Documentary, Dinosaur Britain - Ep 2 Dinosaurs on England's Shores 2015
#AncientEarth #Documentary #Dinosaurs #Prehistoric #Evolutionary
#AncientEarth #Documentary #Dinosaurs #Prehistoric #Evolutionary
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00:00ever since i was a child i've been fascinated by the idea of dinosaurs but i never really
00:14thought about them having a connection with britain and yet amazingly this country was
00:19once a paradise for dinosaurs with over 50 species discovered across the uk britain
00:26was a real life jurassic park
00:28britain used to be home to the world's most terrifying predators raptors tyrannosaurs
00:53and flying reptiles pterosaurs
00:56now i'm on an adventure millions of years in the making revealing the truth about how this
01:06country's dinosaurs lived fought ate and died
01:13in a time when britain was ruled by dinosaurs
01:23so
01:28so
01:34thousands of tourists come to loch ness every year with a hope of spotting the famous nessie
01:39without a whole lot of luck but go back more than a hundred million years
01:42and real monsters were everywhere in britain
02:16have been discovered across England, Wales and right here in Scotland.
02:39Wow, that's not Nessie.
02:41That is a plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile.
02:46Even Loch Ness didn't exist when these were alive.
02:53But in the seas around Jurassic Britain,
02:56these huge predators were as real and as common as dolphins and seals are today.
03:05These monster reptiles grew up to 50 feet,
03:10more than eight times bigger than me.
03:17Plesiosaurs had large, deep-set teeth for trapping fish and dismembering prey.
03:23They were one of the ocean's top predators.
03:25165 million years ago, Scotland looked very different from today.
03:38It would have been flatter with a hot, humid climate and freshwater lagoons teeming with life.
03:44I've come to the Isle of Skye on a mission to uncover the hidden story of Britain's dinosaur past.
03:53Now, many of the rocks here in Scotland were formed long before the age of the dinosaurs.
03:58So scientists used to see this part of Britain as a bit of a lost cause when it came to dinosaur finds.
04:04But in 1982, that changed forever when evidence of the first Scottish dinosaurs were discovered right here on Skye.
04:13And that was just the beginning.
04:15The Isle of Skye lies off the west coast of Scotland, 130 miles from Edinburgh.
04:25This remote island has fast become one of the most exciting dinosaur-hunting hotspots in Britain.
04:32With the dramatic coastline stretching over a thousand miles,
04:39much of Skye is still unchartered territory for dinosaur hunters.
04:44And it's not just bones that have been discovered.
04:47Other evidence has emerged of dinosaurs living in Scotland.
04:53To find out more, I'm meeting Dean Lomax on Ancoran Beach.
04:58At 25, Dean might not look like the stereotypical palaeontologist,
05:03but he's already discovered and named an entirely new species of ichthyosaur,
05:08a prehistoric reptile.
05:10Hello, Dean. Hey, Ellie. Good to see you again.
05:13Yeah, you too. What's all this?
05:16This is a dinosaur footprint here.
05:19No way, that's not a dinosaur footprint.
05:21It is. See the three toes here?
05:23God, that's cool.
05:24It was made about 150, 165 million years ago by a big meat-eating dinosaur.
05:29That's just brilliant.
05:31This footprint suggests a big theropod of about 15, 20 feet in length.
05:34Quite an animal.
05:36How can you be sure, though, that that's a dinosaur footprint?
05:37How is that made and left here?
05:40Yes, this animal, this dinosaur, has been walking along the beach,
05:43leaving its footprints in this sort of muddy coastal region.
05:45And over time, that mud would have hardened and been baked by the sun
05:49and turned to stone. And then that's how they've been left here.
05:51For this, it's the footprints of giants?
05:54It is. We are literally standing in the same bed
05:57that dinosaurs were walking on 165 million years ago.
06:01That's amazing. Yeah.
06:09Dean, that was incredible to see the footprints of dinosaurs here, now, today.
06:14Yeah, I mean, that's a great example.
06:16And there's plenty others across the sky on various different beaches.
06:20The more eyes down to the floor looking at this material,
06:23another 10, 15 years, who knows what could be discovered?
06:26A remarkable set of tracks found here in 2002
06:31shows more than 20 individual footprints.
06:34Belonging to a theropod or meat-eating dinosaur,
06:36the prints are from an adult and juveniles,
06:40suggesting these creatures lived in family groups.
06:44The adult theropod measured around 11 feet long.
06:48But it would have been dwarfed by a type of dinosaur
06:51that roamed ancient Scotland and other parts of Britain
06:54165 million years ago.
06:56I'm heading to Skye's Staffin Museum,
07:00where Dean has lined up a big surprise.
07:03It's not our normal museum, is it, this?
07:05It's not. Wait till you see the inside.
07:07Has it got a cafe?
07:09Hopefully.
07:11Wow.
07:13This is huge.
07:15Yeah, this is a massive bone from the biggest animals
07:18that used to walk the planet.
07:20The sauropod dinosaurs, the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs,
07:23and this is just the upper arm bone.
07:24The biggest animals ever to walk on Earth.
07:27Absolutely.
07:33How much should they weigh?
07:35Some of these dinosaurs, they may have been about 40 tons.
07:38About the weight of ten African elephants.
07:40Incredible weight.
07:42These would have been earth-shakers.
07:48Do you think they're really shaking the ground?
07:50I'm pretty sure they would, yeah.
07:52These are huge, huge animals.
07:55The massive limb bone suggests this type of sauropod,
08:01called Cetiosaurus, grew up to 65 feet long,
08:05the same as two double-decker buses.
08:07What did they think when they discovered it?
08:08So, the first guy to examine bones such as this, the chap, Sir Richard Owen,
08:17a guy named the word dinosaur, he thought they were so big they belonged to something
08:21that clearly couldn't sustain its body weight on land.
08:23He thought it belonged to some sort of wanolite reptile, and then it must have lived in swamps.
08:29So the water would support its weight?
08:31That's exactly it, yeah.
08:32He didn't think it was a dinosaur.
08:33It was only with more discoveries to realise that actually, these bones, despite their size, are essentially hollow.
08:48The animals have a system of air sacs, so these are able to sustain this massive weight on land.
08:54Amazingly, these gigantic beasts hatch from eggs similar in size to those of an ostrich.
09:07Like many birds today, sauropods swallowed stones to help crush their food and aid digestion.
09:24Some of these giant dinosaurs needed to consume around 100,000 calories a day,
09:30the equivalent of 450 slices of vegetarian pizza.
09:34The mighty sauropods, gentle giants amongst dinosaurs, and the biggest animals ever to have walked the earth.
09:49Next, I come face to face with a pint-sized predator.
09:58And discover that Britain was home to an ancient ancestor of the terrifying T-Rex.
10:04I'm on a journey round Britain discovering the secrets of the towering herbivores and the killer carnivores that once roamed this land.
10:22Over 50 different species of dinosaur have been discovered so far, but not all of them were as big as the enormous sauropods.
10:32See, when most people think of dinosaurs, they think of these huge, massive animals, but these, these are really tiny.
10:42This one was found right here on Skye. Look at the size of that.
10:46That's tiny.
10:47That is a very small footprint, and in fact, it's the smallest in the Western world.
10:51It's really small.
10:52It's amazing. It's amazing. The animal that made that was probably about 20 centimetres in length.
10:56Do you know which dinosaur it was?
10:58It's probably, looking at the footprint type, it's probably a theropod, so a tiny meat-eater.
11:02And it's meant to be a post hatchling.
11:04Gosh. So very small, but can still have the tip of your finger off.
11:07Oh, I'm sure it would do. Yeah, definitely.
11:09Amazing.
11:10But take a look at this one.
11:11Ooh.
11:12This. Very careful to take you down.
11:15Take a look at that.
11:16Ah!
11:17Incredible.
11:18Now that is a portion of jaw, just a lower jaw, of a dinosaur called Echinodon.
11:22This was found on the Isle of Pirbeck.
11:24What, what can this tell you about the dinosaur itself?
11:27So it has two types of teeth in its jaw.
11:29It has molar-like teeth and canine-like teeth.
11:32And we think that perhaps Echinodon may have been omnivorous, so feeding on plants and animals, and probably insects too.
11:38So quite, quite unique.
11:40How big would it have been?
11:42No, no bigger than a catharic dot.
11:45What are you doing here?
11:53Echinodon's name means hedgehog tooth, thanks to its spiky teeth.
11:59Why?
12:00Why?
12:10Feeding on both plants and animals, Echinodon evolved to get its teeth into anything.
12:17Dinosaurs roamed the planet for over 165 million years.
12:29That's more than 850 times as long as modern humans have been on Earth.
12:36There were three ages of dinosaur.
12:39Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.
12:44Over this mind-boggling amount of time, Britain's dinosaurs evolved.
12:49Some meat-eaters got bigger, while other dinosaurs developed new forms of defence.
12:54At the heart of dinosaur research in Britain is London's Natural History Museum.
13:02It was founded by Sir Richard Owen, the same man who invented the term dinosaur.
13:09Apart from the beloved Dippy, another huge favourite at the Natural History Museum is the animatronic T-Rex.
13:17T-Rex has only been found in North America, but the story of this monster meat-eater began right here in Britain.
13:27Amazingly, T-Rex is a direct descendant of one of Britain's own tyrannosaurs.
13:33A-Rex is a direct descendant of one of Britain's own glossy experiments.
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13:36A-Rex is a direct descendant of two, the story of the North American T-Rex.
13:37A-Rex is an одино-in-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-art-is-yt-are-can-the-are-syn-the-are.
13:51A-Rex is an entry-of-a-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are-syn-the-are!
13:55That is not what I was expecting from T-Rex's great-great-grandfather.
14:10It must be about a quarter of the size.
14:21This dinosaur, Proceratosaurus, roamed Britain 166 million years ago in the Jurassic period.
14:30Its descendant, T-Rex, lived just 66 million years ago in Cretaceous times, meaning it's
14:36actually closer to humans in time than it is to this British Tyrannosaur.
14:44Over millions of years, Tyrannosaurs gradually got larger and larger, eventually enabling
14:50them to take down massive beasts like this Triceratops.
15:02To find out more, I'm meeting one of the world's leading Tyrannosaur experts, evolutionary
15:22biologist Steve Brussati.
15:24You can see the teeth from here.
15:27Yep.
15:28This is a Tyrannosaur skull.
15:30That is absolutely incredible.
15:33This is where the great T-Rex comes from.
15:36This is the very oldest cousin of T-Rex, the very oldest Tyrannosaur in the world.
15:40Incredible.
15:41Where was this discovered?
15:42So this, believe it or not, not only is a very small primitive Tyrannosaur, but it also
15:47is from Gloucestershire, of all places.
15:49Yeah.
15:50Where you're from, I understand.
15:51Where's where I'm from?
15:52What would it have looked like?
15:53We don't have all of it preserved.
15:55So the bones have kind of sheared off right up here.
15:57So there would have been more bones, and the brain kind of would have been over here.
16:00The eye would have been here.
16:02The nostril would have been over here.
16:05So you can see the basic outlines of the skull.
16:07But this was a dinosaur smaller than me, and I'm not a very big guy.
16:12So this was a very, very humble dinosaur.
16:15It was not a top of the food chain type of animal.
16:18The story of Tyrannosaurus over millions of years of evolution is extraordinary.
16:23T-Rex is, I know it's a cliche, but it is my favorite dinosaur.
16:28I think for many people it's our favorite dinosaur just because it's so big.
16:32The biggest meat eater on land today is a polar bear.
16:34So, you know, T-Rex could have just swatted a polar bear away.
16:37So it's a fantastic animal.
16:40There's features here that, yeah, even though it's smaller than T-Rex and much older,
16:44there are features that are only seen in T-Rex.
16:46Things like the nasal bones are fused up, or there's these tiny little nipping teeth at the front of the jaw.
16:52You can just see how the teeth at the front are really, really, really tiny compared to the ones on the side.
16:56That's a Tyrannosaur feature.
16:57What might it have been eating?
16:59Well, we think that these kind of Tyrannosaurs were eating small animals, small mammals,
17:03some of our very earliest relatives, small little lizards, small little amphibians,
17:07but they weren't at the top of the food chain.
17:09That came much later, about 80 million years after Proceratosaurus lived,
17:14when the other dinosaurs that were at the top of the food chain for some reason went extinct.
17:19And we don't really know why.
17:21Tyrannosaurs took advantage, and they grew to huge sizes, and they ascended to dominance.
17:29Tyrannosaurs had this long history, and only right at the end did they become big.
17:34And then they were top of the food chain, king of the world, king of the dinosaurs.
17:38And it all begins with this dinosaur right here in front of us.
17:42It's fascinating.
17:45The Natural History Museum has the largest collection of dinosaurs in the country.
17:50But London isn't Britain's dinosaur capital.
17:55There's one place in Britain where more dinosaurs have been found than anywhere else in Europe.
18:00It's become known as Dinosaur Island.
18:04And that's where I'm heading now.
18:07The Isle of Wight is located two miles off the mainland,
18:10with many rocks dating back to Cretaceous times.
18:13130 million years ago, Southern Britain was much hotter than today with extreme weather, floods and drought.
18:26The flood season created swamps.
18:30When dinosaurs died, the wet and boggy landscape provided ideal conditions for preserving their remains.
18:36Today, the south coast of the island is constantly eroding into the sea.
18:44As the cliffs crumble, they expose fresh rock, revealing new evidence of dinosaurs.
18:51I'm meeting amateur fossil hunter Nick Chase to take a look at some of the most remarkable finds to come out of these cliffs in recent years.
19:03Hi, Nick.
19:05Hello, Willie.
19:07Can you see anything unusual?
19:09No, nothing unusual.
19:11What about this one?
19:12Oh, my goodness, it's never a print, is it?
19:15Wow, which animal made this?
19:17It's so big.
19:19You can't be 100% certain, but almost, without doubt, it was very large.
19:25Iguanodon.
19:26This is just an individual one, and it's not in situ.
19:29It's actually been eroded from that sandstone layer, and then the sea's washed it over here.
19:34And you can find these anywhere along here.
19:37Incredible.
19:39You wouldn't want one treading on your toes, I don't think.
19:42So, we'll go and see if we can find some more.
19:44Good stuff.
19:46Since 2013, an intriguing new dinosaur skeleton has been emerging from the cliffs, bone by bone.
19:55Three very impressive vertebrae here.
19:57I've been collecting this specimen for over two years.
20:00Wow.
20:01As it's gradually eroding out of the cliffs.
20:03Talk me through the finds you've got so far.
20:05Yeah, this is a beauty, really.
20:07Wow!
20:08This is exactly as it came out and ended up on the beach.
20:12It's from the tail.
20:13Gosh!
20:15These fossilised bones come from a sauropod dinosaur, the biggest animals ever to have roamed Britain.
20:24What about these other pieces?
20:25This one is a vertebrae from the neck.
20:28Quite long.
20:29And this is in two pieces.
20:31It's all joined together there.
20:34Oh, yeah.
20:35That's it.
20:36It broke up when it fell out of the cliffs.
20:38But that's from the back.
20:40One thing this does show quite well is some of the internal structure.
20:45Ah.
20:46And you can see the black lines, the actual bone itself.
20:51And they're surrounding these enormous great big air cavities.
20:55So it was not so heavy.
20:56That's right.
20:57If all the bones in the neck were solid, it would never get its head off the ground.
21:01No.
21:02So it had to have these huge cavities to make it light enough to lift its head.
21:06There's another kind of fossil that helps us get to the bottom of the eating habits of dinosaurs.
21:16I've got this to show you.
21:18Don't know if you know what this is.
21:20There you are.
21:21It's not a bone, is it?
21:22No, but it is what it looks like.
21:25It looks like a piece of poo.
21:27It is.
21:28And that's what it is.
21:29It's a coprolite, a piece of fossilised dung.
21:32How do you know that that's what it is?
21:34Its shape is quite a good indicator.
21:38Also what it's made of.
21:39It can be analysed and they contain a lot of phosphate.
21:43Right.
21:44And also, sometimes, you can actually see bits of bone and fish scales sticking out from them.
21:51It's very big though, is it?
21:52Considering how big the dinosaurs were.
21:53That is not very big.
21:54I've got a slightly larger one in my bag.
21:56That's a much bigger piece.
21:58More of a decent size.
21:59But could easily, for someone like me, be mistaken for a pebble.
22:02It is, but with a bit of experience, you can tell, in fact, that it's quite different
22:07from the beak pebbles that you get around here.
22:10It's made of a different material and it's quite heavy for its size.
22:13It really is.
22:14In a certain density.
22:15So this would have come from a meat-eater?
22:17Probably.
22:18Probably most of the coprolites that we actually find are from meat eaters.
22:22And you can, in fact, see some slightly darker patches inside this.
22:26And they're probably bits of bone.
22:28Wow.
22:29From the last meal of this animal.
22:31But they are rarer than bone.
22:33There you go.
22:34Fossilised dino poo.
22:37Next, I come face to face with an armoured stegosaur.
22:42Get a sneak preview of Britain's latest dinosaur discovery.
22:45A brand new species of meat-eater from Wales.
22:50And uncover evidence of a deadly dinosaur battle.
22:54You can imagine these being bite marks made by one of those big predatory dinosaurs.
22:59Involving a 30-foot hunter who preyed on other dinosaurs.
23:03The ferocious neo-venator.
23:13I'm on a journey around Britain.
23:15Finding evidence of this country's hidden dinosaur past.
23:18Amazingly, more than a dozen different dinosaurs have been found here on the Isle of Wight.
23:24Including mighty sauropods.
23:28Each bone furthering our understanding of what life was like in dinosaur Britain.
23:36Evidence on the Isle of Wight found that during Cretaceous times, 130 million years ago, Britain was a real dog eat dog or dinosaur eat dinosaur world.
23:46In 1978, the fossilised bones of two dinosaurs began to emerge from the same Cretaceous cliffs.
23:55It took 18 years for all the bones to appear.
23:59These remarkable skeletons show evidence of a ferocious fight for survival.
24:04I've come to Dinosaur Isle Museum to meet paleontologist Darren Naish, who has conducted a forensic analysis on this dinosaur crime scene.
24:15What's the story of their discovery?
24:17So both of these animals were found literally with their bones jumbled together.
24:21But what's really interesting is that they preserve an extraordinary number of features that tell us exactly what happened during their lives.
24:29The largest of the two skeletons belongs to a ferocious, flesh-eating dinosaur called Neoveneta.
24:38What was Neoveneta like?
24:40Neoveneta would have been an awesome, giant, scary carnivore, basically.
24:46This is an animal with fairly long arms, big, three-clawed hands.
24:50It has a narrow, very deep skull, numerous large chariated teeth.
24:53It's a giant predator that's going to be grabbing things with its hands before moving in and making numerous horrible slashing bites.
25:01Quite a nasty, efficient predator.
25:03Fast?
25:04About as fast as your eye, which is fast enough to catch big dinosaurs.
25:08Yeah, so pretty fast.
25:10Our second skeleton belongs to a plant-eater called Mantellosaurus.
25:15Mantellosaurus is a large, rotund-bodied herbivore.
25:19You should imagine it as having a long, almost horse-like head, but with a bird-like beak at the end.
25:24And the weird thing about it is it had a giant conical thumb spike on its hand,
25:28which was maybe used as a weapon to defend itself from predators like Neoveneta.
25:33So a weird kind of parrot-faced, horse-skull, thumb-spiked, big, plant-eating dinosaur.
25:42Like elephants or bison today, Mantellosaurus probably lived in herds for protection against predators.
25:50What are the pathologies on these two individuals?
25:53So we see numerous things that have clearly happened during the lives of these animals.
25:57First, our flesh-eating Neoveneta.
26:00This weird-looking bone here, this is from the underside of the animal's belly.
26:12And what seems to have happened here is that this particular belly rib has been broken in half
26:17and it hasn't fused back to its other half.
26:20But there's all this weird, gnarly extra bone texture, which shows the animal is growing extra bone,
26:26presumably to try and heal that injury.
26:33If we look at the foot of Neoveneta, this giant, beautiful bird-like foot,
26:37if we look at one of the claw bones here, you can see this blunted end
26:41with this overgrowth of bone over the tip here.
26:44This is not normal compared to a normal claw that we have right there.
26:47Uh-huh. What could have happened?
26:49Well, it looks as if it's literally stubbed its toe while running.
26:59What else has this one got?
27:00Well, if we look at the two tail vertebrae here from the Neoveneta,
27:04we think that something affected the cartilage disc in between the two vertebrae here,
27:09hence this new bone growth.
27:11And this means the animal grew this in response to some kind of injury.
27:14Next up, our plant-eater.
27:22Mantellosaurus?
27:24The strangest thing we see in the Mantellosaurus is if we look at one of the vertebrae here,
27:28one of the bones from the backbone, this giant, weird loop of bone,
27:31which is absolutely not normal for these dinosaurs.
27:34The spine should normally be somewhat taller.
27:37It doesn't look very comfortable.
27:38Exactly.
27:39If you compare it with a normal one from the same animal, from the same individual,
27:44you should see this normal rectangular shape to the top of the neural spine.
27:48This has meant that the individual was in pain and more likely to be preyed on.
27:53It's quite plausible.
27:54If you can imagine having parts of your backbone snapped off,
27:58moved around in your body and then fused back...
28:01It's going to hurt.
28:02A final piece of evidence is the most compelling proof
28:07that Neo Veneta preyed on this one-ton herbivore.
28:14What have we got in terms of battle scars in front of us?
28:17So we have obvious tooth marks on one of the bones from the top of the spine.
28:23You can see these large score marks.
28:25Wow, fantastic.
28:26It's really hard to imagine what they could be
28:28unless they are bite marks made by the teeth of a big predator like Neo Veneta.
28:33This is a Neo Veneta tooth.
28:35We can imagine these being bite marks.
28:37You'll notice that there's no evidence this animal was healing.
28:40So this happened either as it died or after the time of death.
28:44As tragic as it was for these animals and as much pain as they must have been in,
28:55these pathologies allow us to tell a story more than a pristine bone.
29:00That's exactly right.
29:01And they give us an exceptional insight into the life histories of these two animals.
29:05Fascinating.
29:07Thanks to evidence found less than 40 years ago in these Isle of White cliffs,
29:12we can now piece together amazing details about the lives of two dinosaurs,
29:17130 million years after they died.
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30:09In Dinosaur Britain, only the strongest survived.
30:29I'm heading back to London's Natural History Museum
30:32to discover another world first for Britain.
30:35A plant-eating dinosaur that evolved the perfect self-defence
30:40against meat-eating predators.
30:43I'm meeting paleontologist Dean Lomax
30:46at what he says is the most important stegosaur fossil ever discovered.
30:52Why this one then, Dean?
30:54Well, so, so many people walk straight past this specimen
30:56without realising its true significance to paleontology.
31:00Why is it significant?
31:01Well, this is not only the very first substantial stegosaur
31:04to be found in Britain,
31:06but the very first substantial stegosaur to be found in the world.
31:09This was a big deal.
31:10This was a very big deal, yeah.
31:12It sounds like it's got some personal meaning for you, this one.
31:14Yeah, as well, growing up, I was fascinated by all types of different dinosaurs.
31:17And I remember seeing a picture of this specimen,
31:19and it just sparked my imagination.
31:21There was something so big and monstrous.
31:22Yeah, what's the story of its discovery?
31:26So this was found round about May 1874
31:29by a bunch of workers in Swindon, would you believe?
31:31And they found lots and lots of bones.
31:33They thought they weren't quite sure what they were.
31:35So they wanted the very eminent paleontologist Sir Richard Owen
31:38to come and look at these bones.
31:40Owen was contacted,
31:42and then he realised that these were something brand new to science,
31:45to paleontology,
31:46a brand new dinosaur to add to the ever-growing list of dinosaurs named by Owen.
31:50It's a brilliant discovery.
31:52You're going to have to describe this to me.
31:53That jumble of bones doesn't help.
31:55Can you describe to me how it would have looked?
31:57Yeah, so this huge block here at the bottom, that is the pelvis.
32:01This long element here is the femur, the thigh bone.
32:04All these little bones here dotted around as the vertebrae.
32:07Now the size of this animal is probably between six and nine metres in length,
32:11so quite a big animal.
32:12So I imagine the head would have been about here.
32:15If you follow it all the way back along its back,
32:17you get quite high up, quite a high, high back.
32:20At the top of the back, they've had all this basically armour plating.
32:23They have lots of different types of plates.
32:25Now before we get to the end,
32:26there's something quite special about stegosaurs,
32:28which is really iconic, I think, is what brings their name.
32:31And that is this specimen,
32:33which is a tail spike,
32:36an original specimen which belongs to this here on the wall.
32:39Wow.
32:39It's incredible.
32:40That is a sizable spike.
32:42That's got to be a serious weapon.
32:43It is a massive, massive weapon.
32:46These would have been used on the tail of stegosaurs.
32:50It would have swung its tail side to side
32:51with this immense spike as a form of defence against predators.
32:56And it would have fit probably somewhere like this
32:59quite high up on the tail of this animal.
33:01An impressive weapon indeed.
33:03Wow.
33:03What a wonderful discovery.
33:17This species of stegosaur is called Dacentrorus,
33:22meaning very sharp tail.
33:23While the stegosaur's tail spikes clearly evolved for defence,
33:36palaeontologists have put forward a number of theories
33:39about the purpose of the plates on its back,
33:42from a show of force to an ingenious cooling system
33:45or to attract mates.
33:53Stegosaur fossils are normally found alone rather than in groups,
34:03suggesting they may have lived solitary lives.
34:07Weighing up to five tonnes,
34:10the armour-plated Dacentrorus,
34:12one of the largest stegosaurs in the world.
34:15Next, I travel to the National Museum of Wales
34:24to track down Britain's newest dinosaur discovery,
34:28a small but deadly meat-eater with razor-sharp teeth.
34:38Dinosaurs have been discovered all across Britain,
34:41each find furthering our understanding
34:44of these awe-inspiring creatures.
34:50Many of the dinosaurs that have been discovered here
34:53were found by amateur enthusiasts and ordinary families
34:56who happened upon a piece of bone or tooth
34:59or even a footprint while out on the beach.
35:04The ferocious Baryonyx,
35:07found by an amateur fossil hunter in a Surrey clay pit.
35:11The pint-sized Dekinodon on the Isle of Purbeck on the south coast.
35:18And the armour-plated Scalidosaurus,
35:21an ancient ancestor of the Stegosaur on a Dorset beach.
35:27As Britain is an island,
35:29there are dinosaur-hunting hotspots along much of the coastline.
35:34I'm heading to the Jurassic Coast,
35:37a World Heritage site famed for its fossils.
35:40I'm joining an organised amateur fossil hunt
35:43with palaeontologist Dean Lomax.
35:45What might we find today, then?
35:47Well, we might find some ammonites,
35:49bellumites, which are extinct-type squid.
35:52If we're lucky, we might find even some marine reptiles,
35:54maybe even a piece of dinosaur.
35:56That would be a good day, right?
35:56That would make my day.
35:58What do you need?
35:59First, a good geological hammer, or rock hammer.
36:02Nice.
36:03Which is great to have.
36:04And a couple of brick chisels.
36:07And, of course, we need some safety glasses or goggles
36:09to protect your eyes.
36:12Dean's already spotted a promising-looking rock.
36:15The flat, round shape of this stone suggests it may contain a fossil.
36:23That's going to be good.
36:24Well, I might have something at least.
36:27Yeah.
36:28That's not too bad.
36:29That's a lovely spatterin.
36:31It's beautiful, isn't it?
36:31Our first find of the day, an ammonite,
36:35a prehistoric relative of the octopus.
36:38The ideal time to search is after a storm,
36:41when winds, rain and rough seas may have exposed new fossils.
36:46Try and take this side off.
36:47This isn't fun anymore.
36:51That's something different.
36:53What's that?
36:54Oh, wow, lots of fish.
36:55They're really rare from here.
36:57Wow, that's really exciting, isn't it?
36:59Yeah, that's brilliant.
36:59Gosh, that's just real.
37:01This fish swam in the warm seas around Britain
37:06195 million years ago.
37:09Finding a fossil like this is the best experience for any fossil.
37:12And this is the reason that you are the very first person
37:15to ever see that.
37:17The safest time to search for fossils is at low tide
37:20and avoid the base of cliffs in case of rock falls.
37:24I have been lucky today and found a piece myself.
37:26Have you?
37:27Yes, sir.
37:27What am I looking at there?
37:28So that's the backbone for a minute, for you, so...
37:30This group are from the UK amateur fossil hunters
37:34who hold regular events across Britain.
37:36How have these very young paleontologists been doing?
37:42Lovely.
37:43What have you found?
37:44You found what?
37:45Bellumites.
37:46Well done.
37:48See, the cool thing about these as well,
37:49these are bellumites, so squid-like animals,
37:51but originally a lot of people thought these were dinosaur teeth.
37:54Ammonite there.
37:55Well done.
37:57The group's best finds come from two marine reptiles
38:00that would have dominated the waters when dinosaurs ruled the land.
38:05What's this?
38:06I think an ichthyosaur bird spray.
38:09God!
38:10That's a great find.
38:11This is a good one.
38:12This is a marine reptile.
38:13Yes, it is, from an ichthyosaur, a fish lizard.
38:15Iichthyosaurs look similar to modern dolphins,
38:21but they could grow up to 50 feet long.
38:24Iichthyosaurs were first identified from fossils found here on the Jurassic Coast.
38:29What's this one?
38:30What we think that is from the plesiosaur,
38:32we actually think it's part of the flipper.
38:33It's quite a rare fire from down here.
38:35How old would that be then?
38:36It'd be about 195 million years old, approximately.
38:38OK.
38:40Plesiosaurs have four large paddles,
38:43which they use to power themselves through water
38:45faster than an Olympic swimmer.
38:51Whee!
38:52Got one of those!
38:53There you go, it's an Ammonite.
38:54And they died out when the dinosaurs died 65 million years ago.
38:58Start small.
38:59And if you're lucky enough to find something really special,
39:03get in touch with your local museum.
39:05It might just be a dinosaur.
39:07That's my day one.
39:09It's not bad, is it?
39:09Yeah, you've got two Ammonites.
39:11We've got a Pasolotuthis there.
39:12It's kind of Bellomite.
39:13I'm getting quite addicted to this, you know.
39:15They don't want to stop.
39:18We've made some fantastic discoveries today,
39:21but I've heard of a truly spectacular new find.
39:26I'm on my way to Wales to see Britain's latest dinosaur discovery,
39:30a real-life Welsh dragon.
39:33It's a completely new species,
39:35the only skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur ever discovered in Wales.
39:40And it's so new, it doesn't even have a name yet.
39:44The amazing discovery was made at Cliffs in Lavernock,
39:48five miles from Cardiff.
39:49Brothers Nick and Rob Hannigan found the extraordinary new specimen
39:56in a rock fall in March 2014.
40:01Nick and Rob's dinosaur will soon be on permanent display
40:04at the National Museum of Wales
40:06to join their collection of prehistoric skeletons and footprints.
40:10But I'm getting a sneak preview with paleobiologist Dave Martill,
40:15who believes this may be the earliest Jurassic dinosaur ever discovered.
40:19Good to meet you, Dave.
40:24Oh, hi, Ellie.
40:25How are you doing?
40:25Nice to see you.
40:26You too.
40:27Just looking at these bones at the moment.
40:28Wow.
40:29Setting my eyes on this is a real privilege,
40:31because very few people have seen these so far.
40:34A handful of people.
40:35This is a completely new species of dinosaur,
40:37one of those little meat-eaters, ones we call theropods.
40:40How are you able to build up a picture of what this dinosaur looked like?
40:44We don't have all of the bones,
40:45but if we have a left arm bone,
40:48then we know what the right arm bone was,
40:50because it was a mirror image.
40:51Really, we do have enough that when we've worked out what the bones are,
40:55we can put it together and we can work out what it looked like.
40:58And what I can say about this animal is that it was very, very slenderly built.
41:02It had a long tail, but it was very fierce, quick, agile,
41:07very, very good eyes, very tiny little teeth, very sharp,
41:11and you really wouldn't have put your fingers in his mouth.
41:14He would have drawn blood very, very quickly.
41:16He would have been like that, very, very fast, very, very lightly built.
41:23This is a nice little bone here.
41:25This is the roof of the brain case.
41:28So where my finger is now, that's where its little brain would have been.
41:31You can just feel what it was thinking when it died.
41:37How did you deduce that this was a theropod?
41:44Ah, well, the clues are just there.
41:47For instance, these teeth with very, very fine serrations
41:52are found in meat-eating dinosaurs.
41:55Ah.
41:57And then how did you figure out that this was a new species?
42:00First of all, no meat-eating dinosaur has been found
42:04in the Jurassic Rocks of Wales before, you know?
42:06So there's a very, very real chance it's going to be new anyway.
42:10But what you have to do is you have to compare it
42:13with every other meat-eating dinosaur from the same time period.
42:17So we just had to go through piles and piles of literature
42:19comparing every bone, and it looks similar to some dinosaurs,
42:24but then if the vertebrae look similar,
42:26you compare the pelvic bones and they're a bit different.
42:28So you think, oh, well, OK, well, it looks like that one,
42:30but it's not exactly.
42:31And you keep doing that until eventually you go,
42:33oh, it's new.
42:41Is there still a possibility of finding new species?
42:44Oh, all the time.
42:45And the more people that go out there and collect,
42:47then the more we're going to find.
42:48Britain's latest dinosaur discovery,
42:58a feisty three-foot meat-eater and a brand-new species.
43:02This has been a truly incredible adventure,
43:14200 million years in the making.
43:17The first dinosaur bone discovered anywhere in the world
43:20was right here in Britain.
43:22And it belonged to the mighty meat-eating Megalosaurus,
43:27a 30-foot predator who stalked prehistoric Oxford.
43:34With more teeth than T-Rex,
43:37Baryonyx was the world's first fish-eating dinosaur,
43:41hunting on the banks of Britain's ancient rivers,
43:44while flying pterosaurs ruled our skies.
43:48Britain was home to some of the biggest dinosaurs ever
43:54to walk the Earth.
43:57The giant sauropods that roamed as far north as Scotland.
44:02Some of the smallest.
44:05With the spiny-toothed echinodon discovered in Dorset.
44:08And even an ancient ancestor of the fearsome T-Rex.
44:18I've discovered how dinosaurs hunted.
44:25What they ate.
44:31How they fought and how they died.
44:35But the story of Dinosaur Britain doesn't end here.
44:47And new discoveries are being unearthed to this day.
44:51And yet there are still unknown species out there
44:53all across Britain just waiting to be discovered.
44:57So go out there and get searching.
45:00Keep listening.
45:16Take care.
45:16Look.
45:18Transcription by CastingWords
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