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Documentary, PaleoWorld S01E13 Mistaken Identity
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00:01The study of dinosaurs is a tale of discoveries and blunders.
00:06For every breakthrough in understanding, there's usually a colossal error.
00:12The head that should have been a tail, the horn that was really a claw,
00:17the meat-eater's head stuck on the vegetarian's body.
00:21Today's scientists are like patient detectives on the trail of the tiniest clue
00:26seeking the truth from fragments of bone.
00:29Advancing new theories and backtracking to correct old mistakes.
01:08Crystal Palace Park, a Jurassic Park of the Victorian age, opened in London in 1854.
01:15Here, for the first time, scientific ideas about dinosaurs were translated into full-size models, moulded from cast iron and
01:26cement.
01:28The audacious plan was masterminded by scientist Sir Richard Owen.
01:33The sculptures created the illusion that Owen and his contemporaries knew more about dinosaurs than they really did.
01:39At any rate, they knew more than the public did.
01:42The park was a triumphant success.
01:44It sparked a love affair between dinosaurs and the public, which has continued ever since.
01:55In this century, Hollywood has thrived on wild views of dinosaurs and romanticized the dinosaur hunter as a bold adventurer.
02:04The same image was deliberately cultivated by legendary fossil hunter,
02:09Roy Chapman Andrews, of the American Museum of Natural History.
02:16A self-confessed restless spirit, Andrews was notoriously impatient, often breaking valuable finds in his zeal to unearth them.
02:25At the American Museum, to destroy a specimen was to RCA it.
02:31RCA meaning Roy Chapman Andrews.
02:36Andrews would be party to a classic case of mistaken identity, one that would go uncorrected for 70 years.
02:44In April 1922, Andrews led an expedition deep into Central Asia's Gobi Desert.
02:50One hundred twenty-five camels, two trucks, three Dodge automobiles fitted out with extra sturdy springs,
02:59servants, table linens, a pearl-handled Colt 45, and a Hollywood cameraman to publicize his exploits.
03:08Between brushes with heat, sandstorms, and bandits, Andrews stumbled across a sensational find.
03:16Dinosaur eggs in shallow nests dug into the desert soil.
03:22What dinosaur had laid the eggs?
03:25Everywhere, Andrews found bones of plant-eating Protoceratops,
03:29a primitive hornless relative of Triceratops.
03:32Andrews assumed that these were the parents.
03:38For the next seven decades, popular illustrations depicted Protoceratops as a devoted parent guarding its nest.
03:48The expedition had also found fossils of a rare, strange predator.
03:52Resembling an ostrich without wings, the raptor was found on top of the nest.
03:58Andrews assumed it had died while feasting on the eggs.
04:01He named the beast Oviraptor, or Egg Thief.
04:10Then, in 1993, another team from the American Museum of Natural History returned to the Gobi.
04:18They found more nests full of eggs.
04:20Their most surprising discovery was an embryo still clinging to a fragment of egg shell.
04:27Roy Chapman Andrews had been mistaken.
04:31The eggs were laid not by the Protoceratops, but by the Oviraptor.
04:37Oviraptor was no egg thief, but a protective parent, which had died guarding its nest.
04:47Flamboyant Andrews was easily tempted to make bold assumptions based on fragments of evidence.
04:53Yet every scientist faces similar pitfalls, according to paleontologist Robert Baca.
04:59Well, my mother, who's a creationist, sometimes rattles my cage by saying,
05:04Well, Bob, you scientists, you always make things up.
05:07You get a single bone, you build a whole animal.
05:08You got the wrong head, the wrong tail, tail on the wrong end, head on the wrong end.
05:11And that does happen on occasion.
05:14But almost always it's another scientist who, another anatomist, who catches the mistake and corrects it.
05:22And paleontology has been pretty good at catching those mistakes.
05:27Many errors are formed from hardened beliefs and incomplete discoveries.
05:31A point made emphatically by Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
05:37Paleontology is a complex field.
05:39Most fossils are scrappy, you get little bits and pieces.
05:43And remember, the fossils of most creatures are representing animals that are dead and have been extinct for millions of
05:51years.
05:52Imagine you go out and you find a shell or a bit of a bone of a creature that has
05:59no modern analog on Earth today.
06:00It's very difficult.
06:01And so, inevitably, large numbers of mistakes will be made in identification.
06:06And there's no disgrace in that.
06:09One of the first enthusiastic fossil hunters was American President Thomas Jefferson.
06:15An avid naturalist, Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark to report on any exotic beast or other rare animals they might
06:22encounter during their exploration of the Louisiana Territory.
06:27On another occasion, Jefferson was sent the fossil bones of an animal he could not easily identify.
06:32Never one to turn down a challenge, Jefferson labeled the fossil a giant lion's claw and missed the mark entirely.
06:42Among the many things that Thomas Jefferson did when he wasn't being president or sending out Lewis and Clark or
06:48purchasing Louisiana was paleontology.
06:51Jefferson actually wrote two technical articles in paleontology, and in one of them he made a notable error.
06:58But nothing to be ashamed of.
07:00That was a perfectly understandable mistake.
07:01He found a very large claw, and he thought it was a lion's claw.
07:05It doesn't look very much unlike the claw of a large carnivore.
07:09Now, it turns out it isn't.
07:10It's the claw of a giant sloth.
07:12But how would he have known that?
07:14Sloths today are little creatures that hang upside down from trees in South America.
07:17It's big.
07:18How would Jefferson have known in the 1790s when he wrote this article that there were once sloths in North
07:24America that were 20 feet tall and that had big claws for digging?
07:34Bigger mistakes lay ahead.
07:37Fossils of the dinosaurs were finally coming to light.
07:42Until the 1800s, both the concept of extinction and the age of the earth were unknown.
07:49Scholars had every reason to accept the biblical account of creation.
07:53If they sought more precise information, they turned to the pages of the Old Testament.
08:00In 1650, Irish Archbishop James Usher poured over the biblical list of prophets, priests, and kings, and deduced that Noah's
08:10great flood had occurred in 2349 BC.
08:14God made the world, he said, in 4004.
08:18The notion of a vastly older world inhabited by long gone creatures was unthinkable.
08:26When strange fossils were unearthed, they were often attributed to exotic beasts who might still be living in some remote
08:33corner of the globe.
08:35Elephant skulls, with large openings in the middle of its head for the trunk, were believed to be skulls of
08:41the one-eyed giant cyclops.
08:43The tusks of mammoths dug up from quarries in Germany were identified as the horns of the fabled unicorn.
08:52According to one theory, the skull of the protoceratops, with its bird-like beak and claws, inspired the fable of
08:59the griffin.
09:01Then in Paris, in the 1790s, the foundation for the concept of extinction began to be laid by a brilliant
09:0826-year-old naturalist named George Cuvier.
09:11His methods of research are still used in paleontology today.
09:16Cuvier was studying massive bones dug up during renovations in Paris.
09:21Superficially, they resembled elephant bones.
09:24The idea that elephants once roamed Paris was thrilling for the Parisians.
09:28But Cuvier would stun them even more.
09:31By comparing these surprising bones with those of modern elephants, Cuvier concluded that they were remnants of extinct mammoths.
09:39His technique of comparative anatomy and his notion of extinction revolutionized the thinking of scholars and naturalists of the early
09:47scientific age.
09:49Cuvier's reputation grew when he corrected another notable mistake.
09:53Strange fossil bones unearthed in an ancient German lake bed, next to more recognizable fish fossils, presented an interesting problem.
10:02While they were thought by many to be a strange species of unknown marine animals, Cuvier saw them in a
10:09new light.
10:13He surmised they belonged to a land-dwelling flying reptile.
10:17He named the creature pterodactyl, or wing finger, for its wing-like appendage.
10:24Even Cuvier was allowed to make a mistake every now and then.
10:27In 1795, a French general had shipped back to Paris a trophy of war, a pair of huge fossil jaws
10:35that had been found in chalk quarries in Holland.
10:38The jaws measured over three feet long.
10:41Cuvier examined them and concluded they belonged to a giant fish-eating lizard and named it Mosasaur.
10:47His identification was correct, but his conclusions would lead to centuries of misunderstanding.
10:54Cuvier decided the animal was distantly related to the Monata family of tropical lizards, which includes the Komodo dragon.
11:02His conclusion made a deep mark on the scholars of his age.
11:07Because it resembled nothing modern, it was presumed to be very old.
11:11Soon old and lizard-like became almost synonymous.
11:17In the history of paleontology, this would perhaps be the biggest mistake of all.
11:23In 1820, a young English doctor named Gideon Mantell found unusual teeth and vertebrae in a quarry near his home
11:31in Sussex.
11:32The shape of the teeth convinced him they belonged to a giant plant-eating reptile, yet he could find no
11:38record of such a creature in the living world.
11:42Mantell finally stumbled on a clue in a London museum where he was shown the teeth of a reptile inhabiting
11:49Central America, the iguana.
11:51He named his creature Iguanodon.
11:55But Bob Barker points out that early on, there were critics of the theory that the dinosaurs were giant lizards.
12:03The first grand thinker about dinosaurs was Hermann von Meier.
12:08He may be a distant relative of mine.
12:10Hermann von Meier was a German banker.
12:12He gave his fortune to establish the first scientific magazine about fossils, still being published, called Paleontographica.
12:19He looked at the dinosaurs as they were known in 1834, and he said these animals weren't reptiles.
12:26They combined an awful lot of features of hot-blooded mammalia.
12:30That's how he described them.
12:31He called them Pachypota, which means strong foot, because he envisioned them running around like big Mesozoic versions of rhinos
12:40and elephants.
12:401834, the first sort of grand synthesis.
12:44And he was right.
12:45But the lizard idea had taken hold.
12:48The Crystal Palace Park opened in 1854, featuring replicas of the Iguanodon and other creatures.
12:55The sculptures piqued the public's curiosity, and people flocked to the exhibit.
13:00It was the Jurassic Park of its time.
13:03The inaugural dinner of the park was a stylish affair held inside the belly of the half-completed sculpture of
13:10the Iguanodon.
13:11Presiding over the event was the eminent Sir Richard Owen, who had just coined the term dinosaur, meaning terrible lizard.
13:20Peter Doyle has traced the origins of Owen's ideas.
13:23In the 1850s, dinosaurs were a new concept.
13:28Dinosaurs had been really discovered in the 1820s, but not really thought of as a separate race of reptiles.
13:36They were thought just to be lizards.
13:38So, in 1841, Sir Richard Owen came up with the term dinosauria.
13:43Owen recognized that his dinosauria were radically different from modern lizards.
13:48Their legs were more robust, suggesting faster-moving creatures.
13:53Still, the sculptor of the Crystal Palace creatures, Benjamin Hawkins, would turn to existing animals for inspiration.
14:00The beasts in the park ended up resembling giant versions of lizards.
14:06So, what we are seeing is gigantic versions of the Iguana, gigantic versions of other reptiles.
14:12And the version, or the idea that they were slow and lumbering, really came about from that reconstruction, from the
14:19present-day reptiles.
14:25The sculptures include many errors that modern paleontology has long since corrected.
14:30Megalosaurus, depicted as a low, squat, four-legged lizard, was really a swift, two-legged predator like T-Rex.
14:39The Iguanodon looked even stranger. Hawkins gave it a horn on its snout, like a modern Iguana.
14:45Later discoveries placed the horn in its rightful place as a defensive spike, projecting like a thumb from the creature's
14:53wrist.
14:55Today's reconstruction shows a very different Iguanodon, finally free of the reptilian baggage.
15:01A biped, horizontal, with a stiff tail off the ground.
15:05The new Iguanodon looks far more nimble, perhaps even a swift-footed, warm-blooded runner.
15:13In the 1920s, the great American nature artist Charles Knight began his long career.
15:20His vivid paintings were as influential in the 20th century as the Crystal Palace sculptures were in the 19th.
15:26Like his contemporaries, he depicted dinosaurs as slow, cold-blooded reptiles.
15:34Knight's lumbering mistakes were set into motion in the 1925 classic, The Lost World.
15:41Hollywood made even bigger mistakes all by itself.
15:44Plant-eating sauropods devastating a city and eating its people.
15:51Cavemen and dinosaurs living side by side, even though they were separated by 64 million years.
15:59Though Hollywood's mistakes are legendary, there was still plenty to go around among the paleontologists themselves.
16:09In the 1870s, when dinosaur fossils began turning up in the American West,
16:14museums back east began a race to acquire fossil collections.
16:18Suddenly, dinosaurs were more than curiosities, they were big business.
16:23No exhibit was sought more than the big brontosaurus.
16:29Brontosaurus belongs to the family of giant dinosaurs known as sauropods.
16:33Some weighed 20 tons and stood 15 feet at the shoulder.
16:38The hunt for the brontosaurus was to lead to a classic case of mistaken identity.
16:46In 1877, an aloof professor of paleontology at Yale University, Othniel Charles Marsh,
16:52received ten boxes of bones dug up by a Colorado school teacher and part-time fossil hunter.
16:59By the time Marsh got around to looking at them, the teacher had sent a similar shipment to Edward Drinker
17:04Cope,
17:05a brilliant, hot-headed, self-trained scholar of independent means living in Philadelphia.
17:11Cope and Marsh each dispatched a team to Wyoming to find prized fossil sites.
17:17Sometimes the rivals dug so close to each other they spied on one another.
17:23Once the best specimens were taken, leftover fossils were smashed to bits by the team to deny their rivals any
17:30further finds.
17:32Edwin H. Colbert began his career in paleontology at the Museum of Natural History more than 60 years ago,
17:40not long after the bone wars between Marsh and Cope.
17:45Well, Cope and Marsh were what you might call pioneer paleontologists in North America.
17:53Marsh was at Yale University, Cope lived in Philadelphia, and they were both independent as pigs on ice, you know,
18:01and Western North America just wasn't big enough for the two of them.
18:07In the great hall of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, where Cope did much of his work,
18:12is the fossil of an ancient creature with a very long neck, the Elasmosaur,
18:18inspired one of the most famous mistakes in American paleontology.
18:24Cope was studying a plesiosaur, which was one of the great aquatic reptiles, marine reptiles of Mesozoic times,
18:30and he got the skull on the wrong end, he put the skull on the end of the tail,
18:34and Marsh discovered that, and of course he didn't let Cope forget that.
18:38Well, of course, that was all a result of a lot of hasty work.
18:43Both Marsh and Cope were men in a hurry.
18:45They were in a hurry to do as much describing as they could, you see,
18:49and they weren't always as careful as they might have been.
18:52Humiliated, Cope at first refused to admit his mistake.
18:57Finally, in the dead of night, Cope crept into the great hall,
19:02and with no one watching, he quietly made the correction.
19:07But Cope's rival bungled too.
19:10In the late 1870s, Marsh collected two magnificent skeletons of brontosaurus,
19:15the first ever found.
19:17There was only one snag.
19:18Both specimens were amazingly well preserved, but the heads were missing.
19:25Marsh had to make an educated guess.
19:27Paleontologist Bob Bucker explains how the big dinosaur won its giant head.
19:33This is a really great head.
19:35It's the head of a brontosaurian.
19:38Professor Marsh found the first good skeleton of a brontosaurian, brontosaurus itself.
19:43And it was a huge, powerful animal.
19:45But Professor Marsh didn't have a head.
19:48So he looked at other quarries for a head.
19:50And what sort of head should his brontosaurus have?
19:53Well, it had to be a great, big, strong head.
19:55And he picked this head, wonderful head, to orient you.
19:59That's the ears, and the eyes, the nostrils here.
20:04A great, big, boxy cranium.
20:06And this is the head Marsh put on brontosaurus at Yale.
20:10And the New York Museum put the same sort of head on their brontosaurus.
20:14And the museum in Pittsburgh put the same head on their brontosaurus.
20:17And when the movie King Kong was made, the brontosaurus that ate the sailor had this type of head.
20:22A very fierce head with huge teeth.
20:26A great head.
20:28A wonderful head.
20:29A very adaptive head.
20:30But it's the wrong head.
20:32Marsh didn't realize there were actually two different types of brontosaurians.
20:36One, like Camarasaurus, had tall shoulders, short tails, and big heads.
20:41While the other, like Diplodocus, or Apatosaurus, had long slender necks and tails.
20:47And small heads.
20:48In his ignorance, he mounted a big skull from one group on the long slender skeleton of the other.
20:57The real shocker is that the correct head was found nearly 80 years ago.
21:03You see, the Carnegie Museum was digging a beautiful brontosaurus in the early part of the century.
21:09And they got the torso, and they got the base of the neck, and the front of the neck,
21:13and then the neck right behind the head, where the head should be, and a few feet away was this
21:20head.
21:21And the quarry man said, whoopee, we've got the head of brontosaurus.
21:25And the head preparator back at Pittsburgh said, whoopee, we have the head of brontosaurus.
21:30But then the government paleontologist came in and said, wrong head.
21:35We all know brontosaurus had a great big boxy head.
21:38This is an elegant, skinny, triangular head.
21:41It looks like Diplodocus, so it can't be the head of brontosaurus.
21:46So this head, this wonderful head, the true brontosaurus head, sat forgotten on a shelf in Pittsburgh until the mid
21:53-1970s,
21:55when Professor McIntyre said, the quarry guy was right all along.
21:59This is the head of brontosaurus.
22:01And it looks like a Diplodocus head because brontosaurus and Diplodocus are sister species.
22:08They had the same construction all over from tail to head, so of course they're going to have the same
22:13sort of cranium.
22:15In the 1970s, views of brontosaurus changed.
22:19They had once been seen as sluggish swamp dwellers.
22:23New discoveries showed that brontosaurus lived in dry grasslands.
22:27Barker compared their mighty legs with the muscular limbs of fast-moving elephants and rhinos.
22:37Like elephants in Africa today, brontosaurus may have migrated hundreds of miles in search of food.
22:44Nothing could be more different from the old image of a sluggish reptile.
22:49What other mistaken ideas about the dinosaurs remain to be corrected?
22:54Today there are more fossil hunters searching for the bones of dinosaurs than ever before.
23:00Few are trained paleontologists.
23:03Many dig out of sheer fascination with the hope of finding something that died out nearly 65 million years ago.
23:14Robert Barker is a firm believer in training larger numbers of amateur paleontologists and has a theory of how to
23:21prevent the narrow thinking that can lead to mistakes.
23:25The most important thing to look for when you're out digging dinosaurs is the stuff over there in the periphery
23:32of your vision.
23:33When we go out to dig, maybe we're looking for a giant megalosaur meat-eater, but what may be more
23:38important is the thing over here, the thing over there, the peripheral context.
23:42So when you're digging dinosaurs, you've got to have a 360 degree ecological vision.
23:48Look at everything. Be aware of everything.
23:54Undoubtedly, the paleontologists of tomorrow will enjoy a few laughs at our expense.
23:58In the search for dinosaurs, more mistakes will be made, but they are an inevitable misstep in a field where
24:07so much is still unknown.
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24:43Transcription by CastingWords
25:04CastingWords
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