So, Art, this is where all
these bones end up, huh? Yes. After… after we come back from
the field this is where the…. Oh my goodness sakes! What in the world? Yeah, this is a very
large triceratops. These are the two
brow horns, Yes. And this is the nasal horn here. And actually it has a nose that projected over
a foot beyond that, so that the total length
of the skull from here to the back is about seven feet. That is a huge skull. Art, this is amazing. I mean this is huge! This is where you
classify all the bones? This is where the bones
end up being stored. And, for example, these are sorted by size — so
these are small vertebrae here, down to little,
tiny ones like that. And these are from
a variety of species, but the predominant species
is edmontosaurus — the duckbilled dinosaur. And these are tail vertebrae
from a little farther forward. These are all
vertebrae right here. This section here
is… is the hand. This is the wrist bones here. And you can see they're… they're
really unique and they're wonderful bones to find because almost always
they have integrity. They're very large. This is… this is
the bone of the wrist — this would be equivalent
to the back of your hand, yeah. These duckbill dinosaurs had
quite robust front limbs. They didn't walk on all fours —
they probably ran on two feet — but they had the ability, their front limbs
were strong enough, to support the body. A little bit like the kangaroo? Yeah, kind of like a kangaroo. These are the
terminal phalanges. These are called unguals. So…. The very end of the…. That's just like… just like each
of the ends of your fingers. This would have been from a toe. These projections are
where the tendons attached that allow your fingers to move. And then down here at the bottom
— I won't pull it out — there's the metatarsals, that's the bones
in your foot. That's hard… hard
to imagine, isn't it? It is. But while we're over here, let's take a look
at these bigger bones. These are massive. These are the tibias —
the lower leg bone and…. Just the lower leg? Most of these are
from duckbilled dinosaurs, yes. This is a very
beautiful example. It's got a lot of integrity. This area of the bone
is usually crushed because of the oppressive sediment. So…. Is that because it's…
it's more hollow here? Yeah, it would have had
more space in there. This is an ulna. So that would be the
lower… lower arm. It gives you an idea —
this is a large one — but it gives you an idea
of just how big these… these animals were. This one's unique because it has a tooth mark
right there … is that right? …where some tooth got caught in it and you can see
the drag mark coming out of it. Is that unusual? Obviously you're pointing
to some sort of a battle that was going on. [Chuckles] More likely
it's a scavenger…. Scavenger after the their dead? All of these bones have come
from the Hanson ranch. That's right. These are all
from that one site. Do you have any idea how many? Well, we have upwards
of 20,000 in the collection. And how long a time
is it taking? It's been over 20 years. Yeah. This has been your life work
almost, hasn't it? Well, I didn't plan it that way,
but that's how it turned out. It's turned out that way. Wow. Over here on the table
we have a couple of more. Those are the upper leg bone. These are monsters. They are. And that's the largest —
the longest — bone in the body and usually the largest, and these weigh
a couple hundred pounds. So you can imagine — you take one of those large
tibias that we just looked at, added to this, and you're dealing
with… over here somewhere, and then you've got
the foot below that, and the hip above that. Just hard to imagine. These are… these are
really big animals. This case has
the remains of nanotyrannus. Nanotyrannus is one
of the rarest dinosaurs. And these are…. Is that when you say tyrannus …
so is this similar to the T-Rex? Similar to T-Rex, and there's a big dispute in
the scientific community about whether it is T-Rex or not. So the problem is there are
no juvenile T-Rexes; or if there are, they're very,
very poorly understood, very poorly known. So you can't have a dinosaur that's 30 or 40 feet
long without having something smaller. And so they said, well, this must be a juvenile one;
but the characteristics don't match with… with T-Rex. So you see them
as fairly different. It's a different taxon, yeah. What do we have here? This is…. This is the…. Teeth? This is the upper jaw. And then the lower jaw is here — this happens to be
from the other side of the body, but you can visualize this. So it would have been
a… it would have been a fearsome animal. It would. It's a kind of animal I
think it would run from. [Chuckles] Here's…
here's the tooth — and that brings us to teeth. These… teeth are very important because one tooth
can tell you a taxon. So if you find a single tooth, you know that that particular
kind of animal was there, because you can
identify the teeth. For example — well, let's just take this one, this
is a tyrannosaurus rex tooth. And how do you know that? It's a massive, crushing tooth. It has serrations
on the edge and is bigger than it could be in any other
dinosaur that's around. And that's… that's
a tyrannosaurus, and here is
a nanotyrannus for comparison. And you see
how that's blade-like, Oh, it is, yeah. and the serrations
line up on the front and back of the tooth. It's a very
different tooth, then. And this one, yeah,
this is a crushing tooth. And when this thing
bit into bone, the teeth would break off, sometimes — and that's okay
for the dinosaur because he has
an infinite supply — a new one will grow up. Is that right? Now the fact
that we find so many of these associated with these
duckbilled dinosaur remains, suggests to me
that after they died, they were available for scavenging for
some time — long enough for tyrannosaurs and other
animals to be able to get in and enjoy the feast. Now this drawer down here
has a bunch of unique stuff, full — grab that side. These are the mostly
nondinosaur materials: you can see here are shells,
here's some dinosaur egg shell. Oh my. Goodness. These are from these are scoots
from the skin of a crocodile — really beautiful fossils — and we have a lot
of turtles in the site. These are all water animals. This is a… this is an example
of a turtle shell. And you can see on the inside
we have the rib cage. Turtles are unique
among all the animals because their pectoral
and pelvic girdles are inside the rib cage. So in order to develop
a turtle you would have to figure out a way to move its pectoral and pelvic
girdles inside it's rib cage. It seems backwards. But it just can't. It's a real
enigma for evolution. Art, that brings me, then, to another question
that's associated with the layer that you were finding
all of this in — was that called the Lance Formation? Right. Is that correct? That's the unit. And if I remember correctly, it's not as
if these bones are random. It seems that there is
some sort of structure. What does that show you? Well, this certainly is what's called
a fossil graveyard. It's a place where many hundreds
or thousands of dinosaurs or animals died. They didn't die where they are because I think we've discussed
already they were transported… yes. …to where… where we find them. But they died somewhere
and they were catastrophically killed — they all died
about the same time because the bones are all
in about the same shape. And so we have
this massive number of bones, and there had to be some event that was significant
enough to kill that many animals all at once. So that certainly brings
up the idea of a global, catastrophic process. Bone beds that we find
in the fossil record are really much more
pervasive and extensive than they are today. You can get a bone bed
if you have, for example, a catastrophic flood
and it covers an area where people and animals live. Then if you came
back years later, you'd find some bones there, but you wouldn't find anything
like the scale that we find in the fossil record. When you find a bone bed
like these and there are many of these in the Cretaceous it
certainly pushes you to the conclusion that there was a major, catastrophic process going on. This is not just life as usual. And that layer that you're finding
these bones in, if I remember correctly, we were talking about how
that appeared to be more of a mud layer. Is that right? Yes. This particular place we have the bones
in a clay stone to mud stones, so it's very fine material. In other places they're
found in sandstone. So there are a variety of different sedimentological
environments you find bone beds in. This one we're very fortunate because it's easy
to get the dirt off because it's not rock it's… it's unconsolidated sediment. But you still are dealing
with massive numbers of animals being killed. How big is that formation? Well, the last formation extends
most of the way across Wyoming, and then it goes
into South Dakota, and the names change
to Hell Creek Formation, and then it goes into Montana
and… so South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. And then there's
an equivalent formation up in Drumheller, in Canada, where they find
the dinosaurs up there. And they're also finding these
same dinosaurs up in Alaska. So we're talking about a large part
of North America. So this… this one
is extensive on its own. This is an extensive,
upper Cretaceous bone bed. Yes. And then there are many of them,
it's not just one, but they're not connected. But there are many bone beds
in the upper Cretaceous. That means these layers
are striated that we call them. These are the layers
like you saw in Grand Canyon, where you have one unit that has some integrity
and also has some extent, and those layers are
one above another. So if you go down farther,
you find another layer, and then you go down farther,
you find another layer; and these have different kinds
of fossils in them, all through the geologic column. Wherever you find fossils,
the same question arises. How did you get all
these fossils there, and how do you
preserve a fossil, and what kinds of processes are
involved in fossil preservation? Art, it's… it's obvious that what you are doing there
at the Hanson Ranch is… is digging in a huge mortuary. I mean it's a huge death bed. And that's what
taphonomy is about. Taphonomy is the science
of finding out what happens to an animal
from the time it's alive until it's excavated. So it includes a cause of death. What happened after it died? Did it lie around
and… and… and decay, or did it get buried quickly? And the evidence that it got buried quickly
is the preservation of the integrity
of the organism. Now in the case
of these dinosaurs, their original death
was followed by a period of time during which we assumed
they were scavenged and where… where they were rotting. And then after they were
pretty much rotted — maybe a few days, or weeks, or even months — the whole mass
of bones was… was picked up and transported out
into deeper water and buried. And… and that burial is
what preserved the bones. That's indicated by the fact that these bones
are all separated. If we find a whole dinosaur
that's still together, we know it had to be killed
and buried in very short order. And to bury an animal this big
requires very rapid burial. For example, we were studying
whales down in Peru. Yes. And whales are
pretty big animals. So when you find a whale
that's been buried quickly, and all its bones are still
in place, you know that there was sedimentation — the dirt that covered them up
was coming in very quickly. These whales still have
the baleen in their mouths: the protein that comes out in just a few days is
still in their mouths. So we know they
were buried quickly and… and when we wrote this up
in scientific journals, we drew people's
attention to the fact that this was rapid burial. Well, Art, these… the dinosaur fossils that
we're… we're finding. You say that they are pretty
much found in the same layer. They're not found throughout
that whole system of layers. Give me the perspective of that. In the… in the Cretaceous, we find specific kinds
of dinosaurs — we find these duckbilled dinosaurs, we find Tyrannosaurus rex,
we find dromaeosaurs, raptors. That's typical of what you find
in the upper Cretaceous. If you go into
the next layer down, the next set of layers down
called the Jurassic — that's where they got the name
for the famous dinosaur movies — that's where you find these big apatosaurids and
the other long-necked dinosaurs, and some other typical kinds of
dinosaurs including stegosaurus. And then if you go
down below that, you find some dinosaurs that aren't so familiar
in the Triassic. If you go down
below the Triassic, you'll find other layers of rock
and these kinds of layers of rock don't have
any dinosaurs in them. They have some reptiles — and if you go down a little farther
there's some amphibia and fish — and we get more and more marine as we go down
in the layers until, finally, what we have at the bottom is
entirely the kind of animals that would live in the ocean. So this whole scene, from bottom to top, is an orderly distribution
of forms of animals and that's what we're…
that's the fossil record. Well, let me take you back
to the dinosaurs, then, for a second, because one of
the big questions, again, was what caused all
the dinosaurs to go extinct? You mentioned the… the asteroid. But now let's talk
about from a Genesis paradigm. How do we explain that? When we look at the fossil
record of dinosaurs, we find that they
are killed off in layers. Also, we have… we have
the Triassic kinds of dinosaurs here. And then we have the Jurassic
kind of dinosaurs higher up, and then we have
the Cretaceous kind of dinosaurs at the very top. And right at the very top,
we find Tyrannosaurus rex, and these duckbilled dinosaurs, and the kind of things
we're studying in Wyoming because we're just
right below that layer which ends the Cretaceous. And so, I think, this process of burial
couldn't just be explained by a single asteroid. It has to involve
something — dare I say — much bigger than that. And certainly on a grander scale
that encompass the whole earth. And we find evidence
for this in the… in the direction of currents that are flowing
over the surface of the earth. For example, in the rocks, if you've ever seen crossbedded
sandstone — it's sandstone that lies at an angle like this — that sandstone tells us which direction
the current was moving that deposited that sand. If we look at these flow
of currents over the surface of the earth — and in all
these different layers of rock, from the Cambrian all
the way up to the… to the top — we find out that it seems to be
going the same way over wide areas of the earth, like there's some kind
of flow taking place that's different from
anything we have today. Today we have a basin, the settlements go
into that basin from all sides, and we would see evidence of currents flowing
in that basin. In the fossil record, what we see is the currents tend
to ignore the basins. They tend to go right
across the basins, and they tend to be looking at something much
bigger than just a part of North America, for example. And, in fact,
the currents in North America and South American
behave the same way, just to give you one example. So that, to me, suggests that in the development
of the fossil record, we had processes going
on that were bigger than anything we
can imagine today. It doesn't say
today's processes, continued over a long
period of time, would have produced this. It says the only reasonable way
to produce this is to have processes
that are not going on, on the earth today. When you look
at the rocks themselves, you don't see evidence for
the passage of a lot of time. Dr. Brand and I have
been working on this for the last 15 years, just going through tens of
thousands of meters of sediment, looking for evidence
of the passage of time between the layers. And the evidence would be that the layers have
been disrupted or re-suspended or moved around by organisms, or roots, or…
or whatever processes. Once you deposit a layer, if it's just sitting there
for a year — say nothing of a hundred years,
or a thousand years — that layer is going to be
affected by its environment. So, in the
current process today, if we have some sediment
that gets laid down, what you're saying is that there are processes going
on that would radically change that layer. Sure. Roots penetrate soil
and move it around. Organisms if it's… well,
even above sea level, but below sea level
you have worms that live all over the bottom
and other organisms, and they're burrowing
constantly in the sediment — that's where they
get their food. And so if you bring in
a new supply of food for them, they're going to devour that and they're going to mess
up all the internal structure. So we look at these layers and we say is the internal
structure still there, or has it been disrupted by
organisms which equals time? Not a lot of time,
necessarily, but time. If you see no disruption, then you're going to have a hard
time explaining that sediment in a long period of time. And what did you find down
in the fossil record? We found tens of
thousands of meters with no disruption whatsoever. One layer, after layer, after layer, after layer —
and we were looking at it in a centimeter scale. We were walking through thousands of meters
of sediment looking at centimeter-level disruptions. And they were very
difficult to find. You can find them
once in a while. But not the kind
that we would expect if there'd been the passage
of a lot of time.
