So I built a stegosaurus model kit, which included some factoids in the instructions. One of these factoids was that stegosaurs are not believed to have had a secondary brain in the hips to help them control their rear half after all. That was wild to me, since the whole stegosaurs and sauropods with their tiny heads needing a secondary brain for their huge bodies was commonly accepted back when I was a kid. So I looked it up, and indeed, the current hypothesis is that the cavity that the second brain was thought to occupy is used for a thing called a glycogen body. But what exactly does a glycogen body do? We'll get back to you on that, apparently.

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[–] 15 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I can anecdotally confirm as a "dinosaur kid" of the 80s, that this was a common tidbit in children's books of the era.

I'm pretty sure I had a VHS with Fred Savage where they ran through it as well.

The explanation was that the response time if a Brontosaurus got its tail messed with (an anvil dropped on it) was problematicly slow if the nervous system had to send the message such a great distance to the "head brain" and then have the reaction message all the way back. Basically they'd be living with massive lag IRL.

Can't say I'm surprised that science is backing off the certainty on that. Those same books were also full of "look at all the goofy things previous generations of paleontologists thought"

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The explanation was that the response time if a Brontosaurus got its tail messed with (an anvil dropped on it)

    If a Brontosaurus needed to react to an anvil being dropped on its tail then I have more important questions.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Laughing that kids didn't get taught this in the day! It was "common knowledge" when I was a child. And I had an excellent science teacher. That woman taught me empiricism and how to form an hypothesis and test it. We simply didn't know in the 70s and 80s!

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)