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00:16For a hundred million years, dinosaurs dominated the Earth.
00:23But they remain enigmatic creatures.
00:30That's because all that scientists had to work with were fossilized bones.
00:45But now, the seemingly impossible has been discovered.
00:55Signs of life inside these long dead skeletons.
01:00It opened the door to the possibility that we could begin to understand dinosaurs in a different way.
01:08For the first time, they've been able to look at the blood of a T-Rex.
01:19Touch 68 million year old soft tissue.
01:25It was, you know, goosebump inducing.
01:30Just about everything that we saw.
01:36And Dr. Mary Schweitzer may be on the verge of turning Hollywood fantasy into scientific reality.
01:53Finding dinosaur DNA.
01:58It looks like it.
01:59It acts like it.
02:00It smells like it.
02:01You know, if you have cells, if you have soft tissue, if you have proteins, why rule out DNA?
02:10Yeah, that's why.
02:38No one-time grappling.
02:39So maybe it's handled with magnifying
02:46For the past few decades, dinosaur hunters have been drawn to the American West.
02:54It's pretty much Dr. Mary Schweitzer's backyard.
03:01She lives, for part of the year, in the Rocky Mountain state of Montana, where some of the
03:08richest dinosaur remains have been uncovered.
03:22A lot of dinosaurs lived in this area because just to the east of us, in eastern Montana,
03:28north and South Dakota, was a big, shallow, warm inland sea.
03:32And so the dinosaurs would follow the seaway, migrating up and down, north and south.
03:38So there was a lot of them here.
03:43More T-Rexes have been found here in Montana than anywhere else in the world.
03:54But we know very little about the world's most iconic dinosaur.
04:02Apart from a few very simple facts, like it was 12 meters long and could weigh seven tons.
04:17There you go.
04:19And that's because, according to Dr. Schweitzer, the male-dominated world of dinosaur science
04:26tends to ask the wrong questions.
04:30And I think for men, a lot of it is, can we quantify it?
04:34You know, bigger teeth, meaner animal.
04:37And I think for women, we're, I can't say that it's all that way, but I think mostly we
04:42ask different questions.
04:44We ask, how did they function?
04:45What was their, what was their biology?
04:54Today, she isn't riding the range in search of another T-Rex.
05:02She's hunting more recent remains that might help to reveal some of the hidden secrets of
05:08the world's best known dinosaur.
05:22And that's because she's interested in how the once living tissue of this dead buffalo
05:28decays and gets broken down over time.
05:38In paleontology, we can't watch our dinosaurs die, and we can't see what's going to happen
05:44to them.
05:45But we know that, obviously, if all we have is a skeleton, we don't have the whole dinosaur.
05:50There's a lot of information missing.
05:53But again, when you see parts in the fossil record, this is skin right there.
05:59That has a high preservation potential, and it's because of the molecular makeup of the
06:03skin itself.
06:04Well, the guts are gone, the intestines are gone, but the skin and the cartilage, the
06:12bone and the teeth are what remain.
06:15Good boy.
06:18Buddies are jealous.
06:22It's long been Mary's dream to do this with a 65 million year old fossil.
06:31To be able to get her hands on blood, soft tissue, and even the DNA of a T-Rex.
06:39Come and play with me.
06:41It might seem an impossible task, but she believes that finding signs of life, uncovering ancient
06:48biology, is the only way to put flesh on the bones of the most iconic creatures ever to
06:55stalk the Earth.
06:58I mean, a lot of the things that have been done in the past, with respect to dinosaurs,
07:02have been untestable hypotheses.
07:05I mean, really, you could say dinosaurs are invisible in green, and how would I prove you
07:09wrong?
07:10There's no data.
07:11I love the way they smell.
07:13So I think that getting at some of these questions about how their proteins are put together can
07:19get us at their function, get us at why they had an evolutionary advantage, and if we can
07:24understand that, there's a lot we can learn from them.
07:38Imagine trying to figure out how a horse might look, just from its skeleton.
07:52Without the biology, the cells, protein, and DNA, we couldn't tell what color its eyes were,
08:01how far it could see, the way it smelt, the texture of its coat, the make and shape of its
08:12muscles.
08:15Without its biology, the horse just isn't a horse.
08:25But most paleontologists believed that finding any biological material in 65 million-year-old
08:31dinosaur bones was impossible.
08:36And that's because it was thought that the process of fossilization destroyed every living
08:42thing in the bone.
08:48Once the dead animal is covered in sand or mud, the fleshy parts then decay.
08:56And the mineral and organic elements of the bone are replaced by the minerals in the soil.
09:04In essence, they get turned to stone.
09:15But what if this wasn't the case?
09:19What if some of this biological material was still with us?
09:27The only way to find out would be to look inside the bones, to conduct a dinosaur autopsy.
09:46A dinosaur leg bone is being cut up for analysis, in a process known as histology.
10:00The bone then needs to be carved into thin slices.
10:08And embedded in plastic, so it can be examined under a microscope.
10:13It's a bit like cutting down a tree and looking at the rings.
10:18They reveal how fast or slowly the tree grew.
10:24And you can see the same kind of pattern in dinosaur bones.
10:31Is this the first femur?
10:34It was pioneered by Mary's mentor and the world's leading dinosaur scientist, Dr. Jack Horner.
10:42Looking at the bone histology of dinosaurs and looking at babies and juveniles and sub-adults
10:50and adults, we've learned that when baby dinosaurs hatched out of their eggs, they grew really fast.
11:01Do you know what side of it is yet?
11:04They had sustained high growth periods.
11:09If you hatch out of the egg at a half a meter long, you're not very big.
11:14And if you're going to grow to the size of a house, you better get busy.
11:18That's all I can say.
11:19Because the longer you are small, the longer you're vulnerable.
11:30Mary started out as Jack's student.
11:35And back in 1991, he gave her pieces of a T-Rex leg bone to analyze.
11:44At first, there appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary about this bone.
11:51But this bone turned out to be rather special.
11:57Because what she was looking at when she placed the slide under the microscope had never been
12:02seen before.
12:19Staring back at her was something that shouldn't have been there.
12:25It looked like a red blood cell.
12:30And its chemical composition included a heme, a part of hemoglobin which helps carry oxygen in blood
12:38and gives it its red color.
12:43I was shocked.
12:45I was really surprised.
12:49The thing that was cool about it is we know very little, really,
12:53about these beasts that once walked on the surface of our planet.
12:57And all vertebrate organisms except, well almost all, except for mammals, have nucleated red blood cells.
13:04And these things that I was seeing in the vessel channels of the bone were nucleated.
13:08They were translucent red with a dark center.
13:32And this evidence seemed to suggest that organic matter could in some way survive the process of fossilization.
13:48And what was so exciting about it is that the new tools and technology of molecular biology
13:57might now be used to understand these long-vanished creatures.
14:08It opened the door to the possibility that we could begin to understand the function,
14:13the physiology of dinosaurs in a different way.
14:16If we could get at the elemental molecular structure, that's where the real evolutionary information is housed.
14:26And so being able to recover those things from a dinosaur would open the door to understanding them at a
14:34completely different level.
14:45She now set out to look for other evidence.
14:49That's if there was anything else to recover.
15:12Mary's new techniques now started to play into one of the most long-standing questions in paleontology.
15:21Just what kind of creatures were dinosaurs?
15:27For decades, scientists relied on unearthing clues from the bones, the anatomy.
15:34And for the people who invented paleontology in the 19th century,
15:40the bones they saw mostly looked like giant lizards.
15:48It wasn't just the size of the bones, they're obviously colossal.
15:52It was the teeth that really helped them understand what sort of creatures dinosaurs were.
16:01The teeth that they were finding were very similar, or at least somewhat similar, to lizards.
16:09And in particular, one was particularly close to an iguana lizard.
16:16And so they didn't have much of the skeleton of the dinosaur, but they knew what an iguana lizard looks
16:24like, and an iguana lizard is a reptile.
16:29But for modern scientists, the teeth are now seen as a distraction.
16:33A more comprehensive analysis of their skeletons suggests they're not related to lizards, but birds.
16:43And there's one bone in particular, familiar from the dinner table, that's helped to prove the case.
16:51It's a very special bone called the furcula.
16:55And the furcula, we find in meat-eating dinosaurs, is otherwise known as the wishbone.
17:05And so, when we think about what characteristics define a bird,
17:11the wishbone, hollow bones, feathers, hard-shelled eggs,
17:18I mean, there's a whole list of them.
17:20And what's interesting is, through the ages, we've discovered that dinosaurs actually invented all of those characteristics.
17:30Dinosaurs had all of those characteristics, those that we consider bird characteristics.
17:59Anatomy has helped to establish the size, weight, even the strength of dinosaurs.
18:08But on questions of their bird-like biology, the color of their skin, whether they were warm or cold-blooded,
18:15even how they evolved, the bones are silent.
18:27Their friendship is holding two hands on its head.
18:29So thank you toust assunto.
18:50Making them talk would require luck, skill, and knowing the right people.
19:06This is Bob Harmon.
19:09For decades, he's worked closely with Jack Horner.
19:13And he's something of a legend in paleontology.
19:19He has a special gift for sniffing out fossils.
19:25And back in 2000, there was something about the lay of the land in the Hell's Creek area of Montana
19:31that looked promising.
19:38One day I came to this one area, kind of a box canyon type area.
19:43And I actually sat down to eat my lunch and figure out how to get up to this next cliff
19:49I was going to look at.
19:51So I was eating lunch, turned around, looked, and here's a bleached out white bone sticking out of the cliff.
20:00And then I got to looking a little farther and I could see it.
20:04The cross section of a Tyrannosaur vertebrae has a very distinct shape, something we look for when we're out prospecting.
20:12It's a honeycomb shape.
20:14So when you see that, you get all excited because it's probably a T-Rex.
20:19You know, my heart started beating pretty good.
20:21And then I started looking up and up and up at 50 feet of rock sitting on top of this
20:27bone.
20:28And pretty much just went, my God, what have I done, you know?
20:36That's because he knew he'd have to remove all of that 50 foot of rock to get at the fossil.
20:45It took them nearly three years careful digging to extricate the whole skeleton.
20:53But there was another problem.
20:55The area was so remote, there were no roads in or out, that every single piece of it had to
21:01be choppered out.
21:07But one of the bones, a femur, was just too big to carry.
21:14And Bob had to do something he really didn't want to.
21:19I said, geez, we're going to have to break this thing in half.
21:22And trinosaur bone does not break well.
21:25I mean, it's so dense, and it's hollow in the middle, and it just shatters like glass when you break
21:30it.
21:30So I knew it was going to be bad.
21:33But I said, okay, I don't think we have any choice, let's just do it.
21:37So he broke it in half and shattered all over.
21:44The bones get removed with the soil surrounding them.
21:48It's what the scientists call context.
21:53They still don't really know why, but the Hell's Creek soil seems to have special preservation properties.
22:03And when some of these Hell's Creek bones are cracked open, there's something about them that marks them out as
22:10different.
22:17In many bones that are broken up, we do have a very biological smell, kind of a, almost like oil
22:25or, or rotting something.
22:30And, you know, it was certainly weird back in the days before we knew what it possibly was.
22:38As it turned out, this smell was a clue to what lay within the bones.
22:55This was just the kind of material Mary Schweitzer wanted to get her hands on.
23:08But it wasn't the smell of the fragments of T-Rex femur that Jack sent her, that set her pulse
23:14racing.
23:20It was how they looked.
23:25T-Rex bones might appear solid, but they're not.
23:28They are, in fact, hollow.
23:37But when she peered through the microscope, she saw something that shouldn't have been there.
23:44And this is it.
23:46The yellow area should have been hollow.
23:51The fossilized bone on the outside, which is all that remains of cortical bone, was all she expected to find.
23:58This tissue right here is what most dinosaur bone looks like.
24:02Everybody has this.
24:03This tissue right here had not been seen before.
24:13She saw what appeared to be a group of specialized cells.
24:18And these cells were utterly unique.
24:36They're only found in birds.
24:43And they use this tissue to make eggs.
24:49And that could only mean one thing.
24:54I looked at it and I held it in my hand and I said to my technician,
24:57Oh my gosh, this is a girl and it's pregnant.
25:04If Mary really was looking at the bones of a pregnant T-Rex, it'd be a first in paleontology.
25:11But the microscope slide on its own wasn't enough.
25:17I love her wings from the back. Can you get that picture?
25:25To be sure, she needed to compare it with the medullary bone from one of the most primitive birds still
25:31alive.
25:32The ostrich.
25:38Its evolutionary history can be traced back 23 million years.
25:48So just how does an ostrich compare with a dinosaur?
25:53I am in love.
25:55Look at this.
25:55Look at her wing.
25:56Can you see how the feathers attach to the skin?
26:00Look at there.
26:01Arms are like T-Rex.
26:03With skin on.
26:05They're short little stubby things.
26:07But you see how the feathers are inserting into the skin like that?
26:14Do we have any more grapes?
26:17The problem was that she couldn't do the test on a living pregnant ostrich.
26:23She needed a dead one.
26:24So she put out a plea for help.
26:27And fortunately, a local ostrich farmer answered the call.
26:31He had a pregnant bird.
26:33But it had been dead for over a week.
26:36I could definitely smell it before I could see it.
26:39It was all, you know, bloated from death.
26:41And you touched the stomach and it kind of went gush.
26:46It was so gross.
26:47And it was really smelly.
26:49So I sawed the leg off and tasted really rotten ostrich meat for about two weeks after that in my
26:54mouth.
26:55But it was really gross.
26:56And he had a whole bunch more ostriches.
26:58So they were all kind of standing around me in a circle watching as I dismembered their friend.
27:02And I felt a little weird about that.
27:12Holding her nose, she took the bone back into the lab and placed it under a microscope.
27:21And what she saw was groundbreaking.
27:27The pregnant ostrich had medullary bone and in exactly the same position as the pregnant T-Rex.
27:37It was really cool that we had a pregnant dinosaur.
27:40But this had been predicted.
27:42And it was just verifying that, you know, if birds and dinosaurs were as closely related as we had been
27:48thinking as a field, it should have been there.
27:59It was the first time that anyone had ever been able to establish the sex of a dinosaur.
28:08And it confirmed the importance of trying to understand the biology of these ancient creatures.
28:21I couldn't believe it. It was, you know, it was just a gift.
28:26My kind of paleontology, everybody's eyes glass over.
28:30If you want to go to a talk on paleontology, you think field pictures and badlands and really pretty, you
28:38know, big dinosaurs.
28:39And I study under the microscope.
28:41So this was exciting in that I thought, well, maybe this is the time I can really contribute to the
28:46field in a way that my colleagues will understand and care about rather than just letting Mary do her own
28:52weird thing.
28:52So, yeah, I was excited.
29:03One of the first implications of her work was to make the biological case that dinosaurs were indeed birds.
29:12They're so fun.
29:14See their feet?
29:18And Mary, along with other scientists, has been figuring out what this might mean for how we see these iconic
29:25animals.
29:26He's so pretty.
29:30For a start, it would be difficult to read their expressions.
29:35Well, if you notice their skulls, their head, it's just skin stretched over the bone.
29:43And so they don't have the muscles.
29:46They don't have the additional fat.
29:48And that's what gives animals expression, like your dog that looks at you with the cocked head and the ears
29:54and the little furrow in its brow.
29:56These guys aren't capable of doing that.
30:00They don't convey any emotion at all.
30:03And if you look directly in his eye, it almost looks dead.
30:12That's what they might look like in a one-on-one.
30:15But what about collectively, when they're all gathered together?
30:20I think that when we're imagining dinosaurs on a plane, we have to really think of them like flocks of
30:27birds walking and then shifting and then, you know, I mean, just, you know, not just mulling around like mammals
30:36do.
30:36I mean, mammals are just sort of mulling around.
30:39Birds, you know, really have some, you know, some overall shape to their, their, their groups.
30:47I mean, they, they all are traveling in one area and then they shift and they, I mean, they just,
30:52it's just very different.
30:57And what about the best known dinosaur of all?
31:01T-Rex.
31:03What kind of bird was it?
31:07So if we think about Tyrannosaurus with its bone-crushing teeth, I envision it to be much like a vulture.
31:17And when you think about big vulture eating carcasses, they're nasty.
31:25He wants to eat me for lunch.
31:32Oh, God.
31:43That was my Velociraptor experience.
31:45That's as close as I want to have.
31:47Look at, there he goes again.
31:50I think there would be no hesitation, no pulling back.
31:53And I think once they decide they want you for lunch, you might as well just give up.
32:05All this started to show that her work, hunting for organic matter within ancient fossils,
32:11had the potential to really transform our understanding of dinosaurs.
32:23The next step, the most important one, came from re-examining the basics of bone biology.
32:35Bone is a composite.
32:36It's like plywood.
32:38It has a hard part, which is the minerals that make up bone, and it has a soft part, which
32:44is the collagen.
32:45So bone is both protein and it's mineral.
32:48And when you put the two together, it gives it great strength.
32:51But it is alive, and the cells that are part of bone maintain it, and they give it nutrients,
32:56and they continue to just maintain the bone as living structure.
33:03Take away the mineral element of this chicken bone by sticking it in an acid bath,
33:07and all you're left with is the bendy, flexible collagen protein part.
33:14So Mary wondered, could you find that organic material in a T-Rex fossil?
33:20We have always assumed that all of the organics go away.
33:23And so what you're left with is basically a mineral morph.
33:27And it's got lots of holes in it where the protein used to sit, where the blood vessels used to
33:31run,
33:31and the little houses where the bone cells are.
33:33That's all empty now.
33:35So, I mean, if we're right about that process, then if you remove the mineral,
33:40you should have nothing left, right?
33:42Because the organics are already gone.
33:47So she set up a deceptively simple experiment.
33:52She dropped the T-Rex fossil packed full of medullary bone,
33:56in an acid bath.
34:00And left it overnight.
34:12When her assistant came back to check in the morning,
34:15something remarkable had happened.
34:20Something that didn't seem possible.
34:23The process went faster than neither of us predicted.
34:26And so when she went to stop it by taking the piece of medullary bone and putting it in water,
34:33she went to pick it up with her tweezers and it went like that.
34:41And she called me immediately and said, something's really wrong.
34:45And you know, I mean, I had the same expectation as anyone else.
34:48If you dissolve away your dinosaur bone, you're going to have nothing left.
34:53But we did.
34:58And this is what it looked like under a microscope.
35:05In a sense, she was able to reach back through 68 million years and touch a dinosaur.
35:21And not just any dinosaur.
35:24This was a soft, pliable piece of a T-Rex.
35:35So we saw this, where basically this is the medullary bone with the mineral removed.
35:42And you can see, see the blood vessels inside the bone?
35:46They stretch with the matrix themselves.
35:48This was really hard to hang on to.
35:51But there you go.
35:52See it stretch?
35:55This was a combination of my absolute worst nightmare and Christmas.
36:01Every day in the lab for about a month.
36:03I couldn't wait to get to work, but I was scared to death at what had happened overnight.
36:09It was, you know, goosebump inducing.
36:13Just about everything that we saw.
36:16It was, I can't even explain it and I know I'll never have that experience again, but it was magic.
36:21Just magic.
36:23Just magic.
36:40Finding the soft tissue opened the door to a new world of possibilities.
36:51She now set out to do something that no one had ever done before.
36:59To try and find proteins.
37:02The building blocks of life.
37:08She started with this T-Rex bone cell.
37:11If there was a chemical signature of ancient proteins, it should be hidden away inside.
37:21Because birds are descended from dinosaurs, the chicken would be the key to this quest.
37:31Mary took a classic tool of modern biology, one that helps to identify proteins in chicken bones.
37:37And she applied this same test to the T-Rex soft tissue.
37:55If there were no proteins in the cell, the slide on the right would remain black.
38:01Anything green would be a sign of life.
38:16The green glow made paleontological history.
38:23It was very exciting, yes. I was very happy.
38:26Very cool.
38:44When it was first published in 2005, this research wasn't universally accepted.
38:52Some scientists said her samples might be contaminated.
38:57Others were dismissive.
39:00Because I was a middle-aged housewife from Bozeman, Montana, I had no credentials at all.
39:05And I think that came into play.
39:10I know it came into play later.
39:15Yeah, I had a reviewer on one of my papers once say that he didn't care what the data said.
39:22He knew it wasn't possible.
39:23And for me, it's like, if you can't be convinced by data, then how is this science?
39:34But over the past decade, her work at the North Carolina State University is gaining acceptance.
39:43She's ruled out the possibility of contamination and painstakingly analyzed other dinosaur bones.
39:55And she's gone even further, potentially turning Hollywood fantasy into scientific reality.
40:04She's taken some of the cells from the 68-million-year-old soft T-Rex tissue and began to look
40:11for the impossible.
40:13DNA.
40:20You know, if you have cells, if you have soft tissue, if you have proteins, why rule out DNA?
40:34So she took a single T-Rex bone cell and ran a series of chemical tests using a classic DNA
40:41staining procedure.
40:49If the DNA was present in the cell, it would show up in yellow.
41:01And astonishingly, it did.
41:08You can see there's this little light point right here that's internal to the cell membrane.
41:13It's inside the cell.
41:14It's very specific, a single point.
41:19We have a visual signal of something that chemically reacts like DNA.
41:28It looks like it. It acts like it. It smells like it. You know, yeah.
41:35If I didn't tell you where those cells came from, but I told you the chemistry of what we did.
41:39So yeah, yeah. So it should be there.
41:42It's a bone cell for Pete's sakes.
41:53Now if I tell you it's a dinosaur bone cell, all bets are off.
41:58Because everyone knows that DNA can't persist for 65 million years.
42:02I personally think that DNA is way more hardy than people give it credit for.
42:13But the challenge now is to try and sequence it.
42:19This will allow her to see how the genes fit together and figure out their exact biological function.
42:30I don't believe that you should publish if you just have one line of evidence.
42:34Especially not something like this in a field full of controversy like ancient DNA.
42:38I want lots and lots of evidence.
42:41And so if we were ever to get to the point where we could sequence it,
42:45and that may be problematic for several reasons,
42:48I want to be able to say, we've got the chemistry to back it up.
42:54This is proving really difficult because the fragments of DNA she has are very small and degraded.
43:02So there's a lot more work still to do.
43:06But there's one thing for sure.
43:08This new approach to studying dinosaurs is set to continue.
43:13There's sort of a shift now to look at bones from the inside out.
43:21Where people generally thought of bones as being really precious,
43:26we're now realizing that there's more information inside than there is on the outside.
43:32This one? No, a boat.
43:33Finding this material has recently become much more difficult.
43:40This is Sue, the most complete T-Rex ever discovered.
43:48And the story of how this dinosaur ended up here in this room takes us to the heart of why
43:54getting ancient biological material is so problematic.
44:11It all started in the auction room of Sotheby's in New York when Sue was put up for sale.
44:17Five million dollars.
44:20Five point three in a new place.
44:23It fetched seven point six million dollars.
44:29Seven million six.
44:31Seven million six.
44:47The Fields Museum in Chicago bought it.
44:51And Sue, named after the woman who found her, now occupies pride of place in the main exhibition room.
45:07Suddenly, Sue's sale price sparked a dinosaur gold rush.
45:17Is that what you got?
45:20It's a…
45:21But the commercialization of collecting is a major problem for scientists like Mary Schweitzer and Jack Horner.
45:29When people are in the business of selling something, they're in the business of making as much money as they
45:37can.
45:37And therefore, the specimen is all that matters.
45:41So the specimen is what they're going to sell.
45:44Why don't we just plan on, you know, taking that off and leaving the thing in the jacket?
45:48The scientific data that comes with the specimen when it's in the ground is overhead.
45:54In other words, it costs them money to get it.
45:59And therefore, they will make less if they get it.
46:02Have you seen the other side of that pubis? Is it a good bone on there?
46:06So, the problem is, is that, you know, when we want to study dinosaurs and learn about them as living
46:12animals, we have to have that data.
46:15And so, a commercially collected dinosaur is useless to science.
46:30The pressure from private collectors has forced dinosaur scientists to scour the globe in search of pristine fossils.
46:45Preservation is, of course, the key for Mary.
46:49And one of the most promising places she's found is here in Mongolia.
46:55The evidence is locked away in a specially constructed building in the middle of the main square of the nation's
47:01capital, Ulaanbaatar.
47:07That's quite the specimen you found.
47:11Yeah.
47:11Brought back here?
47:13Yes.
47:13Home at last?
47:14Exactly.
47:16Mongolians are very happy to see the dinosaur.
47:19He's beautiful.
47:23Occupying pride of place is a Tarbosaurus batar, an Asian relative of T-Rex, recently returned to the country after
47:32it was stolen.
47:34Dr. Bolo Menjin, one of Mongolia's leading paleontologists, has invited Mary Schweitzer to see it in all its glory.
47:44It's amazing, the color of the bones.
47:47That's very different than what we have back home.
47:50All the pictures I've seen of Gobi bones show it like this, like white, not discolored like we have back
47:57home.
47:58Oh, yeah. You know, T-Rex is much darker color.
48:02Yeah, mahogany colored almost.
48:04Exactly. So it's much lighter.
48:06The bones usually take on the color of the sediments that they're from.
48:11Right.
48:12And since this probably comes from more red sediment.
48:15Yes.
48:15A lot of iron reach.
48:16And the color is so white.
48:19Yep.
48:20That's gotta be because it's such a dry environment that you don't have the transfer between the sediment and the
48:26bone.
48:27Yep.
48:27As much as you do back home.
48:28I mean, that's an indicator that this might be really good for preservation of organics.
48:36But these bones are unfortunately useless to her.
48:41Any organics that might lurk inside them have been fatally compromised because they were excavated by looters, not scientists.
49:09To find the potentially well-preserved fossils she needs, Mary is taken by Dr. Minjin to the Gobi Desert.
49:21This seemingly endless expanse of rough grass and sand is a dinosaur hunter's El Dorado.
49:41Out here is where the first fossilized nest of dinosaur eggs was discovered.
49:48And it's the first time ever that Dr. Schweitzer's been here.
49:58I feel incredibly lucky and I'm quite sure that most of my paleo colleagues would be jealous.
50:05Because Mongolia holds a special magic for paleontology as a community.
50:12It's, you know, it's a place where dinosaurs first entered the public mindset.
50:18Right.
50:19They were introduced to the American public, at least, from Mongolia, from right here.
50:25Yeah.
50:26It's amazing.
50:31And this is where they're heading.
50:35The place that's become the natural cathedral of dinosaur hunting.
50:42The appropriately named Flaming Cliffs.
50:47Wow.
50:48Beautiful.
50:49It is so pretty.
51:07It is an incredible honor to be here.
51:10It's magic.
51:12It's, hmm, I don't know.
51:16It's like going to Rome if you're a Catholic or going to Mecca if you're, you know, if you're a
51:24Muslim.
51:24It's, it's, if you're a paleontologist, this is one site that is in everyone's dreams.
51:35This area is so rich in fossils that they're virtually stumbling over ancient bones.
51:47Hope there's something up here.
51:49I hope so.
51:51Make it all worthwhile.
51:52Yep.
51:53Oh, look.
51:54Polar.
51:56Bone.
51:57Oh, look at that.
51:58Look, and more over here.
51:59That possibly looks like kind of skull could be.
52:03Really?
52:03Interesting shape.
52:04Right here.
52:05You're right.
52:05It does.
52:06See the way it bends?
52:07Oh, wow.
52:08Okay.
52:09I need to get all the sand out of my shoes.
52:14Oh, look.
52:16Speaking of bone.
52:17Yep.
52:18Nice.
52:20Look at that.
52:21Yeah.
52:22Could be a jaw.
52:24This almost looks skullish.
52:27Yeah, look at this.
52:28That looks like a cross section of a long bone.
52:31Yeah.
52:32Amazing it can persist for this long.
52:35Mm-hmm.
52:41So why are these fossilized bones so white and seemingly well preserved?
52:48The answer lies in the soil.
52:53The Gobi has been a desert since the time of the dinosaurs.
52:57It's been dry for more than 65 million years.
53:03And that's potentially good news for Mary in her quest to find ancient organic material.
53:15Scientists think that wet soil pushes out organics from the fossil.
53:23The water effectively seeps through the bones, flushing the cells as it goes.
53:30So if you have a very long protein, like a whole collagen molecule or a whole hemoglobin molecule,
53:36you put it in a wet environment and it gets broken up into little chunks.
53:41And of course the chunks are a lot easier to move away from muscle or from bone
53:45and into the environment where they're lost forever.
53:49In theory, if it's dry, the bone proteins, molecules and even possibly DNA should be better preserved.
53:59We think dry is good for preservation.
54:02A lot of the incredibly preserved mummies from Peru, they are preserved with their skin intact,
54:09the colour intact, the clothing intact because it's dry.
54:14The problem is that around here, fossils are so easy to find.
54:20Now that might not seem like an obstacle, but it is.
54:26It seems like if we saw it, that easily other people would too.
54:31Yeah, the colour, it's very white.
54:33It's very white. I've never seen that.
54:35And very distinct shape.
54:36Yep.
54:37You know, shape is the thing people really, really easily pick up.
54:41And if you know, if you're here to find bone and you know anything at all about it.
54:45Yep.
54:47Yeah.
54:47Hmm.
54:54Not surprisingly then, there has been a spate of fossil looting at this historic site.
55:00Ooh, look at that.
55:03Looks very suspicious.
55:04It's something.
55:06He's a garbage.
55:07And the looters rarely take the trouble to cover their tracks.
55:10It's not good.
55:11Who would leave something like that here?
55:14Yeah.
55:14What the heck is that?
55:15Strange bits of plastic, sometimes used as markers for a site, are scattered around these cliffs.
55:22Look.
55:24Oh my gosh.
55:26Other clues include general litter, like these discarded plastic bottles.
55:32Wow, long day, huh?
55:34Yeah.
55:36Sun is going down very soon.
55:40It all leads to the inevitable discovery of a telltale hole in the ground.
55:46Oh, look at here.
55:49Yeah.
55:50This is clearly excavation.
55:51That looks kind of weird.
55:52Right there.
55:52See the sharp line?
55:53Yep.
55:54Yep.
55:55That's exactly.
55:56Look at how perfect.
55:57You know, this is not natural.
55:59Could have been something valuable for science.
56:02Yep.
56:02So this is what's happening here.
56:04See, the thing is, you know, when somebody takes something out of context like this, it's
56:07lost.
56:08It's valueless.
56:09Exactly.
56:09It might look pretty, but you might as well go get a coffee table book.
56:12Yep.
56:13It just, it's just not, not right.
56:34But things are changing here in Mongolia.
56:39The government is now planning to take much firmer action against the looters.
56:45And Mary has her own plan to help combat the problem.
56:49She's setting up a project with Bolong to mount a dig in the Gobi, using all the techniques
56:53she's helped to pioneer.
57:01The fossil record is always surprising us with things that we said couldn't be preserved.
57:08Why not look a little deeper now that we have new technologies?
57:11Maybe what we've said all along that couldn't last this long, maybe does.
57:16And her groundbreaking work, the discovery of cells, proteins, and even possibly DNA, is
57:29pioneering a new era in our understanding of dinosaurs.
57:40But even if she was able to find dinosaur DNA out here in the wilds of the Gobi, we might
57:48have to wait a very long time for a Hollywood ending.
57:56You know, if you want to build a dinosaur, out of DNA you pull from a dinosaur bone, there
58:02are so many things that you have to answer.
58:05You know, you might get little chunks of DNA, maybe you might even get the whole genome.
58:10But it's going to be fragmented, it's going to be split up, it's going to be broken.
58:15So, how are you going to piece it together in the right order?
58:18Because if you get chromosomes and genes in the wrong order, you're toast.
58:25It may not be possible to bring a dinosaur back to life, but Mary's bringing them closer
58:30to us than ever before.
58:35And the well-preserved remains which lie buried beneath these flaming cliffs might allow her
58:40to put even more flesh on the bones of the most fearsome and forbidding creatures ever
58:46to walk the earth.
58:55Who will ever forget Stuart the Brand Bags from The Apprentice?
59:00He's on the Sarah Millican television programme next on BBC Two.
59:03And on BBC Four, a trek across Siberia for Bruce Parry and The Tribe.
59:18I'm great to see you on the show on BBC Four, ailing nestEEP.
59:20We'll see you on BBC Eight of Whitties, an imagery Gymcat, a tour from Florida to urban
59:21across Australia.
59:21We have recorded EXCRITUS!
59:21I'm part of this for my ESCR of B
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