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Koala brain8/3/2023 ![]() What’s Setonix brachyurus? I didn’t know it’s the quokka either. Unfortunately most people can’t identify animals based on the scientific names given in this dataset. My personal gratitude for these wonderful people:īurger, Joseph Robert George, Menshian Ashaki Leadbetter, Claire Shaikh, Farhin (2019), Data from: The allometry of brain size in mammals, Dryad, Dataset It’s a dataset with measurements for more than 1500 species of mammals, compiled from a large number of scientific publications. The data that I will analyze came from a dataset released in 2019 under the Creative Common CC0 License. ![]() I encourage you to take a look, check my work if you know some data science, and maybe use them as the basis for answering your own questions… perhaps about quokkas or bilbies. The point is that everything I say in this post come from these rather simple notebooks. Some plots are interactive so you can check out the brain size of your favorite animals. In this notebook (produced with a popular software called Jupyter), you can see me load a brain size dataset, ask myself questions about koalas, and answer them with short programs (written in the R programming language). So I am showing you my programming “notebook”. But with the rise of data science, almost any curious person with basic knowledge in programming and statistics can try to answer questions about this world, and even get some answers, on a Friday night with nothing else to do. It was not too many years ago when only university researchers could have access to the resource needed to mess around with brain data. I want to demonstrate that you can figure it out yourself. In this blog post, my goal is to explain why this Wikipedia paragraph is highly misleading. Don’t trust me! You can fact-check the Wikipedia yourself! Hmm… looks like Wikipedia isn’t well-informed about koalas after all. According to measurements made in a couple of studies ( here and here), the koala’s brain takes up ~75% of the cranial cavity, which is about the same as other mammals. I wanted to see what this Homer Simpson brain looks like, so I did a little search. Inside a koala’s head, 40% is water! Poor koalas! That sounds really bad. It occupies only 61% of the cranial cavity and is pressed against the inside surface by cerebrospinal fluid. The brain’s surface is fairly smooth, typical for a “primitive” animal. The koala has one of the smallest brains in proportion to body weight of any mammal, being 60% smaller than that of a typical diprotodont, weighing only 19.2 g (0.68 oz) on average. This is what the Wikipedia has to say about koala’s brain: Let’s turn to the most authoritative source of knowledge in the world, the Wikipedia, instead. That seems plausible to me, but you shouldn’t believe in Internet memes. Did you know that the koala is the dumbest animal in the world? According to an Internet meme, koalas have really tiny brains because the eucalyptus leaves that they eat are toxic and poor in nutrition.
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