Tegan Taylor

There you go.

I wouldn't want to get rid of it, but it's not like we've got a tail waving around behind us anymore.

I don't say either because I'd never heard of that thing before you said it just now.

Oh, like a third eyelid.

Like a crocodile.

I don't think I've seen this in a human before.

Maybe I haven't been gazing hard enough.

I love this because I'd never really thought about the fact that some people can wiggle their ears and others can't.

And I'd never thought deeply about what that means.

But of course, lots of other animals, mammals, are able to move their ears around like horses and my dogs.

And the idea that humans maybe at one stage were able to do that, I find very endearing.

So the other structures I want to talk about today are the sorts of ones that we usually leave where they are unless something goes wrong with them.

So I suppose the big ones are... Well, I rattled them off at the beginning to you, Norman.

The appendix, tonsils, gallbladder, which is, of course, what Cass and Jane have been asking us about, and then wisdom teeth as well.

Like, they're the sorts of things that...

Things seem to go wrong with them, not uncommonly, but we don't take them out as a prophylactic.

We leave them there unless something goes wrong.

And sometimes they have more of a function than maybe we once thought.

We talked about the pineal gland actually at length in our episode that we did on melatonin when we did sleep timber a couple of years ago.

It's called the pineal gland because it's shaped like a pine cone, adorable, but it's where melatonin is produced in the brain.