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  • 8 hours ago
The exhibition allows visitors to plunge into ancient waters and discover the terrifying creatures that hunted beneath the waves while dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Transcript
00:00Jurassic Oceans, Monsters of the Deep is taking you back in time 200 million years to look at what was
00:06roaming the oceans while dinosaurs were dominant on land.
00:09So lots of people will be familiar of and fans of dinosaurs, but there were also some incredible fierce reptiles
00:16lurking in the ocean depths.
00:17And that's what we really want to shine a light on in this exhibition.
00:19So these are our kind of fierce factor panels.
00:23So these are profiles we do on lots of the different creatures, main creatures in the exhibition.
00:27And we wanted to give each of them a different design flourish.
00:29So some of them, as you say, have sound effects. Others have life-size cutouts or lighting effects.
00:35And the sound effects we created in collaboration with our special effects team and also in consultation with our scientists.
00:42So, for example, the ammonite and the ichthyosaur have kind of water jet or swishing motions to kind of imitate
00:49what they might have sounded like moving through the water.
00:51Whereas our marine crocodiles, for example, are based on modern crocodile bellows that would have probably sounded similar that we
00:58don't know.
00:59And they aren't directly, interestingly, marine crocodiles from the Jurassic aren't related to modern day crocodiles.
01:05But we can imagine that they probably evolved similar body plans and therefore similar vocalisations.
01:10Jurassic Ocean's monsters of the deep at the Natural History Museum opened its doors to the public on Friday.
01:19The exhibition allows visitors to look at ancient waters and discover the bizarre and often truly terrifying creatures that haunted
01:28them while dinosaurs still roamed our planet.
01:31The project also showcases just how dramatically Earth's oceans have changed over the last few million years and features real
01:41fossils from that era.
01:44So my favourite exhibit is this long-necked plesiosaur.
01:46It's really spectacular and stunning to see the three-dimensional skeleton laid out like this.
01:53So the fossils in this exhibition come from a wide variety of places.
01:58Some of them come from the UK, some of them come from North America.
02:03This specimen here, which you can see, this is from Japan.
02:07So it's a cast, but it's a very good resin cast of a long-necked plesiosaur from the early Cretaceous
02:15of Japan.
02:16So marine reptiles aren't a natural group, they're kind of a collection of different groups that all radiated into the
02:23oceans separately and they don't include dinosaurs which are on the land.
02:29So these groups can include like the crocodiles, so they're distant relatives of crocodiles from today, but some of them
02:37became more aquatically specialised.
02:39They evolved flippers, some of them lost their armour to become more streamlined and some of them became really large
02:50marine predators with these deep skulls and huge, robust, stoutly built teeth.
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