel system is a question to paleontologists too. Their hypothesis that they needed them for predator protection, so 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 low metabolisms. Yeah, and so it could have been like a more communal place because so many of the boroughs 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 because we had ground sloths everywhere, but they found a really high concentration of them in this one region of Brazil. It was because they had a city.

They had a city. They became intelligent. And what else did they build? Just dig a little deeper. They found a monolith and they were sentient, 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. Sarah, you got one. Good. Straight from Stefan Chin. Stefan, you got one, thanks to your poem. And Blake and I also have one, thanks to the fact that we did a script 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 presentees each have a Hank Buck to award to the fact they 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 going to go first? Who's eaten the oldest piece of food? Oh, okay. Sarah suggests who's eaten the oldest piece of food. My lunch today was Chinese that I ordered on

what day is today? On Saturday. But that was just the most recessed the oldest thing you've ever eaten that I can remember. I found like

some macaroni and cheese under the couch when I was in college once and I ate it. You win. I don't know how old it was. No.

It wasn't like under the couch cushion. It was under the couch. I don't think how old it was. No. It wasn't like under the couch cushion. It was under the couch. I don't think that matters. 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. Yeah. That seems like a very specific anecdote there, Stefan.

No, I have never done that. I could at least fix a date to my meal. And yours is? I mean. You have to radiocarbon date the mac and cheese. I used to like do exploratory bites in college. I'd be like, well, I'm going to eat one bite of this chicken and if in six hours I'm okay, I'm going to eat the rest of it. I used to do that too.

There was an 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 leave just a sack of donuts outside on the table. Yeah, oh my gosh. Wouldn't know how old they were, hopefully from the morning. I think probably, yeah. Should. I think that's fine. All right, so I guess I'm going first.

Right, Sari, I have to ask you to do a thing for me. I apologize for this, for involving with a visual aid, because you can't see this picture. But Sari, this is a topographic map of Mars. I'll show our other panelists here. And can you describe some of the main features of this topographic map of Mars? It's blue where it's low elevation, red where it's high elevation. Okay, so there appears to be a cliff that crosses the whole image. There are two cratersaters one's really pretty deep

one's medium deep and there's a mountain yeah uh with four is white extremely high elevation yeah like four spires on it and what's sort of like a main main trend as well the fact that there's like a low elevation on the southern, it's very low or very high. And on the Northern Hemisphere, it's very low. So that's sort of like the main look of Mars. That's what's up with it. Now, Mars has on it the largest crater in the solar system. Can you point to it for me?

I pointed to the screen and I touched the big blue dot. Touched the big blue dot. That's Hellas Planitia or the Hellas Basin. That is the fifth or fourth largest crater in the solar system. The largest crater in the solar system, we think maybe, is a little easier to see if you look at the polar map of Mars. And in fact, we think that it is possible. This is 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.

The entire North Polar Basin is a crater. 40% of the surface of Mars. If you put it on the surface of Earth, it would stretch from San Francisco to Poland. 10,000 kilometer wide crater. Now, definitely, if that isn't a crater, because we would have to be on the surface of Mars to do some geology to figure that out for sure. The largest crater is definitely what's called Utopia Planitia, which is inside of that massive crater, the North Polar Basin. And Utopia Planitia is this hole right here, which you can't

see very well because it's so freaking big. But we think basically that like if you follow this topographic map, there's a bit of a dip that comes and that has been obscured by the explosion of the Tharsis Bulge volcanoes, 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 heavy bombardment or even before the late heavy bombardment

when the biggest crater in history happened. So that's 40% of the planet. But the largest confirmed impact crater is Utopia Planitia, which is so big that the entire United States could fit inside. I never really 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 of the solar system. And wouldn't it alter the orbit of Mars? That seems like somebody that would knock it off its whatever. Yeah, I don't know that it would necessarily alter its orbit, 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, it didn't like come down from the top it came in on the plane but it like fell onto the top she made a soft landing yeah and that's

actually part of the hypothesis is that 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 it created an opportunity for a lot of the heat from the interior of the planet to exit. That's interesting because that's one of the big puzzles is why we know it used to have a magnetic sphere and it doesn't anymore. Yeah. So how long ago are we talking about?

Like before 1900? Yeah. This was, so there's a period called the late heavy bombardment. Taft administration? The late heavy 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 covered in craters. It's why Mars is covered in craters.

And a lot of those craters date back to the exact same time. But we think this big impact might have actually been before that. So very early in the formation of the solar system. Okay, that's pretty good. Mine is, I'm interested in geology. And actually, it came to mind because we did a script that involved the Burgess Shale, which I've never been to. It's in British Columbia. It's supposed to be amazing.

Yep. And it was caused by a mudslide about 500 million years ago. It covered, you know, dozens of square kilometers, maybe more. Again, I've never been there. Of all this ancient life, exquisitely 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

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 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. 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 Agulhas slump. I'm going through an Agulhas slump right now. Mid-20s, midlife crisis. But it's very big. A slump. I'm going through an Agulhas slump right now. Mid-20s, midlife crisis. But it's very big.

Slump seems like it's small. It was not small. It was actually geologically very huge. It happened about 2.6 million years ago, which was the very beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, off the coast of South Africa. And it changed its part of the world forever. How big is it? You're asking.

So the flow of material, this mudslide that happened, it's like a flow of sediment underwater, was 160 kilometers wide. So it's about 100 miles wide. It traveled about 750 kilometers, about 460, 465 miles. And the most impressive part was its volume, because it released 20,331 cubic kilometers of rock and debris all at once. And the hard part for me was 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 the Sayyid Mara landslide in southwestern Iran.

It happened 10,000 years ago. It moved 20 cubic kilometers of rock, and that was measured at 50 billion tons. So what we're talking about here, the Agala Slump, which I just enjoy saying now, was 20,300 cubic kilometers of rock, which means, I did the math, it moved 50 trillion tons of rock sand and sediment which was enough to fill all the great lakes oh and it caused

a tsunami that would have inundated what's now Cape Town and contributed to the formation of the Agulhas Bank

which is what brings cold nutrient rich water up from the sea floor and it creates what is now one of the most

fertile ocean environments on the coast of South Africa because it creates an upwelling of the cold and tasty Arctic waters. So should we do this more then? If it's so good for the fish. We got to slump it more.

Got to nuke the ocean. Yeah, where are the oceans not nutritious enough? Can we just nuke it? Create a slump? I mean, I've tasted California ocean. That's not... Doesn't taste good at all. It's bad. You. That's not... Doesn't taste good at all. Tastes bad.

You want a mineral water? Doesn't taste good at all. Where's that tasty Arctic water? Is this... So all of this rock that moved, it's still underwater. That didn't become like land formation. That's right. Yeah.

Slump from underwater to underwater. Did you say this already? But did you talk about what dislodged this? Do we know what the triggering event was? It appears to have been triggered by seismic activity because the slump sits on two major faults. One's called the Cape

Fold Belt, which sounds like something that Batman would wear. And the other is the Agulhas Marginal Fracture Zone, which I don't have a joke for. So this is where the continental crust of Africa, which is 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 billions of year old rock. Good slump, 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.

I'm going to give it to Blake. All right. Aw, thanks, Stefan. For the slump. What do you got, Sari? I'm going to give it to Hank because I didn't know anything about Mars' craters. It's such a big crater. It's a really big crater.

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 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 finely honed scientific minds. An influential David asks, were glyptodon shells really used as makeshift shelters, or were they just slow and delicious? So, Sari, what is a glyptodon? A glyptodon, it's a genus that lived in the Pleistocene in South America. They are relatives of armadillos. So they're just like these giant armored mammals that got up to 2,000 kilograms.

They're beefy lads. An influential David is specifically asking about their carapace, so the bony covering that has been described in many science articles as big as a Volkswagen Beetle 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 have some variation of the phrase, there are records of indigenous South American people using a fossil carapace for shelter.

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 for the original source and it's apparently just one specific paper and discovery that has spawned all of this like misconception. So what the evidence is, in 1881, a paleontologist named Santiago Roth uncovered human remains in Argentina. It's called the Fontes Suelas skeleton after the region.

And the bones he found like a femur and a pelvis and toe bones and a skull kind of in an arrangement kind of scattered and on top of these bones was an upside down carapace

of a glyptodon so instead of like over it like a shelter it was upside down like a bowl

if that makes sense so maybe he was sitting on top of it yes in the layers of dirt so it would be like being buried under a Volkswagen Beetle upside down. Yes. So maybe he was riding the glyptodont and then

he flipped. And then... Yeah. Got crushed. I'm no CSI investigator, but... I watched a documentary about ancient megafauna and they were talking about the terror birds flipping these things over.

It might have just been 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 glyptodon were both from the Pleistocene. So 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 and just put it on top. 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 glyptodons. So the body was there. The 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 carapace was put on top of it we don't know how or why it could have 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 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 some way. But like, I could not find any other thing. So it seems like all this talk, this general internet idea that humans use these big shells as shelter came from

this one body carapace situation that has gotten misinterpreted. It sounds good. It sounds like, oh, the thing was so big, people used it as a house. Well, thank you for debunking that myth. Yeah. Because there are a lot of them out there. If you want to ask the Science Couch, follow us on Twitter, at SciShow Tangents

where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to Rose, Aurea, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Now, time for our

final score. Sari and Stefan, you're tied with one. Blake, you're tied with me for the win. Be sure to check out more from Blake and me over at PBS Eons

at youtube.com slash eons. And if you like this show and want to help us out, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful and helps us know what you like about the show

because who knows, we might change some things up. Second, you can follow us on Twitter. We got a Twitter now, at SciShow Tangents. And tweet us your favorite moment from the show.

Finally, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Chin. I remain Blake DePastino. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's produced by all of us and Caitlin Hoffmeister. Our art is by Hiroko Matsushima, and our sound design is from Joseph Tunamedish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno, 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. But one more thing. Did you know that the Stegosaurus had one of the lowest brain-to-body ratios of any known dinosaur in that it was about nine meters long, but it had a brain the size of a puppy's, about 60 cubic centimeters. So for a long time, in the 1800s, paleontologists thought that it must have had a second brain in its butt. But then they were wrong? And there's a cavity in the sacrum where the spine meets the pelvis. And they're like, obviously, that's where a second brain in its butt. Oh, but then they were wrong? And there's a cavity in the sacrum where the spine meets the pelvis. And they're like, obviously,

that's where its second brain was. Turns out there wasn't enough nervous tissue over there to have been any kind of bundle of butt nerves 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.