What are you on about? If a theory has been shown to be untenable, yet many people continue to popularly believe it is true, then it certainly meets one definition of a “myth” as commonly used — a story or alleged “fact” that is widely believed but untrue.

I remembered reading as a kid that stegosaurs and sauropods had neural ganglia at their hips that acted as a kind of auxiliary brain — making “decisions” to react to stimuli that reached them long before the impulses could reach the real brain. Seemed to make sense to me. Ever since, I thought this was a settled thing. I had no conception that this idea had been discarded.

One of the things I like about Brian Switek’s blog posts (and his book Written in Stone) is that I, even with a lifelong and continuing interest in animals (especially dinosaurs), still end up learning something new and unexpected whenever I read them.

Great article as usual.

To call disproven theories falsehoods and myths is a disgrace.

Shame on you.

That was a weird video…

Thank you for fixing my ignorance on this matter!

But, being serious here, we most likely won’t ever really know what the extra large cavity in the stegosaurs and other sauropods was for, except by inference via birds. The only way we could be for certain is to go back in a time machine and check them out first hand, but that won’t be happening anytime soon.

I recently taught a group of 2nd and 3rd graders in summer school at the AMNH. The Stegosaurus skeleton there includes a label that says “Did Stegosaurs Have Two Brains?” The small text underneath explains that no, they didn’t, and that the expansion in the spinal column is shared by elephants. But the children, in their rush to get information rather than read and comprehend labels, thought that this means that stegosaurs AND ELEPHANTS had two brains.

(The label does not mention the uniqueness of stegosaurs)

(This hurried reading of labels is how most visitors, of all ages, read museum labels – title and picture give the initial impression, and the small text if they have time, and children generally don’t.)

They’d never heard of this idea until they saw it in the AMNH, and then it took some work to point out what the label was actually saying.

This is actually a deviation from the topic of this post: The hindbrain myth is an interesting factor in discussing the sacral expansion. But this recent experience suggested to me that we need to be careful about when and how we deliberately introduce misconceptions into people’s minds.