Clinton Presidential Center Presents "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs"

[Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] this is [Music] Christmas [Music] one of the best [Music] Christmas [Music] one of the best [Music] assistant [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you thank you foreign foreign foreign foreign [Music] thank you foreign thank you [Music] foreign [Music] this on oh it is now good evening welcome to the Clinton Center we are so excited that you're here tonight for a very very special program my name is Stephanie Street and I serve as the executive director of the Clinton foundation and behalf of all of our staff and volunteers from the Clinton Foundation The Clinton Library and the Clinton School of Public Service let me again just say a special thank you and a welcome to you this is going to be really an extraordinary program we've been looking forward to for a long time and please allow me to exp extend a special thank you to our members and our donors whose financial support makes programs like this possible please join me in giving them a hand so tonight we are going to embark on a journey way back in time and our guide is a world-renowned professor paleontologist and best-selling author Dr Steve brusati Dr brasati is the author of the of the international bestseller the rise and fall of the dinosaurs um and he served as the paleontology at paleontology advisor on the Jurassic world film franchise he is named more than 15 new species of dinosaurs and several ancient mammals and his research and his writing has been featured in science the New York Times Scientific American and many more Publications and this probably comes as no surprise to uh to you all tonight but President Clinton is a huge fan and in fact he is the one that suggested that we reach out to Dr Versace and invite him to speak tonight at the Clinton Center and I'm sure you'll hear more about that story of of that famous tweet in just a few moments so tonight's program as you know is being held in conjunction with our temporary exhibition dinosaur Explorer which is an interactive family-friendly exhibit that invites visitors on an unforgettable adventure and will leave them with a new understanding of the most fascinating living organisms in known history now the exhibit is going to close on October 1st so be sure to catch it before it becomes extinct and make sure you tell all of your friends and Neighbors about it too tonight Dr brusati will discuss where dinosaurs came from how they Rose to dominance why and when most dinosaur dinosaurs became extinct and where we can still see living dinosaur uh descendants today additionally he'll share some stories about he and his students excavate fossils and bones and show how scientists use modern Technologies to study old fossils and after the program Dr brusati will sign copies of his best seller the rise and fall of the dinosaurs which copies are available for purchase here on site by the Clinton Museum Store now a few little housekeeping items just please silence your cell phones and I also want to recognize a few other special guests before we get started tonight as you all know here in Arkansas August is back to school month and so prior to this program we held our annual Educators reception and I believe some of of our esteemed guests are still stayed over for this program so if you are one of our Educators please stand up and let us recognize and thank you for your extraordinary service please know here at the Clinton Center we strive every day to serve as an extension of your classroom and know how much we value and trust and appreciate all you do for our children and for our community so without further Ado please help me welcome Dr Steve Rosati to the stage [Music] all right well thank you all for coming out I've you know I've done a lot of dinosaur stuff in my life I didn't know dinosaurs at a Presidential Library Museum but here we are I know the president is a big dinosaur Enthusiast mostly because of his grandchildren so it's really a wonderful thing to have this exhibit and I really appreciate the invitation and what I'm going to do here in a little bit of a rapid fire format is I'm going to tell you the story of dinosaurs and I'm going to try to tell you the story of the whole 150 million plus years of evolution of the dinosaurs in about 45 minutes so I won't blather on too much but I'll just say uh I teach at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and I've been there about a decade but I grew up in Illinois and I've been visiting my family this summer and and uh actually when we arrived a few days after that is when I got this invitation from the president to come here so we made it work I'm very happy to to do it I drove down from Champaign Illinois today uh and uh I'm just again really pleased to have this opportunity um it's great to teach and to work in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh and for some of you uh you know younger members of the audience here I've already met a few of you uh both of the Jacks so far and a few others um we got a great paleontology program so this whole thing will be a little bit of an advertisement for what we do but please do keep us in mind you know if any of you want to study paleontology because this University in Edinburgh the university goes back to the 1580s and it's the place where geology is a science star and some of the world's greatest fossils have been found in Scotland including some dinosaurs which I'll tell you about in a little bit so I feel just a really special you know feeling to be able to grow up in the middle of America make my way to Scotland and be able to have this life studying dinosaurs and I'll give you a little snippet a okay so the talk will more or less follow the story I tell in the book which um we'll we'll be signing out there afterwards and anybody wants a signed copy I'll wait until the last one is signed anybody has any questions I'm happy to chat of course when we're doing the books but I published the the book a few years ago it was genuinely one of the biggest shocks of my life but also one of the proudest moments of my life when somebody on I guess the social media platform formerly known as Twitter uh sent me a message one time in October of 2019 saying Bill Clinton said something about your book and I said okay what's that this must be a hoax and he posted a video to this thing where the president was at a summit and he was asked his favorite book that he's read over the year and he said okay the book dinosaurs I couldn't believe it and so and so I I I was just so honored and that started the connection here with the the Clinton Center so um uh so uh just again a big thanks to all of you who put this talk together I've met so many of you today all the volunteers here as well thank you for making this happen okay that's enough enough waffling I want to tell you about dinosaurs again it's 150 million years more actually of evolution I want to cover in 45 minutes and I want to tell you where dinosaurs came from I want to tell you how they rose up to dominance how they grew to huge sizes and ruled the world and how some of them uh sprouted feathers and wings and became the birds of today and then I want to tell you about how the rest of them died out very rapidly in this Extinction event I think that does hold a lot of relevance for us today and so to start telling this story we have to go back actually about 250 million years to when the world looked like this this was the time of the supercontinent of Pangea when all of the land was gathered together into this one enormous land mass that stretched from North Pole to South Pole and this was a really difficult challenging place to call home this world of the supercontinent was hot it was dry there were vast deserts across much of that land but of course organisms adapt organisms always adapt and there were different plants and animals that were really well suited to that desert supercontinent world including some of our earliest mammal ancestors they ruled that world but then catastrophe hit about 250 million years ago these enormous volcanoes started to erupt in what is now Siberia in Russia and as always Russia 250 million years ago now uh anyway um but these volcanoes I know you think humans have ever seen okay don't think the Hawaiian volcanoes Mount Saint Helens pinotubo get those out of your mind these were volcanoes Mega volcanoes they were essentially like Grand Canyon sized Fishers in the earth that opened up and spewed out tsunamis of lava for hundreds of thousands of years and that lava covered a lot of land it scorched a lot of the land but the real problem was is that magma came up it burnt through the Earth before it erupted his lava and that released a lot of carbon dioxide and methane all these nasty greenhouse gases and that caused runaway global warming and that led to a mass extinction and this was the closest that life has ever come to dying out ever since the first living things evolved about 4 billion years ago maybe 95 of all species died in The Inferno and the global warming of those volcanoes but a few things did survive and when I was a student I was particularly interested in this Extinction I wanted to know what lived and What died and how a new world was forged in the aftermath of this and so I spent a lot of time in Poland looking for fossils and maybe Poland doesn't strike you as the kind of place where you would would go and dig up dinosaurs and big fossils it maybe doesn't fit that image you see on the Discovery Channel shows or National Geographic shows of you know some Brawny guy that looks like Indiana Jones going out in the desert and brushing the sand off of the bones that is not what most paleontology or archeology is like and really we can find fossils anywhere where there's the right type of rocks because fossils are the remains of ancient things that are preserved and turned into rock they're encased in rock so Poland happens to have a lot of rocks from the time before that Extinction and then the time after that Extinction which is called the Triassic period and these rocks you often find them in quarries where they mine them to get clay to make bricks and you can read those rocks layer by layer like the pages in a book and you can see the fossils in those rocks and that tells the story of what died and what lived in that Extinction and how a new world was forged afterwards now the fossils we find in Poland most of them are not big skeletons they're not the kind of things you would see at the centerpiece of a museum exhibit but they're a more humble type of fossil they're what we call trace fossils they're basically the marks that these animals Left Behind as they were going about their everyday lives hand prints Footprints drag marks from their tails that kind of stuff and in rocks that are only about one million years after that those volcanoes we start to see these tracks this is a footprint and a handprint and they're really small you can see they're just about an inch long or so so they're they're roughly about the size of a your cat's paw print and they were made by animals that would have looked something like this and we can tell this because we can do the Cinderella thing and see which skeletons can fit the footprints now what you're looking at here is a small animal again about the size of a house cat kind of an awkward looking creature I think I think it looks kind of weird frankly a very long gangly spindly arms and legs really Slim body but you can tell by the look of this thing that it was a fast runner it was agile it was energetic this thing is a reptile it's a type of reptile that had ancestors that survived those volcanoes and this is a type of reptile we call a dinosaur morph and that's just a fancy scientific name and apologies I don't know how you signed dinosaur morph of time that's just the for the very cousins of swords essentially sort of a human ancestor a very close relative of humans this is like the dinosaur version of Lucy and what you're looking at here is what the ancestor of dinosaurs would have looked like and I know this doesn't look like a T-rex or a brontosaurus it's not some big enormous hairy dinosaur but of course all great things have to start somewhere and this is where dinosaurs got their start these humble little reptiles the size of cats trying to eke out an existence in the aftermath of those terrible volcanoes now these first dinosaurs and they're close cousins they were not dominant animals they were not at the top of the food chain they were not very special frankly they were just one of many groups of animals trying to survive during that chaotic time and is the Triassic period unfolded for the next 50 million years these these dinosaurs evolve they changed they gave rise to new species but they were not dominant they were not at the top of the food chain it was other animals that really ruled the Triassic world and we've got a glimpse of some of these in Portugal we've done a lot of field work in Portugal and we've found a graveyard of hundreds of skeletons and when we found the first bones we were hoping oh maybe they're dinosaurs but no the dinosaurs were so small and so rare it's hard to find their fossils in Portugal but instead these hundreds of skeletons are from these types of animals hideous slimy grotesque animal they kind of make my skin crawl I shouldn't say that as a scientist these are amphibians they're basically salamanders and they were the size of cars and these were the animals that ruled the rivers and the lakes back during the time when the first dinosaurs were small and humble but things weren't any better on dry land because the Triassic period this was the age of the crocodiles now today we know crocodiles and alligators they're plenty scary you don't want to run into one there's all kinds of horror stories of people mostly down in Florida running into a gator doing something stupid doesn't usually end well but really frankly I mean alligators crocodiles are not that important today there's none of them back home where I'm from they really only live in the tropics or the subtropics there's only about 25 species of them but back in the Triassic period there were thousands of Crocs and a lot of them lived on the land and some of them were almost the size of buses other ones were top predators some had Spikes all over their bodies some had armor some had sales on their backs some lost all their teeth and had beaks like turtles some walked only on their hind legs if you can imagine a Croc walking on its hind legs this was the age of crocodiles and it was these crocodiles that Ruled the Land when the first dinosaurs were trying to find their way and that's what it was like for the first 50 million years of the history of dinosaurs and their close cousins dinosaurs didn't really get much bigger than horses maybe a few got up to the size of a giraffe they were second-tier animals role players in that Triassic world where the supercontinent was still in existence but then something happened of course something happened and about 200 million years ago is the Triassic period ended the supercontinent began to split apart and of course that's why we have separate continents today and today the ocean fills the gaps you know between the different continents you can see the South American Africa fit together like puzzle pieces that's because they used to be connected and then the continent split apart and the Atlantic Ocean came in to fill the gaps but before the water came in to fill those gaps once again the Earth bled lava and once again there was massive global warming and there was another big Extinction not quite as bad as that 150 million years earlier but still a pretty nasty one and for any of you that maybe have been to New York City you look across the Hudson River over to New Jersey there's a big thick Cliff of rockets called the Palisades that rock is the remnants of the magma from that very moment that the supercontinent was splitting and in fact there's these magma rocks these these rocks that solidified from the Magna magma all along the Atlantic seaboard and so the supercontinent broke apart there was a big Extinction again that Extinction decimated the giant salamanders it decimated the Crocs leaving only a few species the ancestors of today's crocodiles and alligators but the dinosaurs were the Great survivors of that Extinction and we don't know why I wish I could tell you why it would make the story a whole lot more convincing but the fact is we don't know why we know that it happened we know that this Extinction basically wiped out the dinosaur's competitors it spared the dinosaurs but we don't know why that is and there's all kinds of theories maybe the dinosaurs were warm-blooded maybe they grew fast maybe they had feathers to keep them warm and keep their body temperature regular during all these swings and climate maybe they could run faster maybe they were smarter than the other animals all kinds of theories we don't know and I really do think this is one of the biggest mysteries that remains about dinosaurs and there's plenty of mysteries there's still so much we don't know about dinosaurs and I I do think that this one will be solved by somebody in the next generation of paleontologists maybe Jack here who knows maybe somebody else in the room it's a big mystery somebody needs to solve it we don't know the answer but what we do know is that as the Triassic period ended the supercontinent broke apart the next interval of time began this is what we call the Jurassic period And this is the age that dinosaurs became dominant this was the age where dinosaurs evolved their Grandeur they spread around the world they grew to huge sizes they became the top predators the biggest plant eaters in most ecosystems on land and all these familiar species the ones with long necks and horns and spikes and Frills and duckbills and Dome heads and all of those fantastic Sublime things we think of when we think of dinosaurs all the quirky amazing features you can see on these dinosaurs in the exhibit here this is in the Jurassic period when dinosaurs evolve these things and there's a reason that is called Jurassic Park not Triassic Park Triassic Park would be a book and a film about car-sized salamanders and Crocs that walk on their hind legs I think a pretty cool film it probably wouldn't make a billion dollars at the global box office but the Jurassic that's when the dinosaurs we all know and love started to spread around and right now we are finding more dinosaurs than ever before we really are in the Golden Age of paleontology and somewhere around the world somebody is discovering a new species of dinosaur on average once every single week so that's about 50 new species that are found every year and I mean a new species not a new bone not a new skeleton not just another T-Rex but a totally new species and this has been going on for over a decade so since the time I became a paleontologist there's been like well over like a thousand dinosaurs that have been found it's amazing and we're fine and this is really because there's so many more people looking for dinosaurs than ever before and like so many fields of research paleontology used to be a very narrow very esoteric field in some ways it still is but it used to be something that if you wanted to be a paleontologist you pretty much had to study or work at you know some of the Posh universities in the US and Canada and Western Europe that was pretty much it but now there's people all over the world young boys young girls that didn't used to be such a thing but going out all over the place studying dinosaurs finding their own dinosaurs and I have colleagues in China Brazil Argentina South Africa Mongolia that grew up with Jurassic Park and that's really what sparked a lot of this and so people are now finding dinosaurs all over the world and people are finding dinosaurs in so many interesting places that we're even finding them in Scotland believe it or not and believe it but it's a weird thing because the very first dinosaur fossil in Scotland was discovered right around the time I was born and that was in the mid 80s and it was only then I mean people have been finding dinosaurs in America for much much much longer people never even knew there were dinosaurs in Scotland but now we keep finding a lot of new ones and these are important dinosaurs because they are Jurassic age dinosaurs and they help tell us how dinosaurs spread around the world and grew to big sizes and became dominant and these Scottish dinosaurs are about 170 million years old and most of them come from one place an enchanted place a place I think is one of the most beautiful places in the world a place where they've started to film a lot of big Hollywood movies because of the gorgeousness of the scenery and this is a little island off the west coast of Scotland's called the Isle of Skye and maybe some of you have been there maybe some of you have tried the really nice whiskey they make there it's called talisker they have it down in the 42 bar I saw how about that I'm always trying to get them to sponsor our digs but it hasn't happened but it's a wonderful place guide beautiful place a very popular with tourists now and I mean just look at those landscapes but those Landscapes are carved some of them are carved out of Jurassic age rocks that are full of fossils and so we go we look every year we go out and I bring my students out there and I teach my students how to search for fossils and dig up dinosaurs now it's a challenging place to work the weather let's say is about the complete opposite of like today's Arkansas weather um you know it's cold it's wet it's always damp it's windy um it's Scotland and uh and almost all the fossils are found along the coast so we're always battling the tides and so you can see this is May okay and I grew up in Illinois right I mean I'm from the Chicago area like I know what cold is this is a different kind of cold but it's worth it because we find some amazing fossils there and it's no exaggeration and I mean this completely that my students always find the best fossils more reason for maybe some of you to come and study with us in Edinburgh if you get the chance and I I wish I could say that I find the best fossils because it's always a little bit of a competition when we're out there looking for fossils you know but it's always my students find the best fossils and there's no better example and this is Amelia in the middle there she was a student a few years back she was out with us walking along the coastline she noticed something sticking out of the rock it was a bit darker than the rest of the rock it had a bit of a different texture to it that's how she realized it was a fossil she called us over and I looked at it and I said oh my God this is the head of a pterodactyl it was the entire head of one of these pterosaur reptiles that flew over the heads of dinosaurs and it had a wingspan of over eight feet wide it had a wingspan wider than a king-sized bed and we named it last year as a new species we called it York it's a gallic name that's from the the language that actually many people still speak up in the Scottish Highlands anyway I could say a lot more about it except as the younger uh crowd that was I mean Jack will know this for sure pterodactyls are they dinosaurs nope so I'd have to yeah I would just be straying too much if I said more about pterosaurs so that's a trivia thing for uh maybe some of the older crowd here if you're ever in a in a quiz or something pterodactyls are not dinosaurs they're dinosaur cousins but we find them and we find mammals and we find frogs and salamanders and all kinds of things on the Isle of Skye we find that fossils from the whole ecosystem but we're mostly interested in the dinosaurs and again the students find the best fossils and we have students that come from all over the world to study with us this is Moji who came from from Nigeria to do our masters course and she was actually studying the fossil fish so she's using this little tool this angle grinder to cut the the fish bones out of the rock because the rock is really hard it's harder than concrete but if we want dinosaurs well we got to use bigger tools and so we we have to use Diamond tip saws to cut the bones out of the rock literally and this is Doogie Ross who we work with on the islands he grew up on the island he speaks galic as his native language and he's the only guy I know who has literally built his own museum he started collecting fossils and artifacts when he was a teenager he needed a place to put him he found the ruins of a one-room schoolhouse from the 19th century he built it into a museum and then it means he has a lot of saws he knows how to use them so he helps us cut the bones out of the Rock anyway I could go on and on about sky but I want to tell you one story of one discovery that puts into context why these fossils are important and this is a find that we made a few years back at the far Northern tip of the island and I'm taking this picture I'm literally standing in the shadow of the ruins of a 14th century Castle doesn't get much more Scottish than that and look at that sky on the Isle of Skye those of you with good eyesight can tell that's a blue sky there's no rain so why in the world am I taking a photo why am I up on the Hilton why am I not looking for fossils well the problem is this high tide and the waves are lapping against the beach but when the tide goes down that beach turns into a rock platform it juts out about 300 feet into the very frigid Waters of the North Atlantic and we visited there a few years back hoping to find some fossils and we looked all day literally on our hands and knees looking for dinosaur bones dinosaur teeth we found nothing and it was a very frustrating day and the reality is that a lot of days are like that when you go out looking for fossils because you know if it was if it was easy if you found a dinosaur every time you went out everybody would be finding dinosaurs every day you know it there is a challenge it's like gold prospecting or looking for diamonds you know there is this this element of patience and luck that goes into it and this was just uh one of those days that just luck wasn't on our side so about seven o'clock at night or so we start to walk back to our vehicles we start to look at these tide pools and these are just you know the normal tide pools from the Scottish Coast seaweed and Barnacles and limpets and hermit crabs and all that kind of stuff but we started to notice that actually there were a lot of tide pools on this rock platform there were over a hundred of them actually and they're all about the same size and shape each one was about the size of a car tire and then we started to notice that these things actually had a pattern to them there was a bit of a zigzagging like Left Right pattern to that which you can see here a bit of right pattern it's weird you wouldn't expect that if this was just random holes made by the tide and then some of these things we could see from the side we could see they were actually impressed into the Rock so these things were formed by something that was impressing into the soft sand before it hardened into rock now some of these holes were filled with another type of rock that really stood out and helped us see the shape of these holes they're not actually holes they had little bits sticking out one two three four there some of them were paired together there was a bigger horseshoe shaped one a smaller Crescent shaped one in front and again these things are really big which one again about the size of a car tire and so after a few minutes it dawned on us the wait a minute this was actually a great day we had found what we had come to find we had found fossils but just not bones or teeth or skeletons these are trace fossils they are footprints and hand prints but so much bigger than those ones in Poland because we're now in the Jurassic period dinosaurs are getting bigger they're becoming dominant and there's really only one type of dinosaur in fact only one type of animal that's ever lived on the land in the entire history of the earth that was so big that every time its hand or foot hit the ground it left to hold the size of a car tire and that's these types of dinosaurs the ones with the long necks what we call the sauropod Dinosaurs the ones like brontosaurus and Diplodocus now later on in the Cretaceous Period the time after the Jurassic some of these sauropods would become the very biggest animals ever to live on land some of them became literally bigger than Boeing 737 airplanes so remember that the next time if you're on like a Southwest flight or something like that there were dinosaurs that had to hatch from eggs that grew into larger sizes than that plane you're on now these ones in the Jurassic period were merely about the size of three elephants put together but they were some of the first ones becoming really big so we see this in Scotland dinosaurs becoming huge and now the more we look the more Footprints we find and one of my students page she like me is from America she's from Nevada uh and she moved out to Scotland to study with us Paige has a background in geology but also in engineering so she's very good at building different gadgets and Contraptions and she's become an ace at using drones to fly over these rocks on the Isle of Skye and she's identified lots of different track sites of lots of different dinosaurs it's not only the long neck dinosaurs we have Footprints and of meat-eating dinosaurs of stegosaurs the ones with the plates on their backs we have duck-billed dinosaurs we have a whole ecosystem of dinosaurs that was living flourishing in Scotland 170 million years ago in the shallow lagoons and on the beaches back then and this is a rendering from an artist a good friend of ours a guy named John hod who's from uh Perth in Scotland the little Perth not the big one in Australia and John is he's great he's a great artist I am not I'm lucky that I work with some great artists uh and John has envisioned this scene where there's been a big storm and one of these lagoons and the storm is breaking and these big dinosaurs are going out to start eating some of the hundreds of pounds of leaves and plants they would need every day to fuel their giant bodies but in the foreground you can see there's something else lurking something that only walks on two legs something that has sharp teeth and claws and these are what we call theropod dinosaurs and that's just the fancy scientific name for the meat eaters the group that includes T-Rex and Velociraptor and also something feathery which we'll see in a minute now these things that we're leaving their Footprints alongside the giant long neck dinosaurs and the Scottish lagoons were actually some of the very oldest Tyrannosaurs they were the ancestors of T-Rex they lived about a hundred million years before T-Rex and they were merely the size of a human so again as we saw with Dinosaurs themselves back in the Triassic period on the supercontinent they started small and humble it took them a long time to become big it was the same with the Tyrannosaurs and so you might ask how did Tyrannosaurs supersize themselves how did they become these ferocious top predators that are so famous that are the stars of the movies well we've learned quite a bit about this from a new fossil that was found a few years back in another place you might not think of when you think of dinosaurs and this is Uzbekistan in Central Asia and some colleagues of mine found the bones of a Tyrannosaur that's an intermediate one it's kind of in between the very oldest Tyrannosaurs that were the size of humans that lived in the Jurassic and the very last Tyrannosaurus like T-Rex which were the size of buses that lived at the end of the Cretaceous and this is a new species that was about the size of a horse so again kind of in between size and we called it Timur lengia we named it after the one of the great Warlords of Central Asia fitting name I think for a Tyrannosaur now what's important about this and I promise you there's a reason why I have this this kind of formless blob of something up on the screen there what you're looking at there is the back end of this Tyrannosaurus skull and that hole is where the spinal cord goes in to the brain now what's important about this is we can put that into a cat scanner and use the x-rays of the cat scanner to see inside just like a medical doctor might use a cat scanner to see inside of our bodies and we can use software to make digital models of the stuff inside the head the brain the inner ear the nerves the blood vessels the sinuses all that stuff that gives us insight into the actual biology and behavior of these animals and what we're able to do is actually reconstruct what the brain of a Tyrannosaur looks like in this brain that blue thing that's the back end of this Tyrannosaurus brain that thing that looks like a pretzel there that's the inner ear and the thing that's hanging down from the pretzel that's the cochlea that's the thing in our ear it's all coiled up but that's the bit of the ear that really senses sound now what's important here is that this Tyrannosaur again it's just about the size of a horse it's not a big top of the food chain animal it's not a dominant animal not yet but it has a brain that is really big for a horse-sized reptile and that cochlea is really long the thing sticking down from the pretzel we know from Modern animals the longer the cochlea the greater range of sounds you can hear that means that these Tyrannosaurs were evolving bigger brains higher intelligence Keener senses while they were still quite small and living in the shadows of other types of dinosaurs maybe as a way to survive there were other giant meat eaters that were alive when this Tyrannosaur was trying to eke out its existence but it was evolving Keener senses and higher intelligence now some of those other big meat-eating dinosaurs died out in the middle part of the Cretaceous and this is another big mystery we don't know why there's very few fossils of that age but what we do know is that there was an Extinction there was some climate change there were changes in the sea levels that wiped out a lot of the incumbent dinosaurs and it left an opening at the top of the food chain a job opening at the top of the food chain these smaller Tyrannosaurs were able to survive that Extinction maybe because they were intelligent and had good senses we don't know but they were able to survive and then that apex predator role was open in Tyrannosaurs rushed in and filled the Gap and that's when Tyrannosaurs supersized their bodies to become the bus-sized monsters that crushed the bones of their prey it heads the size of bathtubs that I could fit inside of and T-Rex absolutely the ultimate dinosaur Predator but what made T-Rex so awesome was not just that it was big it didn't just have bronze but it also had brains it inherited those bigger brains Keener senses from its ancestors so it was its brute strength and its intelligence that made T-Rex the king and the queen of dinosaurs and that's why T-Rex is my favorite dinosaur I know a lot of people say that but that's true of me too I know it's cliched but it is my favorite dinosaur now okay Tyrannosaurus got bigger over time but there was another group of meat-eating dinosaurs that did the opposite they got smaller over time and these were the Raptor dinosaurs and what you're looking at here is the real velociraptor don't believe what you see in the movies and I'm sorry I only worked on the sixth film by that point in the franchise there was little I can do but the real Velociraptor is only the size of a miniature poodle and it was covered in feathers and it even had wings and that's not guesswork that's not the hallucination of a Mad artist that's reality we know this from actual fossils we know that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers and the great thing I took pride in was helping finally get feathers on some of the dinosaurs in Jurassic world Dominion for those of you that saw it last summer there's a new dinosaur in that film called pyroraptor and that one is covered with feathers it has wings that's what Raptors really looked like again this isn't some crazy hypothesis this is reality we know it from real fossils because in 1996 in northeastern China a place called liaoning Province this land of Rolling Hills Farmland factories far off the Taurus Trail it shares a long border with North Korea in 1996 three years after Jurassic Park came out some Farmers working their fields started to notice some really peculiar things in the Rocks they started to find the skeletons of dinosaurs covered in feathers some of them even had wings so what dumb luck right three years after the film comes out if Spielberg tried to put feathers on those dinosaurs he would have been laughed well maybe not laughed out of Hollywood he would have been laughed at um three years later they found the feathers and that's why it took until now to get feathers in some of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs anyway this is something we know there are now thousands of fossils of feather-covered dinosaurs that have been found in China because this part of China back in the Cretaceous Period about 125 million years ago it had the great Misfortune of Being this Lush ecosystem with volcanoes in the distance and occasionally those volcanoes would erupt and bury these entire ecosystems almost like Vesuvius burying Pompeii so it locked into stone all of these fossils with exquisite detail I've been really privileged to work with some great Chinese colleagues to study some of these fossils they are by far the most important dinosaur fossils found in my lifetime first of all they were the fossils that proved once and for all that today's Birds evolved from dinosaurs this Theory goes all the way back to the time of Darwin but finding feathers on dinosaurs that was the final bit of evidence that the Skeptics needed to be converted so we know that birds evolve from dinosaurs but in addition to that these fossils tell us how birds evolve from dinosaurs how did Evolution take a big scary meat-eating dinosaur turn it into a small feathered thing that could flap its wings and fly well these fossils tell us first of all that most dinosaurs had feathers this is part of the tale of a Tyrannosaur and those things that look like scratches in the Rock above the bones those are feathers but very simple feathers they would have been a lot like our hair just little strands and meeting dinosaurs had them they're a plant-eating dinosaurs from China that have them they're small dinosaurs there are dinosaurs that weighed more than a ton that have been found covered in these feathers so this tells us that feathers were a normal thing for Dinosaurs the same way hair is a normal thing for mammals but these dinosaurs could not have used their feathers to fly any more than we can use our hair so feathers must have evolved for something else and we think they probably evolved to help these dinosaurs control their body temperature so it's part of their metabolism to stay warm and most dinosaurs kept those very simple feathers but one group of dinosaurs elaborated those feathers and these were the Raptor dinosaurs and as those Raptors were getting smaller and smaller over time those feathers became ever more densely packed along their bodies and some of these Raptors started to line up some of these feathers on their arms and those feathers got longer and they started to Branch out they turned from things that looked like hairs into things that looked like brushes and some of them even developed Wings proper wings and that's what you're looking at here a fossil wing all of these feathers quill pen feathers flattened branching feathers attaching to the the arm to the hand just like in a bird today but this is not a bird this is a raptor dinosaur we don't call it a bird because its body was too big and its wings were too small that if it flapped those wings it could not power itself through the air that's really the convention of what makes a bird a bird so the first Wings actually show up in dinosaur fossils that are about the size of horses those wings are about the size of a laptop screen no way even the first Wings could be used for flying and we think they probably evolve for display reasons like why a peacock uses this towel it doesn't use that towel to fly it uses it to attract mates to intimidate Rivals and we can even tell the colors of dinosaur feathers we can see the pigment in them under high power microscope so we can see that these feathers had all kinds of gaudy colors and patterns so it was this raptor dinosaur that had that Wing that I just showed you and this is a beautiful fossil one of the the most amazing fossils I've ever had the great luck to study a new species that I was invited to help describe with Jun Chong Lu a great one of China's great dinosaur hunters there and you can see these chocolate brown bones in this chalky Limestone the whole skeleton is there and there's feathers all over the bodies there's Wings on the on the arm now if you saw this dinosaur life it probably would look something like this and if we if we were around back in the Cretaceous Period or one of these things was you know brought to today I'm pretty sure we would just consider it some type of bird okay I mean a really horrifying terrifying monster bird yes with claws and sharp teeth but really is it any weirder than an ostrich or an emu I don't know but we again we don't call it a bird by convention because its body was too big its wings were too small it couldn't flap those wings to power itself through the air but you can imagine remember these Raptor dinosaurs were shrinking over time you can imagine that they're reached a point where the bodies were small the wings were big you know they were elaborated to be better display structures to attract mates better advertising Billboards getting bigger and bigger sticking off of the arms that at some point the laws of physics would just take over and if these little Raptors started to move those arms those advertising Billboards would provide a little bit of lift a little bit of thrust and these dinosaurs could start maneuvering in the air and it's at that point that we say birds were born and as you can see really in that sense flight essentially evolved by accident that is how Evolution works it can't plan ahead so the first dinosaurs to evolve feathers to evolve Wings they would have never known that some descendants in the future would turn those things into flying structures in the same way that whoever invented the propeller the wheel would have never known that the Wright brothers would have put them eventually together into an airplane so that means that dinosaurs live on today and birds are dinosaurs right they evolve from other dinosaurs they are part of the dinosaur family tree they are as much dinosaurs as a T-Rex's as a brontosauruses and I know that's weird to think about but you should really think about it the same way we think about bats you know what's a bat a bats are mammals of course they are right they have hair they feed their babies milk they have all the things that make mammals mammals they evolve from other mammals they're part of the mammal family tree there's just a strange type of mammal that got small evolved wings and developed the ability to fly and that's what birds are the dinosaur equivalent of that a strange type of dinosaur that evolved wings and developed the ability to fly and that means that there are actually over ten thousand species of dinosaurs still with us more than double the number of mammals and some of them majestic creatures like our presidential bald eagle here uh and others ooh not so much I live just a few miles from the North Sea in Edinburgh we have so many goals they land on our roof they're whenever we're at the beach they're always dive bombing us trying to get our chips our french fries our ice cream uh I think if that's ever happened to you in that moment you can sense that the nastiness the viciousness the cunning the ferocity you can sense the inner velociraptor in a seagull and that's not just to turn a phrase It's a good turn of phrase but it's not just one because really seagulls are dinosaurs Velociraptor is one of their closest Cousins so dinosaurs live on but only in the guise of birds so imagine a world where all mammals went extinct except for bats that's kind of the world we're in now be because at the end of the Cretaceous Period something happened now by that point the world was starting to look more modern the continents were moving around and it was one day one Tuesday evening let's say when that world was rudely interrupted by a six mile wide rock that was hurtling through space it was traveling like 10 times faster than a speeding bullet and it could have gone anywhere right it's just a piece of space junk could have gone anywhere but it made a beeline for the Earth and it smashed into what is now Mexico with the force of over 1 billion nuclear bombs put together and it punched a hole in the earth over 150 miles wide and you can still see some of that crater in Mexico the dinosaurs were there t-rex triceratops they were there thriving the day that asteroid hit and this asteroid Unleashed chaos Wildfire tsunamis earthquakes all the dust and dirt and grime went into the atmosphere it blocked out the Sun for many years plants couldn't photosynthesize they couldn't make their own food the forest collapse the plant eaters had no Fuji they died the meat eaters had no Fuji they died ecosystems just imploded Like Houses of cards and the dinosaurs did not make it in fact except for birds and in fact 75 percent of All Creatures died out in what was the most recent mass extinction and so as I continue to study dinosaurs I and I've just become more interested in what happened after the asteroid and so I've done a lot of work in New Mexico out in the Badlands now this does look more like what you see on TV of people digging up dinosaurs and I take my students out there because this is one of the best places in the world to find fossils of the very last dinosaurs and then the animals that took over from them the ones that survived and we go out every year I was there looking for fossils I work close with the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Tom Williamson my dear colleague who's the curator there we bring our students out this was Sarah she was my very first PhD student she's now one of the world experts on those animals that took over from the dinosaurs and it's really amazing you can walk these rocks in New Mexico walk up through the Rocks there are so many dinosaur bones you cannot help but step on the busted shards of T-Rex femurs and Triceratops backbones and then they just disappear and things go quiet in the rocks and then these types of things start to appear new fossils fossils that maybe look familiar to you because at least most of us will have some of these in our mouths right now these are teeth and these are the classic teeth of mammals molar teeth premolar teeth with all the ridges and valleys and cusps and so on so it's mammals that survive the extinction it's mammals that took over from the dinosaurs and just a few million years after the asteroid in the rocks of New Mexico we start to find a lot of fossils of this mammal an awkward gangly thing long arms and legs just about the size of a house cat hmm a little bit of poetry there but long fingers and toes for grabbing onto the branches and what you're looking at here is one of the very first primates an ancestor of ours an animal that only got us opportunity because that asteroid knocked out all of the dinosaurs except for birds and I think that just goes to show how interconnected all of this is our story and the story of the dinosaurs too now there's a lot more I could say about mammals there's a book about it too that some of you might be interested in learning the whole story of mammals or I can come back sometime and tell you the story of mammals when there's a mammal fossil exhibit at the Clinton Center but the point here really is that our story our Evolution our existence it does owe itself to that Extinction and the story of the dinosaurs really is our story too and I think of course there's lessons there lessons about Extinction about climate change about how the world can suddenly change and how even the most dominant species sometimes can find themselves on the losing end if things change very quickly so I think there's a lot to learn about dinosaurs but I will leave it there as we've reached the top of the hour and I'm very happy to take questions now I know we're on a bit of a a time um uh a bit of a time schedule here the Bridget is keeping us too but we'll take as many questions as we can now if you don't have a chance to have your question uh answered I'll be outside sign the books and I'm happy to answer any questions out there so again thank you everybody for making this happen it's very special [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right now I'm not sure we have a microphone or okay oh wow okay I'll go over here uh first yep and then we can kind of go side to side thank you I appreciate your talk your presentation was very fascinating and I have another question in relation to that do you have to get a permit to look for fossils and what what happens to the fossils do we leave them there or like for example in Scotland do you have to get one do you have to leave them there on site or yeah well that's a great question and especially one you know be fitting of a Presidential Library and especially because President Clinton another connection with dinosaurs and there is this is mentioned in the exhibits here one of the the many great things that he did as president was sign into law protecting an area called the grand staircase Escalante National monument in Utah which is full of dinosaur bones he can serve that area by proclamation that means that area is protected that means that you do need a permit to collect there and so the Bureau of Land Management uh in the U.S will control those permits and they'll only grant them to scientists from universities or museums that can show that they that their experience and that they have a plan in place for what will happen to the fossils after they're collected if it's on private land in America you can do what you want and so if you ever see a dinosaur up for auction this hits the news a lot these days usually that's something that's collected on somebody's private Ranch and that's fine but every country then has its own laws and so what's true in America won't necessarily be true in Scotland and Scotland we have to get permits a lot of the land is owned by the crown so used to be the queen now the king so we have to get permission uh in a similar way to how we would get permission in America but some other countries there's hardly any laws and fossils are often ransacked and it's it's kind of a wild west situation so anyways as as academic paleontologists we always have to be familiar with the laws and follow the laws which we are very careful to do all right take one from this side yeah over there yep hi so we know that pteranodons are not dinosaurs but I often see quetzalcoatalyst depicted as having feathers is there any fossil evidence of pteranodons also having these sort of primitive fur-like feathers that's a great question so yes there is now and that evidence has emerged over the last few years there have been fossils of these pterodactyls from China from those same rocks or these volcanoes buried a bunch of stuff uh and those and it locked in the soft tissues and there are these little branching filaments on the pterodactyl skeletons now they did not make up the wing the wing of a pterodactyl is a wing made up of skin kind of like a bat swing but these feathers were on the body probably to help keep the animals warm they look just like the feathers of like that Tyrannosaurus show so probably what that means is that feathers go back even farther in evolution and the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterodactyls would have had feathers and we just didn't know it because it's so hard to preserve something as delicate as a feather unless something is random as a Pompeii style volcanic event Berry stuff all right we'll go over here yeah you can you mentioned that the dinosaur morphs resemble dinosaurs well what are the physical characteristics that define this is a dinosaur this is another arceusaur well there's a reason I didn't do it in the talk I do this I I do it in my undergrad lectures and even there it kind of starts to bore the students because believe it or not is only a few features of the anatomy really nuanced things that Define a dinosaur that things like those dinosaur morphs don't have and these are things like there's an opening in the pelvis like the The Joint where the femur the thigh bone goes into the pelvis and us it's a cup you know um and if somebody breaks their hip a lot of times that head of the thigh bone kind of breaks off in the cup in dinosaurs it's an open hole not a cup uh dinosaurs have an extra backbone connecting to their hips to help stabilize the limbs and true dinosaurs have a long um Ridge on their upper arm bone the humerus bone for a big muscle that helps kind of bring the arm in those are the three technical features of the anatomy that technically distinguished dinosaurs from their very closest dinosaur morph cousins so I will quiz you all later yeah we'll go over here somewhere where um first a comment I think Jurassic Park six was the worst one get out but uh go going back to Jurassic Park three uh the uh the male scientists had had made a big deal about how smart the Velociraptors were yeah do you think they were like smarter than the average bear yes I think they were and I'll still answer your question despite those harsh words about my phone or so people have put Velociraptor skulls in the cat scanner and they've done the thing building a digital model of the brains and the brains of Velociraptors are really big for for an animal about this size the brains are I don't know something like like this um they're probably on the order of intelligence of some birds today maybe even some mammals too so they're quite smart probably the smartest dinosaurs even smarter than Tyrannosaurs again that's based on the size of the brain relatives of the body it's not an exact measure of intelligence I know there's you know neuroscientists in the room here that that would scold me for this book all right we'll go ah yes there this is have shiny stub hands oh so the question is why uh T-Rex has had tiny little arms so um there's a lot of ideas about it we we have a new study we're trying to get it published um for those of you that are scientists you'll appreciate it we've submitted it to the journal Nature it's gone through some rounds of review and they just rejected it because we couldn't convince one of the reviewers so we're we're trying to do the next steps on this but we think we have an answer we think the the so T-Rex was the size of a bus its arms were like the size of our arms which is Goofy right like you know I mean if you see a T-Rex that the arms look ridiculous and imagine putting human-sized arms at the front of a bus you know how stupid that would look um but they're still there Evolution will lose things if they're doing nothing also they're very muscular they're much more muscular than our arms and the muscles that are really big are the muscles that kind of bring the arms towards the body not only that we can see throughout Tyrannosaur Evolution that as the bodies get bigger and the heads get bigger the arms kind of get smaller so what we think is happening is that over the course of evolution the head is taking over most of the responsibility for hunting for getting food actually grabbing the food and then killing the food and and eating the food and so on the arms which in the Primitive ancestors would have been used to grab prey they shorten up because the head's now taking over that job but the arms take on a new function which is helping to stabilize the the T-Rex as it's feeding because his head was so big it bits so strong that it would need to brace itself so we think that that is one of the reasons and there could have been other reasons but basically those arms would were not worthless they were not useless they were very good at holding stuff like this grabbing on to things so that's what we think we will see now as we resubmit our study to a new Journal uh what the new reviewers think but yeah the scientists in the room we had a problem with reviewer three as they say and what can you do all right let's see we'll go over here yeah are you there the plaid so you basically always talk about how the um like how the natural deaths of dinosaurs what about the dinosaurs that killed the other dinosaurs would the bones be like disrupted and stuff oh that's a good question so yes you know sometimes we find bones of dinosaurs that were probably killed by other dinosaurs and the way we know that is because there's bite marks on those bones so you see the big wounds in the bones and if the bite marks are preserved well enough uh you can match them to the teeth kind of like what the police you know and forensic people used to do with you know with with crimes I know it's not so much of an exact forensic thing anymore but you can basically match the the bite to the teeth and so there are bones of Triceratops of duck-billed dinosaurs with big bite marks that perfectly match the teeth of T-Rex and so sometimes those bite marks show signs of healing that the bone has grown around that that means that that animal must have survived the attack to live on but other times those bite marks show no signs of healing which maybe means that the T-Rex in that case killed that dinosaur or maybe it's scavened kind of way that we can see what a what and you're right if if a dinosaur has been eaten by another dinosaur it's not going to be a beautiful skeleton like these ones that were buried by the volcano there'll be bits and pieces and chunks and like a you know some kind of smashed vase or something like that that's what it'll look like all right we've got yeah down here in front you can shout it out and I'll repeat it that's fine that's fine what's the largest fossil that you found in what dinosaur did it come from a larger this one well those Footprints of those long neck dinosaurs in Scotland although it's not the skeleton of those dinosaurs those dinosaurs would have been you know the size of three elephants when I first was got to start got started as a student in college I was on some dinosaur digs and that's where I learned to dig dinosaurs um and we were digging up some some long neck dinosaurs that were the size of like four or five elephants put together from these are from the Jurassic period in Wyoming so those are probably the biggest ones that that there we got another two yeah yep now we'll get yours we'll get yours actually afterwards how many Aqua dinosaurs were there I mean like water dinosaurs ah so okay this is a good question there's all these reptiles that lived back in the Jurassic and the Cretaceous that that lived in the water things like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs um and and their fossils are amazing um they're not dinosaurs there are other types of reptiles that are cousins of dinosaurs kind of like pterodactyls not true dinosaurs they're cousins of dinosaurs there are some water living dinosaurs today penguins and those kind of things um but as far as during what like the Jurassic and the Cretaceous and the Triassic as well uh there were no dinosaurs that we know of that come from there was no like whale version of a dinosaur or dolphin version of a dinosaur it's one of the few things dinosaurs never did and that's another big mystery we don't know why you know dinosaurs some got to be bigger than jet airplanes some became tiny and started to fly why could they not go into the water we don't know but maybe it's just because these other reptiles were already there and there was no space for dinosaurs to go into water we don't know but that's another to me that's another one of the big mysteries about dinosaurs uh we had another one in the blue shirt just uh two behind there huh how much pressure was in in a T-Rex bite I you know I can't remember the exact number it's in the book I think you'll have to read the book but there's a lot so T-Rex probably had basically like the strongest bite of anything we know some sharks have really powerful bites but it was something like the force of of like a Ford you know F-150 pickup truck like on each side of the jaw something like that um and it's crazy I mean it you know it was powerful enough to snap bone so some of these bite marks that I mentioned here there's actually bones of prey speeds that have been completely smashed up by the teeth of T-Rex now were any of you here for Karen Chin's talk yes so Karen Chen with Karen for a long time she's the world expert as some of you know on dinosaur poop and uh they're called coprolites you know actually there's a lot of fossils and they tell us a lot of they're very important they help tell us what ate what and how the what the food webs were like but she described about 25 years ago now one of the most amazing fossils ever it got into nature it wasn't rejected by reviewer three and the title of the paper was a king-sized copper light it was a piece of poo from a T-Rex it was over a foot long and it was chock full of bone of the actual bone that the T-Rex shattered so it bit so hard that it shattered the bones of its prey and again I can't remember the numbers but it's something on the order of like the pressure of a big pickup truck was that five you're saying okay we have time for a few more questions we'll go over here and then again anybody who wants a book I'll sign it and then of course any questions you want as we're signing books I'm very happy to take them yeah let's go in the back there and let's do both both of you have your hands up we'll just do both of those so I have the little one first why did dinosaurs get so big oh oh that's such a hard question but such a kind of basic question like what was able to what permitted these dinosaurs get so big now the biggest um animals that have ever lived are not dinosaurs they're whales like blue whales are the biggest animals that have ever lived and they live right now which I think is really cool but they live in the water and in the water the buoyancy of the water can support an animal you don't have to walk around you have to hoist yourself up against gravity in the same way so land animals are never going to be as big as the biggest water animals and as far as land animals go dinosaurs are the heavyweight champions and the biggest mammals that ever lived on land probably weighed about 18 or 20 tons which is Big that's like three or four elephants put together but the biggest dinosaurs that ever lived on land were probably like 80 tons so why were they able to get so much bigger than mammals we don't have a firm answer but we think there's a couple of things that are important one of them is they have the big long neck so they could reach high into the trees they could access basically an all-you-can-eat buffet of food that no other animals could reach so that help them power their their bodies the other thing is they had very good lungs and what I mean by that I mean their lungs could take in a lot more oxygen than our lungs and why is that important because the more oxygen you can take in the bigger you can grow now how do we know that we don't find fossil lungs but the lungs of birds today have these balloons that stick out from them they're called air sacs and they actually store extra air that allows Birds to take in more oxygen those air sacs go into the bone they leave marks on the bone we see those same marks on the fossils of dinosaurs so we know that a lot of dinosaurs had the same type of really efficient lungs as birds so probably a combination of the next reaching a lot of food the lungs taking in more oxygen helped the dinosaurs get to be really big at least bigger than mammals but again it's still a bit of a mystery so I think a lot more work needs to be done all right we had one more there which we'll do you've made a lot of references to millions of years periods of time my question is how has the scientific Community figured out how to measure such huge amounts of time to make any sense yes so we know quite a bit about the age of the Earth and the age of different rocks because some rocks actually preserve a chemical fingerprint of time inside of the rocks and what happens is it's all about radioactive decay so certain elements will break down into other elements over time releasing radiation this is what Marie Curie discovered and so for instance uranium you start with some uranium over time it will turn into lead and it releases radiations that does so now it doesn't do so well at once it does it kind of in a a bit by bit piecemeal way and we know from lab experiments the rate at which that happens which uranium turns into lead now with rocks if a rock has formed from a magma or a lava something that's liquid that then solidifies into a rock at the moment that rock turns into a solid that uranium will start breaking down into lead so you can measure the uranium you can measure the lead you know the rate at which it changes from the lab you can then back calculate to determine the age of The Rock and so that's how we know the ages of a lot of rocks it doesn't work for all rocks and there's very specialist geologists that that focus on this but it's a technique called radiometric dating carbon dating is kind of similar maybe you heard of carbon dating but carbon dating only works on things that are a few tens of thousands of years old because the carbinol breaks down really quickly but carbon dating is used to date like archaeological artifacts but it's the same principle all right I think we have time for one more and then we'll do the books so right here with the bow and again I promise any other questions I will answer them just not publicly yeah there we go all right quetzalco Lotus the biggest pair of swords that like when the dinosaurs left oh great and you mentioned quetzalcoatlas as well this is a pterodactyl or a pterosaur that was found in Texas about 50 years ago and it's been found in a few other places um it it was the size of a fighter jet plane its wingspan was like 30 feet something like that and as far as we know it was the biggest or or the second biggest Pterodactyl that ever lived with dinosaurs and that would make it the biggest or second biggest thing that's ever flown in the history of the Earth the only thing that may rival it is one from Europe it's called hatsugopterxis from Romania the country of Romania and I've done a lot of field work in Romania and if about 10 years ago we were collecting bones and we found a bone unlike anything we'd ever seen before like seriously I mean I've studied Anatomy my whole life like a medical doctor I learned the bones my students learn the bones we learned the names of the bones how to recognize them all the different bumps on all the bones where all the muscles attach all that stuff that's what we learned but I'd never seen a bone like this nobody on the field trip had ever seen a bone like this it was about the size of a football and it had no symmetry to it it had holes in it it had grooves in it it had ridges on it it had a big ball on one side of it we had no idea what this bone was and then we figured out a little bit later that this bone the size of a football was a single wrist bone of hatsagopteryx so our wrist bone is like the size of a p its wrist bone was the size of a football that shows how big that animal was that's a great question and on so again thank you all a great privilege to speak to you all and I will be out signing the books and answering any other questions you have so thanks again thank you [Applause] [Music] a very quick thank you once again to Dr versodio if we can give them one more round of applause please my name is Victoria de Francesco Soto and I'm the dean of the Clinton School very proud sponsor of this program together with the Presidential Library and the foundation I have learned that if there's someone who knows his book Rex it's President Clinton thank you for joining us tonight and please join us for more conversation and book signing [Applause] foreign [Music]

Channel: Clinton School of Public Service

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Id: m55xLihTrDQ

Length: 88min 4sec (5284 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023