Colorado's Dinosaurs & Mesazoic History - Lyle Carbutt

welcome to my friend today thank you dr. stalo so I'm gonna turn off some lights here so we can see the screen a little bitter that'll work all right so the title of my talk is Colorado dinosaurs in the Mesozoic history I'm gonna try to focus on the past and the dinosaurs that lived in the past we'll also see some of the traces that they left behind and as you can see on the table I have quite a plethora of the different dinosaurs that we had the first slide here of course has our state flag and it also has our state dinosaur which is Stegosaurus now this dinosaur became the state fossil by a group of fourth-graders that petitioned the local Congress and they decided to name it the state dinosaur it was found the most complete one was found in Canyon City and we'll go ahead and get started here so we're gonna be dealing with the Mesozoic Age just the middle age of geologic time goes from the Triassic which starts at 250 million years ago goes to about 209 million years ago we'll go into the Jurassic starting at 208 million years ago and goes to 145 million years ago and finally the Cretaceous which starts at 144 million years ago and ends 65 million years ago I'm also going to be looking at some of the traces they've that these dinosaurs have left behind and there are some that didn't leave any traces however due to migratory patterns and so forth they've been found in states from as far north as Montana as far south as New Mexico so it's very very probable they would have traveled through here during a migration we're going to be looking at the world in different during these different time periods with a we're gonna talk a little bit about the climate during these different time periods the Triassic Jurassic and Cretaceous and a look at the dinosaurs that lived in those time periods from Colorado where they fit in the in the ecosystem at the time and so we're gonna start with a Triassic and here's a picture of the Triassic Colorado would be well it would be roughly in this area here all the continents are connected at this time this is 210 million years ago you'll notice that I I did say that the Triassic started about 40 million years earlier than this and dinosaurs actually didn't show up in the fossil record until about 230 million years ago and as far as Colorado is concerned we didn't have any discoveries that date back any further than 210 million years ago now the climate is pretty dry and desert like the interior of the supercontinent of Pangea would have been very dry very very mountainous regions on the on the outside so a lot of the rain falls on the on the coasts and a lot of the interior places get or in the rainshadow the closest closest modern equivalent today is Kenya but there was no grass back in the Triassic we don't have grass until very late cretaceous in fact there weren't even any flowers at this time yet so a total different ecosystem we're dealing with a lot of things like ferns mosses psyche heads and and those things the dinosaur that is discovered here in Colorado was Coelophysis now Coelophysis is there's probably been over 200 skeletons found down in ghost ranch in New Mexico here's a artist rendition of Coelophysis he's about 10 feet long and probably about this tall what we have of Coelophysis are footprints they're in several different places but that's that's about all that we have now it's a little it's a little suspicious to just go off of footprints but based on the size and the time period and considering that most of the dinosaurs would have looked about like Coelophysis as far as meteors go that left these footprints behind it's a pretty safe bet that Coelophysis ran through Colorado he would have been a small meteor he wouldn't have been the top predator by any means there were much larger predators a lot of crocodiles and so forth and were also much larger herbivores he probably would have dined primarily on smaller lizards and insects and possibly even small pterosaurs which were flying reptiles were under the time now we'll go a little bit further ahead as you can see not a whole lot has changed in the in the world going into the early Jurassic 200 million years ago the climates still pretty much the same very similar to the the climate that we had in the late triassic there's two dinosaurs that Discoverer discovered again both meters the first one's a little more fun to pronounce and it was actually a lot simpler to pronounce before they found out that the bug had the same name as this this particular dinosaur and they had to rename it the original name for this dinosaur was sin Tarsus very easy to say and instead we get this mega penis horas know if a it's the that's the scientific Creed though if there is a animal that already has scientific name you can't give it but give another animal that same name billon we have is Dilophosaurus and if any of you are familiar with Jurassic Park that is the spitting dinosaur that gets the computer nerd and again what we have of them is footprints a lot of footprints the preservation in the in the early Jurassic is is still okay there hasn't been a lot of digging it's a lot of hard sandstone to go through makes for excruciatingly ly long collection time and everything else and the preservation if you're busting anything out of that can take a very long time and a lot of times it bones will tend to crumble we have footprints from them the Dilophosaurus here and again the Magana soros not a whole lot different than the Coelophysis however we do see this small crest here on the magenta soros and the much larger crest over there on Dilophosaurus it actually had the twin crests in if you're thinking that maybe this is a juvenile an adult well they are very closely related they do have different skeletal structure and we have cross sections that tell us that this was a full-grown animal as well as the Dilophosaurus there and that picture in the top left is from an area outside of Grand Junction where these footprints can be found and now we'll move forward to Jurassic Park because most people know it things have changed you look the continents are starting to come apart and we have Colorado again right right in this area probably see over in this this area right here there's a mountain range those are the ancestral Rockies the ancestral Rockies are really pretty much worn down now there are first set of of Rocky Mountains and what we have now are a lot younger you can see Africa and South America are very much separated from from North America and there's as the plates move further and as we get into the Cretaceous Europe and North America will actually be connected but the let's move on into the climate it's a semi-arid savanna with plenty of vegetation now interestingly enough the climate is actually pretty dry what we do have is monsoon seasons every now and again so there's a dry season and a wet season the other interesting thing is that the water table is very high at this point so it's providing plenty of underground underground water for the a lot of the plants to grow and they're gonna need to grow and grow very fast because of all the animals that we have during this time the most dinosaurs from Colorado are from the Jurassic period there's about 20 of them so will will go through quite a few of them here now as you can see there's quite a list I don't know if it's completely alphabetical it might be as far as the different types of dinosaurs are concerned we have Allosaurus Ceratosaurus a laugh resource Marsha Soros another fun one to sate any colleague rias torva Soros Apatosaurus barosaurus Brachiosaurus Camarasaurus Diplodocus and phacelia s-- haplocanthosaurus supersaurus Camptosaurus ovni liya dry source Stegosaurus my Mara Pelt and the smallest of this bunch is a little dinosaur called fruity dense it's only about 28 inches long and could pretty easily fit in the palm of your hand so we'll start with the meat eaters on the top is Ceratosaurus who's about 20 feet long probably about 6 to 8 feet tall and weighed about a thousand pounds the next one below him is the dinosaur called torva soros one of the larger meters that would have been in competition with Allosaurus on the bottom we have a tani calgary's which in most recent looks at him he may be an ancestor of tyrannosaurus rex and now we get to more of the fun part this is a Ceratosaurus jaw piece this is the top part of the jaw you see that they have really long teeth and quite an overbite and one thing that you'll probably notice about Ceratosaurus is it's got that nice horn on on its skull and we have the horn here as well this probably would have had a keratin sheath on it and may have been about this far as far as in life probably mostly for display and probably wouldn't have grown into the dinosaur till it was growing into adulthood and worrying about reproducing to the next generation the next dinosaurs we have here on the top is Allosaurus this dinosaur here is a Lapras Oris and this is Marsha Soros a laugher Soros is probably the fastest dinosaur we have in a Jurassic between 40 and 50 miles an hour it can run Marsha Soros is kind of a smaller version of Allosaurus Allosaurus is probably the most common dinosaur found as far as meteors go in the Jurassic there are different species of Allosaurus found throughout the Jurassic Allosaurus could get to be about 40 feet long I have a lower jaw bone here of Allosaurus and the teeth are actually pretty small as compared to that of Ceratosaurus he's only half the size but he's got twice the teeth I also have a couple other pieces of another piece of Allosaurus and this is the this is the hand of Allosaurus nice little three fingered claws there and pretty big powerful arms probably equal to use these to hold on to do prey as it's getting it towards its mouth Allosaurus interestingly enough doesn't have quite the strongest bite so it needs something else to help it digest its food and grab hold of it now we're going to get to the plant eaters a one on the top is a pata Saurus which most folks are familiar with the name of brontosaurus and they were discovered roughly the same time brontosaurus was actually named two years later and they had mounted a skull on it that wasn't quite the same skull as a actual sauropod and sauropods are notorious for that because their skulls relative to their body are really small I mean your skull is about this big and the rest of you is sixty feet or better and so they were digging in the quarry and they found a skull very similar to this dinosaur here this is a Camarasaurus and they said well it's close enough that we can just put the two together well years later they went back to a similar quarry and they found a more complete skeleton of Apatosaurus with the skull right up on the on the neck vertebra and they said we've got a problem here is it the same dinosaur which one of them was named first well turns out that a pata source was actually named two years before brontosaurus and so that lovely Thunder lizard and very common name has to be thrown out the window because the first person to name that species that name sticks and there's a lot of paleontologists who tried to bring back the name of brontosaurus but you just can't I'm sorry to say Apatosaurus was about 70 feet long and probably weighed in the order of 20 tons Camarasaurus was a little smaller he was about 60 feet but weighed about the same much heavier much heavier build and have an Apatosaurus vertebrae here this is the tail vertebra so have that there I also have some pieces of Camarasaurus here this is the lower jaw of Camarasaurus and you can see that they have teeth here these would have fallen out interesting thing about these teeth they have a sort of spoon shape to them now this is just typical for Camarasaurus and a closely related animal called Brachiosaurus now you'll notice here maybe a little bit that these guys have these big big feet well they also have these nice big claws on their on their front feet and if you are able to look at these foot sometimes you can actually see this claw at the front of that all those footprints these guys were not speed demons by any means they're their speed probably would have been 1 to 3 miles an hour not very fast at all but if you're big enough you don't have to worry about predator sizes a is a good deterrent of being eaten so our pods are probably the most common climate animals found in the Jurassic as far as bones are concerned and they're really hard to miss because they're quite large this is Brachiosaurus this one was found outside of Grand Junction this dinosaur is at least 80 feet long and the neck extends to 40 feet so it's about as tall as a four-story building probably would have gone on the order of 40 tons one of the tallest dinosaurs that we have and one of the more complete ones that we have it's a good sized sauropod so our pods are they break up into several pieces and they're hard to put back together we have a Diplodocus here on the Left which is clocks in at about 90 feet but is only probably about 15 tons much much lighter build then it's very close relative Apatosaurus and you'll notice that the teeth of Diplodocus and Apatosaurus are right up in the front they don't have a spoon shape to them they're more like pencils these guys did not chew their food they couldn't so what they would do is they would strip the leaves off of the surrounding vegetation and we also have a interesting thing there's still some debate over whether these guys Diplodocus or Apatosaurus could really raise their necks up very high the musculature and everything else so these really long necks which are about half the half the length of the animal are really good for sweeping across but not so good at going up and down now dinosaurs like Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus are built differently and don't have that same problem this is a dinosaur called haplocanthosaurus another sauropod mostly complete remains have been found in Canyon City it's roughly the same size as a Pettis or so about 70 feet this is one called supersaurus this was found in western Colorado it's it was originally thought to be part of another dinosaur which was a named ultra soros but as they got to examining the bones it was actually two different dinosaurs a Brachiosaurus and this dinosaur called super source and super is a pretty good name for it it's 130 feet long and as you can see feeding up on the on the tops of trees probably would have been been a little bit over 20 feet tall at the hips these guys would have all sauropods would have been more hurting animals so these guys probably migrated in and out otherwise all that vegetation that we have would have been gone but it's a veritable meat market for any predator that's there you have one of these guys keel over and you got food for weeks now here we go to the next one the one on the bottom right is an animal called bear asaurus very long net very similar to a Diplodocus about the same length and up on the top is an animal called an phacelia s-- now empathy leus has a very interesting story was discovered by a scientist by the name of Edward cope who found the vertebrae in the vertebrae that it found that he found was similar to this one this is from a totally different dinosaur but this is the basic shape of the vertebrae the vertebrae itself would have been eight feet tall this lone vertebrae that he found he called this animal and phacelia see had the person who was out there in the field digging it up it was pretty crushed in very very poor state of preservation he had it shipped back east to Boston and nobody's seen the bone since he made drawings of it and scientists today have looked over the drawings and looked over his notes and they said well you know he didn't make it up they've been searching for it the past few years of the director of the paleontology museum up in Denver his name's Ken carpenter has gone out to Canyon City where this guy has been this dinosaur was found and has looked for pieces of it they have found a few pieces but nothing quite as spectacular as this vertebrae now empathy leus is a monster among monsters the length for this guy would have been well over 160 feet so if you go out onto the football field you stand at the goal line go out to the 50-yard line you have your head and tail there huge animal there are there are some debates maybe this is a really large Diplodocus or so forth there's just not enough pieces to to say otherwise so until then empathy Leah's huge critter but still kind of surrounded in mystery you don't know a whole lot about it some of the smaller plant eaters that would have been amongst these giants the largest of the bunch is camped asaurus Camptosaurus is a relative of Iguanodon and this is Camptosaurus and and then the one here on the bottom is a small dinosaur called Athena Leah and I have off me Leah's foot here not very big and these guys didn't grow very big in fact they would have only been about this tall if they have the rest of the skeleton here it would only be that tall dry soros is a little bit bigger about ten feet long would have been a pretty good meal for most of the predators that were around and then this small one that we see is at 28 inches this is the fruited ends that was just described this past year this animal was very very small and the interesting thing about it is in the skull the teeth it actually has small little things this is a typical of a of a dinosaur that came earlier called heterodon to Saurus which means different teeth and these dinosaurs are thought to have been possibly herbivores and maybe maybe omnivores because of those different kinds of teeth but we have hopefully decides hopefully dispel the rumor that all dinosaurs were big because this guy would have been extremely small now we get into the armored variety the top dinosaur that we have here is called my Mora pelt it was found in western Colorado and just below him is Stegosaurus you'll notice the pieces of armor on the my Mora Pelt oh here's a nice piece of that armor here would have stuck out from the flank and would have discouraged any predator from hopefully taking a bite out of it this guy was about 10 feet long and is one of the first in Kyllo sores the armored dinosaurs that we have from the Jurassic we don't have any other discoveries of these guys until the Cretaceous and we were wondering well where did they come from well now we have some ancestors before they first showed up now a Stegosaurus is quite a bit bigger he's about 30 feet long he's at least seven feet tall here at the hip and has his wonderful plates on his back that are still the subject of question as to what did they do they could have been used for display during courtship they could have been used for possibly defense and they also could have been used to help regulate the body temperature I also have a example of one of the smaller plates here that Stegosaurus would have had on its back and don't forget the tail spike on the back of Stegosaurus he's got four of them and interestingly enough if you guys are familiar with the far side and Gary Larson this tail spike is actually named a thagomizer and if you do a search for Sagem Iser you'll run across a cartoon that has a picture of a caveman and he's pointing at a picture of a Stegosaurus and we say we call this the thagomizer after the late sag Simmons and scientifically this is the thagomizer this is what it's called so Gary Larson is is has some credit in science it would have been bone now each one of these whether it's a claw or whether it's one of these spikes they would have also extended another six inches or so and the protein that would have helped them extend to this this length is a protein called keratin which is in your fingernails and in your hair this is just the bony core and we'll get to some more that as well with Triceratops and a few others that we're going to get to as well now we'll move ahead to the Early Cretaceous 125 million years ago so we skipped about 25 million years one of the things that's interesting is you can see there's an interior seaway beginning to form here Colorado is not underwater yet it will be Colorado's in this area here we still have the ancestral Rockies Europe is a again a series of islands and if you want an extreme example of what possibly global warming could look like this is it there are no there are no polar ice caps at this time and a lot of this water has melted it was a lot hotter and this was a period of global warming the globe itself was actually quite a bit hotter than it is now during the entire reign of the dinosaurs and a couple of the dinosaurs that we have from this area know it it is a little cooler than your than the Jurassic but not a whole lot this is where we have our first flowering plants and there were a lot of them millions and you know about 400 million years ago or so we had our first insects and it took them it took the plants that long to catch up and evolve the pollen mechanisms that they have now no grass as of yet and there's three dinosaurs discovered here in Colorado you'll note the one that's in quotes it's because it hasn't been officially described and we only have one bone of it kind of tough to nail it down to a particular species but as far as the bone goes it looks like a hip salaf Adhan which is native and found whole skeletons are found in England this is a smaller bipedal one very similar to off knee Lea or dry sores the big one that you might note is a Utah Raptor and another one that was just recently described and is a dinosaur called Theo fight alia very similar to camp thesaurus in fact they thought it was a Camptosaurus for the longest time they got to looking and examining where it had been found and noted some differences in the skull and they had to rename it to Theo if I tell you now the pieces that we have I have a piece of Utah Raptor here let's let's look at some of these dinosaurs here there's Utah Raptor over here the killing claw is probably the thing that sticks out most about it there's a picture of the hip Salaf and on here we have and this is in a giant boulder just outside of Grand Junction you see the bone is is right in here and this is the the femur of the Utah Raptor right in here totally encased in the it's just an impression of that bone there and this if you look up further you can see where that Boulder came from again this is this is really rough stuff to go through it's hard to get good preservation out of some of these bones and a lot of its falling off of hillsides and so forth this is the Theo fight alia and this is the skull that they looked at this guy was found around the garden of the gods area and that's a artists representation of what what that one looks like we'll get to the Late Cretaceous here shortly I do want to show you the The Killing claw for Utah Raptor this would have been on the toe on the first toe and again this claw would have extended out here this claw would have been about a foot long or so in real life and the tendons here would have held it straight up off the ground on the foot and when it was ready to employ these lethal devices it would snap them and the tendon would snap much like a switchblade this would have been able to cut a foot deep in about six feet across really nasty Utahraptor 20 feet long and interestingly enough all the related ones like Velociraptor and Deinonychus are a lot smaller in fact Velociraptor that you see in Jurassic Park had been I level with me in Jurassic Park would have actually been up to about my knee in real life it's interesting that they found Utahraptor when they did in 1993 1993 was the year that Jurassic Park came out and Steven Spielberg made his velociraptors very large and he knew people like myself who I was well you know a teenager at the time and still very much into dinosaurs velociraptors not that big well luckily they found this Utah Raptor right around the time that it came out supporting the idea that yeah those those Raptor dinosaurs could get that big you got a lucky break now we'll move on to the Late Cretaceous 75 million years ago and we've got the wonderful interior seaway which is full of its own bit of nasty critters a lot of sea sea monsters that you might think of a Plesiosaurus and so forth would have lived in that sea way at the time basically divided the North America in half and we're looking here at at Colorado there's not a whole lot of space for for moving here in Colorado a lot of the dinosaurs that we have would have lived in Montana and traveled down to New Mexico for migration during during this time and some of the dinosaurs that we have from this time period again they we don't have traces of these guys we have the inference that they would have would have come through here so we have an increased temperature part of Colorado's underwater the eastern half it's a great place to look for some of these things like these water creatures that the turtles and mosasaurs and so forth there were big sea reptiles actually found one I think outside of Pueblo not too long ago the dinosaurs discovered an animal called pentaceratops another animal called Parasaurolophus a - plio saurus and Gorgosaurus these guys are both relatives of Tyrannosaurus Rex a Soren Ethel st's which is basically the American equivalent to a Velociraptor Velociraptor did not live in the United States has only found in Mongolia and China a dinosaur called Edmund tonyia and a spareth Ollis interesting names will will shed some light on what they looked up here on the top left is the pentaceratops very similar to Triceratops the reason they call it pentaceratops means five horns on the face has to do with these cheekbones right here now they're a little bit larger than they are and other other animals that look like this you just because all of these ceratopsians have these little cheekbones it's just they were a little bit more prominent and pentaceratops when teucer chops also had a very large skull and difference between it and Triceratops is in this area here this right here would have been a hole as bone Triceratops didn't have those holes or finestra as they call them and very similar in size this guy was originally found in New Mexico but pieces of him have also been found in Colorado Parasaurolophus is the next one the very long tubular crest here originally scientists thought that it would have used it as a snorkel swimming under the water however there's no opening back here so what they looked at and they they kind of carved open the side to take a look at it and this is a hollow chamber that has hooked right up to the nasal passages this guy would have been able to make some very interesting sounds was very vocal in how it communicated with other animals of its species and if you go to the unit the New Mexico Museum of Natural History you can actually play what this animal may have sounded like you can press a button and it sounds a little like a sick trombone mm-hmm animal right below Parasaurolophus is an armoured in kylus or called edmond tonyia and this guy actually did survive until the end of the cretaceous and there's really not a whole lot of arguing with him these these spikes would have been pretty nasty to deal with this dinosaur right here is deathly to Saurus very strong very very powerful probably would have hunted guys like pentaceratops this is the thought to be the direct ancestor of tyrannosaurus rex has very similar features just came from an earlier time period a dinosaur that we're looking at here in wonderful pink and blue feathers is the sahrin ethel estie's and most of these dinosaurs that are this size would have been covered in feathers in fact they've been looking at Velociraptor right here on me on the radius and ulna and they found where the feathers would have actually gone right in this area here and these dinosaurs of course also the very long tails and at the end of these tails they were they're nice and stiff so these guys could run and make make nice quick turns but at some of these some of the ends of these tails we have something that that modern birds have today where the feathers attached at the at the base of the tail it's just of course the tail is a lot longer and it couldn't fly it was too big didn't have the right kind of muscles to fly and feathers are meant for more than just flight feathers are meant for insulation and also for display think of a peacock those feathers on the back end are not used for anything else but display the animal that we have over here is another relative of t-rex this is gorgeous Horace it's got a much lighter build than Daspletosaurus well quite a bit faster this guy probably would have hunted down guys like Parasaurolophus and other things that would have been available at the time this dinosaur is interesting because we also have up in Alberta Canada plus an assemblage of bones that shows that these dinosaurs actually would have lived in family groups and probably would have hunted as a family as well so the days of dinosaurs hunting alone and being alone is pretty much over which of course by process of elimination this is a relative of what most folks are familiar with is Pachycephalosaurus Pachycephalosaurus had a relative this one is named sarah thallus and it's due to the really round dome on the head that it's that it gets its name it's almost a perfect sphere now what it used it for is still a matter of debate because there are some scientists who said well they they hit heads they ran into each other like Rams well the problem is if you've got a dome on two domes like that hitting you might have some slippage there and they could have broken their necks that way the other thought is that these guys grow these over time and it was a it was a species indicator they might have actually done a little bit of head-butting but not not running against each other when they're fighting over who gets to take the girl out now we'll move to the Late Cretaceous 68 million years ago about three million years before the massive asteroid impact that would have hit down here in the Yucatan Peninsula as you can see the interior seaway has been broken up there's still parts of Colorado they're a bit underwater but for the most part things are looking good it's a little less wet Colorado climate is very much like the southeastern United States today more swampy very hot and humid not a place I care to live forever but especially in the summertime it's one of those places where it's just as hot in the shade as it is without out of the shade here's some of the dinosaurs discovered Triceratops Torosaurus ornithomimus these'll asaurus edmontosaurus Alamosaurus which you may think is found in a particular place but I'll tell you a story about that one and of course Tyrannosaurus Rex now the first three that we have here this is good old Triceratops and this is his cousin the Torosaurus if you look at the shield here you'll notice some distinct differences one being all these nice row tribune PSA's and the other these are big holes again and a lack of any sort of ornamentation here these guys had the biggest heads of any animal that we know of these skulls could go from the tip of the beak to the end of the shield they could be ten feet in length huge animals and of course in order to support that bulk you got to have a good strong neck these guys would have weighed in about the same weight as an elephant today they would have lived in in family groups and interestingly enough they've recently discovered that these dinosaurs we call ceratopsians actually went through quite a bit of changes as they grew no matter how many horns they have on their face they all started out with the same amount they all looked pretty much the same no matter if they had a horn that went this way this way long nasal horn they all pretty much started out the same and as they grew these other distinguishing features would become a part of them so what did these guys use their shields and horns for well defense probably not so much this is really thin stuff and a Tyrannosaurus Rex would have no problem biting right through it with the bite force that t-rex had of easily 7,000 pounds per square inch not a problem probably being able to bite off one of these horns these could be used like antelope use of there's several different types of antelope that are in Africa they have some of the strangest horns you've ever seen they're curled up there in all kinds of different there are in various different ways well use them for species identification use them to show that you're better looking than this guy and don't rule out defense because you know these are these are Triceratops horns right here these are the brow horns these could get three feet in length they would have been a very sharp and you'd want to stay away from them and so I wouldn't rule out defense I would also wouldn't roll out these guys fighting like like elk and modern modern antelope each day with their with their horns this dinosaur is a sauropod called Alamosaurus it's different than Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus and so forth this guy probably had a little bit of armor on his back he's related to a group of sauropods they call titanosaurs titanosaurs are primarily found in the southern continents of South America Africa parts of India as well and as we saw a few slides ago South America and Africa were pretty much separated so how did they get here well there might have been a couple of them that that stayed this guy was about 70 feet long and I know Alamo sounds like was found in Texas Sunday New Mexico actually it's named after the formation that it was found in there an Alamosaurus definitely would have migrated north and would have been a tasty meal for any Tyrannosaurus Rex that it would have come across so the old movies that have a Tyrannosaurus Rex fighting an animal like this for a meal actually plausible now as long as they don't call it brontosaurus here's a few of the other ones the one on the top left is ornithomimus looks very much like a bird very much like an ostrich and its name means ostrich mimic probably had some feathers on it didn't have any teeth no teeth probably ran about as fast as an ostrich did as well about forty miles an hour probably had a mixed diet could have eaten eggs but without the without the teeth it probably would have been feeding on things like eggs and maybe shellfish and so forth this is these'll asaurus here these two are roughly the same same length 10 to 13 feet this is a plain ater and the interesting thing about this vessel asaurus is they looked and they found a massive material and in one of the skeletons of this and it looked too kind of interesting and odd to them so they got a CT scanner and they looked and they found a four chambered heart in a CT scale so the the kind of cold-blooded idea kind of goes away with this as well as the feathers and the fact that a lot of these animals had hollow bones like birds and also had wishbones as well the animal on the bottom is Edmund tonyia this is the cow of the Cretaceous quite quite literally and Edmund tell our Edmontosaurus excuse me had this wonderful set of teeth they're very closely packed together and could have about 400 of these teeth in its mouth at any given time this is a a cud sure you would grind up its food I chew it and if any one of these fell out well I'm they had plenty - plenty to just regrow interesting thing about edmontosaurus as well this is the dinosaur that we find that is mummified the most we find skin impressions on these guys quite a bit I have one of those skinny impressions here from Edmontosaurus and some of the relatives of edmondo soros are some of the ones that we're looking at very closely as far as they've they've been well preserved and of course it would take take some very interesting circumstances to get them in that way they've actually been able to find relatives of Edmontosaurus that still have the plants remnants of the plants that they ate they also have been able to determine that the tail would have been a little bit longer would have attached probably a little bit lower here and there probably would have been some stripes on the end of this tail as well some of the things they've been able to do with and they've one of the the dinosaur that they're looking at is called Leonardo they're there looking at him in all sorts of sorts of cool ways and of course this is Tyrannosaurus Rex and notice the coloring here this is probably the male and this would probably be the female female interestingly enough is probably a little bit larger a little bit more heavily built than the male we see this in crocodiles today crocodile the female is actually a little bit larger than the male snakes as well one of the other things I have from Edmontosaurus is the vertebrae here this is from a juvenile he's actually got quite a bit larger and don't have any pieces of pest Allosaurus or anything - I left those in the museum little claws that I had for t-rex I have his brain this is this is it big animal the the skull for t-rex was 60 inches which is 5 feet but his praying wasn't that big however it is on the upper end of the smartness scale for dinosaurs most of these relative to the body size they had a pretty good good sized brain the sauropods probably wouldn't be able to operate a door that opened once you stepped on it so they were they were incredibly unintelligent but if you sacrifice the the brain for feeding then then you can survive I also have one of the teeth for Tyrannosaurus Rex this actually has the root in it and the route starts where the line gets darker and continues on up these are very thick roots very big so the tooth itself would have been right here and these teeth actually got a bit larger they could get as big as a as a full-sized banana good good size Chiquita and they would have been as big around the serrations interestingly enough on on Ceratosaurus and Allosaurus or at the end and if we look the teeth for Tyrannosaurus Rex are a lot thicker these guys would have been tearing into their prey and slicing and dicing it China Saurus Rex didn't care he'd bite into the meat he'd bite into the bone and he'd crunch it up and it would pass through and it has passed through they found a what they call a coprolite of t-rex this is dinosaur poop and they looked at this big piece of rock that is about the size of a French bread loaf they looked inside and they found tiny little fragments of bone in there ouch painful and they belong to Edmontosaurus so they definitely they definitely were were enemies and the other thing that is interesting about these two you go up to the Denver Museum you look at the skeleton that they have of it montes horas and you see that there's a chunk taken out of the tail it started to real the only animal big enough to take a chunk out of an Atlanta soros is t-rex and the interesting thing is Ken carpenter who's about as tall as I am gets up on this big huge ladder these guys were probably 15 feet tall or more these edmontosaurus he gets up there and he takes a t-rex tooth and he puts it in the spot where there are tooth marks and it fits perfectly now this this is evidence that Tyrannosaurus could have hunted down its prey so it wasn't just a scavenger most terrestrial carnivores can't survive on one or the other they are usually looking to survive in the best way they know how and that is if there's a free meal eat it if you got a hunt for something hunt for it now that's only 40 of them there's a heck of a lot more dinosaurs I believe to date there's probably about 7,000 and every year there's probably about 12 or so new that are found every single year but the problem that we have is that fossilisation is incredibly rare it has to happen under the right conditions and in the case of these mummified hadrosaurs which is isn't it one of the Edmontosaurus is one of them has to happen under the right circumstances there has to be a flood they have to be very quickly and no animal can can touch them in order for that to happen now if you look around today and you look at animals that died on the road they get eaten bones get picked apart if you live if you're an animal and you live in the mountains and you die in the mountains those bones fall off the mountainside they get crushed they get smashed they get carried away by by wolves and so forth they want to continue to gnaw on them and maybe break out the marrow fossilisation is incredibly rare and the larger animals you'll notice that we have a lot of larger animals throughout all these slides larger animals are better preserved well why is that well there's just simply more of them to preserve smaller ones like fruited ends and it's interesting the only really the pieces that they have a fruit it in fruit it ends the jaw fits on my first the first digit of my finger really tiny you have to have the right kind of preservation one of the reasons that we don't have a lot of animals with feathers here that we found that feathers are preserved in Colorado is due to the nature of the preservation China is a better place for that because of the of the sediment that's there you have these really fine paper shales there that can print that can when they when they have an animal that dies in the in those lake areas preserves them very well because it just lays them down to be nice thin thin layers now the other thing that we're looking at you probably saw through some of the slides there are a lot of other animals that existed the same time that dinosaurs did mammals were around have been around as long as dinosaurs they came around the same time it's just that dinosaurs were occupying all the quote unquote good niches and the mammals had to kind of stay underground and be in other places there were also plenty of crocodiles to go around in this area throughout all of Colorado there were plenty of turtles snakes didn't show up till the Cretaceous but we had snakes there were plenty of the flying reptiles called pterosaurs like Pteranodon and cats a quat list these guys were basically flying flying jets they would have had wing spans of anywhere from thirty to forty feet some of them were much smaller than that but there were some very interesting animals and there's there's plenty of other things the Jurassic is a wonderful example the number of animals found it in the Jurassic only a third of them are actually dinosaurs the rest of them are other animals turtles Crocs and so forth so are there any questions yes a four-chambered heart is is unique in I mean crocodiles have a four chambered heart but it's the way that the chambers are used most birds and mammals have four chambered hearts they they all have the four chambered heart and it's the way in which the valves hook up to each other that determines whether the animal probably had a warm-bloodedness or cold-bloodedness and this four chambered heart was found to resemble more than that more of mammals in and birds the other interesting thing is when you look at the cross-section of any of these bones you look to see how many holes are in the bones because that's where we get our blood and you look at the holes the more holes you have the more blood that can run through you warm you up the reptiles generally crocodiles and so forth don't have a lot as compared to mammals and birds and dinosaurs have a lot more than reptiles but fewer than mammals and birds they're kind of right in between and let's see one other bit of information if you guys have time visit the Ryan Museum they have their hours and and it's a great it's a great little museum to go in and look at it's where I keep a lot of these specimens as well as some wonderful mineral specimens and some of their fossils that some of the students have found as well any other questions our speaker Adam State College great stories begin here

Channel: Adams State University

Views: 26,866

Rating: 4.8127661 out of 5

Keywords: dinosaurs, dinosaur, Lyle Carbutt, Earth Science, Geology, lecture, lecture series, Adams State College, Adams State

Id: SXfHqyOUYf8

Length: 53min 27sec (3207 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2010