This is Throwback Thursday #84. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc ...), please sent them to [email protected]. Thanks!
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We have a poem called "The Dinosaur" this week. It comes from the Chicago Tribune's "Line 'O Type or Two" column, which was created by Bert Leston Taylor in 1901. He presided over it until his death in 1921. Starting in 1924, Richard Henry Little took over the column. And, starting in 1924, he published annual compilations of the material until 1948. Some information on the column can be found here, scroll down or search for "The Linebook".
One of the things that always seemed to be available for next to nothing, were small oblong publications called “The Linebook”. They were filled with charming collections of poems and writings reprinted from the Trib’s column “A Line o’ Type or Two” started in 1901 by Bert Leston Taylor. When Richard Henry Little took over the column in 1924, he established “The Linebook” – an annual compilation of material from the column. The first issue’s cover design displayed his silhouette in full, ungainly length, but as of 1926 they employed colorful and playful wraparound covers to grab fans of the column. These covers more often than not depicted Little’s image designed by a long list of talented graphic designers. Bit by bit I gobbled them up and eventually collected up the entire 1924 to 1948 run presented below. . .
"The Dinosaur" is attributed to Bert L. Taylor, so it must have appeared between 1901 and 1921. Interestingly, it references the myth that dinosaurs had two brains. That idea arose when 19th century paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh noticed that the sauropod Camarasaurus had an enlarged canal in the vertebrae over its hips. The expanded canal was actually larger than the animal's brain case! See this article in Smithsonian Magazine in 2012.
Dinosaur brain expert Emily Buchholtz outlined the double brain issue in the newly-published second edition of The Complete Dinosaur. The idea stems from the work of 19th-century Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. In an assessment of the sauropod Camarasaurus, Marsh noticed that the canal in the vertebrae over the dinosaur’s hips enlarged into an expanded canal that was larger than the cavity for the dinosaur’s brain. “This is a most suggestive fact,” he wrote, and, according to Buchholtz, in 1881 Marsh described a similar expansion in the neural canal of Stegosaurus as “a posterior braincase.”
Sauropods and stegosaurs seemed like the perfect candidates for butt brains. These huge dinosaurs seemed to have pitiful brain sizes compared to the rest of their body, and a second brain–or similar organ–could have helped coordinate their back legs and tails. Alternatively, the second brain was sometimes cast as a kind of junction box, speeding up signals from the back half of the body up to the primary brain. That is, if such an organ actually existed. As paleontologists now know, no dinosaur had a second brain.
Here is "The Dinosaur" as it appeared in the ESCONI newsletter in October 1951.
The Dinosaur
Behold the mighty dinosaur,
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his weight and strength
But for his intellectual length.
You will observe by these remains
The creature had two sets of brains-
One in his head (the usual place)
The other at his spinal base.
Thus he could reason a priori
As well as a posteriori.
No problem bothered him a bit;
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise was he, so wise and solemn,
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong
It passed a few ideas along;
If something slipped his forward mind
Twas rescued by the one behind;
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving after thought.
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgments to revoke;
For he could think, without congestion
Upon both sides of every question.
O, gaze upon the model beast,
Defunct ten million years at least.(Bert L. Taylor in The Tribune's Line of Type or Two Submitted by F. C. Wray.)
