Similarly, the paleontological record, as a matter of fact, is full of dumbass land animals. Think about it. For your shitty body to end up in a circumstance where it can get preserved well and hold its form over eons, you have to have died in a calamitous way.

This is why there are very few female mammoth remains. The theory is that males were impulsive dumbasses who had a higher tendency to do something idiotic like fall into a mud hole and die. If you die smartly, rather than by an accident, then your body most likely will get eaten up by critters and bacteria. It’ll decompose naturally. Smart animals are less likely to be represented in the fossil record.

Those rare land animals that ended up dead with their bodies happening to end up in a good preservation environment were fucking idiots. It’s a self-selection bias.

All the fossils you see in museums are the dumb ones. That was Jerry, the idiot dinosaur, who was dared to try to run across the bog by the other dinosaurs. He tried, and he died, and now he’s in a museum where he is ironically held up as the exemplar of the species.

It’s a little different for sea critters because smart and dumb aquatic animals could both end up in a good preservation environment. But for land animals, scientists can only study the idiots, the morons, and the dumbfucks who died doing what they loved: Being stupid.

Lucy, the Australopithecus human, was a fucking idiot. She died probably falling from a tall tree at about 12 years old. What a dunce.

That’s why you read the plaque at a museum and it’s usually some story like, “This is Gus the Stegosaurus. He probably died when trying to do a rad skateboard trick when he fell off a cliff into a massive swamp. Other dinosaurs described his death as ‘gnarly bro’ but insisted that it was still a ‘sick trick’. Gus broke his spine in 6 places and probably died in immense pain.”

Think about that the next time you look at fossils. You’re looking at a bunch of fucking morons. This is why, when paleontologists try to use cause of death to make conclusions about the behavior of the entire animal species, sometimes they’re full of shit. It’s like saying that all humans are daredevil alcoholics who liked to jump motorcycles over canyons because you personally found the ancient remains of Evel Knievel.