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00:04The American Wild West, known for dramatic stories of cowboys and outlaws, but hidden
00:14beneath this sprawling wilderness lies a lost prehistoric world. Tens of millions of years
00:21ago, the West was truly wild. It was tropical and humid, lush green vegetation, towering trees,
00:29and the distance, a vast sea. This was the stomping ground of the most gigantic creatures ever
00:37to walk the earth, the dinosaurs. As the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, their bones
00:48were buried, and their very existence remained hidden. But 200 years ago, all that started
00:55to change as explorers flocked to this area, looking for fossils. And in doing so, they
01:01ensured that the Wild West would be at the heart of a ruthless dinosaur gold rush.
01:10Now I'm on the hunt for the astonishing story of those cutthroat discoveries.
01:15The fossil collectors would spy on each other. They hated each other vehemently.
01:20Wow. I'll be uncovering incredible details about the world's most iconic creatures.
01:26I'm going to put that in your hands very carefully.
01:28That's so cool.
01:29And revealing the very first discoveries of some of the most amazing dinosaurs of all time.
01:36Triceratops, T-Rex, and the most famous of them all, Dippy the Diplodocus.
01:44This is the incredible story of the greatest dinosaur discoveries, and how the Jurassic World
01:49really came to life.
02:00The Natural History Museum, London.
02:04Home to one of the greatest dinosaur collections in the world, and a very special exhibit.
02:10The creature that started a worldwide dinosaur craze.
02:15And here it is, the most famous dinosaur of them all, Dippy.
02:22Our own prehistoric national treasure.
02:28Dippy has been wowing visitors to this museum for over 100 years, since 1905, and for millions
02:33of them, it's the first dinosaur they would ever have seen. Can you imagine how exciting
02:37that must have been? Actually, I can imagine that, because I think it was the first dinosaur
02:41I saw when I was brought here as a young child. And even many years later, I still get such
02:49a thrill being up close to this gigantic dinosaur.
02:55Dippy is a Diplodocus, a huge plant-eating animal, and one of the largest to ever walk the earth.
03:03It would have weighed a whopping 12 tons, as much as three elephants, and lived between 70 and 80 years.
03:15When it died, this prehistoric giant's bones were buried beneath the ground for 150 million
03:20years, until 1899, when they were uncovered in Wyoming, America.
03:28What makes Dippy so special is that it was remarkably complete. And the bones were so well preserved,
03:38that they could piece together this skeleton and be confident about its accuracy.
03:44But the incredible discovery of Dippy was actually the end of a very long and cutthroat journey.
03:51And it all started over 40 years earlier with a chance event on the east coast of America.
04:00In 1858, a Philadelphia lawyer, William Fook, was visiting the home of a neighbour near
04:06some woods in Haddonfield, New Jersey.
04:11To his complete surprise, he spotted bizarre objects around the house as decorations and doorstops.
04:18They were like nothing he'd really ever seen before, but they looked like big chunks of bone.
04:23He demanded to be taken to the place where they'd been found.
04:31The location was a forest only a few miles away. The soil there was marl, a fine clay,
04:38very good at preserving old bones. He wondered if there could be more bones there.
04:46He put together a team of people, and they started stripping off the soil layer by layer.
04:50First, they found nothing.
04:56They kept going, and slowly, objects start to appear out of the ground. Small bones, big bones.
05:08Fook knew that he could potentially have something remarkable at his hands here.
05:21Today, the mysterious fossils he dug up are held in Philadelphia at the Drexel University
05:26Academy of Natural Sciences, the oldest natural history museum in the United States.
05:33Dr. Ted Deschler is a curator here.
05:37Come on in.
05:38Oh, the collection.
05:40You know it.
05:42So, this is the cabinet where those original bones that folk collected in Haddonfield, New Jersey are.
05:50Whoa, that's huge.
05:52I know.
05:53This is the upper arm bone.
05:54This is the humerus, the original piece.
05:57So, I'm going to put that in your hands very carefully.
05:59Whoa, okay.
06:00That's so cool.
06:01So, this is the end up in the shoulder.
06:02This is the end down at the elbow.
06:05Wow.
06:08That's about as long as your entire arm.
06:10Yeah, so it's about twice the size of me.
06:13These are the lower limb bones, a tibia and a femur.
06:19These are...
06:20How many bones are there in all?
06:21I think there's about 35 bones, which is not a complete skeleton.
06:26No, there's a lot missing.
06:27There's a lot missing.
06:30Paleontology wasn't established yet, so folk needed help identifying the bones.
06:36Luckily, there was an expert nearby, an anatomist, called Joseph Leidy.
06:42He investigated every bone found.
06:45When he got to the teeth, he realised something incredible.
06:49They were very similar to those of an iguanodon,
06:52a dinosaur found three decades earlier in Britain.
06:58So, those teeth, that's critical evidence that this is...
07:02Well, this is a dinosaur.
07:03Yes, it compared exactly to what was previously known of dinosaurs,
07:08but it was different as well.
07:10So, it's not an iguanodon.
07:11It's not an iguanodon.
07:14This was the very first dinosaur found in America.
07:18Leidy named it Hadrosaurus, meaning bulky lizard,
07:22phokii, after William Folk.
07:26He's worked out as a dinosaur, far more complete than anything in old England.
07:30This must have been... This is groundbreaking.
07:32Absolutely. It was a revolution. It was the beginning of understanding dinosaurs.
07:41The next challenge was figuring out what the animal looked like.
07:45Here are some great images of that original attempt to rebuild the dinosaur.
07:50You've got to remember that Leidy didn't know what he was aiming for.
07:54He didn't know what this dinosaur would actually look like.
07:56But he did understand the anatomy of animals in the world around him.
08:01He looked at these bones and he thought there was something similar to the kangaroo going on.
08:05So, you can see that he's placed the skeleton in an upright stance, strong hind legs, arms sticking out, a
08:13bit like a kangaroo.
08:14The head, which he had very little evidence for at all, well, he just got this made up based on
08:19the iguana's head.
08:20It was the first time anyone had tried to reconstruct a dinosaur using its actual bones.
08:33In 1868, the incredible find went on display in Philadelphia and it captivated audiences.
08:42Though it wasn't entirely accurate. This is what we now know the Hadrosaurus looked like, walking on four legs, not
08:51two.
08:53As a large plant-eating animal, it would have spent the entire day eating greens to feed its massive three
09:00-ton bulk.
09:01But the discovery was remarkable and it kicked off an exciting gold rush to uncover the secrets of the lost
09:10world of the dinosaurs.
09:14Fossil hunters now descended on the mull pits of New Jersey, desperate to get their hands on some dinosaurs.
09:20Sadly, most went away empty-handed. But, as luck would have it, tantalizing clues were being discovered elsewhere in America.
09:37In the 1860s, the US government began building a train line thousands of miles across the western territories.
09:45As the workers dug, they found something astonishing. Bones all along the tracks.
09:59I'm heading into the Wild West, following in the footsteps of those early dinosaur hunters.
10:26Bones all along the tracks.
10:36Wow, there's a real majesty, a real beauty to this wide, flat landscape.
10:42Big sky country.
10:44It's pretty dry, pretty arid, doesn't look great for agriculture.
10:48In fact, the Native Americans that lived in this area used to call it Mako Sika, the Badlands.
10:57In 1868, a Yale University professor called Othniel Charles Marsh took the train on a trip west.
11:07While his fellow passengers were on the train heading west, seeking a new life and opportunities, he was there for
11:13a rather different reason.
11:15He was a trained geologist and anatomist, and he was looking for fossils.
11:23The bones that had been discovered by the railway workers weren't American animals.
11:27They belonged to ancient elephants and tigers.
11:31These incredible discoveries made Marsh think that these barren lands might hold the remains of even older creatures, like dinosaurs.
11:48To get a feel for what he was up against, I'm joining a modern-day dinosaur excavation in Utah.
11:58Paleontologist John Foster has directed digs in the old Wild West for many years.
12:05John, this is not a bad commute every day.
12:08No, it's a good view. It's a little steep, but that makes it interesting.
12:18The rock is very flaky, isn't it?
12:24What are we digging out behind us now?
12:25We have a sauropod pelvis, and we don't yet know what kind of sauropod it is.
12:33It's a sauropod, a giant plant-eaten dinosaur, like Dippy, like the Diplodocus.
12:38Exactly, yes. In fact, this could be a Diplodocus. We don't know yet.
12:43We need to get a better look at some of the vertebrae from the back to tell for sure.
12:50The first dinosaur hunter to come out west was Othniel Charles Marsh, way back in 1868.
13:00John, tell me, Marsh, the trained geologist, what's he seeing in this landscape? Is it giving him hope?
13:04What we're looking at here is a sandstone, a pretty fine sandstone, and there is some siltstone or mudstone mixed
13:11in that represents a river channel that was flowing at the time.
13:16He would have recognized these types of rocks as being the kind that you wanted to look at to find
13:23animals.
13:25But Marsh was not the only one to be tantalized by the Wild West.
13:31A young explorer, Edward Drinker Cope, had also been captivated, and he was just as driven.
13:40Cope and Marsh first met in 1864. Initially, they were friendly.
13:45And then something happened that ruined their friendship.
13:50Cope received a set of intriguing vertebrae found in Kansas and tried to put the mysterious animal together as accurately
13:58as possible.
14:00This is what Cope came up with. It was a strange looking creature, impossibly long tail, very short neck.
14:07But he thought, you know what, they're strange looking creatures anyway.
14:10Marsh then came out publicly against him and ridiculed his build.
14:15He pointed out the head was on the wrong end of the body.
14:20This was really embarrassing.
14:24Today, we know the animal as a plesiosaur Elasmosaurus.
14:30It lived around 80 million years ago and weighed just over two tons.
14:35Plesiosaurs were not dinosaurs, despite living at the same time as them, but marine reptiles.
14:42Their legs spread out at the side like a modern lizard or crocodile.
14:48Unlike dinosaurs, whose legs were positioned under their bodies.
14:55The Elasmosaurus incident sparked a rivalry between Marsh and Cope.
15:00Both men now set about trying to discover as many dinosaur remains as they could.
15:06But they had a huge challenge ahead of them.
15:14The lands they wanted to investigate were centred in Wyoming and Colorado,
15:19with other promising hotspots in nearby states.
15:23Nowadays, this area is called the Morrison Formation and covers a whopping 600,000 square miles.
15:36In 1870, two years after his first train journey, Marsh organized a trip into the vast wilderness of the Morrison
15:44Formation.
15:45His biggest concern was safety.
15:50American westward expansion meant encroaching on Native American land.
15:54It's a very troubled history.
15:57As the American settlers moved west, they clashed with Native Americans who'd inhabited that territory for centuries, like the Lakota.
16:07Marsh was not alone.
16:10He was accompanied by a group of wealthy Yale students to help him hunt for dinosaurs, all ready for the
16:17rough ride.
16:19And to be safe on their dangerous journey ahead, they hired military escorts from the many forts built across the
16:26wild west.
16:28The plan was to scout either side of the Union Pacific Railroad and do some shallow digging,
16:33check if there's any potential for dinosaur fossils.
16:36They were going to comb over a gigantic chunk of territory, and they were going in blind.
16:47But nowadays, it's hard to imagine what that journey into the unknown wilderness,
16:52hunting for prehistoric creatures, would have been like 150 years ago.
16:57But I want to get a taste of it.
17:13I've got my hat, backpack full of water, and I'm off.
17:24Off into the dry lands that promised dinosaur bones.
17:41It's a gorgeous landscape.
17:43I love these undulating plains that stretch off as far as the eye can see.
17:48There's no big trees.
17:50No shade anywhere.
17:52Anywhere.
18:05The sun is unforgiving.
18:10One day, after 14 hours of trekking, one of Marsh's soldiers exclaimed,
18:16what did God Almighty make such a country as this for?
18:22Marsh and his team started scouting and digging in June 1870,
18:27and worked all through summer and into fall.
18:30They moved across Western America, ending up in Kansas.
18:42Copes, heading in the wrong place, Elasmosaurus had come from Kansas,
18:46and Marsh was hoping he could find one in Kansas too,
18:50preferably one a lot bigger than Copes.
18:54On the last day of the expedition, for some reason, Marsh just didn't want to go back to the camp.
18:59And I have his account here.
19:00He went ahead with just one soldier for protection, and that soldier started to get very jumpy.
19:06He writes here that it was after sunset, but he was still working his way along the riverbank.
19:12Suddenly, something stopped him in his tracks.
19:16He spotted a mysterious object sticking out of the ground.
19:21It could have been a rock, but to Marsh's trained eye, it looked like a bow.
19:28At long last, Marsh had discovered something.
19:33I brought with me an exact replica of what he found that day.
19:38I must say, I'm not sure I would have spotted it on the riverbank, but he certainly did have a
19:42trained eye.
19:43It looks very bird-like, but you can see this piece at the end suggests it was a different animal
19:48entirely.
19:53He needed to find out what animal it belonged to, and that was no easy task.
20:04To his great surprise and satisfaction, it became clear that he had discovered part of a pterodactyl,
20:13the flying reptile that lived 100 million years ago during the age of the dinosaurs.
20:19Amazingly, this was the first pterodactyl bone to be discovered in America.
20:23Others had been found in Europe, but they were nowhere near as big.
20:28Pterodactyls were carnivores, great hunters who fed mainly on small animals.
20:33They had huge leathery wings, long and large necks and heads, and are still the largest known flying animals.
20:42The bone Marsh discovered in Kansas was from the pterodactyl's wing.
20:49The Wild West was at last beginning to give up its prehistoric remains.
20:56The hunt was now on for more discoveries, and for bigger and better preserved dinosaurs.
21:04In 1877, the search was reaching boiling point.
21:15One afternoon that spring, a school teacher from Colorado, called Arthur Lakes,
21:21was exploring the Rocky Mountains with his friend.
21:24They were walking along a creek when he spotted what looked like a strange old tree trunk.
21:31He took a closer look and it appeared to be, to his untrained eye, a bone.
21:38Lakes needed an expert opinion, so he wrote to Marsh, who rushed a team to the site.
21:45Over the next few months, his men uncovered a gold mine of monster bones.
21:53The whole prehistoric world was starting to emerge.
22:00I'm heading to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to find out the outcome of the dig.
22:06When Marsh got the finds back to his lab, he spent months studying them.
22:12And as his work progressed, he realised he had something very, very special in his hands,
22:17something unlike anything ever found anywhere in the world.
22:22He had indeed found new species of dinosaurs.
22:29Now you can imagine the excitement of a man who'd spent years and years preparing for this moment.
22:40Palaeontologist Matt LaMana can show me some of the dinosaurs that were miraculously discovered by Marsh's team in Colorado.
22:47This is Stegosaurus. This animal lived about 150 million years ago.
22:54One of the things that intrigues me is that this is one of the only major groups of dinosaurs
22:59who have gone extinct before the giant asteroid fell out of the sky.
23:03Maybe because they were carrying around so much armor.
23:06What are these, what are the spikes?
23:08Yeah, yes.
23:09When the animal was first discovered back in the late 19th century,
23:13Marsh actually interpreted the plates as lying flat.
23:16And so the name Stegosaurus actually means covered lizard because he thought it was covered in these plates.
23:20Their function remains controversial to this day.
23:23I think the consensus opinion is that they probably were for display to other Stegosaurus,
23:29maybe also warding off predators by making the animal look bigger.
23:33But there also probably was a thermoregulatory function.
23:36In other words, a function that plates may have played a role in keeping the animal warm or cool.
23:41Wow.
23:42So if you still aren't even sure today, can you imagine Marsh and his colleagues,
23:46they would have just been taking wild guesses.
23:49Yeah, I think absolutely.
23:51Marsh's team also discovered clues of the most famous killer dinosaur.
23:56Well, I know what this one is.
23:58The T-Rex.
24:03Yep. Tyrannosaurus rex.
24:08This thing lived between about 68 to 66 million years ago in the western part of this continent, North America.
24:15It would have absolutely been the apex predator in its environment.
24:19The only thing I think that an adult T-Rex would have to fear would be another adult T-Rex.
24:24And look at those teeth and those jaws.
24:26Rather than taking bites out of prey, this animal seems to have been adapted for grabbing prey and crushing it.
24:34So Marsh's team found the first T-Rex.
24:37In a sense, yeah.
24:39Marsh's collector, Arthur Lakes, found teeth in Colorado that we now know belong to this dinosaur.
24:44But it took the discovery of this skeleton, beginning in 1902 in Montana by Barnum Brown,
24:50to really start to reveal what this animal was really like.
24:53So this is the original Tyrannosaurus rex?
24:55Yeah, yeah.
24:56This is when the name T-Rex was coined.
24:58It became the gold standard for the most formidable predatory dinosaur that's ever lived.
25:05Marsh had spent almost a decade scouring the western territories for dinosaur bones.
25:10Now, at long last, it was a bonanza.
25:14But figuring out exactly what he had proved to be a bigger challenge than he had anticipated.
25:21So when I was a kid, I loved the Triceratops.
25:25Yeah, I loved them too, actually.
25:27So this dinosaur is probably the biggest of the horned dinosaurs.
25:31And it lived from about 68 to 66 million years ago in western North America.
25:37So alongside T-Rex?
25:38Alongside T-Rex, yes.
25:40Wow.
25:40The name Triceratops means three-horned face, so I think you can see why.
25:44You know, two horns over the eyes, one horn on the nose.
25:47And then, of course, this giant neck frill, this giant solid sheet of bone extending off the back of the
25:52skull.
25:53And was it Marsh's team who identified Triceratops?
25:56Yeah, so Marsh actually was, I believe, sent a pair of horn cores, so the horns over the eyes.
26:03He actually thought it was a weird type of bison.
26:06And only a few years later, when more complete skulls of this animal started turning up,
26:10it became clear this was a type of giant horned dinosaur.
26:14The amazing finds by Marsh's team in Colorado sealed his name as one of the greatest,
26:19if not the greatest, of American paleontologists.
26:23But Cope was still on the hunt.
26:28Cope was growing frustrated.
26:30And that same year, 1877, he decided to follow Marsh to Colorado.
26:36He pitched his tent nearby. Can you imagine how annoying that must have been?
26:40And then he started digging.
26:44Marsh was digging in Morrison, Colorado.
26:47Cope set up camp only 100 miles to the south in Canyon City.
26:52Soon, he too started to find bones.
26:55He hit the jackpot, and it was a big jackpot, literally.
27:00Canyon City turned out to be full of dinosaur bones.
27:06Cope found a Camarasaurus, like this one here, and it was the biggest dinosaur ever found at that point in
27:13history.
27:14The Camarasaurus was a huge plant-eating animal that lived 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Age.
27:23The largest of the species would have weighed close to 52 tons.
27:26Just one tooth would have been seven and a half inches long.
27:36Despite these amazing finds, throughout the summer of 1877, the digging reached fever pitch.
27:44But just around the corner, an unexpected opportunity was about to take the dinosaur hunt to a whole new level.
27:53In August of 1877, Marsh received a mysterious letter from two gentlemen in Wyoming.
28:00It's cagey. It's tantalizing. They wanted to interest him in a little business deal.
28:07They told him that they'd found a large number of fossils, in particular a big one, possibly bigger than anything
28:12found in Colorado.
28:14They say here, as you're well known as an enthusiastic geologist and a man of means, both of which we're
28:20desirous of finding.
28:21More especially, the latter. They're saying, let's see how rich you are.
28:26Now this was very interesting for Marsh. It seemed like there might be a new rich seam of fossils out
28:33in Wyoming.
28:34The big thing was to get there first.
28:40Was it possible there was a whole new dinosaur gold mine there for the taking?
28:46The letter had come from a place called Como Bluff in southeastern Wyoming.
28:50That's where I'm heading now.
28:54Como Bluff is around 200 miles north of the very rich fossil fields of Colorado,
28:59but the letter promised much bigger and better fossils.
29:04Marsh was determined to check if it was true.
29:09I'm going to get an expert introduction to this amazing site with paleontologist Melissa Collinley.
29:18Hey, how's it going?
29:19Hey, welcome.
29:21Nice to meet you.
29:21Nice to meet you.
29:22Welcome to Jurassic Park, huh?
29:24What a great landscape.
29:26Yeah, isn't it beautiful here?
29:30Melissa has been digging in Como Bluff for almost 30 years
29:34and knows all the hidden spots where the rocks tell stories from millions of years ago.
29:40What's going on down here?
29:41Well, this is the star of the show.
29:44These are dinosaur footprints.
29:47You've got to be kidding me.
29:48No.
29:48These are enormous holes in the ground.
29:50Yeah.
29:50Yeah, these are sauropod tracks.
29:52So this is a big footprint right here.
29:54This whole hole right here is just one footprint.
29:56And it is the hind foot of a sauropod where he just stepped down into the mud.
30:02And he was so heavy, he pushed right through that muddy layer into the soft sediments below.
30:08And the impact pushed up this ridge here, this rim, which we call the impact rim.
30:15And then what, a flood came and put down a layer of sediment and then they were preserved forever?
30:19Exactly.
30:19And then the water rose and the muds came in and filled in all these little holes and preserved it
30:24forever.
30:24Is that one there and is that something there as well?
30:27Exactly.
30:28So we have the sauropod walking along and we have other sauropods walking along different sizes.
30:34And then we have theropods walking as well.
30:36So there's lots of little theropods running along and along there looking for something to eat, I'm sure.
30:41This is evidence of dinosaurs not dead, but alive.
30:45Exactly, they're living.
30:46This is behaviour, fossilised dinosaur behaviour.
30:49The footprints here reveal a lost world, locked in a moment.
30:56It was filled with meat-eating dinosaurs known as terrapods, the great hunters of the prehistoric age.
31:07And the huge plant-eating animals, the nasaropods.
31:17Now listen, I don't want to get too dramatic here, but this could have been dippy.
31:21It could have been dippy, yes.
31:22Oh my goodness.
31:22This could have been dippy, yeah.
31:26These many tracks in the soil show just how incredible Como Bluff
31:30is at preserving traces of the prehistoric past.
31:34But in 1877, no-one had a clue.
31:39Until one man arrived at the scene and found something even more intriguing.
31:50William Reid was a railroad man.
31:53He was based at the local station of Como, now since gone.
31:59One day in March of that year, he was hiking back to the station when he noticed some huge bones
32:06sticking out of the landscape. He took a closer look, and they were big bones with a shoulder blade
32:12that was about a metre and a half in length, and there was a piece of vertebra which seemed to
32:17be about
32:18a three-quarters of a metre in circumference. Now he had no idea what to do with this, but he
32:22had heard news
32:23that a fancy east coast professor was paying money for fines like this. So he decided to write him a
32:31letter.
32:33The letter arrived on Marsh's desk in August 1877.
32:40He immediately mobilised his team, sending them straight to Wyoming to see if Reid was onto something.
32:48They put an embargo on the location and started digging.
32:54Nowadays, it's hard to visualise what they would have found when they got here,
32:58because so much has been removed. But Melissa can give me a taste of it.
33:03She wants to take me to the oldest active quarry in Como Bluff.
33:08Hi, everyone. Hello there. Hello. How are you doing?
33:11Glenn, you're working on a pile of bones there. I am.
33:15Tell me, what is going on here? This is what I call kind of a jackpot find.
33:20You have a femur from what looks like a very large sauropod,
33:25a femur from another large sauropod, and the real surprise bone, which is a stegosaurus tail spike.
33:35These are at least a couple of different animals just all piled on top of each other.
33:39Yes, and that's not uncommon here either. We've discovered as many as 20 different species
33:44at this quarry over 32 years that it's been operating.
33:48As we're sitting here, dinosaurs are emerging from this site.
33:53Yeah, absolutely. And these are all Jurassic age.
33:58Como Bluff seems to be a dinosaur goldmine.
34:04By the end of the summer of 1878, Marsh's team had discovered nearly 30 tonnes of fossils.
34:13The bones belong to all kinds of new species, and they were in fantastic condition.
34:19One of those new species was the brontosaurus, which I've got a picture of here. It was almost
34:24complete, though it was missing a head. And more species were to follow. The American
34:28Wild West was really delivering. These finds were revolutionising science.
34:33So far, Marsh's team had been digging in these rich fossil fields alone.
34:45But in the spring of 1879, Edward Drinker Cope arrived here and started digging too.
34:53Soon enough, his dinosaur discoveries proved to be equally groundbreaking.
35:02The hunt for fossils carried on throughout the 1880s, with Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope funding large-scale expeditions.
35:12By 1890, the Bone Wars had been going on for 20 years. Just imagine that, spending 20 years
35:18obsessing about what the other person is up to. It had a terrible effect on their lives. Marsh had become
35:25a loner. Cope, for his part, had spent so long out west, his wife left taking their daughter with her.
35:34It was a sorry state of affairs.
35:38In 1896, Cope got ill and died the following year. Marsh died two years later in 1899.
35:49Their dinosaur gold rush had finally come to an end.
35:56Between them, they had discovered over 130 new species of dinosaur. Incredible.
36:03They'd shone a light on a previously unknown age in our planet's history. At the time,
36:08they were towering figures of science. The two most famous paleontologists in the world.
36:18Their many finds defined the field of paleontology and revealed a secret prehistoric world that was
36:27filled with gigantic animals. But there was one thing they hadn't quite managed to achieve.
36:34find a complete dinosaur and put it together for the wider public.
36:42Luckily, out in the west, one dedicated searcher kept on digging.
36:50By the 1890s, William Reed, the former railroad man, was employed by the University of Wyoming as a fossil
36:57hunter. One day in 1896, he was walking through his old stomping grounds here at Como Bluff,
37:05and he saw something he couldn't quite believe. Amongst the sandstone, he saw a truly gigantic thighback.
37:15Like in the days of the bone wars, Reed wanted to sell the fine to make a profit.
37:20But Marsh and Cope weren't around anymore. So he needed to get the attention of another buyer.
37:26He thought a bit of publicity might help. Matt LaManna can tell me more.
37:33This is an article that appeared in the New York Journal and Advertiser in December 1898,
37:39describing a discovery that had just been made by Bill Reed in Wyoming. And it's very over the top.
37:46It's got the best headline I've ever read in my life. Most colossal animal ever on earth,
37:51just found out west. But my favorite is actually not the headline itself, but the subtitles, such as
37:56when it ate, it filled the stomach large enough to hold three elephants. And is this the man,
38:01this is the man who discovered it? Yeah, that's that's him. That's William Harlow Reed, Bill Reed,
38:06shown with what is claimed to be the eight foot thigh bone of the monster discovered in Wyoming.
38:12This article was not the only one that appeared about this discovery. In fact, an earlier article,
38:19maybe not quite as dramatic as this one, was noticed by somebody really powerful. This scrawl here,
38:27can you read that? And it says, my lord, can't you buy this for Pittsburgh? Try. And at the end,
38:33it's signed AC, Andrew Carnegie. So Carnegie's famous for being one of the richest men in the world.
38:39He's a big steel magnate in Pittsburgh. Why is he so interested in dinosaurs?
38:43He had a brand new museum. He wanted something that was going to get people to come. He wanted
38:48a gift for the people of Pittsburgh, basically something to put their museum on the map.
38:53So yeah, it's amazing to think there's Bill Reed working out there, getting all dusty on the front
38:57line. And he's got this weird pipeline now into one of the world's richest men sitting in his
39:01Fifth Avenue apartment. It seems like something that you would see in a movie. But as Carnegie would find out,
39:07it wasn't just as simple as going to Wyoming and bringing the giant dinosaur home.
39:15It turned out that this piece of bone was the only thing Bill Reed had found,
39:19not an entire dinosaur. Andrew Carnegie would need to fund his own hunt out in the Wild West.
39:30Although Bill Reed had found a huge bone, he didn't actually
39:34have the rest of the dinosaur to go with it. That didn't stop him, though, from promising it
39:39to Carnegie and his team. All he needed, he said, was a load of cash to dig it up.
39:49In 1899, Carnegie bit the bullet and sent a team out west to look for dinosaurs at the site.
39:57But instead of finding a huge prehistoric giant, they found nothing.
40:04Bill Reed had to come up with a backup plan quickly.
40:09And somehow, he had a hunch that another spot, a very remote place few people knew about,
40:15might be a gold mine. Paleontologist Brent Breithart can take me there.
40:23But even today, it's not easy to find.
40:28So we're navigating based on a photograph taken in 1899.
40:32This is a photo of the quarry workers. But what we're interested in is the skyline here.
40:41We're looking for these outcrops, going off in the distance.
40:44Yeah, haven't got too much to go on, I'd say.
40:47No, not too much.
40:55Last time I was here was about 15 years ago.
40:59I remember most of the way to go, but there's a couple turns up ahead that
41:03may be challenging, but I'm sure we can do it.
41:07I have great faith in you.
41:10As well you should.
41:19After two long hours of driving through open landscape, Brent finds the spot.
41:31This is Sheep's Creek.
41:35So that was not an easy journey to get here.
41:37Very few people have ever come out here.
41:39And so the roads that we were following were barely roads.
41:46Carnegie's team started digging at this remote spot.
41:50As summer approached, the air became hot and filled with flies.
41:56The strong wind carried dust and tumbleweed.
41:59Worst of all, the temperature soared.
42:03Carnegie's team kept going.
42:05They didn't give up despite the harsh climate, the heat, the wind, the thunderstorms.
42:09They kept digging.
42:11By the 4th of July, Independence Day, they were really under pressure to make a find.
42:17Incredibly, the intense digging activity here has left many clues behind.
42:22Even today, a trained eye can still spot them.
42:28There's little bits and pieces of where the early collectors were working.
42:34Here we have an old can.
42:37There's really been no activity out here since the late 1800s, early 1900s.
42:42So anything we find relates to the fossil collecting.
42:45Can't believe it.
42:46From the original dig team, you think?
42:47The original dig team.
42:48Yeah, from the Carnegie crew.
42:50If you keep looking around, lots of rocks.
42:53But this one here, a little fragment of bone.
42:55Get out of here.
42:56Take a look at that.
42:57You can see the little pore spaces of the bone.
42:59This appears to be a rib bone, and I'll bet that it's a rib bone of a diplodocus.
43:04What?
43:06It's very cool.
43:08On the 4th of July, 1899, the moment Carnegie's crew had been waiting for finally arrived.
43:17It was on that day that one of the workers struck something with his spade.
43:22He called over his friends and dug down deeper.
43:26Under his feet, he'd unearthed a massive toe bone.
43:31Over the coming days and months, the team uncovered an incredible find.
43:36Bit by bit, an almost complete diplodocus was taken out of the ground here.
43:42Over two thirds of the bones were found intact in great condition, not broken up into small pieces.
43:50Excitingly, a second diplodocus was also found here, probably related to the first.
43:58They'd lived together, travelled together and died together.
44:12And that meant that whatever was lacking from the first skeleton could be filled in from the second.
44:17So the fusion of the two created one of the world's most complete dinosaurs,
44:22and the world's most famous dinosaur, Dippy.
44:27The massive bones the crew recovered were sent 1,500 miles away to Pittsburgh,
44:33to Carnegie's brand new Museum of Natural History.
44:38I'm heading there to see the original Dippy.
44:57These are the actual bones taken out of the ground in Wyoming.
45:02The most complete diplodocus ever found.
45:05The pinnacle of 30 years of dinosaur hunting in the Wild West.
45:10Because of the date on which it discovered, the 4th of July, it was known as the Star Spangled Dinosaur.
45:18Dippy's discovery caused a stir, not just in the United States, but worldwide.
45:25There are still crowds of people who have come to see Dippy. Why is this such a famous dinosaur?
45:29So in 1902, Andrew Carnegie was hosting the King of England in Carnegie's Castle in Scotland.
45:36And the King saw a picture of Diplodocus Carnegie on Carnegie's wall and said,
45:41can we have one of these things for England? And in May of 1905, a copy of Diplodocus Carnegie went
45:47on display in London's British Museum of Natural History,
45:50now the Natural History Museum in London. The fame of Diplodocus spread from there.
45:55So other heads of state started asking Andrew Carnegie for copies of Diplodocus for their own museum.
46:01By the mid-1930s, there were copies in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg,
46:11La Plata in Argentina, Mexico City, and a copy was sent to Munich.
46:14I remember being in a foreign European city, seeing it and going, what the heck is this British dinosaur doing
46:20here?
46:20The truth has been a bit difficult to digest.
46:23This dinosaur is probably the most seen dinosaur in the history of the planet.
46:29What started as two men fighting over fossils in the Wild West
46:34became an international craze to unlock the secrets of the prehistoric world and its gigantic animals.
46:42And it continues to this day.
46:49It's incredible to think that without the bone walls and the intrepid adventurers coming out here to the West,
46:54we may not know about Stegosaurus, T-Rex, or even Dippy.
47:00These breathtaking discoveries were revolutionary.
47:03They inspired new generations of explorers into the Badlands,
47:06who in turn would discover new species of dinosaurs that would transform the way we understand life on Earth.
47:14And what I find so inspiring is the story is not yet over.
47:18So who knows what mysterious creatures lie waiting to be discovered in this vast wilderness.
47:25We'll see you next time.
47:35Travel the globe and discover the ultimate culinary pleasure
47:38with the best-selling author, travel guide and bad boy of Bistro, Anthony Bourdain.
47:44Anthony Bourdain, no reservations.
47:46Stream free on SBS On Demand.
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