This year is the 100th Anniversary of the
National Park Service, and to celebrate we’ve partnered with the The National Trust for
Historic Preservation and American Express to give you just a glimpse into how our national
parks have benefited the world of science -- and, therefore, all of us here on Earth! The National Trust and American Express have
partnered together to give away two million dollars in grants to preserve historic treasures
as part of Partners in Preservation: National Parks. And you can help decide which projects get
funded! Just go to VoteYourPark.org to show your support. Until July 5th, you cast five votes per day
at VoteYourPark.org. Now, you might think of national parks as
a nice place to see a geyser, or a canyon, or historic landmarks that you don’t typically
see around your neighborhood, like cabins and footbridges and lookouts. But there’s more to them than that: there’s
tons of scientific research going on, and a lot of awesome discoveries have been made
in these parks. Over the past 100 years, US national parks
have produced some of the biggest, oldest, deepest, and creepiest discoveries that have
been made in this country! Really, there have been too many to talk about
in just ten minutes. But if I had to choose 10 of the awesomest
discoveries made on park lands? They’d definitely include these: In 1959, an anthropologist exploring Santa
Rosa Island, part of Channel Islands National Park in southern California, discovered the
bones of an adult male eroding out of a canyon wall. The bones turned out to be more than 13,000
years old — making them likely the oldest human remains ever found in the United States. And this discovery helped fuel a whole new
way of thinking about human migration in the New World. The first North Americans came from Asia at
the end of the last Ice Age, moving south from Alaska wherever they could find a route
that was free of giant glaciers. And for much of the 20th century, anthropologists
thought that they must’ve moved down through the middle of the continent. But the discovery made in Channel Islands
National Park -- a find that became known as Arlington Springs Man — showed that people
had already reached the coast of southern California 13,000 years ago. And what’s more, they were hanging out on
islands. This helped spawn what’s now known as the
coastal migration theory -- the idea that at least some of the earliest Americans populated
the New World by moving south along the Pacific Coast, instead of through the interior. Do you wanna go back even farther in time? Then, let’s talk dinosaurs. No, let’s actually talk: the oldest dinosaur. In 1984, an exquisite set of fossils was discovered
in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park that turned out not only to be of a new species
of dinosaur -- at the time, it was the oldest dinosaur ever found on Earth. The bones belonged to a little, two-legged
carnivore -- about the size of a small ostrich -- and they were found in a layer of mudstone
that was more than 215 million years old. At the time, this pushed back the known range
of dinosaurs some 5 to 10 million years. And the new species, named Chindesaurus has
taught us a lot about what life was like back when northern Arizona was swampy marshland. Since the the discovery of Chindesaurus, some
older dinosaurs have been found in other parts of the world. But “Gertie,” as the Petrified Forest
specimen came to be known, is still probably the oldest dinosaur fossil ever found in the
US. But here’s the thing: Scientists are discovering
new species all the time in America’s national parks. Living species! That live among us today! The number of plant and animal species that
have been discovered in the parks is almost impossible to pin down, so it might be easier--
and more fun! -- to tell you about the forms of life that have been found only recently! For example! In 2006, teams of biologists set out to explore
the network of marble caves that runs under Nevada’s Great Basin National Park. They ended up discovering at least three species
of invertebrates that were totally new to science, including a creepy looking pseudoscorpion
-- kind of like a scorpion without the stinging tail -- as well as a pale white millipede,
and a springtail -- a weird arthropod that escapes danger by flicking its tail to propel
itself to safety. Oh, sorry. Is three new species not enough for you? Well, at Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park
in California, a different research team in 2006 turned up 27 kinds of invertebrates that
had never been described before -- including more pseudoscorpions and millipedes, along
with previously unknown kinds of pillbugs and spiders. Now, most of these newly-found species are
endemic to the areas where they were discovered, meaning that they’re only found there. But another creature discovered in a national
park takes the idea of endemism to the extreme. First recorded in 1930, a species of tiny
fish known as the Devil’s Hole pupfish is found only in a single pond of water inside
a cavern at Death Valley National Park. In addition to being the rarest fish in the
world -- with a population of only 115 as of 2016 -- these tiny fish also have the smallest
geographic range of any vertebrate on Earth. This picture shows their entire worldwide
habitat. So, caves and caverns are great places to
find species that have never been recorded before. But the caves themselves can be pretty cool
too. Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave -- which can be
found at its namesake national park -- has long been known as the longest cave on Earth. But in 2013, explorers announced that they
had discovered at least 16 new kilometers of caves within the system, and even a previously
unknown entrance to the whole thing. But these discoveries weren’t all made at
once. It took a team of speleologists -- the scientists
who study caves -- several years to find and explore these new underground passages, a
little bit at a time. And they’re still being studied, as scientists
look for new species, even more new tunnels, and new insights into how the world’s longest
cave system came to be. Now let’s go back to the West Coast, where
naturalists exploring Redwood National Park in California made another find for the record
books. In 2006, they discovered a coast redwood that
stood 115.61 meters tall, making it the world's tallest known tree. They named the tree Hyperion, after one of
the Titans from Greek mythology, and ten years later, it still holds the title of the tallest
plant on Earth. Now, scientists are looking for even larger
trees, which many think are still waiting to be discovered elsewhere in the park. Some discoveries are made in places that are
already national parks. Other discoveries have been so huge that the
places where they were made have been turned into national parks. One such place is Thomas Edison National Historical
Park in West Orange, New Jersey -- the site of Thomas Edison’s home and laboratory. Edison’s lab witnessed such breakthroughs
as the invention of the phonograph -- the first instrument that could record sound AND
play it back -- and of course the improvements that Edison and his team made to the incandescent
lamp, which involved using a carbon filament carrying an electric current to make a practical
light bulb. Another monument to scientific discovery? The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical
Park -- also known as the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop! Sure, everyone knows about Orville and Wilbur’s
first flight in North Carolina in 1903 -- but that event was the culmination of years -- you
might say, centuries -- of experimentation by generations of engineers. And their Ohio bicycle shop is where the Wrights
made their biggest contributions to the science of flight. By the time Orville and Wilbur started working
on a vehicle for powered flight in 1899, other engineers had already figured out ways to
control some aspects of how an aircraft might move. Like, there were already designs that could
control its pitch -- or vertical movement -- as well as its yaw -- or how it moves from
side to side. But -- supposedly after watching buzzards
flying in circles near their bicycle shop -- Wilbur discovered that there was another
factor that no one had thought of: roll -- the rotational movement of a flying object. So, he and Orville designed an aircraft with
flexible wings that allowed an on-board pilot to control the vehicle’s roll. And the rest is engineering history. Finally, no list of the national parks’
contributions to science would be complete without mentioning a little island that’s
been the site of the longest-running ecological study in history. On Isle Royale, the largest island in Michigan’s
Isle Royale National Park, biologists have been studying the interaction between two
charismatic animal species — wolves and moose -- since 1958. Before this research began, it was widely
believed that predators and prey always lived in equilibrium, with the proportions of hunters
and hunted staying pretty much the same all of the time. But thanks to the contained environment of
Isle Royale, scientists were able to study the wildlife in isolation, and discover that
that wasn’t actually the case. In the 1970s, the number of wolves spiked
dramatically, probably because the population of moose was getting older, and therefore
more vulnerable. That meant more food for the wolves, and then
more wolves, as females began having more pups, and more pups survived to adulthood. But this only lasted for a few years. Because so much of the moose herd had been
hunted, there wasn’t enough food left for the new, bigger wolf population. Suddenly, by the 1980s, the wolf numbers plummeted,
and in some cases, the wolves even began attacking each other. Entire books of research have been written
about the natural drama that’s played out on Isle Royale. But it won’t last much longer. As of 2016, only two wolves remained on the
island. So, in just a hundred years, the national
parks have witnessed all kinds of scientific discoveries. They’ve taught us about life on earth, both
below ground and on the surface. We’ve discovered new species -- living among
us today, and in the distant past. And they also include places where we learned
to fly, and discovered how to illuminate the world. Now, your park needs your help to unlock its
part of two million dollars in preservation funding. So head on over to VoteYourPark.org to show
your support, where, until July 5th, you cast five votes per day. And thanks for watching this episode of SciShow,
which was brought to you by the US National Park Service and our patrons on Patreon. If you want to help support this show, just
go to patreon.com/scishow. And don’t forget to go to youtube.com/scishow
and subscribe!
