SciShow Tangents - Dogs with Frankie Jonas

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Frankie Jonas stops by to chat with us about your best friend and mine, the humble dog! You'd think that in this, of all episodes, we'd be able to have a nice, simple definition of the topic. But guess what, no one even knows what a dog is apparently! Science!If you want more Frankie Jonas, check out his TikTok! He's got a cute dog!Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I am your host. I'm Hank Green. And joining me, as always, this week is our science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. Resident Everyman Sam Schultz is here today as well. Hello, Sam. And we also have a special guest this week, a very special guest. I am excited to announce we have joining us,

content creator, and I am quoting this directly from an email he sent to sam today noted foot fetishist frankie jonas why hello there thank you very much i'm sorry that we didn't do feet as our episode which is a perfectly legitimate size your tangents episode there's lots of cool feet it's on the the topic list. There's some fascinating foot facts that I've found in my foray into the field. Wow. Were you prepared for this? I felt smart saying that. Yeah.

That sentence makes me think that you're now about to tell us like eight or nine foot facts. Oh, I'll keep them for the episode so that I have a reason to come back. I wanted to ask everybody a question today, which is, if you could go get a pet right now, what pet would you go get? Another cat. You'd get another cat? It would ruin my cat's life. Friends with cats, yeah, that was the problem. I had a cat for a long time and I wanted another cat, but

that is not how my cat felt. No, she would be extremely depressed if we got another cat. I would love a tortoise. Not a big one. I don't have the space for a big one but a small one and maybe one that's like in the middle of its life because i'd be really sad if i like grew very old and had to bequeath my tortoise onto someone like that feels like a lot of pressure because they live so long you want to die at the same time as your tortoise yeah we could just fade away to the

great beyond together and be like we lived a good life huh yeah this is like a little tortoise high five and then you both evaporate like obi-wan yeah that'd be great when i lived in florida there were a lot of old people around and i had an idea for a business that was you pay me five dollars a month and after you die i I'll take care of your animals. It's like kind of pedanture. Just because you don't want to be thinking what's going to happen to my poor pet when I'm gone. When are they paying you the five bucks?

While they're alive. It's insurance. Like a monthly thing? Yeah. Okay. Do you have the same dehumanization methods of insurance where you can't take on certain animals after a point in someone's life yeah you gotta you gotta do the actuator stuff where if

it's like it's like a 98 year old who's who's you know got a foot in the grave it's like well that's gonna be a hundred dollars a month thank you very much yeah oh no yeah 98 98 years old and like a two-month-old puppy i feel like that's a high premium on that one. Yeah, that's a difficult trade off. Or if it's like a two month old parrot, like very bad, like worst possible outcome, because that thing's going to be around for like 120 years. What about you, Frankie? What kind of pet are you looking for?

Well, I just coincidentally, as we're doing this podcast, I just got a puppy two months ago. She's the best but i think if i weren't to have gotten a puppy i would probably have gotten an axolotl i've always wanted yeah totally i'm one of the i'm one of those guys an axolotl guy can you get an axolotl like on the on the white market depending on the state okay you have to have a permit and in certain ones it is uh technically not an exotic animal okay so you can just get it however you can just roll up to your nearest pet smart and just buy the axolotl when i was in college there was an email list for like free

things so you could get free stuff on it free food and one multiple times during my undergrad people were offering axolotl eggs for anyone who wanted them to like raise their own what whoa wow you get little axolotl tadpoles yeah i just i didn't want the responsibility i was like absolutely not i am not ready to be a parent, but I'm sure someone claimed them and raised their own axolotls. Your puppy is what informed the topic of this very episode of the show. Really? Yeah, I was scrolling through stuff and I saw your puppy and I was like, this is a guy who's going to be dying to talk about dogs.

I am dying to talk about dogs. It's become the only topic of conversation I have as of late. It's like when you become a dad and all you talk about is your kids it's all i think about it's all i think about it's the it's the same level of responsibility it's absolutely well i mean at this point it's probably like to have a puppy is probably more work than having a four-year-old who mostly he he puts his dishes in the sink. Wow. Whoa. It's amazing. My wife doesn't put her dishes in the sink.

Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while also trying and failing

to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and they're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode,

one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, now as always we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week if this is correct it says in my show notes from frankie jonas eat sleep reproduce my thoughts are limited in their bounds i can only remember my whole life momentarily entirety in momentary fragments all is happening at once eat sleep reproduce owner is safety see you as alpha yet you do not resemble alpha i am reprogrammed. Eat, sleep, reproduce inside. The carcass I hunt is a stuffed dinosaur. The pile of leaves is a furry and full of foam. The prize mate is the couch cushion. Eat, sleep, reproduce domesticated.

Am I happy? I don't know what the difference is my thoughts are limited yet know what i should feel am i beast or slave am i friend or accessory eat sleep reproduce holy shit that was a good science poem. Yeah, that was like a proper poem. It's like, whatever. Well, maybe we'll have you on every episode from now on. You'll show up, do the poem, and then you can go. Just text me when you want a poem, and I'll write it for you.

I got it. I got it. Beautiful. Our topic today is dogs, and dogs eat, sleep, and reproducibly let them. Hopefully we're in some control of that, I guess. And Sari, what is a dog? What is a dog? Because I know that there is some complexity to this categorization.

Yeah, so it's one of those like species designations that is kind of fuzzy. It's one of the definitions you don't like, Hank, because we like saw a thing and then we're like, let's define it based on what fits into this group and then kind of try and exclude things that are similar but- But we don't feel like fit, yeah. So Canis lupus is the species name for a wolf. And then Canis lupus familiaris or canis familiaris is the domestic dog right and the way that it's treated taxonomically is as a domesticated domesticated descendant of the wolf

domesticated dogs have been bred for different traits so like uh i don't know i think all of us maybe know it but maybe not everyone who is listening may know it, that all dogs are technically the same species, even though they've been bred for different traits, whether it's like a squished face or a big body or a small body. Those are all considered to be the same species. And where the definition gets a little fuzzy is because the way that it was defined was people looked at the domestic dog the gray wolf and an animal called the golden jackal and we're like those are similar and and so like with the golden jackal and now the dingo in australia we're like are those domesticated dogs are those not domesticated dogs are those like wild dogs right even dogs like domesticated dogs can mate with wolves so is there a hard line between the species it does seem exactly like the kind of definition that i don't like where it's like

okay we we wanted to have a special category for the dog but we should just call those we should call those dogs and then it's like everything else is just the ones that we don't have in our houses so we don't know what dogs are. Do we know where the word dog comes from? No. I'll quote this from the etymology website I use. Its origin remains one of the great mysteries of English etymology. Wow.

Wow. Which is quite impressive to me. It's like somebody looked at it and was like, that looks like dog. Yeah, but the thing is, it's like the word hound existed beforehand and like the old English hund, like, so like dachshund existed.

And then at some point in like the 16th, 17th century, we just started calling them dog. We just started calling them dog. We just started calling them dog. And that overtook hound. That's very cool. I love that we just lose stuff. And then, you know, it was just one guy or girl somewhere who was like, hey, I think we should all start calling this thing a dog.

Or there was a dog that was, they named it dog. The most famous dog of all time. Dog the dog. Dog the Dog. Dog the Dog, the forgotten dog. Became cool to call them dogs instead of hounds or huns. That was boomer behavior to call them hounds. I mean, this happens all the time. And now that I'm like pretty old,

yes, suddenly there are many words that I do not know the meaning of. Can I ask a question about dogs that I don't entirely understand the question I'm going to ask? If other species had done what dogs did, like in the wild, if dogs had just naturally turned into poodles and dachshunds and all that stuff, would we call them different species then, do you think? Or like, is that not even? I don't think that you can naturally do what dogs do. Do all that stuff. Yeah.

Artificial selection can take place over a much shorter period of time than natural selection does. The sort of genomic similarity but phenotypic dissimilarity is a pretty specific thing to artificial selection. So like having a very similar genome but a very different look. Like you look very different despite the fact that your genes are very similar, is the thing that is much more common in artificial selection. And are they particularly like flexible to that? I have heard that there is something interesting about their genome that makes them easy to change shape. Whereas like cats, for example, are much more static. They're genetically the perfect little friend.

They are definitely the perfect little friend. They are definitely the perfect little friend and I maintain that they are one of our great creations. Or I don't know if I should use the word creation. They are one of our great series of decisions. We did a good job, I think, with dogs. And now, y'all, it is time to move on to the part of the show where I actually quiz you and you show your butts by being wrong about stuff.

This week, we're gonna be playing a new game that we've played before. So it's... Not new? A little bit of both. This game is called This or That, and it's the Dog-Wolf Edition. Dogs are our best friends thanks to domestication and evolution. According to genetic evidence, dogs and wolves diverged around 27,000 to 40,000 years ago. So not as specific as we'd like, but still pretty specific. We don't know exactly where or how this domestication occurred. In

addition to figuring out the history of domestication, researchers have been intrigued by the behavioral and physical traits that distinguish modern wolves and modern dogs. So in today's game of This or That, I will be presenting you with an experiment that compares wolf and dog behavior along with the result of that experiment. And you got to tell me whether that describes a wolf or a dog. So I could, for example, say researchers measured the development of muscles in the brow that make eyes look larger and more puppyish. Is that muscle more developed in dogs or in wolves?

And you would say... Dogs. Dogs, that is correct. Dogs have a special muscle that makes their eyes look cuter, which is dope because we were like, I like that one. An important safety note before we begin, all of these experiments involved hand-raised wolves, and they are done by experts. Please do not do experiments with wolves.

Our first question. Researchers trained wolves and pack dogs to press a touchscreen with their noses. So this is not a domesticated dog, a pack dog. To touch a touchscreen with their noses to provide food to an enclosure next to them. And then they put a member of the wolf or dog's pack in the adjacent enclosure and looked at whether the subject gave food to their pack mate. Who was more likely to give food to the neighboring pack member, dog or wolf? Wolf.

Wolf. Dog. The answer is wolf. a dog would never share food i had hope i had hope you see the best in dogs i do i do so this is a a pro-social comparison and uh there are contradictory theories about whether dogs are more or less cooperative than wolves some researchers hypothesize that dog domestication would select for cooperative there are contradictory theories about whether dogs are more or less cooperative than wolves. Some researchers hypothesized that dog domestication would select for cooperative behaviors, while others predict that wolves would be more cooperative because they're pack animals.

This experiment was a test of pro-social behavior, which are actions meant to help others, not themselves. And the experiment suggests that wolves rely on more cooperation than pack dogs, but this is pack dogs. It's not necessarily true for pet dogs. Pet dogs have shown pro-social behaviors in experiments, and these results suggest that pro-social behavior in pet dogs may actually be an ancestral trait. So next we've got gaze duration. So this is a thing that we also are studying. Researchers stood next to a container holding several small pieces of sausage. The experimenter then called the subject, which was in this case either a wolf or a pet dog, to bring their attention to the food. And then they gave

the subject pieces at different times. And then upon giving the subject the last piece of food, the experimenter made eye contact with the subject and tried to maintain it. Which made eye contact longer, dog or wolf? Dog. Dog. Dog is correct. Yes, more food, please, was what he was saying.

And not only was it dog, but the dog looked at the human face for an unbroken, on average, 34 seconds. Oh, my God. Whereas the wolf looked away in five seconds. So as you probably would expect, the experiment was the second of two experiments designed to compare the sociability of dogs and wolves, where sociability refers to the willingness to approach strangers.

The other experiment had the researchers compare the willingness of 11 human socialized gray wolves and 11 pet dogs to approach an experimenter who was sitting quietly and ignoring the subject. Dogs waited less time to approach the stranger and then spent more time with the stranger after approaching. Dogs are just like, hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello. You seem important and nice. All right, our final this or that. Researchers provided individual pack-living dogs or wolves with an unsolvable task, getting food out of a ball designed to hold the food in.

They gave the subject the ball in the morning and then watched as the dog or wolf made first contact with the ball. And after that first contact, they tracked how long it took for the dog or wolf to give up trying to get the food out of the ball. Which one took longer to give up, dog or wolf? Dog. Dog. Oh. The answer is the wolves took longer to give up.

Oh. Incredible. They did my day. Well, now it's even. Wow. So the researchers have compared dogs and wolves in various problem-solving contexts and generally found that wolves perform better than dogs. One hypothesis is that dogs are used to saying,

hey, human being, please help me with this problem. While another hypothesis is that because wolves are mainly hunters and dogs are mainly scavengers, dogs may not need to be as persistent. But disentangling these hypotheses from previous work was difficult because the dogs and the wolves being compared might have just been raised differently, like pet dogs who might have been discouraged from problem solving things around the house. Because problem solving around the house can lead to problems that they will be discouraged from making. The experiment compared pack dogs with wolves that were raised similarly, and the results suggest that the difference in problem solving is connected to the difference in hunting and scavenging lifestyles. So that means that we have come out of that with an absolutely tie ball game at two and two and two for our three contestants. Next, we're going to take a short break and then it will be time for Truth or Fail.

I've prepared three science facts about dogs, but only one of them is real. Our three panelists have to figure out, either by deduction or wild guess, which of the facts is true. If they do, they get a Hank Buck. If you are tricked, then you do not get a Hank Buck. And I'll take it for myself and I'll use it to buy probably a coffee. African wild dogs, or Lycoenrichthys, are pack dogs that are related to domestic dogs. They are endangered, but there's a population in Botswana, and while observing African wild dogs getting ready to leave their resting spot and go on the hunt, researchers observed something unusual about how the pack coordinated their activity, which is the following thing that they observed.

Number one, to coordinate their departure, the dominant male or female lightly bites the tail of another member of the pack, who will then go on and bite another member of the pack's tail and so on until everybody's little butt has been bitten and they know that it's time to go. That is one of the facts that may or may not be true. Fact number two, to optimize their group's movements, the pack sends out scouts to find foods. But the scouts don't just look for food. They also take periodic pit stops to pee, leaving behind a scented guide for the rest of the pack to find them. Or fact number three.

To decide on whether or not they will get moving, the dogs gather together and they vote on whether or not they're going to go hunt by exhaling loudly through their noses. If enough dogs vote yes, the pack moves out and hunts. They think dogs should vote. I think dogs should vote. The facts presented are tail bite telephone, pee guiding guides, or vote by sneeze. Which of the facts do you think is the true fact? I really want to say three. It's so tempting, isn't it?

Dog democracy. I'd say two. Oh, you already did your answer? You can deliberate a little bit. Yeah, wait till Sari talks more. She knows. No, I don't know anything. I feel like they wouldn't need to buy each other's tails

because they can see with their eyeballs, right? But I don't know anything. I feel like they wouldn't need to bite each other's tails because they can see with their eyeballs, right? But I don't know. Dogs get distracted too, maybe. It's like, hey, here, pay attention. It could be a more specific signal. It could be like a tribal thing. Buddy up and bite a butt. Buddy up and bite a butt.

That's what they say. That's how it started. The pee thing feels too obvious. But I don't know. Maybe the obvious... The problem is Frankie, is that I talk myself out of the correct one a lot of the time.

So don't listen to me. Sam's strategy is completely flawed because the pee, it makes perfect sense. It sounds real. Sneezing sounds fake, but fun. Sneezing does sound fake,, it sounds, it makes perfect sense. It sounds real. Sneezing sounds fake, but fun. Sneezing does sound fake, but it just, it sounds just ridiculous enough

to also be true. Are there animals that vote? Do even like primates? I mean, are there animals that vote? I mean, in this case, maybe the dogs do, but that's all I got. I haven't done a bunch of research on animal democracy. But you could say that one in three are also like similar behaviors

and that it's like it's showing like a clear line of intelligence and like social behavior. I've just searched do animals vote and yes. The answer is yes. Because they can make decisions. And so at some point in animal complexity, they're like, we're not going to make decisions alone. We're going to make decisions together.

And so then that's voting. Hank, does Google say if they lean more Republican or Democrat? I think I'm going to have to go with vote by sneeze. Vote by sneeze for Sam. Sam's sliding right in with a vote by sneeze. I'm going to go with Sam and say vote by sneeze because I want it to be true. So far, by going against the pack, I'm one for two. So I'll go with two.

The answer, everyone, is vote by sneeze. Oh, thank goodness. And it's not. The coolest thing about this is that it's not a direct democracy. So if one of the leaders of the pack sneezes, it takes fewer total sneezes to get the pack to move. So this, they figured this out because they were watching the dogs

and they would they like, before they left in the morning, they just started to sneeze. They'd be like and they're like, why are the dogs sneezing? But then they looked and they're like, well they're only like each sneezing once. This is very weird.

So they collected data from five different packs and they observed more sneezing in the groups that were more likely to go and hunt. And the researchers found that if dominant male or female in the group sneezed, fewer sneezes were needed for the rest of the group before they moved out to hunt. And from the results, they concluded that sneezing is a kind of vote that allows the

pack to decide on whether or not it's time to go hunt. Ah, these dogs can count. Who's counting? Who's keeping total? They all are? Who is proctoring this? Direct democracy, except that it's not because some people get more votes because they're sure.

It's the electoral college. Yeah. because they're sure the electoral college yeah now those other things were were also based on real on real things of course uh there there is a number of are a number of different strategies that use pheromone signals in paths bees ants dogs also do this to teach them how to get to teach other members of the group how to get to food and then uh when it comes to tail biting that's not a thing that dogs do but african elephants decide to go on the move when a member of the family moves to the side faces away from the group and then rumbles while lifting a leg very specific sign and then other members will do the exact same thing they will

turn in the same direction they will rumble and they will lift a leg until everybody's like, we have agreed. We are all on the same page. It's time to move out. I freaking love elephants. That's so cool. Congratulations to Sam and Sari, Frankie Jonas. Thank you for coming on the show.

Your poem was great. I tried. I put a lot of work into it. Does the poem get me any extra Hank bucks? Oh, gosh. Don't even ask him because he'll give you one. He's a big talkie. It hasn't never happened, so don't ask.

We don't want to throw everything into confusion. But anyway, it doesn't really matter because you're not going to be here next week and the only people who are who are taking home titles are sam and sari who've tied already so yeah you get one for the poem and now everybody ties and that means it's time to ask the science couch where we've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds our question is from hannah g 913 who asks why do dogs do the little head tilt this is a great question I have always assumed that it's to give them like a better like ability to perceive things in more dimensions so like when we're doing this we can only see 3d in like stereoscopic in these directions but we can't see it from up and down. So like I can see,

well, if I, if I could see your face, I could see slightly more of one side than the other, but I couldn't see slightly more of the top than the bottom. And so I've always figured that like turning the head gives you more visual data, maybe to go on.

I think it's so they can put blood in their brain and new places. They're shaking their blood brain around. Well, that's, that's not on the list that I have, Sam, put blood in their brain in new places. They're shaking their blood brain around. They get it up. Well, that's not on the list that I have, Sam, but you might be onto something innovative here. Let's have a hypothesis and we'll test it later. Okay. I always assumed that it was,

like when they did the communication with dolphins, how they used physical touch as a way of communication, that it was like a physical communication of docile inquisitiveness. Yeah, it's just a, it's like a tail wag, where it's like just, it's communicating something

about the dog's state of mind, which is, you know, which we do constantly in our facial expressions. We have like tremendously complicated facial expression systems. Frankie's twirling his hair at me. And I feel like we are more likely to pass that kind of trait on to a dog who we, like an animal that we spend a lot of time communicating with.

But dogs, don't they also do it when they're alone as well? Like in situations where they're hunting or they're in their packs, they also do the head tilt to each other? I don't know. Oh, I don't know if they do. I couldn't, I was trying to look that up. And apparently from my research, that's an open question. Like all of our theories about dog head tilts are just from dogs interacting with humans. And we don't know if they do it to each other. If a dog is alone in the woods, does it still tilt its head? So yes, all of those things. I feel like we've all spent enough time around dogs to kind of piece this together. So part of it, like you said, Frankie, is social. Humans tilt their heads to think about things. So it's possible there's something about like dogs interacting with us

that had them learn the head tilt, but also we just think it's really cute. So the fact that we like give them positive reinforcement when they tilt their heads, we like start giving them treats or talking to them in a baby voice or like get really excited. Then they're like, oh, these humans are excited. I'm going to tilt my head more.

Yeah. And so that's why they like do it more often. Part of it is what Hank was saying about seeing. So could improve their sight line or like give them a different perspective on something because they often tilt their heads when there's something in their environment that they want to see better or hear better. And one study thought it had to do with like the muzzle size of their dog. And it was pretty inconcclusive but there was a really nice visual where if you take your fist and you pretend it's a dog muzzle on your nose, you can see how

it blocks some of your vision in the way that your nose, your brain kind of cancels out but it's a bigger block and so by tilting you can see parts of the environment. I'm really sad that not everyone in podcast land could see us all.

Literally all of us sitting there, not thinking we're not in no way performing for each other entirely, just looking. And hopefully you at home are, we're doing it with us. That was, I hope that is why I described this so that everyone could participate in this like moment together.

But then also hearing is a big part of it too, they think. So human ears, the way that they're structured, we have a pretty good ability to sense sounds from all directions, even behind. Even the way that our ears are structured, we can still hear sounds from behind fairly well. that our ears are structured, we can still hear sounds from behind fairly well. But dog ears, whether they're like floppy and blocking the entire ear canal or like a German shepherd and like pointy and facing forward, there's a lot more directionality to their hearing. And the head tilt allows them to like flop their ear flaps around and change the direction in which they're getting sound. And so that gives you information about like what they're hearing. If they need to hear better, they can reorient their head to listen to your voice or something in the environment or where it's coming from because our brains are great.

And because of how we hear sounds slightly differently in both ears, that helps us orient where something is in the environment and dogs do the same thing. So by tilting their head around, they can adjust their ears to understand where a sound is coming from. That is surprisingly complicated. And are those all reasons, or are they all guesses? I think they're all guesses. Well, do we know anything, Hank?

Everything's just a guess, really. True. Okay. All right. So it's of various levels of certainty about these things, but mostly what I think it outlines to me is that scientists spend a lot of time looking at their dogs and thinking about their cute little faces.

If you want to ask the science couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. You'll also see lots of other good stuff there at Twitter.com slash SciShowTangents. Thank you to at Caitlin Lisbeth, at He's Pepperminty, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you want to see more of Frankie Jonas and Why Wouldn't You,

you can go and look at I am Frankie Jonas on TikTok or maybe also on Twitter what's your Twitter I I don't really go on my Twitter but it's just Frankie Jonas on Twitter that's that's before the the the revamp of myself what oh you are revamped yeah I fully revamped fully revamped I was off social media for years and years and years and then here we are now you had the you had the TikTok just like me

the TikTok was was a was a game changer game changer if you like this show and you want to help us out it's so easy to do that

first you can go to patreon.com slash sideshow tangents and become a patron you can get access to our bonus episode that we do once a month where we

answer your questions. You can also, what's it called? It's called potty time. No, it's called, no, it's called,

it's called truth or bidet. What was it? No, no, Q and bidet. It's called Q and bidet where you can listen to, I've, we don't,

it's called potty time. I've renamed it again. I'm very excited for you to come and hang out on our new episode of Potty Time, which will be released soon. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful and lets us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us.

Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz. And I've been Frankie Jonas. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by, except for Frankie, and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes as well. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of this 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. Borafagus is an extinct genus of dog that lived until about 2 million years ago with short, flat teeth and huge, stubby jaw bones. Scientists guessed that they used these chompers to eat bones, but no one knew for sure until 2018. That's when we found a Borafagus toilet full of fossilized poop. And that poop was filled with fragments of bones from small animals like birds, all the way up to deer that

were more than four times bigger than them. After studying the old poop, scientists think Baraphagus hunted in packs, but they weren't very good at sharing. So each dog ate as much as it could, as fast as it could, which made being able to chomp right through bones without slowing down to chew pretty useful. Does Baraphagus mean bone eater? Gluttonous eater? Oh, gluttonous eater.

Just goes and goes and goes real hard. And they didn't even know anything about it when they named it. They named it so long ago and they just looked at its skull and they were like... This thing ate like crazy. Yeah.

It's like Thanksgiving every night with these guys. Jeez. Look at these teeth. Get a room for those chompy's