California Dinosaurs and Their Environment

my pleasure to welcome Richard Hilton as a professor of geology and paleontology at Sierra College in addition he serves as Panta logical consultant and his chairman of the Sierra College Natural History Museum dick has published widely in the field of vertebrate paleontology and has written a book entitled dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles of California which will be available as you heard in the lobby as published in nineteen or 2003 by University of California Press he's led Natural History trips to Africa South America the Galapagos Baja and has contributed many paleontological digs in western United States today he's going to speak about California dinosaurs and the environments in which they lived what a group and I'm kind of scared because I have to follow that last talk but I'll give it a shot anyway we need to turn down the white sea route I got some dark slides here anyway I've been giving talks around the state concerning my book in my book is dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles so it says dinosaurs California when to look at it not just to get you to buy it it's about a whole lot of other reptiles which I decided not to get into today I decided maybe I'll talk a little bit about the dinosaurs the few dinosaurs that we have found in California and maybe get to Baja as well but talk about you know what was the environment like back then and how did they live here we have a a chart of geologic time and if you unwound all of this you know this would go way down through the second floor down there we think of dinosaurs is old but they're not very old the dinosaurs four and a half billion years of Earth history dinosaurs didn't come about until a little earlier than 250 million years ago so they're really late comers and very sophisticated critters and they live during the Mesozoic most people recognize the Jurassic they're from Jurassic Park now it's kind of centered in the Mesozoic a lot of other things going on here evolution of mammals and flowering plants and birds and pterosaurs so a lot of things happening in the Mesozoic this is a good time for life on Earth and we've been going a little into plate tectonics here if you remember I don't know if he got into this I missed the early part but if you went back to the early Mesozoic there was basically one continent and one ocean and you notice California's gun in the ocean during the early Mesozoic so we don't really rise out of the sea a little bit in the Triassic we have a few islands I think of the Triassic if you want to remember that remember that's when the dinosaurs first evolved and I think the first dinosaur had three rear ends okay during the Triassic no sorry about okay okay a little little plate tectonics this is taking us I think if I can read it yet to the Jurassic the Late Jurassic and with the plate tectonics at that time we had a spreading Ridge off the coast and the seafloor was migrating towards the east and the continent here was migrating towards the west and the shoreline would have been a burn if you know where a burn is on i-80 okay or maybe no this is this is Late Jurassic the shoreline would have been a little bit actually west here about where it says shelf there is Sierra Nevada eroding depositing you know as is Sierra Nevada the original Sierra Nevadas like the Andes and is it eroded away it deposited layer upon layer upon layer of sediment in the valley whereas in the seafloor all the sediment was being deposited there as it you got older she got away from the ridge it gets scraped off so this becomes I'm wiggling this because I just had a cup of coffee and I'm shaking like hey anyway the the Coast Range is is scraped off the seafloor there so it's all munched and crunched in and a real mess whereas the rocks of the Great Valley group are nice and flat line and the the boundary in between was a Vacaville right about in there so here is the approximate Late Jurassic shoreline and the shoreline doesn't look a lot if you if you went to the beach in the Late Jurassic it probably wouldn't be a whole lot different than what the Northern California shoreline looks like today but keep in mind we had a bigger Pacific Ocean and that meant that bigger waves to and stronger currents perhaps but a shoreline not too much different than ours different plants and animals but in the southern part you notice an interior coastal desert so we had forests in the north and an interior desert in the south that's kind of what it is today isn't it we have for us in the north and interior deserts in the South in the Jurassic as today as I was looking at this picture last night I realized that that's not a fern that's another cycad but what the heck what are you gonna do anyway in the Late Jurassic we do have evidence lots of evidence of plants these are from the Monta del oral formation near Orville and lots of firms although that's not one and lots of cycads we also find some ginkgos cycads if you well we can maybe you've got a look at these yeah no not yet oh gosh I've done it very good there we are anyway we'll look at four ferns and cycads later but you might know the sago palm that's some people call that it that's a type of psychotic so I can't what's interesting when we find these leaves near Oroville these big fronds of ferns and cycads we don't find this the trunk of these things and I'm wondering what ripped the the fronds off because normally they don't fall off so that's got me kind of wondering so there's some Late Jurassic plant fossils and we do have some Late Jurassic dinosaurs in California that's it that those are our Late Jurassic dinosaurs we have one from the trail formation actually two bones of a tooth here it's so bad we can't tell what kind of tooth if it looks kind of like a meat-eating dinosaur and we have part of a rib and the rest are a few fragments the trail formation by the way is in the Sierra Nevada now I never thought we'd ever find dinosaurs in the Sierra Nevada but a guy named Jeff Christie who's been working in some conglomerates and conglomerates are made out of rounded rocks and to places you can get conglomerates is in river channels and the in beach deposits well he figured out that these bones are coming from river channels braided streams and he was sharp enough he's got amazing guy because he took me up looking for dinosaur bones up there and he could see him and I couldn't and I'm usually pretty good at finding these things but we've got part of a rib from I think it's a carnivorous dinosaur I'm not sure we've got a tooth I think it's a carnivorous dinosaur the other one was found not in the Sierra Nevada they went on the upper left but I'm saying Knoxville quote because that's the old name but this is Late Jurassic Rock that remember the bottom of all those layers that were eroding out into the valley well they got tilted up and are exposed right up against the coast range rocks and in these up tilted rocks a local rancher out there found this rock this fossil and it's a mid hand or foot bone from a dinosaur and I've showed a lot of people and nobody knows what kind so that's our dinosaurs from the Late Jurassic this is gonna to get worse and worse now in the South we have evidence for deserts in the South interior coastal deserts but even deserts have oases don't they and I love the film I saw on the Namib Desert where they showed the elephants migrating from waterhole to waterhole I think man elephants and lions in a desert well you could have dinosaurs in a desert too because there is water if you look and if there's water there's plants and if there's plants there's animals so there's something to eat and what we have here there's Bob Reynolds are some little meat-eating dinosaurs and basically that's all we know little meat-eating dinosaurs because we can give it some names but all we've done is they've named the tracks that they found so all we have is some trucks now it kind of makes me wonder you know you're supposed to have more plant eating creatures than meat-eating creature and it makes me wonder what are these things eating maybe they were eating insects or something or maybe they were eating some of the first mammals or you know who knows but we haven't found any plant eating dinosaurs in the impressions they left their footprints in the sand dunes so the picture up on the right is the coral dunes in Utah and you notice our plants in the background so this is if you want to imagine the environment that's probably a pretty good environment and then we have some modern dinosaur tracks over here and birds are basically dinosaurs the boundary between birds and dinosaurs has gone away because we're finding lots of dinosaur fossils with feathers now and we'll talk about a little bit about that later here is the only Early Cretaceous dinosaur found in California and this is kind of why I'm here today is I got lucky I was out looking for these big coiled shells we call ammonites that are related to the chambered nautilus they're kind of an octopus in a shell I was out looking for those and I accidentally found bones and they were in a couple of hard lumps we call concretions and I just kind of took the lumps home with me I realized there were bones but I figured they were gonna be some sort of seagoing critter because I was looking in see going in see deposits marine deposits and years later a friend of mine worked them out and when I saw them I went whoops this is not a swimming critter this is a running critter and it turned out to be the lower leg hind leg and foot most of it anyway of a hips alofa knot and that's about a deer sized dinosaur and these are little herbivores probably with fast running legs because something was chasing it you know there had to be carnivores at the time but this is the only Early Cretaceous dinosaur that we have and we look in the rocks and we find in the rocks we find the fronds stems of early redwoods of cycads and ferns so this is must be what the carnivore excuse me the herbivores were eating you have to have something to eat so these were forest animals and they might have been camouflaged to live in the forest so a lot like deer just kind of sneaking around hoping that enough nothing they're gonna eat it and if something does chase it you can run really fast so here's a painting and by the way I didn't point out that all the artwork that you're seeing here is done by a guy named Ken kirtland who is a meter reader okay that walked into my office one day when I was just starting my my book and said he was real interested in dinosaurs and he was an artist he'd never had a day of training but I said well show me some of your artwork and he did and I grabbed him by the collar and I didn't let go for about four years okay now we're going to the Late Cretaceous so we're talking 70 million years ago probably a good round number a lot of these fossils are from the Chicot formation if you know our Chico California is the Chico formation kind of laps up on the western side of the sierra nevada and we've been hunting fossils there for years in fact I was out yesterday hunting fossils when I lost my glasses but some of the things we find in this formation are seeds and I thought wow these are really interesting and so I collected all the seeds that could possibly find and I sent them to the seed people this the paleo seed people they know what the heck they were I took them to a good friend of ours who is a seed botanist she says I don't know what they are I ended up identifying one of them actually these up here because I had this great big monkey puzzle tree cone and the receipts in it and I took the seeds out and whoa I've seen that and it turned out to be an eric area monkey puzzle three and then I have a friend who is a specialist on cycads and so I took some of the seeds to him anyone yep that one that one Gotland that one that one so we we have a lot of cycad seeds we have Eric area seeds the rest of them are still a mystery some of them might have been seen ferns and other ones may be flowering plants we do have lots of leaves of flowering plants as you see here and again I collect up up all these leaves of flowering plants and I send them to a guy in Denver and I send them a guy in Berkeley I'm excuse me in Santa Barbara nobody knows what these things are and the reason is they don't match they're different than the modern leafy trees are what's also interested interesting is how fast these flowering plants come into the fossil record it's like all of a sudden somebody went boom and all these plants are moving in so it's probably safe to say that these evolves somewhere in an isolation and then maybe once the continents bumped into each other or you got a raft of material these things and spread to the rest of the world but they seem to have a very quick origin on this planet we're still finding ginkgos you know ginkgo biloba it really doesn't help by the way I know that now and cycads more cycads so again we're getting a picture of this early forest and its really neat not only to know ok here's these dinosaurs but what what kind of an environment did they live in well more cycads more ferns and notice the the cycads have cones and inside those cones are our seeds ferns don't have seeds at least modern ferns some of the older ones did but modern ferns reproduce with spores we found in the Chico formation a beautiful trunk of a seat well affirmed let's just call it a tree fern and there's a tree fern on the right but it even had some it's little proper roots on the side there so you find something like this we found this big concretion and we could see something was in it so I got a sled you know we're beaten on the side of this thing and the thing pops open and can you imagine Wow look at that you know here's a fern tree a tree fern right in front of me Equus sedum you might know a scouring rush horse tail they call it you know this this guy right here this very ancient plant actually evolved in the Paleozoic way before the dinosaurs were around and we find it stems in the rock again we find gingko in the rock so we're getting a picture of this forest and of course the Eric area my wife and I and my son we took a trip to Chile about a year year ago last winter because it's summer down there and I had seen these pictures of the Eric area forests and we've got a lot of the movies that they're doing on dinosaurs and they're doing it in the Eric area forest and I wanted to see this this is real important to me and this is kind of neat because you get the smoking volcano in the background so if you put the dinosaur in here you've got the classic dinosaur diorama they almost always have a smoking volcano in the back and again more redwoods not the same redwoods we had the day but similar to today so redwoods go back a long time and we find lots and lots of redwoods in the fossil record so our redwoods of today that we have the Sequoia gigantea in the Sierra and the sempervirens that we have in the coast and then we have the the dawn redwood the few little remnant areas of redwoods are remnants of Mesozoic forests so when you see movies with dinosaurs and redwood trees right on that's what it was like of course redwood trees aren't very good to eat or and of course we're again the leafy trees come in too you know we get not only conifers but we get leafy trees and we get flowering plants think about how lucky we are to have flowering plants if we didn't have flowering plants you'd be like a cow you would have to eat all day long wouldn't you okay but we get to harvest the seeds we're basically grass seed dependent aren't we you have your cereal you have your breads rice you know without you know and then of course you eat the cow that eats the grass too but just think of we didn't have those flowering plants and it's it's late here in the in the Mesozoic we start to get lots of flowering plants oh by the way not grasses yet grasses are flowering plants that came later so I always look in the dinosaur movies for grasses because uh they got that one wrong the other thing we're finding in these forests and remember all these fossils are fossils that are floating out to sea they're plants and seeds and things that are floating floating out to sea we're finding land snails that floated out to sea and sunk to the bottom so we've got about three different types now of land snails that we're crawling and eating needs plants back in the Mesozoic and believe it or not we've got I'm putting tortoise in quotes here because it's not a true tortoise but it's a land turtle at least going toward a tortoise we have Bassel lemmy's which Howard Hutchinson here at Berkeley thinks was actually a land roaming tortoise like turtle much like the Galapagos tortoise that we see over here so dinosaurs lots of plants snails tortoises we're starting to get a better look at our Mesozoic forests and here's our Stabler with Chad Stabler's Bassel amis you talk about a roadkill look at that these things don't look real pretty sometimes when we find them but we get enough shell and we get enough bone that we can actually figure out what they are artists and Chad Stabler feature prominently in my book they found dozens and dozens of mosasaur seagoing reptiles and turtles and marine turtles and pleaseyou sores and even dinosaurs so these are great folks these folks are from Fresno California so through fossils a 70 million year old forest is coming to light and we're learning more about the forests of the Sierra now when the fossils that we're finding well here's a another friend of mine his name is Eric curry and you'll notice wherever they're supposed to be two dots above the oh I haven't figured that out how to do that yet okay this is brand new to me I was just praying it would come up on the screen today anyway Eric up there on the upper left Eric found the the first mammal bones the oldest mammal bones and these are little things that's one bone in several different looks of a little thing you know maybe a one of the early pouched mammals from california so we have mammals in our forests as well and eric has found what the oldest mammal birds pterosaurs this guy works up in the Orval area again in the Chico formation and he has brought us a wealth of information he found this bone which turned out to be from ik the Auris and we have it pictured kind of like a turn here maybe a plunge diver like a part like a turn maybe after fish and we think that because it still has teeth in the beak remember these are dinosaurs and dinosaurs evolving - Birds takes a while to develop a true beak and this one still has the teeth like Archaeopteryx does later on they they get a beak and then some of them actually go back and get toothed like structures in their beak if they're catching fish so these are modern dinosaurs oh that one on the right what is that that's a pelican yeah yeah so and that's winter would not look like a dinosaur yeah I think they're really dinosaur looking aren't they so these are our modern dinosaurs Eric also found some modern Birds you know that probably had beaks in the Chicot formation he also found pterosaur wing bones interestingly enough here's we've got we've got Alma and we've got the fourth metacarpal I go out and look with him and one time we were looking you do this with a sledgehammer these are real hard rocks sledge hammer and chisel that's how you find these rock these fossils anyway I was standing on this big rock and I was beating on rocks all day and breaking them open and not finding anything he goes out the next week and on the rock I'm standing on he finds this finger bone of a pterosaur which that's this one here which scales out to be the size of a Pteranodon maybe is a Pteranodon that's our best bet we've shown it some scientists this Pteranodon that he found this bone would have scaled out to be 18 feet so you're talking about a small plane here here's a Golden Eagle so compare the Pteranodon to the Golden Eagle now of course if you go to Texas Texas big you know they've got a 40-footer down there now this is a painting that Ken did and from one of our articles that went on the front of Cal geology but whether these things actually fished we're not sure some people think this long beak might have been something like used like a marabou stork marabou stork eat dead animals and so they use the beak to probe for carrion you know deep in the between the ribs of a dead zebra or something so maybe these things were actually eating dead diners and not fishing like this so here we have our modern bird we have our egg the Ernest and Pteranodon here taking wing in California so back to dinosaurs a little bit surprisingly there are you know a few finds of dinosaurs in California even though most of it was underwater almost all of the finds have to be creatures that maybe drown in a river and floated out to sea and settled to the bottom the first dinosaur in California was found by Allan Benison he was seventeen years old when he did this he lived in a little town called Goose T not in the San Joaquin Valley and he would ride his bicycle 35 miles one way to the hills to look for fossils and he ended up finding a dinosaur this was I think 1937 if I remember right 36 37 when he was 17 years old that that those bones he found her right here in this building and there he is on the right yeah he was about 83 I think when I took this picture that's Chad Stabler the other guy on the left by coincidence there you know Chad and I were gonna go out looking and Alan called me up and says I'm gonna be in town can we go fossil hunting so we all went together and we did actually find part of a plesiosaur that day unfortunately Alan passed away early this year but he had a long good life believe me this is a drawing and done by a WPA artist of venison's hadrosaur his duck-billed dinosaur that he found that they called early on a truck Adhan okay now chester stock was a scientist here at berkeley and ended up kind of moving on to the California Institute of Technology and there's lots of stories here I don't have time to tell but he went into the panocha hills looking for reptiles and he did find lots and his teams found a lot I should say that and amongst them he found his team found the two most complete dinosaur skeletons that we found in California now the panocha hills is if you get on i-5 you know about time you're about to fall asleep there on the right that's where the panocha hills are anyway a lady named Betty Smith found one of these again a duck-billed dinosaur called sorrel ofus and here they are this is the old days back in the late 30s excavating this dinosaur and right here they've set off some black powder to blast away the rock on the top we don't do much of that anymore here they all are all resting but they're using black power powder and picks and shovels and then dental tools and so forth to excavate this hadrosaur interesting Betty Smith not a lot of women in science back then here she is back in 1939 like the earliest reptiles found in California a gal named Annie Alexander patron of the museum here she was in the field back in the early teens so even though they quote you that wasn't the quite the thing to do women found a way to do it they got in and made important discoveries important contributions so here they're digging up the hadrosaur and you can kind of see there's the head the neck the body and the legs sticking out here there's a close-up of the skull so two fairly complete hadrosaurs here called sorrel Ovitz here they are now you know early days here here they are with a mule and a sled and packing other bones out on their backs tough way to get around back then but you know you didn't have four wheels and here's Ken's depiction you made the skeleton a drawing and then he put flesh on the skeleton now keep in mind that the colors colors don't preserve of course I wouldn't have said soft tissue preserves either so you never know maybe someday we'll have an inkling of color on some of these dinosaurs what we do is we look at other reptiles and the way they're camouflaged and where they're colored and do our best you might notice that the nice little horn on the top that's probably a resonating chamber for sound and they actually had a little pouch on their nose that they kind of puffed up as well the bone structures suggest that so these might have been hurting animals really no defense other than maybe if they called and warned each other about the predators and then hopefully a runaway so there's the skull we didn't get the horn on either one of those skulls you can tell they're plant eaters from this battery of teeth and the teeth just kept coming in and coming in as they worn down which means they're probably eating some pretty rough vegetation other hadrosaur finds in California here's Chad Stabler's whoops wrong one here's Chad Stabler's deines hadrosaur jaw this one's actually from Northern California up in the past kenta area found by Jared Jared case he was out looking for shark's teeth and this is Brad Rainey's hadrosaur femur from down near San Diego and there's a lot more there's a lot more I just thought I'd picture a few so we rarely get whole animals often times you read headlines you know dine at such-and-such a dinosaur found at such and such a place well your picture and whole skeleton they might have one end joint of a bone and that'll be yet but that's enough to tell what you have Brad Rainey he's done it at the San Diego Natural History Museum found fairly complete and kylo sore and here they are digging it up the these photos are courtesy of the San Diego Natural History Museum and here Brad is preparing it out this was oh probably 20 years ago in what they called the bubble at the San Diego Natural History Museum that's no longer there that completely remodeled it's really beautiful and this is what we think it looked like it since been named elite Dipel to Coombe sigh you notice lots of plates and spikes this is kind of the Sherman tank of dinosaurs it did not have to run fast it has very stubby short legs nobody's gonna fuss with this okay it's it's armored plus it has this club now imagine an animal at several tons that then takes in whips around this this club this is going to punch right through your ribs or crush your skull you know if this thing's healthy you don't fuss with it okay Pat and 2zi another friend of mine lives nearby brought me that bone up there and we were not checked it out again in the Chico formation and all it was is the midsection of a bomb but I looked at it and I thought you know that's a very very strong bone and I thought you know that might be a terrestrial animal it'd have to be a dinosaur because if you're swimming you don't have to have quite the strength you know to hold up a body at the time we couldn't do anything about it so I just said that's a real interesting bone I wish we had the end joint so we might be able to tell what it was but all we had is this mid section of the bone well a couple years went by and guy named Greg Erickson was here at the time in fact he's the one you might have seen on TV that it just figured out the age of Tyrannosaurus Rex because he counted the Rings in the rib bones anyways he's being able to tell how old these creatures were by kind of like tree rings in the anyway we he said you know if you'll thin section that bone make a nice thin slice of it and send it to me I might be able to tell you so we did and we sent him that we sent him the thin sections there they are on the upper right and I get this phone matching message yeah that's Greg you know I think he got a horrible and I went what was it it played it again a hard part I just didn't it was fuzzy and I thought you know that's either a sauropod or a theropod then I thought you know they didn't have sauropods this time I think it's a theropod so anyway I did get a hold of them and this was the first evidence of a meat-eating dinosaur at least as far as bones go in California Menaul so tell us what was a young dinosaur so it was a big young dinosaur my best guess and this is only a guess would be an albertasaurus because you do find albertasaurus all the way up to Alaska and we find them in Baja they were probably here so here is our Late Cretaceous Sierra River scene with birds and palm trees and redwood trees okay so this is what it might look like along a river in the Late Cretaceous now we're gonna go a little further but I just might end up stopping because I want to make sure we have enough time here I kind of left myself an out at this point and yes there are no dinosaurs at dinosaur point despite the fact that says wildlife viewing ok nobody really knows where that term came from they think it might have been the shape of the point but I have asked and asked and gone to the forest rangers there's nothing in the literature sorry no dinosaurs at dinosaur point that's on Pacheco pass going over ok so let's go down to Baja because if you go 150 miles south of San Diego lots of dinosaurs there was a terrestrial deposit that is river deposits with lots of bones and leaves and logs and it's a bad Lance so it's kind of a desert topography it's being eroded and bones were exposed in the 60s and 70s guy named William Morris accompanied by a local scientists here Harley gar bonnie and many others went to Baja to search for dinosaurs and they did quite well here we have the hip bone from a large duck-billed dinosaur it's the left ischium of Lambeosaurus la de cádiz well I might as well speak in Latin huh anyway it's a big dinosaur bone huh and here they are digging them out they can't help it but this guy I really like we actually went down to Mexico a year ago looking for this guy but he unfortunately passed away but this is Pedro Fonseca and he was described by one of the scientists there is the strongest skinny man in the world he just happened on their digs and he could speak a little English and he recognized he said ah a Spina he he recognized he had a dinosaur spine and they thought they hired the guy and he ended up just being a great worker he coordinated the digs and he worked with them for years and he lived down there at El Rosario so very hard work hard getting down there no paved roads at the time you'll notice big bones were found and they had to sometimes even break the bones to put them on stretchers and then they had to take him out this very very rugged terrain they found this Lambeosaurus lot Okada's it is a huge hadrosaur and kind of a typical hadrosaur here but they found this bone and that's this bone here so they they scale their specimen out to dog 50 feet one of the biggest hadrosaurs around again a duck-billed dinosaur a resonating crest at the top they even found lots of skin impressions so we not only know what this thing look like but we know what its skin look like exactly in that cool yeah yeah about 20 feet high with the crest I always hate those questions but that's probably about right another ankylosaur was discovered down there another one of these Club guys the Europe you--you'll place' lists and one toe short compared to the others and the fewer the toes it turns out kind of the faster they can run so maybe this one ran a little faster or something but again a very very armored skull you know plates and spikes and again the tail club you don't want to fuss with this herbivore and then we have some book birds that are birds it's good or NIT alignment means bird mimic we have some dinosaurs or very much like birds and we're finding out that dinosaurs and birds they blur we're finding dinosaurs with feathers we're finding dinosaurs with feathers with the basically flight feathers some of these dinosaurs I'm about to show you may have been dinosaurs that evolved the birds and then went back to being dinosaurs in other words became flightless afterwards now this one you notice it even has a bird beak it doesn't have teeth very very fast running dinosaur big eyes maybe a nocturnal theatre it could have been a meat-eater it could have been a plant-eater you know tortoises don't have and turtles don't have teeth do they could have been an omnivore they have actually found one one species that has sin plates in its beak kind of like a flamingo or a duck they don't know whether they're all like that but we're learning a lot big brains for the size of big brain on these things we've got feathers on this one similar to the LOS Velociraptor we all know Velociraptor the one had jumped up on the tables chasing the kids in Jurassic Park yeah you don't want to get near these lots of teeth fast runners notice again the fewer toes that touch the ground the faster you can run saurornitholestes okay here we have Troodon Troodon was the first identified dinosaur found in the new world and lots of fossils actually it's Troodon formosus again probably a a feathered dinosaur closely related to birds in fact some of these dinosaurs these bird-like dinosaurs are more closely related to Archaeopteryx which is the bird the first bird then they are to two other dinosaurs oh they also look at the grasping hands so very grasping hands for manipulation so you're running after something you catch it and then you can eat it you know there were larger dinosaurs albertasaurus we've just mentioned adults we're 25 feet long there's a tooth on the right from Baja so these are like t-rex only smaller and another species found new species found in Baja by Harley with car Bonnie la pequeña anomalous 2/3 the size of t-rex a big massive skull the skull bones are more massive than any one of the large dinosaurs huge nasty teeth look at those so again a a carnivore or and maybe scavenger you know some people think Horner thinks that t-rex was not a carnivore it was actually a scavenger he didn't hunt in other words went up maybe chased other dinosaurs off their prey and ate the prey ate the dinosaurs and a little dinosaur and a cute little looks like a little songbird but this was a second this is the first bird found on the west coast Alex Anna aleck soreness antecedents found in Baja so early birds on the west coast and then other critters there were Crocs crocodilians crocodiles this is a a crocodile and there were alligators notice the different snouts so in the rivers got to be careful when you get a drink of water you've seen the pictures of Africa haven't you and lots of evidence of plants in Baja as well palms and conifers scales and needles air carriers redwoods ginkgos and lots of broadleaf trees so it tells us that Baja is different than it is today there although there are forests in the higher elevations it was probably fairly lush right on down to the coast we we actually had that log donated to them to our museum so late cretaceous Baja California that's what it might have looked like ginkgos and palms and broadleaf trees and lots of dinosaurs and crocodilians look into the Late Cretaceous past just south of San Diego so you can kind of assume that these dinosaurs were 150 miles north - well all good talks or all talks at the end don't they this was actually given to me by Ellen Benison he says you got to have this and so yeah that's me but repente the Cenozoic is near here is the asteroid impact that occurs at the end of the Mesozoic 65 million years ago somewhere you know 70 to 80 percent of the species went extinct all of the dinosaurs except for the birds go extinct I've always said this has been something I've been talking about a lot of years but I thought you know everything went extinct that couldn't crawl in a hole if you couldn't crawl in a hole you went extinct if you were a land animal and I thought well what about crocodiles crocodiles and burrow holes and they'll stay in there in the shade and the cool and wait out a drop so even the crocodiles okay books are available if you like one that at noon we'll have some out here in the table thank you very much questions now be careful you got to remember I am NOT a dinosaur expert I wrote a history but I'll give it a shot go ahead yes mm-hmm okay well asking Windsor the rocks of San Fernando Valley you go lay down your well you're looking at lots of layers of rock and then they get all warped up so you could be old layers or young layers if you're finding big bones chances mostly see shots okay you're probably finding a whale bone or a seal you know one of the you know the pinnipeds I would be just a wild guess at this stage but I ought to point out that collecting vertebrate fossils is illegal on government land okay so you do have to get permits yeah yeah if you find them on private land and you get the permission of land owner fine but don't take them home you know bring them to the attention of a scientist or let the scientists dig them up because you know throw it in a drawer or put on the mantle to get on the mantle first and then they go to the drawer and then you move or you clean and it goes in the garbage science loses yes in the back well there there's no such thing as there weren't dinosaurs that lived in the sea okay some of them you know probably swam on the coast a little bit and through lagoons but we have lots of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and Pilatus oars mosasaurs turtles the majority of my book is animals that lived in the sea but dinosaurs did not live in the sea good question yes yeah I actually got an email yesterday that somebody at U of P had a new dinosaur and I'm going UOP new dinosaur maybe my books not up-to-date anymore it turns out it's it's not from California so yes as far as I know it's up-to-date completely up-to-date now there are there are people that are going to go back to Baja and do some more looking but as far as I know there hasn't been any new reptiles Mesozoic reptiles found in California but it eventually it will go out of date on it well I I had to keep right up to the end you know huh get these things in there yes sure yeah but probably not very far but you're right the ones at the Taylorsville area in the Sierra Nevada we're probably 40 miles from Nevada and it's possible but that's a long way you know and bones tend to get chewed up in a riverbed so but yeah and all these these carcasses that are flowing floating out to sea a carcass could float a long way down a river so yeah they may be cavada dinosaurs it's possible yes other questions okay thank you very much

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 23,266

Rating: 4.712707 out of 5

Keywords: California, dinosaurs, environment, fossils

Id: L4F1Rae_6V4

Length: 50min 47sec (3047 seconds)

Published: Fri May 09 2008

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[u/alllie]

Dinosaurs once lived in California, but what does the fossil record tell us about these past inhabitants? What was the environment like at that time and with whom did they interact? The answers to many of these questions remain in flux, but we have learned a great deal during the last 100 years. Ricajrd Hilton of Sierra College takes you on a journey back in time to when California was smaller, but alive with creatures and plants — some familiar, and many not.