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Documentary, NOVA - The Hunt For China's Dinosaurs
#Dinosaurs #HuntForChina #HuntForDinosaurs #Hunt
#Dinosaurs #HuntForChina #HuntForDinosaurs #Hunt
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AnimalsTranscript
00:19Tonight on NOVA, an international team sets out to explore one of the world's most fertile
00:25dinosaur fields. In China's vast Gobi Desert, they battle mud, heat, and sandstorms.
00:34Dynamite and paintbrushes reveal a menagerie of strange creatures from the past.
00:39Right on, another skull.
00:42A vanished world comes to light on the hunt for China's dinosaurs.
01:05Funding for NOVA is provided by the Johnson & Johnson family of companies, supplying healthcare
01:11products worldwide. And Lockheed, a bold new force in systems engineering, management,
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01:45Sinjiang Province, China.
01:52Farther from the sea than anywhere else on earth, at the western tip of the Gobi Desert
01:58in Central Asia.
02:05There's a theory that millions of years ago, this region was completely isolated.
02:12That it was part of a separate continent, like Australia.
02:17And unusual dinosaurs, found only in China, lived, died, and left their bones in the rocks.
02:38Today, a group of scientists have come to test the theory.
02:45They are the first North American fossil hunters allowed to work here since the legendary adventurer,
02:52Roy Chapman Andrews explored the Gobi in the 1920s.
03:03Andrews was a real-life version of Indiana Jones.
03:11Throughout the decade, he led his team deeper into the vast desert, battling the sandstorms and searing heat, warlords and
03:20bandits of Mongolia.
03:26He brought servants, table linens, a pearl-handled Colt 45, and a Hollywood cinematographer to record all the action.
03:38Andrews came looking for the first human beings.
03:41Andrews came looking for the first human beings.
03:42Instead, he found dinosaurs.
03:45Most notably, a new kind of plant-eater named Protoceratops andrusae in his honor.
03:55Long before its work was done, Andrews' expedition was abruptly ended by political turmoil in China.
04:07But his adventures captured the imagination of millions, including Canadian scientist Phil Curry, now an expert on predatory dinosaurs.
04:17Curry is co-leader of the new expedition.
04:20For me, it has a special romance in a sense because my interest in paleontology started when I read a
04:27book by Roy Chapman Andrews about the Central Asiatic expeditions and coming to this region.
04:32And I never, ever imagined that I would come here myself someday, but I had always anticipated that I would
04:38grow up to be a paleontologist
04:39because the whole notion of going to remote parts of the world to look for dinosaur skeletons was so attractive
04:47to me as a child that I never veered from that.
04:57It took months to persuade the Chinese authorities to allow this expedition into Xinjiang province, the heart of Asia.
05:08For decades, especially during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese dinosaur science and its specimens were covered with the dust of neglect.
05:21Only recently has the Chinese government considered the benefits of opening its dinosaur hunting grounds to the world.
05:33The Canadians beat out many other foreign researchers for the opportunity to explore the Gobi.
05:39They won because they offered the Chinese technical training, an invitation to work in Canada, and money.
05:52As part of the deal, these trucks bought with Canadian dollars will stay in China.
05:58Russell!
05:59I see you hiding there.
06:01Welcome aboard.
06:04Dale Russell, a leading dinosaur theoretician, is the other leader of the Canadians.
06:12Experts on fossil plants, fish, and insects are with the dinosaur hunters.
06:17Do you know all these people?
06:19Have you met Dr. Russell?
06:21Russell.
06:21Oh, Russell.
06:22They are joining their Chinese counterparts on the biggest dinosaur hunt of all time.
06:27How are you?
06:28Four years of prospecting on both sides of the Pacific.
06:36The Chinese leader is Dong Zhiming, who has found the bones of more dinosaurs than anyone else in the world.
06:43It has to fit.
06:46Yeah.
06:47Does it fit?
06:48Okay.
06:49I try.
06:50Okay.
06:57I would like to express our tremendous gratitude to our Chinese colleagues for allowing us to come here,
07:03and to carry out a dream that we've always wanted to do, to work in the Gobi of Northwestern China,
07:09where fossils are found in such abundance, and we look forward to finding excellent specimens for China.
07:15Guys, .
07:18Let's go.
07:21Cheers.
07:22Cheers.
07:23Good job.
07:25Great.
07:26Good.
07:29Good.
07:30Good.
07:31Good.
07:33Good.
07:44Good.
07:45morning after they're up at dawn to work while the blazing Sun is still low in the sky
08:21times have changed since Roy Chapman Andrews called his expedition report the new conquest
08:29of Central Asia today the Chinese are in charge the desert is a mecca for fossil hunters because
08:38the bare earth makes fossils easier to see here wind erosion is constantly exposing new rock
08:46layers that were deposited long ago these rocks date back 160 million years by then the age of
08:56dinosaurs was already well underway dinosaurs first appeared 225 million years ago when all
09:05the earth's land was a single continent the first dinosaurs were fierce 10-foot long carnivores and
09:13primitive two-legged browsers twice their size they spread to every corner of their world
09:21by 160 million years ago the supercontinent had split in two and then splintered further in North
09:30America this was the time of the giant plant-eating sauropods often called brontosaurs the largest
09:37animals ever to walk the earth lumbering beasts with tiny brains this is the period known as the
09:45Jurassic when China may have been cut off allowing its dinosaurs to evolve in different directions from
09:52those of North America these cliffs may hold skeletons unlike anything the Canadians have ever seen I
10:03would like to find dreaming in color a sauropod skeleton just a little bit of it coming out of the
10:10ground so I
10:11could tell it the limbs were there the the vertebral column was there and best of all the skull was
10:16there
10:17sauropods tend to break apart when they die these are the giant brontosaurs and they lose their heads and
10:21it's always very nice to have the head connected with the rest of the skeleton because about half
10:27of the anatomy seems to be located in the head in terms of classification of these creatures if
10:33anybody can find the ancient residents of the Gobi it should be this crew there are fewer than 30 full
10:40-time
10:40dinosaur paleontologists in the world and three of them are here today you must be take the scapula
10:49dung jiming has the most practiced eye he's dug dinosaurs for 40 years and personally supervises
10:57all Chinese dinosaur digging dung jiming is just a superb field man Dale Russell sort of on the other end
11:08of
11:08the scale and he's he's the thinker of the three of us and he's one who develops the ideas whereas
11:15I would
11:15say that dung jiming and myself tend to be people who test those ideas more than anything else fossil
11:29finding is still as much an art as a science when you've been at it for a while you develop
11:39a search
11:39image and it's automatic you can be walking along thinking about something on the other side of the
11:45world entirely and your eyes will catch just a glint of bone or just the right shape in the rock
11:52and
11:52suddenly it fires something in your head and you shut out everything else you've been thinking about
11:57and then you focus on that piece of bone but for weeks the dinosaurs remain hidden it wouldn't be the
12:09first time that top experts return from a promising site with nothing to show but sunburns and desert
12:22souvenirs it's a horse guys it's the only one it's the right end of the horse though congratulations
12:33is that all you could find yeah better days huh what did you get
12:41well i guess that's it guys they're gonna send us back now finally after three frustrating weeks
12:54a chinese scientist spots a huge hunk of bone
13:09what is that that must be a humongous rib it's a rib
13:29but most of the skeleton lies buried under 100 tons of solid rock
13:40the canadians feared the blasting will destroy fossils but the chinese feel it's a risk worth
13:47taking to save time
14:00with a few pounds of explosives and a lot of muscle
14:04the team removes rock that took millions of years to form
14:28a bizarre giant begins to emerge from the rock
14:38the thin rope-like shape is the edge of a chain of neck bones as long as a bus
14:48they once belonged to a plant eater a sauropod called a momentosaur
14:54it was a hundred feet in length with the longest neck of any animal that has ever lived
15:03it's a 30 meters in long maybe it's new maybe the new genus is new genus and species
15:11but with very large maybe i think it is in asia the largest sauropod
15:20it's the first sauropod dinosaur that i've ever had the privilege of working on because sauropods don't
15:24care in canada and uh we're working into the quarry face now looking for hopefully a head
15:29it seems like one of the rules of life which might be called russell's law is the head of the
15:34dinosaur is
15:34never preserved or at least it's very seldom preserved so we're hoping mightily against all odds against all reason
15:48sauropods aren't found in canada because the surface rocks there are the wrong age but dozens of
15:55sauropods have turned up farther south from montana to south america the question is how closely does this
16:03chinese momentosaur resemble its relatives in other parts of the ancient world
16:08if it's different that's evidence for the lost continent theory which predicts the chinese
16:14dinosaurs of this era were isolated and distinct
16:22finding a skull here could settle the issue skulls contain vital clues for retracing an animal's ancestry
16:29but they are as rare as they are valuable no one has ever found a momentosaur skull
16:37the basic problem is is that skulls tend to be quite fragile and in all probability some of the
16:42carnivorous dinosaurs were starting to eat at the front of the body and working their way back and
16:46once they got full they left so um destruction by carnivores is another way of eliminating the heads
16:52and would be quite crunchy but uh whether they in fact enjoyed the heads because they were a delicacy we
16:59don't really know after a month of working with everything from dynamite to toothbrushes the team has dug
17:09out only 10 feet of the neck and most of the tail
17:19they will have to leave in three weeks and the skull if it's there remains buried deep
17:28but the rest of the skeleton is still a treasure
17:33the giant's leg and the ribs are dug out and prepared for transport out of the desert
17:47okay what we're planning on doing we've just finished excavating around the specimen
17:51um we've we've created a trench and we're getting ready to cover it over with a separator
17:56layer of paper and then we're going to put uh plaster and burlap bandages on it
18:02uh eventually once those are hard we'll turn it over and plaster the other side and the block will be
18:07ready to be transported out of here that plaster will start to set up in a minute the plaster will
18:14protect the fragile bone on the bumpy truck ride back to the museum
18:24there it will be removed and the rest of the rock will be chipped away from the fossil
18:33it can take 15 000 hours to dig out and reassemble one large dinosaur
18:43progress is slow and sweaty
18:55at midday a thermometer would register 120 degrees in the shade if there were any shade
19:08in the overheated imagination of a bone digger the momentosaur comes to life
19:16and it's got some nasty company
19:20so
19:31I don't know.
20:02The ancient environment was very different from today's parched desert.
20:06In the hot dust, the team finds the bones of a crocodile, evidence that there was plenty
20:12of water when the dinosaurs were here.
20:21This is the edge of the eye socket there.
20:24You can tell it's crocodile partly because of all those pits are characteristic for crocodiles.
20:31We're getting bits and pieces of most of the skeleton, like proximal ends of the limb bones
20:36and parts of the vertebral column, parts of the skull.
20:39So I suspect that once we finish, we'll have maybe 60, 70 percent of the animal represented.
20:45It'll be like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
21:04The 160 million-year-old puzzle is pieced together
21:08for the expedition's cook, Lao Zhang.
21:11And the toes.
21:12Let's see if any of these shafts match a gorgeous leg.
21:26After a long day of digging, there are tired bones and growling stomachs.
21:37Let's see if any of these things are amazing.
21:40Let's see, we're here.
21:42We're here.
21:43We're here.
22:01The
22:25The season is winding down.
22:27The Momenchosaur skull is still out of reach.
22:34And with just two weeks left, a very different creature is discovered nearby.
22:42I wonder if that's a tarsal.
22:44Probably not.
22:45You know, that could be, Philip, above that, that could be the distal end of the tibia.
22:52Oh, that's beautiful, really nice.
22:57The bones belong to a carnivorous dinosaur, a theropod.
23:02But it's a new kind of theropod, never seen before.
23:07This type of dinosaur is a relatively primitive version of Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would
23:12have weighed somewhere in the vicinity of one and a half to two tons, walked on his hind
23:17legs, very large teeth, very large claws, and been quite ferocious at the time.
23:22You can see the lower leg bones, the tibia and the fibula, coming out of the hillside.
23:27And these bones are extremely rare.
23:30They're not found very often in specimens, especially this well-preserved.
23:34These are ankle bones.
23:35They fit very nicely right on the end of the leg bones, simply because everything isn't
23:40badly crushed.
23:43Bones of the foot are also well-preserved.
23:45You can see these are the metatarsals.
23:48And we have a number of phalanges already from this quarry, that is, toe bones, and quite
23:55a few of the claws as well.
23:57This animal may have been the Mementosaur's tormentor.
24:01It's much more husky than the carnivores of North America, more evidence that evolution
24:06in China was going its own way.
24:11What's been found here already are the hind limbs, parts of the front limbs, and enough
24:17bone to indicate that probably the whole skeleton is in the hillside right now.
24:23So many dinosaurs, so little time.
24:26Once again, the animal's skull may be buried too deep.
24:38The specimen, unfortunately, was found rather late in the season.
24:42So we're now faced with a bit of a dilemma in the sense that there may not be enough time
24:49right now to take the whole specimen out this year.
24:52In that case, we would excavate the parts that we safely feel we can excavate this year,
24:57and leave the rest for next year when we return again.
25:05We've just, just really, literally touched the surface.
25:11We haven't the time.
25:12It's getting cold now, and the winds are coming up.
25:14We haven't got very many days left.
25:16I regret that, because I wished we could have pulled that theropod skull out of the ground.
25:19I don't think we will now.
25:28But there's an unexpected, last-minute triumph.
25:31Most team members have already left, when the great head of the carnivore is discovered
25:37and extracted, four-inch teeth still gleaming in the ferocious mouth.
25:48Its flattened nose and other peculiar skull features confirm that this animal was very
25:54different from predators in the rest of the world.
26:05Three years later, a Chinese crew finally reached the Mementosaur skull.
26:11They reported that it did not resemble any North American sauropod.
26:16Two old skulls pulled from the desert rocks have provided crucial evidence that China was
26:22a world apart during the middle of the age of dinosaurs.
26:25But would it always be so?
26:28Would North American and Chinese dinosaurs follow their separate paths right to the end of their
26:34days on Earth?
26:36In the final age of dinosaurs, China rejoined Asia.
26:40A hundred million years ago, North America met Asia near the North Pole, forming a land bridge
26:46which the dinosaurs could have crossed, ending their isolation.
26:50This was the Cretaceous, the time of the Tyrannosaur, the most terrifying
26:55predator that ever lived.
26:57It dined on duckbills and horned dinosaurs.
27:02To find proof that these dinosaurs used the Arctic Passageway, the Chinese and Canadian scientists
27:09flew to Bylet Island, high in northern Canada.
27:16The Chinese were as eager to prospect in Canada as the Canadians were to dig in the Gobi.
27:47What is this?
27:52The site's over the hill over there.
27:54We're about ten minutes away from it.
27:56You can tell me about the hotel.
27:58Oh, well, it's not picked yet.
27:59We're laying the foundation.
28:01The foundation is a good cup of coffee.
28:03Yeah.
28:08But without fur, how could dinosaurs have survived in the frozen north?
28:14The answer is that it wasn't frozen then.
28:18The shapes and sizes of fossil leaves point to rainy and mild weather, like today's Oregon coast.
28:27It was different in those days.
28:29For sure there was no ice and snow.
28:31So the dinosaurs, probably some of them anyway, would have come north with the polar spring.
28:38And maybe the young ones came here because the plant vegetation would have been luxuriant with 24-hour daylight.
28:43And it must have been quite exceptional.
28:53It was an arctic paradise for the plant eaters of the time.
29:01But some things never change.
29:34It was still the best of the park.
29:34It might be possible.
29:54Weeks of searching the bleak hills turn up only a handful of duck-billed dinosaur bones.
30:00But that's enough to show that dinosaurs were here.
30:09This is the first jaw, a hydrosaur jaw that's found, this far north, so it's a very small
30:15hydrosaur.
30:17The teeth are running up in a battery along here, they're just the two sockets.
30:27Future expeditions will take up the quest in the Arctic.
30:30Meanwhile, this crew will look for indirect evidence of dinosaur migration, pursuing the
30:37globetrotting dinosaurs of the Cretaceous farther south in Canada, and finally back in China.
30:47If closely related animals are found on both sides of the Pacific, they must have crossed
30:53up north.
31:05This is Phil Curry's home turf, the Badlands of Alberta.
31:13These beautiful sediments were laid down about 80 million years ago, near the dramatic end
31:19of the age of dinosaurs.
31:20In those days, Alberta was warm and wet, something like Florida today.
31:27Rocks from earlier in the age of dinosaurs lie deep underground.
31:31But the younger surface layers have produced a bonanza of fascinating fossils from the last flowering
31:38of dinosaur life.
31:40The bones suggest that the last dinosaurs were sophisticated animals with complex social
31:46behavior.
31:46A far cry from the dumb brutes of the Mementosaurs day, 80 million years earlier.
31:55At this site, a rich mine of fossils has convinced Curry that some dinosaurs must have been long-distance
32:03travelers.
32:11He and his co-workers have dug here for a decade, extracting thousands of bones.
32:17All belong to a single species of horned dinosaur, Centrosaurus.
32:25Everything still seems to indicate a mass death.
32:28Anywhere from 80 animals is what we have now.
32:32Probably 400 animals in here.
32:35What?
32:35400.
32:36400.
32:38All the same species?
32:40Yeah.
32:40Cleanly broken bones suggest many of these dinosaurs were trampled alive in a panic
32:45stampede.
32:47Curry has a theory about what may have happened, based on modern herding animals like wildebeests.
32:53Well, the explanation we had for this bone bed is that a herd of Centrosaurs tried to cross
32:58a river in flood, and that a lot of these animals drowned.
33:01And it sounds like a rather spectacular explanation until you look into the recent fossil record,
33:07and as well as modern animals, and you start finding that large herding animals run into
33:12trouble frequently.
33:14It's happening all the time.
33:18As individuals, they can swim quite well.
33:21So as long as it was one going across the river at a time, they're okay.
33:24But as soon as a herd started going across, it's a different game altogether.
33:27They started fouling each other up, forcing each other underwater, and of course it also
33:32introduces mass panic.
33:36This may be what the bone bed looked like 80 million years ago, in the aftermath of a prehistoric tragedy.
33:51Curry believes that this ill-fated herd must have been migrating, because they quickly would
33:57have run out of food if the herd had stayed in one place.
34:01If you're talking about one four-ton individual, it's going to have quite an effect on any ecosystem.
34:09But when you start talking herds of four or five hundred animals, all weighing about the
34:15same, then you start feeling that it's unlikely that any ecosystem could sustain that many animals
34:22for very long.
34:24Another site, also in Alberta, provides a window onto a different kind of social behavior,
34:31parenting.
34:32There are hundreds of fossilized dinosaur nests here, where Curry and his co-workers
34:38have found embryos still in their eggs, tiny dinosaurs which never saw the sun.
34:51In terms of the excitement of finding something, it was the biggest high I've probably had in
34:57my professional career.
35:00It was tremendous.
35:01We were just like a bunch of little kids when we started picking up these little tiny embryonic
35:05bones from the surface of the ground and realized what they were.
35:10The nests belong to duck-billed dinosaurs like the ones in the Arctic.
35:18Though the fossil evidence is sketchy, these nests evoke a picture of what it was like to
35:24grow up dinosaur.
35:27Besides embryos, the nests contain bones of hatchlings, suggesting that parents fed their
35:34young and tried to protect them from predators.
35:38It was a dangerous world for babies.
35:42The teeth of a cunning predator named Troodon have been found inside some of the nests.
35:52This drawer contains most of the world's collection of Troodon.
36:03This is its brain case, discovered in Canada by a Chinese member of the dinosaur expedition.
36:10It held a brain three times larger, relative to body size, than any other dinosaur brain.
36:19The brain extends all the way from the back of the skull here, right through to this region,
36:24with the optic lobes centered right about this section right here.
36:30So there would have been a little bit more of the brain case covering over this part of the brain.
36:33But that's a large brain for an animal that's supposed to be quite stupid.
36:39The brain size of Troodon is relatively larger than any of the mammals that lived at the same time as
36:46this dinosaur.
36:47But even compared to many modern mammals and birds, this is a respectable brain size.
37:01This is the lush world of Cretaceous Canada, as seen through the eyes of Troodon.
37:40In Cretaceous Canada, dinosaurs had come a long way.
37:45But did these sophisticated creatures have their roots across the sea in China?
37:57The expedition is headed back to the Gobi Desert to continue its hunt for the last dinosaurs.
38:05They were smart, adaptable animals with complex social behavior.
38:10If they crossed a land bridge between Asia and North America,
38:14dinosaurs much like those of North America should turn up here in China.
38:24This time, the scientists are going to the eastern Gobi,
38:28because the sediments there are the same age as the rocks of Canada.
38:34Their destination is near the Mongolian border,
38:38the same region Roy Chapman Andrews explored.
38:42It's 1,000 miles east of where the Mementosaur swung its thin neck millions of years earlier.
38:53Curry would love to find an actual site where Andrews pitched his tents.
38:59But that won't be easy.
39:06With geologist Tom Jerzykevich, he tries to reconcile the maps Andrews made
39:12with new American satellite photos of the remote Gobi.
39:15That's just along the one side, although I've heard that there are similar...
39:20The Chinese authorities will not provide maps of this militarily sensitive border region.
39:32The town of Ehrenhot is the end of the line and the beginning of the quest.
39:41Somewhere in this vast desert, Andrews' team made its first dinosaur discovery.
39:50They had found one of China's best fossil-bearing areas.
40:01Since then, the Chinese have dug up dozens of skeletons here.
40:06Many of the bones look familiar to the Canadians.
40:10They have seen closely related animals back in Canada, where they lived in swamps.
40:16But this area of China was very different.
40:19Even in the Cretaceous, it was almost as arid as it is today.
40:30Among the finds are the bones of duckbills,
40:33already found in the Arctic and all over Canada.
40:38One misshapen leg bone tells Canadian Kevin Ollenbach
40:42a remarkable story of pain and perseverance.
40:46Well, what we have here is the fibula off a duck-billed dinosaur.
40:50And what's interesting about this one in this bone bed is that
40:54it has a fracture through it right here,
40:57which happened when the animal was alive and fused up again.
41:00And you can actually see the line of shear coming through here.
41:04Okay, so this actually was broken clean, right in half.
41:08And then the animal, through walking on this broken leg,
41:12has caused the bone to shift.
41:14And then one end slowly fused in by building up a calcium bridge across.
41:18And the same with the other end.
41:20So you've got this bone which has this incredible twist to it.
41:23It must have been quite the blow to break the leg like this.
41:27It just makes you wonder, like, these animals aren't as supreme as they may seem.
41:32Even though they're 28 feet long,
41:34they still suffer from all the ailments that you or I could suffer from.
41:38They still get the parasites, the disease, the broken bones from their environment.
41:43And it just makes them seem more human.
41:47Maybe they drink the beer, you know.
41:50Deng Juming comes up with a different kind of treasure.
41:54The drivers.
41:56Well, the drivers, yeah.
41:56The drivers?
41:58Litter from an Andrews Expedition campsite,
42:01beer bottles, and a tin drinking cup etched with a Model T car.
42:13For the new expedition, the quest leads 300 difficult miles onward.
42:21To a desolate canyon land mysteriously named Bayan Mandahu, Rich Wood.
42:34Satellite maps suggest it has great rock formations, which should be rich in dinosaurs.
42:40But there are no guarantees.
43:00Gobi means sand, but most of it is rocky plains, where trails turn to gullies of mud with the sudden
43:09spring rains.
43:17Andrews struggled to make his way through, but impassable terrain finally turned his caravan back.
43:26These explorers press on into unknown territory.
43:30Ours are the waters.
43:31Two.
43:32One.
43:33One.
43:36A black car.
43:37Four.
43:37One.
43:38One.
43:39Two.
43:40One.
43:57At last, Bayan Mandahou.
44:01Curry is awestruck and hopeful.
44:04There's just so much desert here, and the rocks just go on forever.
44:10This is where the Mongolian hordes came from that conquered much of the world
44:15in the time of Genghis Khan.
44:17And fossil-wise, you have tremendous exposures of rock in the desert.
44:24And if you have tremendous exposures of rock, you have a very good chance,
44:27provided the rocks are of the right age and the dinosaurs happen to be living in this area and so
44:31on,
44:32of finding the remains of those animals.
44:43The expedition's gamble pays off.
44:46Poking in the soft sand, the team comes upon a rare prize, a baby dinosaur.
44:52Oh, here, look at this.
44:54There's a phalanx, a head, and a distal end there.
44:57Oh, okay, you know which one that is.
44:58Yeah, the one that you have on the thing.
45:00That's the second.
45:01Yeah.
45:02Look, that's the raptorial one.
45:04Yeah.
45:04Oh, yeah.
45:06This is an important find, because these bones belong to an animal almost identical
45:12to a Canadian predator, which Curry knows very well.
45:16I had a phalanx and then a distal.
45:19That first one, a whole family.
45:20This is a whole family.
45:21Nothing to touch it.
45:22Great.
45:23You want to get another beer?
45:25Yes.
45:26I'll give you two.
45:29Well, that's especially nice to get in that one.
45:32One of the nicest surprises this year already has been the discovery of what was first thought
45:37to be a bird, but it's very clearly an animal that's very closely related to one of our Alberta
45:42forms called Troodon, and this particular animal called Sorenithoides is not particularly
45:49well known.
45:51In the evening, Curry assembles the small limb bones of this Asian version of Troodon, the
45:58intellectual giant of its time.
46:02We know that this particular group of dinosaurs had, in fact, turned the thumb around, so
46:08the thumb was facing the next two main fingers, which is unusual because many of the dinosaurs,
46:14things like Tyrannosaurids, for example, have lost that ability completely, so they only
46:17have two fingers that are used as grappling hooks in all probability.
46:21This dinosaur not only had the high intelligence, but he had the hands that he could manipulate
46:26his prey and move it around because he could hold it like this.
46:31The fossil hunters soon discover what the Asian Troodon may have had for its last dinner.
46:41A little digging uncovers a domestic scene from the past.
46:49The explorers find at least five different types of shell, long and round, thick and thin.
46:56Any chance of fitting a specimen like this in, which has obviously been crushed?
47:00Well, not on these ones, I don't think.
47:02Because these...
47:03What do you think about that?
47:04Well, I don't think that's gonna work.
47:07Here, you wanna try that?
47:08I've tried a few different ways, it doesn't seem to be doing anything.
47:12Ollenbach faces the daunting task of piecing the thick shell fragments together.
47:17Reconstructing a single egg may take him three months.
47:23It's just amazing, even with all the crystal growth, just how thick these eggshells are.
47:27It must have been an awful strong embryo break out of these things.
47:30It must have had an egg tooth like you wouldn't believe.
47:32Yeah.
47:40The Andrews Expedition discovered the first dinosaur eggs, and they caused a sensation.
47:45One egg was auctioned for $5,000.
47:50The auction angered the Chinese, and helped get Andrews banned from returning to China.
48:02Today's hunters find a prize that eluded Andrews, the tiniest dinosaur skull ever found, a fetal
48:10protoceratops.
48:12I think they're both dinosaur eggs.
48:16Hundreds of other fossils are collected.
48:19In a week, Dian Mandahu has gone from unknown wilderness to the richest fossil locality in Asia.
48:25What environment supported this ancient community?
48:29Paleontologist Paul Johnston has found clues in the burrows of ancient insects.
48:34When we look, we see, for instance, tubes like this, and we might think at first, oh, those
48:40are just root traces.
48:42Ancient roots probably came down into this sand, and perhaps they rotted away and leave kind
48:50of a cast of where they once were.
48:53But when we look at the internal structure of some of these tubes, we can see a layering inside.
49:00And the layers don't go straight across.
49:02They're cupped.
49:03So they're stacked, cupped layers like this.
49:08And that kind of internal structure is very typical for animals that burrow.
49:15The evidence suggests that this area, 80 million years ago, was very much like it is today, a community
49:23of small animals hanging onto a precarious existence in the sand.
49:33The desert is not an easy place for modern humans either.
49:37A sandstorm blows up with little warning.
49:46A sandstorm blows up with little warning.
50:03When you have dust storms that last for days, it gets very depressing after a while.
50:08Because there's not much you can do.
50:11You just hover in your tent and try and hold it together because you can't go out in it.
50:17You can't work.
50:19It's almost impossible to find fossils in a situation like this.
50:27Windstorms that begin here will turn the skies of Beijing, a thousand miles away, orange with
50:34goby dust.
50:35And even fiercer storms swept through here long ago, as the scientists are about to discover.
50:53Shreds of bone near a cliffside lead to the skull of a baby armored dinosaur called an ankylosaur,
51:00a type that also lived in ancient Canadian swamps.
51:04Then two more baby skulls are found huddled close together.
51:09It almost looks as if they got caught in something pretty sudden.
51:13I mean, it wasn't a watering hole, obviously, or something that dried up and they just died
51:16together.
51:17It looks like they were buried or something.
51:20Yeah.
51:20A slump or a storm or something like that?
51:24I would guess a storm.
51:25Right here?
51:26What is this called?
51:28Oh, yeah.
51:28Oh, Jason.
51:30I think you got another skull.
51:32That's your next baby curled up.
51:34That's nice.
51:35It's something.
51:36Yeah, skull.
51:37Yeah, right on.
51:38Another skull.
51:40Shit.
51:41Another skull.
51:42Skull.
51:42Yeah.
51:44So that body's curled right up, isn't it?
51:46Right here?
51:46Right here.
51:47See?
51:48Oh, yeah.
51:49This here is just smooth up here.
51:51Yeah.
51:51And then you're coming into this stuff here, down here.
51:55Okay?
51:56Nice skull.
51:57Okay.
51:58Good show.
51:59Right on.
52:00Number four.
52:02Beer.
52:03Beer.
52:04Beer.
52:04Maatai.
52:05Maatai.
52:06Oh, no, no, no.
52:07This is probably all one body then, do you think, Phil?
52:09Curled up?
52:10Oh, yeah.
52:10Today, we realized that one of the reasons we couldn't sort out
52:13what was going on in this quarry was simply because we
52:17weren't dealing with one animal at all.
52:18We were dealing with several.
52:20And in a very short space of time, we found that we had not
52:22one skull, but three skulls.
52:25And since this morning, two more have turned up.
52:29So it appears now what we're looking at is we have a mass
52:32death site of at least five individuals of dinosaurs that
52:39are all about the same age.
52:41And what that indicates is that we're also looking at perhaps
52:46a group of dinosaurs that have been growing up together.
52:58To curry, the skulls tell the tragic story of a group of
53:01youngsters, perhaps a family, that met its end in the treacherous
53:06shifting sands of the desert.
53:09It's possible that these dinosaurs were clustered together seeking
53:13refuge from one of the sandstorms.
53:15It still rips through this region very regularly.
53:18And were either buried by the sand coming over the top of the
53:21dune and therefore smothered, or perhaps a massive slump from the
53:26top of the sand and it just buried them all.
53:36Another season is ending.
53:38There's not much time left.
53:40And the final detailed work of picking stone away from bone
53:44can be done in a lab.
53:46But Kevin Ollenbach can't wait to get started.
53:52Gets its own character as you go along.
53:55This guy, he's got a bit of a hair lip, as you can see.
53:58Quite the overbite.
54:01Missing a few teeth, sort of like Popeye.
54:03Got the old sideways squint to it.
54:07Yeah, they get their own personality after a while.
54:10Every skull's different.
54:11If you look at the one in front, he's got a bit of a protruding jaw.
54:18Looks kind of Cro-Magnon.
54:20This one's a lot better.
54:23This is more feminine.
54:24This one's a she, not a he.
54:27How can you tell it's a girl?
54:29I have little things in my head.
54:33How can I tell it's a girl?
54:35You can't.
54:37It's just a personality you impart upon your specimen.
54:44We will never know whether this baby dinosaur that suffocated in the hot sand millions of years ago was a
54:51boy or a girl.
54:52But these ancient bones have added rich detail to our picture of the versatile animals that dominated the earth for
55:01140 million years.
55:05The bones are evidence that in the final age of dinosaurs, some were world travelers, equally at home in desert
55:13and swamp, in goby heat and Arctic chill.
55:17Yet they were all wiped out.
55:19It's one of the many dinosaur mysteries still unexplained.
55:23But the quest to understand these magnificent creatures goes on all over the world.
55:29to that.
55:30Look at them.
55:44Go ahead and try to go out.
55:47And theRelax Foldies is good.
55:47He has a world after the war to look for them.
55:48tremb knit in press?
55:57If you're doing it,
55:58beğen 바� temps
56:10¶¶
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57:17For a transcript of this program, send $5 to this address or call 212-227-READ.
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