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The Debunker: Did Big Dinosaurs Have a Second Brain?

Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh was one of the great dinosaur experts of the 19th century, naming pretty much every extinct lizard you see today in museum lobbies or children’s books: Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Triceratops, Apatosaurus. Much of his work centered on the dinosaur he called Stegosaurus, meaning “covered lizard.” In 1881, he made a cast of a Stegosaurus skull, and was astounded to find that the giant animal probably made do with a 3-ounce brain, no bigger than a lime. (Not quite the “brain the size of a walnut” from popular accounts, but close.)


He also noticed a large canal lower on Stegosaurus’s spinal cord, near its hips. The cavity left room for a brain much larger than the citrus-sized one in Stegosaurus’s noggin. Marsh speculated that perhaps dinosaurs had a simple secondary brain near their tails. Since it would take nerve impulses a while to get up and down a 30-foot dinosaur, you can see the appeal of a “junction box” halfway down the line.

But most of Marsh’s thinking about dinosaur smarts turned out, over the next century, to be pretty misleading. Yes, Stegosaurus has a small brain, but that doesn’t mean all dinosaurs are slow, lumbering brutes. It just means Stegosaurus was one of your dumber specimens. And as for the second brain—well, we now know that its location is all wrong to contain nerves. The current thinking is that the “second brain” cavity probably contained a glycogen body, an organ for energy storage that today’s birds still possess. But that’s not nearly as fun as a butt-brain, so it’s taking Marsh’s bad hypothesis just as long to die out as the dinosaurs themselves took.

Quick Quiz: Stegosaurus is the official dinosaur of what U.S. state, which has the bighorn sheep as its state mammal and the columbine as its state flower?



quality posts: 1105 Private Messages whatsamattaU

Columbine? Hmmm. I wish I could ask John Denver for help on this one.


quality posts: 197 Private Messages ROGETRAY
whatsamattaU wrote:Columbine? Hmmm. I wish I could ask John Denver for help on this one.


quality posts: 1105 Private Messages whatsamattaU

I actually thought you would post something like this. Appreciated regardless, and I miss John Denver (and if the audience hasn't gotten the multiple hints by now,...). Heck, I also miss posting as much as I did in the past. Take care, Rogetray.


quality posts: 1 Private Messages ekummel

But what's interesting is that humans have a sort-of rudimentary second brain. It's their digestive system. It's been suggested that the digestive system functions similarly to the way a brain functions. Pharmaceuticals that work on the brain also work on the digestive system. Plus, more serotonin is produced in your gut than anywhere else (up to 95% of the serotonin is produced in your gut)
Disconnect the bowels from the brain and it still functions normally.
So yeah, in a way, humans have two brains.