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Gary Owens needs more dinosaurs and sends Eric Boardman on the ultimate dinosaur safari to find them. Join the hunt for a living dinosaur in the jungles of Africa, separate the facts from fiction in dinosaur movies, visit Dinosaur National Monument, and much more. There's no bone unturned in this award winning program.
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00:07Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Hello? Is anybody here?
01:05Hi, Eric.
01:06Hi, Gar.
01:07Glad you could make it.
01:09Let me guess.
01:12This show's about dinosaurs, right?
01:14You got it.
01:15Didn't we cover that before?
01:17Oh, Eric, we barely scratched the surface.
01:21What's in store for me this time?
01:24Oh, Eric, I need more dinosaurs.
01:30More dinosaurs.
01:31Eric, you could never get enough.
01:36You're going on the adventure of a lifetime.
01:39Yes, in the great tradition of those early American dinosaur hunters,
01:43Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope,
01:46you're going on a dinosaur safari.
01:53Whew, I better get moving if I'm going to find more dinosaurs.
02:16If I'm going to find you over your net,
02:16If you're going to find me in the right office,
02:17and do whatever you eat it will.
02:17Nothing that I'll find you like to find out on the train.
02:19I'm not doing something that I can find out knowing you're going.
02:19You're not doing anything that I can find out on the train.
02:21Don't tell me anything more username,
02:21but to take you with your slowing down am Curric Nail for yourself.
02:23I'll find you so later on the haywire.
02:25I'm going to be yuck as soon as I'll do that for you.
02:37Dinosaurs, the terrible lizards, they mysteriously died out 65 million years ago, or did they?
03:09Hey, you!
03:11Mokali membi. That's what the African natives call it.
03:15Now, I don't know about a dinosaur living in the city, but I know in the Congo Basin, they say
03:19there's something incredibly strange and large out there.
03:23They call it Mokali membi. That means a creature that can block the flow of rivers.
03:27They're explorers in the area. I hope they have better luck than me.
03:33This footage that survived the dark and steamy swamps of the Congo was taken by American explorer Herman Regusters during
03:41his first expedition in search of a live dinosaur.
03:44What he claims to have found raised more than a few eyebrows. Surviving wasn't easy.
03:50For six weeks, we lived on tree roots. There was no dry ground.
03:54And in swamp areas, it sometimes exceeded the depth of our height.
03:59And that's what we lived in. And we lived off the jungle animals. We survived from the land.
04:05Giant footprints of this mysterious creature were found back in 1776.
04:09And legend has it that natives killed and devoured several of the monsters.
04:15Natives who had seen it before assured us that it was the animal they call Mokali membi, which looks very
04:23much like a sauropod dinosaur.
04:27And we estimated the overall length of the animal that we saw it to be somewhere around 35 feet.
04:34This is the photograph for goosters took of the animal.
04:39And this is the noise it made that sound experts cannot identify.
04:58I don't know.
05:00I mean, we'd all like to believe that maybe one lone dinosaur survived these millions of years.
05:06But I've got to see it to believe it.
05:09But luckily, there is one way for us dinosaur lovers to enjoy the world of dinosaurs.
05:13And that's the movies.
05:15But like these scenes from Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend, where explorers actually find a living dinosaur in deepest,
05:23darkest Africa.
05:25Filmmakers have always been intrigued in finding ways to bring dinosaurs to life on the screen.
05:31For Baby, almost full-size hydraulic-powered models of the dinosaurs were made in a warehouse in Los Angeles.
05:37Then, instead of using rear projection or miniatures, the working models were actually taken to the Ivory Coast in Africa.
05:45Then the stars were given a little last-minute attention, the cameras rolled, and the legend of living dinosaurs was
05:53brought to life.
06:17Now, Baby is just one of the most recent dinosaur movies.
06:21Over the years, dinosaur films have always had box office appeal.
06:26The first feature film about dinosaurs was The Lost World.
06:30It tells of a group of explorers that find an isolated plateau in Brazil that evolution had passed by.
06:36The story was written by Sherlock Holmes' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
06:41And if this footage seems a little prehistoric, it's because these are scenes from the classic 1925 version.
06:54It is through the use of the special effects technique called stop-motion animation that small models of the dinosaurs
07:01appear to move on the screen.
07:03The process was developed by effects pioneer Willis O'Brien, who eight years later would bring King Kong to life.
07:10The film was a sensation, and movie audiences felt that they were experiencing something as amazing as the characters on
07:18the screen.
07:19In the darkness of the movie theater, we could now experience the wonders and horrors of a time gone by.
07:51The film was a sensation, and movie theater, and movie theater, and movie theater.
08:12The plot of this movie has become a fantasy film standard.
08:16In this version of The Lost World, a giant brontosaurus is brought back to civilization, only to break loose and
08:23destroy London.
08:46But unlike most other films, the dinosaur manages to escape when the London Bridge collapses.
08:55Going back even earlier to the year 1912, cartoonist Windsor McKay created what was to become the first classic cartoon
09:04character.
09:05And of course, it was a dinosaur.
09:09Her name is Gertie, a lovable and very hungry brontosaurus.
09:35You know, all those movies are great, but they're not necessarily the best way to learn
09:41about dinosaurs.
09:43To do that, you should study them scientifically, and that can be just as fascinating.
09:47Well, take these plants, for example.
09:48They're called cycads, and they're prehistoric.
09:51They were around millions and millions of years ago, just like the dinosaurs.
09:55And it's very possible that this guy's great, great, great, great grandfather was nibbled on by a triceratops.
10:02You know, recently, I went to a paleontologist convention in Berkeley to find out more about these terrible lizards.
10:08The media, specifically movies and television, spread myths and misconceptions.
10:15What are the big misconceptions about dinosaurs that you'd like to clear up right now?
10:19Well, of course, various.
10:20One is that dinosaurs and men were contemporaneous.
10:24Not true.
10:25No, it's not true.
10:26They're separated by about 60 million years.
10:28That is, the last dinosaurs became extinct about 60 million years before the first man appeared.
10:33So when I see a caveman chasing with a club a tyrannosaurus, that's not going to happen?
10:38No, that's a nice fairy tale or myth.
10:41Anything else?
10:42Well, of course, the movies are apt to make the dinosaurs bigger and more ferocious than they were.
10:47Were they docile?
10:49A lot of them probably were.
10:51The big brontosaurs, as we call them, the big gigantic dinosaurs that were herbivorous, were probably very docile,
10:59just as big grazing animals nowadays were docile.
11:01Another advantage of being big is that you can be sure of yourself.
11:08And while we're on the subject of how dinosaurs are portrayed in films,
11:12now we've seen motion pictures where mommy and daddy dinosaur take very good care of their children.
11:18Even Godzilla was a proud parent, you know that.
11:21You're probably saying, that's pure Hollywood fantasy, right?
11:25Well, maybe not.
11:26Some scientists believe that Hollywood may not have been that far off.
11:34This dinosaur nest was found in Mongolia, but the recent discovery of a nest site in Montana
11:41suggests that these Mesozoic monsters were raised and nurtured by their parents.
11:50Fossils of various sizes found together, from babies to adults, indicate that dinosaurs remained together as family units.
11:58There is real good evidence that dinosaurs herded, and this was almost ignored until just very recently.
12:04But it's a funny thing, back in the 1930s, a bunch of big brontosaur trackways were found in Texas,
12:10whole herds moving, and their footprints were preserved.
12:14And it was published, and it was pretty well known, but everybody ignored it.
12:17There's just no doubt that these animals moved in herds, and they were protecting the young.
12:20The young tended to be towards the center.
12:23It seems the original perception of the lone, cold-blooded dinosaur was wrong.
12:29They were a much more complex animal.
12:54Oh, boy, I have had bad luck.
12:57I haven't seen one dinosaur.
13:00Oh, boy.
13:04Oh, baby, a Stegosaurus!
13:07Ah-ha!
13:08Finally!
13:14Triceratops!
13:18Wow, this has got to be Diplodocus!
13:23Amazing!
13:24I'm the only human being who's seen these dinosaurs.
13:27Welcome to the Earth!
13:29What's this?
13:32Oh, my goodness.
13:34Oh.
13:35Mr. Boardman.
13:36Yes?
13:36Sam Schneider, Mayor Vernal.
13:38Nice to meet you, Mayor.
13:39Welcome to the dinosaur capital of the world.
13:40Well, thank you.
13:41We have a little memento for you.
13:42We lost the keys to the city, so we thought we would round up something that is very special,
13:47and I'm sure will suit the occasion.
13:49I love presents.
13:50I'd better open it, huh?
13:51You'd better open it.
13:52Okay.
13:54What could this be?
13:55Mayor, could you hold this tissue, please?
13:58Oh, I don't believe it.
14:00Petrified dinosaur droppings from dinosaur land.
14:04Oh, my goodness.
14:06Oh, that's great.
14:08Mayor, and all the dynamites, I thank you.
14:12What a surprise.
14:14Yeah, this town has gone bonkers for dinos.
14:18There are more dinosaurs on the streets of Vernal, Utah than in most museums.
14:26Everything is patterned after dinosaurs, from the drugstore to the laundromat, where you
14:32could spin-dry your Diplodocus.
14:35Why are the people of Vernal, Utah crazy for dinosaurs?
14:39Well, there's a good reason, and that reason lies just outside of town.
14:44In fact, it's my next destination.
14:48Excuse me, am I getting closer to Dinosaur National Monument?
14:51Yes, it's eight miles down Highway 40 here.
14:54Thanks very much.
14:55And if you hurry, you can see them, feed them.
14:58Great!
15:11Discovered way back in 1909, this site yielded over 350 tons of Prius
15:18historic fossils.
15:19When President Woodrow Wilson heard about it, he proclaimed it Dinosaur National Monument
15:25National Monument in 1915.
15:27Wow!
15:29Actual dinosaur bones 140 million years old.
15:34National Park paleontologist Dan Chury explains.
15:38You know, Eric, this is the only place in the world where one can come and actually see bones
15:43being exposed in place as they were deposited.
15:48This, for example, is a pelvic bone of a brontosaur, probably of an adult.
15:53In contrast, if we look up here, this bone here is the same bone, only of a very small brontosaurus.
16:03Oh yeah, sure.
16:03So this one is probably from an adult that may be 60 feet in length.
16:09This is from a juvenile that may have been only a quarter of that.
16:13Hey, Dan, what's this one?
16:16This is a single neck vertebrae, or neck bone, of an apatosaurus.
16:22If you feel along the back of your neck, there's a series of little lumps, and those are the individual
16:27bones.
16:28You have seven neck vertebrae, apatosaurus had 15.
16:32How large a creature would this be?
16:34Very large.
16:36Probably up to maybe 80 feet in length, and maybe 30 or 40 tons in weight.
16:43Amazing.
16:44When you find a bone, how do you know which dinosaur it comes from?
16:47It's similar to people who really know automobiles.
16:52I know people, you can show them a tail light or part of the grill, and they can tell you
16:56the make, model, and year,
16:57because they know automobile anatomy.
17:00And in a sense, those of us who study fossils know dinosaur anatomy.
17:05When the first dinosaur skeletons were found in England in the 1800s, they were, of course, in rock.
17:11And in fact, they were in stone quarries.
17:13And it was the techniques used by stonemasons for working stone that were adapted to taking fossils out of the
17:21rock.
17:22Just think, with one swing of this hammer, I can unearth creatures that existed 140 million years ago.
17:34Oh, no!
17:41Way to go, Eric!
17:42Well, I think you're about to get a first-hand look at how all those fossils ended up at Dinosaur
17:46National Monument.
17:48You see, that whole area was once a river.
17:56Hey, Mr. Allosaurus, I'm over here!
17:59Whoa, surf's up!
18:01During flooding, the bodies and bones of dinosaurs washed downstream and were trapped in sandbars.
18:06Over the ages, other rivers and seas came and went, leaving layers of sand and mud.
18:11And minerals seeped into the bones, turning them into fossils.
18:14Violent changes in the earth brought the fossils back to the surface.
18:18Paleontologists carefully dig out the bones and take them back to the museum,
18:21where they try to figure out how to put them back together.
18:24It's not easy.
18:25As a matter of fact, they recently realized they had the wrong head on the brontosaurus.
18:28So, they fixed it and changed its name to Apatosaurus.
18:34Over to you, Gare. I'm gonna take a break.
18:36Ooh! Ah! Ah! Oh!
18:37This is a replica of the largest complete Tyrannosaurus skull found so far.
18:45Boy, these six-inch jobs must have been something to reckon with.
18:49Ever wonder how many mild-mannered brontosaurs fell victim to the dreaded tyrant king?
18:55Well, the answer is none. They didn't live at the same time.
18:58Here's Dr. Nick Houghton at the Smithsonian Institute to explain.
19:03That's right, Gary. Tyrannosaurus rex would never have gotten so much as a sniff of brontosaurus.
19:09He was separated from brontosaurus by about 80 million years,
19:12which is a lot more time than separates us from Tyrannosaurus.
19:17Here, let me show you what I mean.
19:20Let's start with the beginning of life.
19:23Now, there are some things that we can identify with living forms,
19:27such as the jellyfish, which are so obvious at the bottom of the column there.
19:32But it isn't until a Silurian, 420-some-odd million years ago,
19:36that you start getting animals with backbones in any kind of abundance and diversity.
19:42And that's that big fat mouth coming at you.
19:45And then it starts really getting interesting,
19:47because some of these fish-like forms got out on land quite early on, actually.
19:52From there on, the joint was run by reptiles most of the time.
19:56Dinosaurs got into the act during the Triassic.
20:01You often hear the Triassic spoken of at the beginning of the age of dinosaurs.
20:05Actually, they came tracing along toward the end of the period.
20:09Now we get into the Jurassic, and here we've got, now we're talking about dinosaurs.
20:13Tremendous diversity.
20:14Then there's the decanthosaurs.
20:17They probably got around most of the time on their hind legs,
20:19but they could always drop down on all fours to feed.
20:22Then you come something like Diplodocus, who is no longer bipedal because he's all fired big.
20:29Dinosaurs did a crackerjack job of running the show for, oh, a period of 140 million years or something like
20:36that.
20:36There does seem to have been an event or several events toward the end of the Cretaceous.
20:43And then beyond that point, nothing.
20:46In formal terms, dinosaurs are supposed to be extinct, but for paleontologists like myself,
20:52and for an awful lot of kids, they're very real and very much alive.
20:59You guys like dinosaurs, don't you?
21:01Yeah!
21:01Yeah!
21:02What's your favorite one?
21:06Dinosauris?
21:06Dinosauris?
21:07Dinosauris?
21:08Dinosauris?
21:08Dinosauris?
21:09Dinosauris?
21:09Dinosauris.
21:11We find that it's one of the most interesting sciences for young children here that we can
21:14teach them, and they're so enthusiastic about it, and we enjoy it very much too.
21:21Well, the adults like it too.
21:22Of course.
21:23Why do you think kids love dinosaurs so much?
21:28They can become a dinosaur is the main thing.
21:31Children will be so involved in the things that they learn from what scientists have found
21:37that they become this dinosaur.
21:40We have children who go home, and our dinosaurs at home, they come back.
21:45When we're on this subject, it's there for months.
21:47It's in their minds.
21:49They're easily become this monster, or this dinosaur.
21:54Roar!
21:56Do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
21:59It's fun playing with clay, isn't it?
22:01But just imagine, if these guys came to life.
22:04This guy is sinking in.
22:06Is that a man?
22:08I'm not a man!
22:09I'm not a man!
22:09I'm not a man!
22:10I'm not a man!
22:13I'm not a man!
22:27I'm not a man!
22:29You rip one two!
22:38Hi, you shit!
22:39Let's go,يف!
22:40Oh!
22:42Tsss.
22:44Oh, man!
22:46No, sir.
22:47Oh, my God.
23:35This is getting kind of intense, isn't it?
23:37Back to Gary with even more dinosaurs.
23:41By now, I think it's clear that dinosaurs have fascinated both young and old for a very long time.
23:48But we should all remember that it was scientists who first made the existence of these creatures known.
23:53Let's go back to Berkeley and paleontologist Edwin Colbert to find out when the study of dinosaurs began.
24:00Well, the first discoveries were made back in 1820, 1822, when the first bones were found.
24:06Of course, people have been finding dinosaur bones, I think, for hundreds of years.
24:10And I think perhaps some of the legends of giants that we have from medieval times were based in part
24:17on dinosaur bones.
24:18But the first really scientific discovery of dinosaur bones was made in the 1820s.
24:24And as a matter of fact, dinosaurs didn't exist in the mind of man until 1841,
24:29when Sir Richard Owen, who was a great English scholar and anatomist, coined the word dinosaurs.
24:35He invented that word, dinosauria.
24:40Thanks to the painstaking efforts of paleontologists all over the world,
24:45we are able to go to the great museums and see the skeletal remains of these huge creatures.
24:51Here in New York's Natural History Museum are some of the best fossil reconstructions.
24:57And you know, if you spend some time there and use a little imagination,
25:02you just may find yourself with the ghosts of these great beasts.
25:22So as you can see, dinosaurs...
25:23Hey, Gary! Gary! Hey, Gary! Gary, I'm back! Gary!
25:28Excuse me.
25:29Gary! Hey, Gary, where are you?
25:31Ah, there you are. Oh, Gary, what a trip. It was incredible. I had loads of fun.
25:35Well, yes, Eric, but what did you bring me?
25:37This. Isn't it neat? I made it with my bare hands.
25:41Uh, what is that?
25:43You don't want to know about that, believe me.
25:45But, oh, is this cool.
25:48An actual dinosaur fossil, millions of years old.
25:51Now, that's very interesting, Eric,
25:53but I send you on a dinosaur safari, and this is what you bring back?
25:58I mean, this is big-time television. This is not some little documentary on the history of fur balls.
26:02This is big-time TV, and we need a big finish for the show. We need a grabber.
26:07A grabber?
26:08Yes.
26:11I got your grabber.
26:15You brought me a real dinosaur.
26:17Oh, yeah. I picked him up along the way.
26:19But don't worry, he's housebroken.
26:21How many has he broken?
26:23Rex may look tough, but inside, he's a prehistoric creep.
26:27He still looks pretty wild to me.
26:29I understand. He's tamed and found him.
26:31How long has it been since he's eaten?
26:34Oh, about 70 million years ago.
26:38Maybe we'd better sneak out of here.
26:41Maybe I'll follow him.
27:03How are we going to get out of here?
27:05Don't worry. He's only toying with us.
27:09Now we can work.
27:17I think we've picked him out.
27:19Let's go out the back way.
27:20Got it.
27:30Hey, Gary, where's the light switch here in the basement?
27:33Eric, I don't have a basement.
27:35Oh, boy.
27:36I don't have a basement.
27:38I don't have a basement.
27:39I don't have a basement.
27:41I don't have a basement.
27:47I don't have a basement.
27:49I don't have a basement.
27:51I don't have a basement.
27:54I don't have a basement.
27:55I don't have a basement.