Documentary, Dinosaurs Piecing It All Together National Film Board Of Canada
#Canada #TogetherNationalFilm #Dinosaurs
#Canada #TogetherNationalFilm #Dinosaurs
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AnimalsTranscript
00:13This landscape was once the shoreline of a great inland sea, a place where dinosaurs lived.
00:21Today, some 60 million years later, it's the badlands of southern Alberta.
00:32In this place, dinosaur bones are found everywhere.
00:39What these dinosaurs looked like and how they behaved are questions for both artists and scientists.
00:48You know, there's nothing more baffling than to sit and look at a pile of sediments that are 100 million
00:54years old
00:54and say, these sediments are 100 million years old.
00:57They represent the detritus of a world that's completely vanished.
01:00How can I see into them?
01:03How do they become real?
01:05And you have to take this information up, study your fossils, put it together in your mind, and reintegrate it
01:13in your imagination.
01:15I was doing an Indian mural down in the museum here, and they needed a slide projection show for children,
01:23so they sent me up to Dale on dinosaurs.
01:26And I thought, everybody knew what a dinosaur looked like?
01:29I had no idea.
01:30And I says, okay, what do they look like?
01:45What I've got to do is sculpture this little creature in its bone form.
01:51And then I've got to fit my legs on them.
01:56He's in this direction.
01:58I've got two sides to work on, so it's quite difficult.
02:02See, and eventually I'll get that sculpture in parts that all those parts go into that egg for the child
02:07to put together.
02:09Then there's also a book behind that, that illustrates the animal, what it would really look like in reality.
02:18Attitudes, the laying of the eggs.
02:22And I'm working here at Paleontology because they want it scientifically correct.
02:29There are actually only two sites in the world, really, that we have good information on dinosaurs, really, as a
02:37dinosaur ecosystem.
02:38That's probably Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, and what's called the Nemegd Valley in Mongolia.
02:45These two sites represent about a third of the diversity of dinosaurs known in the world.
02:50Very nice.
02:54Wow, look at that.
02:56Yeah.
02:58It's kind of a strange one.
02:59A manual claw?
03:02What did dinosaurs look like?
03:04How do they behave?
03:06It starts here with field research teams, like this one in China.
03:11I think I might also have a chapsosaur too.
03:13Very thin, narrow blade-like.
03:17Paleontologists, technicians, geologists, they each bring a special interest to every piece of evidence that's found.
03:23Theropods, only one unguile, that sort of thing.
03:27But I haven't found many vertebrae from anything.
03:28Shark?
03:29Yeah.
03:29Now we've got hybrid on, so.
03:31Yeah.
03:32Two different types.
03:34That's kind of neat.
03:35Yeah.
03:36And the fauna expands.
03:40In western Canada, the grasses of the prairies give way to a glacial cut that forms the badlands of southern
03:47Alberta.
03:51For thousands of years, meltwater from the retreating ice washed away the soft rock that contained the remains of dinosaurs.
04:00These emerging fossils reveal the anatomy of the great creatures that once lived here.
04:08Well, this bone is a metatarsal from the flat of the foot, essentially, of an albertosaurus.
04:14And an albertosaurus with a metatarsal this long is probably an animal that's, I would say, eight to ten meters
04:22long.
04:22I'd say it's a very large albertosaurus, and would have weighed in the vicinity of three to four metric tons.
04:29This, for example, is the area which attached to the next metatarsal bone, and the three metatarsals, the main metatarsals
04:36of the foot of an albertosaurus, were tightly bound together, forming basically a single structure that didn't move very much.
04:44There was some movement here that acted like a spring, because otherwise what you have the potential of doing is
04:49breaking your foot, of course, when four tons of weight comes down beyond a foot like this.
04:55The edges here are where the ligaments attached that helped hold the whole thing together, and the scarring here, the
05:02really bumpy area, may actually indicate some muscle attachment.
05:05Finally, if you go down to this region, you can see a deep pit, which is characteristic of carnivorous dinosaurs
05:11and a lot of other animals, too.
05:13And it was here that the ligaments attached from one bone across the joint to the next bone, and helped
05:22hold the joint together.
05:23This is the joint surface itself right here.
05:29What sort of dinosaur is it?
05:32We can be really accurate these days in terms of our reconstructions of dinosaurs.
05:37We have a much better understanding now of the musculature and anatomy of the dinosaurs in minute detail, thanks to
05:43these detailed studies on the bones themselves.
05:46There are also some mummified specimens around which show what the skin looks like.
05:51And by comparison with modern animals, especially relatives of dinosaurs, both modern birds and modern crocodiles, we have a pretty
05:58good understanding of the anatomy of the animals.
06:01The only thing that tends to be quite speculative still, of course, is the coloration.
06:05And I think artists would very much be upset with us if we started finding colored dinosaurs, because they'd have
06:10no artistic license left at all in terms of reconstructing these things.
06:14There you go.
06:24Hide the dinosaur.
06:26I didn't like it.
06:27Say giddy up.
06:28There hasn't been a styracosaurus like this around here for some 80 million years.
06:34This one helps give more meaning to the bones of the badlands.
06:48We've always tried to encourage people who have an interest in fossils to go look for fossils in Alberta.
06:55It's illegal for them to excavate dinosaurs, for example, but that doesn't mean they can't go out and collect fossils
07:02from the surface or look for them.
07:18In the last 10, 15 years, I would say we've discovered maybe a dozen new types of dinosaurs in Alberta.
07:25Of that dozen new types of dinosaurs, probably almost half of them were brought to our attention by amateur collectors.
07:34All right, it's a completely articulated skeleton of a carithosaur.
07:38Again, one of the seven or eight species of hadrosaur, the duck-billed dinosaurs that's found here in the park.
07:45Again, the specimen was taken from the sandstone ridge to the right of us and moved down here.
07:50It was found in 1964, 65, sorry, by Roy Fowler, who was the first park ranger here in Dinosaur.
07:57He noticed the bones eroding out of the ridge. He walked around to the other side of the ridge and
08:02saw more bones eroding out of the other side.
08:04Realized it was probably a complete skeleton. So they used a technique that they don't use too often here anymore.
08:10They blasted it out with dynamite. We don't like using that technique anymore because it tends to damage the fossils
08:17if you're not careful.
08:19How did this one die?
08:21How did this one die? Well, likely when it died, it fell into a river or it died near a
08:26river and got washed in.
08:28And as it got washed down river, it got caught up on the bottom somewhere.
08:32And probably on a point bar formation, the inner bend of a river, and got sedimented over and fossilized.
08:40Also, because when they die, the tendons in the back of the neck tend to tighten up, which pulls the
08:44head backwards as well.
08:47The majority of fossils that we find in Alberta are pretty common, and they are coming to the surface all
08:52the time thanks to erosion.
08:54We know from looking at drilling cores taken from oil wells and gas wells and so on, that these beds
09:00extend far underneath the prairies.
09:03Similarly, coal mines, big strip mines, will bring to the surface the same age beds that produce the dinosaurs in
09:09Dinosaur Park or Drumheller.
09:11And so there are literally thousands, if not millions, of dinosaur skeletons yet to be found underneath the grasslands of
09:19Alberta.
09:22Okay, when you look at your hand, how do your bones and your hand go together?
09:27At the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta, children build a model, full scale, of the foot of Tyrannosaurus rex.
09:35Okay, now we've got our three big toes in front that are all put together, but how many bones do
09:44we have left over?
09:45In solving the puzzle, they gain some feeling for the time of the dinosaurs.
09:51Let's get a little bit bigger here, so we can see the extra bones that are left over.
09:54So we've got three big toes out front, and we've got these extra bones, which are kind of confusing.
10:00We made it!
10:02It's a creature they don't see on Earth today.
10:06It's imaginary, and yet it's not.
10:10When they go to a museum and see these huge bones, it's difficult for their imagination.
10:15Because sometimes these little children come in with the parents,
10:18Ooh, Daddy, I'm not scared! I'm not scared!
10:21And he's hanging on to Daddy like mad.
10:24And Daddy says, I know, dear.
10:28But they're big, and they're unimaginable to them.
10:32They're accustomed to a dog, a cat, a cow, a horse, a pig, and the things they see in the
10:39zoos, you know.
10:41What we see in the museums makes us wonder about a world so different from the one we know.
10:52That sense of wonder, that search for a link between ourselves and times past, drives the artist's imagination.
11:03Under an animation camera, a filmmaker creates images of dinosaurs from grains of sand.
11:19There are as many visions of the past as there are people who create them.
11:25A bunch of filmmakers sat down with the rough cut of the documentary footage,
11:31and thought about ideas that we could illuminate the footage with.
11:36And one of the sequences involved a bone bed of hundreds of centrosaurs of all ages that had died.
11:45And they didn't exactly know what had caused the death, but they assumed it was a mass drowning or a
11:50flood, something like that.
11:57The set itself is purely imagination.
12:02We arrived at what we thought was a nice compromise, scientifically.
12:06Simply by making it a very strange, foggy, swampy image, I could get away with a lot.
12:12It was more of a mood piece than a scientifically accurate piece.
12:18The set itself is a waste of time, for many years.
12:18The record has been the last ten years
12:18to take care of five years and that was the last ten years.
12:33The entry were in the front of a world to have been established.
12:44Winter. Drumheller, Alberta. A team skilled in the craft of museum exhibits is reconstructing
12:51dinosaurs. A frame is being built to support the plastic replicas of fossils found in China.
12:59Replicas, of course, because the real bones would be far too heavy.
13:03We don't have any spine on it at all. I don't think we're going to put one on. This is
13:10where our cables have our cable come through here.
13:13Most of us have been groupies, museum groupies. We've worked at museum at one time and learned our skills there.
13:21So we brought our skills to this project. So it's basically, if you work well with your hands, then you
13:29can catch on to what we do here.
13:32I mean, certainly right now it already looks as if it's brought its tail up too far.
13:38They're assembling the skeleton of Mementosaurus, all 75 feet of it. It was the largest of the China finds.
13:46Still, until we get the end of the tail on, we're not going to hog it apart somewhere. We're going
13:50to have to drop it down a bit more.
13:52Right now it seems to be almost kinked right here.
13:55Yeah.
13:56Oh, you have to ask Phil the right questions, because he'll look and won't necessarily comment on it.
14:05But if you ask him, you know, does this look right? And he'll say yes or no. And sometimes he'll
14:10say no. And if you say, well, what do we have to do to change it? And he will tell
14:14you.
14:15So it's a bit like pulling teeth sometimes with Phil, but he knows what he wants. And he has infinite
14:23patience if he, yeah.
14:25Yeah, it looks like that. Well, I think one or two of your ribs should be like that.
14:28Yeah.
14:28Fairly large and flat, especially the ones under the scapula. But as soon as you get back a little further,
14:32those are definitely light and fat.
14:35Yeah.
14:37It's a lot of work grinding them down, though, and making them look decent.
14:41Well, if we have a belt sander, it looks quite well.
14:47A fully assembled skeleton is as close to a real dinosaur as one gets. A painting, on the other hand,
14:56puts flesh on the bones, can depict great strength, and place the animal in its own environment.
15:03Animation adds the illusion of life and drama.
15:14Aye.
15:32No.
15:38I'm not.
15:39I'm not.
15:41You're a bad boy.
15:41You're a bad boy.
15:42Oh, my God.
15:42Oh, my God.
15:42Oh, my God.
16:05The first not very accurate drawings of dinosaurs were by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in the
16:12mid-1800s. Growing interest in dinosaurs prompted a meeting in 1853 of the world's first paleontologists held in a life
16:21-size but unfinished model of an iguanodon. It was the British scientist Richard Owen who in 1841 coined the term
16:31Dinosauria from the Latin for terrible lizards.
16:35Early attempts at reconstruction used the actual fossil bones, which being in effect solid rock required some serious engineering.
16:47We have a tremendous number of articulated skeletons, that is complete skeletons of dinosaurs that are really good display quality
16:54specimens.
16:55However, it's not surprising that when people started collecting the garbage bones and the isolated teeth and bones that had
17:04been left before, that we suddenly found that dinosaurs weren't the major animal there, that in fact they were greatly
17:11outnumbered by frogs and salamanders and fish and even mammals.
17:17There were more mammals in Dinosaur Park than there were dinosaurs. But we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't
17:23collected the smaller specimens too.
17:26These are the radiating bones right there.
17:29Unless they're just radiating scales.
17:31I think they're scales.
17:32Just turned on edge there?
17:33Yeah, they just turned on edge.
17:35Oh, okay.
17:36These are really, look at them, they're really long.
17:38And square in the overlap.
17:39I agree, I think it's a lizard.
17:40Looks like an unarmored lizard.
17:53This part of the Gobi Desert was once a large swampy lake.
17:57The rock formed from its sediments holds clues to life as it was 80 million years ago.
18:02The stories revealed just a little at a time.
18:04In the world today, there's less than 30 people who work on dinosaurs.
18:10The whole science has progressed so slowly that we only know of about 300 or so species of dinosaurs.
18:19Now that may sound like a lot initially, but you have to remember that that 300 species is spread out
18:25over 150 million years and the entire world.
18:29Today, we have over 8,000 species of birds alive in the world.
18:34We have over 6,000 species of reptiles and amphibians.
18:39And we have over 4,000 species of mammals.
18:42And you get the idea that the diversity of dinosaurs that we know right now is just a very small
18:48part of what their world must have been like.
18:55What we have here is the fibula off a duck-billed dinosaur.
18:59And what's interesting about this one in this bone bed is that it has a fracture through it right here,
19:06which happened when the animal was alive and fused up again.
19:10It's not uncommon for dinosaurs to have bone deformities or bone crushing.
19:14We find a lot of vertebrae where the arches have either been crushed from downward pressure on the tail or
19:21on the animal's back from something hitting it from above.
19:23And they flare and form nice bony processes like this.
19:29Through walking on this broken leg has caused the bone to shift.
19:33And then one end slowly fused in by building up a calcium bridge across.
19:38It was probably a healthy individual at the time that the break occurred.
19:41So it probably went into hiding or something.
19:44At the time you didn't just have this big flat here.
19:46You had probably a lake and then you had a forest or something probably a couple of miles off, which
19:53you could obviously hide in.
19:55It just makes you wonder, like, these animals aren't as supreme as they may seem.
19:59Even though they're 28 feet long, they still suffer from all the ailments that you or I could suffer from.
20:05They still get the parasites, the disease, the broken bones from their environment.
20:10It just makes them seem more human.
20:47You don't care.
20:47You're too.
20:47You're too, Chao and glad, you've taken many brains in your car and you could look too.
21:00...why are they in the other side?
21:00Al Baix kabo!
21:02You're the one that busy the season
21:08The animator's vision of a moment long past is based upon the work of other artists, like
21:14Donna Sloan, a dinosaur enthusiast.
21:19She specializes in technically accurate drawings.
21:22I'm debating whether to do that, that drawing over, because it's not right.
21:27That's one of the harder things to show when you have such a three-dimensional specimen
21:31as this. You need many drawings to try and give the feeling of what it's really doing.
21:36With a lot of these things, a drawing works better because you can play down the cracks
21:42and the breaks and the missing parts. You know, you can eliminate depth of field problems that
21:47you get with the photography. And the illustrations help the scientists through reading these
21:53papers to understand what it is that has been found.
21:58It's important to know the anatomy and the taxonomy of the animals. And it's interesting
22:03to think of what they actually were like. The thing is to get the animals the way they
22:09really were, like the life that's in them. I see a lot of drawings of animals that they
22:15seem very static. They're just standing there in profile and it says that it's this long
22:19and it weighed this much and it ate plants. And to me, they're real animals because I've
22:24worked with these bones and you just, you can feel just the life force from the, what they've,
22:32they've got a crayfish. We find these sometimes in concretions from the bear paw formation,
22:37you know, the marine. And he's, he's caught one. The other one obviously wants it. It's,
22:45it's kind of like the seagulls on the beach with the peanut butter sandwich kind of a story. And,
22:50uh, as a sketch I might turn this into a good drawing later on as soon as I sort out
22:55some
22:56of the background problems. But, what I thought would be neat is, I've seen cows do this. They
23:01will actually come right up and very delicately with the ends of their hooves scratch the tip
23:06of their nose. I thought if something like a cow can do that so delicately, why not a hadrosaur?
23:17Actually, they're not, they're not all that heavy and, and ungainly an animal. If you, if you see them,
23:23they're, you know, compared to some of the big sauropods and things, they're very delicately made
23:28creatures. So, I want them to have a real animal essence. And to do that you have to have them
23:34doing
23:35animal things. The behavior of dinosaurs must have been influenced by their environment. And so there's
23:44another task, filling in the details of a dinosaur ecology. Okay, we're going to have a look at a
23:49pollen grain here. It's a very large grain. You can see these, uh, little circular white spots here.
23:55These are actually holes into the wall of the pollen grain from where the pollen tube will germinate
24:00through one of these or through a couple of them. The, the amount of pollen produced by plants,
24:05as you know, is very, very great. I mean, hay fever sufferers can attest to this fact. I mean,
24:08it's always in the atmosphere. It's called the pollen rain, in fact. And, um, it, it, because most of it
24:14does not reach its destination, which is the female flower, of course, most of it settles right down onto
24:19the earth. And on that pollen that settles into ponds, lakes, rivers, and streams will eventually fall and
24:24settle to the bottom of those ponds, be covered by more sediment, more silt, and eventually become
24:30part of the rock that's formed and therefore fossilized. So all I need to collect is a small
24:36amount of rock, say a piece roughly this size. So, you know, something the size of your fist would be
24:41almost too much. Processing even less than this, I could probably extract from good type sediment,
24:46a good shale or silt stone, I could probably extract over a million pollen grains, individual pollen
24:52grains, probably representing three or four hundred different kinds of plants. So from one small rock
24:59sample, I can get information on three or four hundred different types of plants that may have
25:04been growing at the time those rocks were laid down. Now, the environments during the times the
25:13dinosaurs were varied just as they are today. You'll have sort of open savanna type areas and you'll have
25:18upland forests. You might even have some subtropical vegetation types creeping in. And through an
25:24examination of that pollen, we were able to determine that the environment must have been a low
25:28backwater or oxbow lake type of environment with these various trees and plants. This one in
25:33particular happens to be a magnolia tree and then some water plants that were in the area at that time.
25:39They're so excited with their scientific things and they want me to make a beautiful painting of it.
25:46And I've got to control them that I have to know what they want in it first because it can
25:52destroy the
25:52whole composition. Because in the middle of a painting or at almost a finish, they come in with
25:58some beautiful plant they thought existed at that time and they want me to put that in there. And it's
26:03like music. You're putting a tone in there in the middle of your song and it just doesn't fit.
26:10When Ellie started to paint this picture, I was under the impression that I had recovered some pollen
26:15from Dinosaur Provincial Park, which was related to a plant known as Metrocideros. There's no real
26:21common name that I know of anyway. And this Metrocideros tree is rather unique in the fact that it's a
26:26member of the Myrtaceae, which grows only in the southern hemisphere today. And to find it in Canada was not
26:33as bizarre as it may seem because we found other plants that only occur today in the southern hemisphere,
26:38so it didn't throw me off too much. But the pollen that I recovered was few in number and my
26:43identifications were tentative. But I thought, let's go with it anyway. And so we did. And Ellie painted a very,
26:49very beautiful Metrocideros tree here. While she was painting this, and it took her several months to
26:54complete this painting, I had found new information by using my microscope and scanning more and more
27:00slides. I found new information that gave me the feeling that this in fact was not Metrocideros, that I had
27:05misidentified the pollen, or at least it was uncertain. And so my confidence level had dropped
27:10very, very drastically. And so first went to Dale and mentioned the fact to him that we should probably
27:15remove Metrocideros from the painting. He was reluctant at first because Metrocideros was a
27:19beautiful tree and some unbelievable beautiful red flowers that have these very fine stamens that are
27:25very showy. I think a lot prettier than Magnolia, in fact. So Dale and I together spoke with Ellie. Now,
27:31Ellie was used to having things changed, especially by Dr. Russell. He would come in and say, no, the
27:36muscle's not right. No, the leg's in the wrong position. No. And she'd be just frantically changing
27:41things back and forth. She is a very patient lady, as you may or may not know, but she is
27:45extremely
27:45patient. She just looked at us probably with some disgust, but she eventually said, if it has to be
27:50changed for scientific accuracy, then she would, of course, change it. And then I remember some grumbles
27:55under her breath or something, perhaps. But she eventually changed, as I say, every individual leaf,
28:01every individual flower on that tree.
28:06Ellie works with images. She sees colors and forms, shapes and dimensions and arrangements.
28:15And she sees these excite her in the same way that words and sometimes mathematical relationships
28:21excite me. So in this sense, then, we work so well together because we each speak each other's
28:28language just enough so that we can really communicate. And we both respect the working
28:34of the two team.
28:36It's fun with them, though. I enjoy that. I enjoy working with them very much.
28:42And Dale gets so excited working on these things. When I'm painting it, he just
28:48goes, oh, and oh, Ellie, that's it, that's it. And we tell stories. Like, he tells me stories
28:54that how he thinks they are, how he thinks they eat, how he thinks they run. And like, he feels
29:02they're big eating machines. You know, and the whole thing is to eat.
29:10As a consequence of making models of these skeletons first and then putting the muscles
29:14directly onto the skeletal three-dimensional models that we had, that I found, to my delight,
29:20that the character of the animal emerged when you made a skeleton first upon which to put the
29:25three-dimensional muscles. And then from this point on, it's a buildup of that muscle to get that to look
29:36proper. I build it up until I get my muscles where I want it, like in here, then where my
29:45hollows are.
29:46And I give this the power that it needs to pull this leg around. And then I begin my finishing.
29:54See, I want his skin to give the appearance like an elephant. And I don't want to lose the shape,
30:01but I've got to get my little wrinkles in there.
30:07I sculpture it for the scientists' feelings, because no one knows what they look like. And once I get my
30:16bone structures, then with the scientists, we create the muscles around that bone structure. And at least I
30:21know I'm accurate with bones when I'm guessing at how fat a muscle should be or how he'd move or
30:28what
30:28would happen. And at least when I finish with that sculpture, then I've got a model to paint from.
30:36Otherwise, it's imaginary and I can't imagine a muscle twisting or something happening there or
30:42what it would look like. And I've got my model to work with.
31:01Whenever I've had the good fortune to travel to interesting places, I've always taken photographs
31:06of scenes that say something to me that I can communicate to her. So we work with 35-mil slides
31:14and plasticine clay. That's our language.
31:21Ellie's finished painting is based on the best we now know about a world long since vanished.
31:32You're not going out to find the laws of nature and being able to define those. I mean, essentially,
31:37once you've discovered one level of information, you open up many new doors and you end up having
31:45more questions very often than you had when you originally started on a particular line of thought.
31:50So science is a process. And to get from one point to another, you certainly, it's like having a map.
31:57You like to have, you know where you want to go and you know how you want to get there
32:01through the map,
32:02but you can vary the routes. It's almost like being a detective. You're looking for clues and you're
32:09trying to solve a mystery. The clues sometimes are very obscure, but if you don't look for them,
32:15then you don't know which way you're going to end up going.
32:23The adventure in a dinosaur hunt is to come across the unexpected. Every now and then,
32:29there's a find different from all the others. In 1989, the team in the Gobi Desert discovered
32:36the remains of baby dinosaurs who appear to have been buried alive.
32:41What sort of inclination do you need on a, you know, slip face or whatever?
32:4533 to 35 degrees.
32:47The possibility of a small landslide came under discussion.
32:51I would expect contorted bedding from a slump.
32:55Well, let them finish the job and then we'll look closely at the rock,
32:59because I haven't had the opportunity to look at this, okay?
33:02Yeah, okay.
33:02Look around, but I haven't seen this.
33:03Fair enough.
33:04Then maybe we'll find something, okay?
33:06Fair enough.
33:06To confirm this interpretation.
33:09Okay?
33:09Okay.
33:09Maybe the position of animals would tell us something.
33:12Yeah, I'm skeptical myself.
33:14Oh, okay.
33:17Okay, make, I told you, we can make an experiment with Kevin, you know,
33:21like with this big old Indian Kevin, and then we'll see what kind of position he will have.
33:25Yeah, right.
33:26Dying.
33:28Sorry, Kevin.
33:29This is Canada Day, so it's got to be nice to me.
33:31It's got to be nice to Kevin.
33:31Can I?
33:32Because I'm being nice to everybody else.
33:33I don't have a problem with the pronunciation of your name, Kevin, because I have a neighbor,
33:38and her son was Kevin, and every day I was listening.
33:41Kevin, Kevin, go home.
33:45Okay, I get the message.
34:20You're listening.
34:24You're listening.
34:28You're listening.
34:35the baby animals belong to a group known as armored dinosaurs fully grown they'd
34:42have been the size of a tank
34:55this is a field preparation which we sometimes do sometimes don't
35:00uh more likely we don't uh just to see what we have in the ground uh this will later be
35:06sent to
35:07the museum either in beijing or across to canada and have a final prep done on it where all the
35:13sand will be removed from all the little denticles you can see there's still some sand inside here
35:16you've got little red dots that can all be removed using a microscope and a pin vise which is what
35:24we
35:24usually use right now i'm using just a dental probe which isn't isn't fine enough for this type of
35:29thing hmm well they could either be burrows or they could be roots that have grown through the
35:37skull at some later time after it was buried i think they're probably burrows though you can see
35:42there's a lot of little bone chips in them paul johnson studies the ancient traces left behind
35:47by insects one of the interesting things about this though is that if they are burrows produced by say
35:54insects for example and if these baby ankylosaurs were buried in a small-scale catastrophe maybe a
36:02sandstorm or a dune slump it shows that they weren't so deeply buried that scavenging organisms such
36:11as insects or maggots or whatever couldn't attack the body after they died
36:17so these guys were actually eating the baby uh they were after it died uh under the sand when it
36:22was
36:23rotting it would probably be burrowing through it taking out whatever nutrients it could and
36:26as it would go through the bone it would uh uh defecate little bone chips yeah that's basically it yeah
36:38this is one of the feet that was found this year from a small theropod called sorenothoides
36:45sorenothoides is uh one of the very first dinosaurs in fact found in uh outer mongolia or the people's
36:51republic of mongolia and this dinosaur is also well known from albertus under a different name called
36:58troodon now this particular specimen is not a mature one this is the femur for example or the upper leg
37:06bone
37:07and you can see it's actually quite short considering it's a man-sized animal normally
37:12we're looking at a baby therefore uh maybe a quarter grown if you look at the claws for example the
37:19claws are very sharp and uh quite grassile they're very much like a the claws of a raptorial bird
37:28that's a normal claw but in addition to that he has a side claw which if you put it on
37:34the foot
37:35is raised above the ground and is very sharply recurved and is obviously a claw that's used for
37:42ripping and tearing his prey so that's one clue the second clue is if you look at the proportions of
37:49the
37:49leg uh we'll take this for example these are the metatarsals here the bones that are in the flat of
37:57your
37:57foot now sauronothoides like all other carnivorous dinosaurs walked on his toes and if you look at
38:05the length of the metatarsus or these particular bones through the flat of the foot they're in fact
38:10quite a bit longer than the femur and the other bone in the lower part of the leg uh the
38:16tibia is also
38:18quite a bit longer than the femur so you're looking at a leg that's more than three times the length
38:23of
38:25the highest limb bone or the thigh bone and what that indicates is that this is a very rapidly running
38:32animal it's an animal that could attain very high speeds uh we we know this because we've made
38:37comparisons with modern animals and we the faster the animal is the longer the lengths of these lower
38:43parts of the limb are we know from studies of the brain case of this particular dinosaur that this
38:57group of dinosaurs was probably the so-called brainiest of all the dinosaurs that we know of
39:02in relative size the brain is much bigger in this animal than it is in any other dinosaur we know
39:07about
39:07right now we know that this particular group of dinosaurs had in fact uh turned the thumb around
39:13so the thumb was facing the next two main fingers there is a connection between the opposable thumb and
39:20and the intelligence itself i think a better connection though is is the fact that he had the
39:25opposability in the in hand to look at things and what you would expect at that point is not eyes
39:31on the
39:31side of the head but eyes that have shifted forward and this has also happened in this particular group of
39:36dinosaurs that they had stereoscopic vision just like humans and modern birds do
39:5080 million years ago the troodon lived in what is now southern alberta
40:00small by dinosaur standards their world was populated by many animals much larger than
40:09themselves but the troodon had the advantage of intelligence and speed
40:16they probably hunted in pairs or groups feeding on small mammals and amphibians
40:24in this particular sequence we're seeing the world from the point of view of a little troodon which is
40:30uh very smart blue dinosaurs that lived in uh cretaceous time he's met a pal and they're frog hunting and
40:39at this
40:40point uh the troodon hears the kaplunk of a frog and and then they're they're off to uh to to
40:49hunt frogs
40:51and making a plunge to grab the little the little frog which because of my squeamishness i actually had
40:59the the frog get away
41:04the frog would be um you know appropriate uh appropriate dinner
41:19their footprints have been found around the egg-laying sites of other dinosaurs
41:26this suggests they were also robbers of nests the two truodon have come up and they're hiding behind
41:32two trees and they're looking at one another trying to planting an attack on the eggs which are in the
41:37foreground on another level the mother's heard the two truodons attacking her nest and she's reacting
41:44to that noise she's turning around and screaming so this is just a very quick scene it entails maybe
41:49five drawings and see and with that you can stop frame it like here i can just stop okay you
41:55know
41:55this is it doesn't work it's too big or it's too small or the eyes looking the wrong way and
41:59on film
42:00it's going to wobble
42:39it was not only the bones of dinosaurs that were chiseled out of the gobi desert what was also
42:44uncovered were their fossilized eggs it's a curious fact that uh all of the eggs that have been found
42:51in central asia now have never yet yielded more than one specimen which has uh tiny bones inside of
42:57them and this is very peculiar because it uh suggests that something was destroying the babies inside
43:04without destroying the eggs necessarily we can confirm that too because if we take a piece of this
43:10eggshell and we look at the inside of the eggshell we can actually see resorption pits or places where
43:15the embryos were large enough that they were starting to absorb the calcium from the eggshell
43:20itself which suggests that the baby dinosaurs were maturing inside the eggs and yet they're not found
43:26as baby dinosaurs it's something that's going on and there's been a number of ideas suggested including
43:32one fairly recent one by kevin which i think is a good one and and that is that the um
43:37the contents of
43:38egg itself may have been chemically active enough to dissolve the bone of the embryos
43:51the history of dinosaurs and the the amount of uh years that they lived and existed just amazes me
43:58i don't remember it technically they do but uh how did they grow so big like this amazes me was
44:06the uh
44:07uh earth less uh with the gravity that that you know they just kept going or you know and and
44:16what was the great extinction you know how massive was it had to be around the entire earth in the
44:23cretaceous era it affected the entire surface of the earth
44:29some some think they ate themselves to death that they were so big they just kept eating and there
44:35wasn't enough food left you know it's fascinating there are a lot of problems related to dinosaurs
44:42and why they were so successful and why they died out that really constitute puzzles both large-scale
44:49puzzles that probably in my lifetime will never be answered and small-scale puzzles that i can answer
44:54by going out into the field and looking at the dinosaur resources so i'm always developing these
45:00little mysteries that have to be solved is to run my life essentially in dinosaur research and
45:07so the next couple of years i'll be looking at a particular problem and in that time period i should
45:13be able to solve it but beyond that i know what's contributing towards solving some of the bigger
45:18mysteries of dinosaurs like why they died out perhaps no other science requires such a wide range of ideas
45:26and skills we know now there's hardly any place on earth where dinosaur bones are not to be found
45:34but to piece together the world and its creatures of a hundred million years ago both baffles and demands
45:52imagination it's nice it's play time it's not a job it's fun
46:14so
46:24so
46:25so
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