Clash of the Dinosaurs: TV documentary turns good science into bad

As a nonscientist who sometimes blogs about scientific things, I am horrified to hear how the demands of sensationalist television routinely distort science, either for political ends, or simply (apparently) to provide more “wow” factor. Take this story of what happened to Matt Wedel of the College of Podiatric Medicine in Pomona, California (I quote from Mat’s own blog articles, as he asks people to do; I found out about the issue from a post yesterday in my favorite way-over-my-head science blog, Tetrapod Zoology). Wedel was serving as one of the “talking heads” in those nature specials that air on the Discovery channel. I’m sure you know the ones; where they have about 10 minutes of information that they stretch into a one- or even two-hour show, supported by the same computer animations of supposedly exciting events.

Well, Matt was mentioning, in order to account for why it’s no longer believed, a kooky old idea with great popular appeal: that dinosaurs had a second brain, a “hindbrain,” located at a swelling in the spinal cord. An analogous structure is still present in the descendants of the dinosaurs, birds; the structure is called the glycogen body. No one really knows what the glycogen body does in birds, and they certainly don’t know what it did in dinosaurs, but if there’s one thing that’s pretty certain, it’s that it’s NOT a “second brain.”

Here is how Matt explains it on his blog; he is quoting from the email response the production company sent him and also commenting on the email, so the quote below is a bit hard to follow; read the whole thing in two articles on Matt’s blog, here and here. You’ll notice a lot of misspellings in the italicized portion of the quote; those are from the transcript the producers made of the interview. So “saurapod” instead of “sauropod,” etc. etc.:

Matt      14.45.08            Ok one of the curious things about saurapods is that they did have a swelling in the spinal chord in the neighbourhood of their pelvis.  And for a while it was thought that may be this was sort of like a second brain to help control the back half of the body.  Erm there are a couple of misconceptions there.  One is that most animals control large part of their body with their spinal chord.  If you’re going through day to day operations like just walking down the street and your minds on something else your brain isn’t even involved in very much controlling your body.  A lot of that is a reflex arc that’s controlled by your spinal chord.

Quick aside: the technical term I was groping for here is not “reflex arc” but “central pattern generator”.

So its not just dinosaurs that are controlling their body with their spinal chord its all animals.  Now the other thing about this swelling at the base of the tail is we find the same thing in birds and its called the glycogen body.  It’s a big swelling in the spinal chord that has glycogen which is this very energy rich compound that animals use to store energy.  Problem is we don’t even know what birds are doing with their glycogen bodies.  Er the function is mysterious – we don’t know if the glycogen is supporting their nervous system – if its there to be mobilised help dry[should be ‘drive’ -ed.] their hind limbs or the back half of their body and until we find out what birds are doing with theirs we have very little hope of knowing what dinosaurs were doing with their glycogen bodies.

You can understand that a TV show for Discovery doesn’t always have the room to expand a complex argument. It must also accommodate the needs of all sections of the audience (including children) and while it must educate, it must simultaneously hold everybody’s attention. This said, this doesn’t mean there’s room for error. In the transcript of the final edit, you appeared to be saying:

One of the curious things about Sauropods is that they did have a swelling in the spinal cord, in the neighborhood of their pelvis.  This was sort of like a second brain to help control the back half of the body.

There it is  in black and white. I was very clearly explaining why a misconception is no longer held, and they edited the tape to make me regurgitate the misconception as if it was not just a commonly accepted fact, but a fact that I accepted. That is beyond quote-mining, it is the most blatantly dishonest thing that you can do with someone’s recorded words.

Now, since I no longer have television service, I wasn’t likely to run across this documentary anyway, but I would recommend, if you are interested in this topic and do chance to see the show, that you consider what else might have been distorted to reflect what the producers wanted to portray, rather than the Truth…

Even on the Internet, we have a responsibility to the truth; I had thought that television nature specials were supposed to have even higher standards.

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