Dinosaur! (Hosted by Christopher Reeve)

there once dwelled on this earth creatures so strange and wondrous that 65 million years after their extinction they still excite the imagination of man they were fearsome coniferous monsters and at the same time they were gentle giants they came surprisingly in all shapes and sizes and lived in a world not unlike our own among birds and frogs crocodiles and insects they evolved from the creatures who crawled out of the sea millions of years before they were indomitable they were the Lords of their universe after a rain of 140 million years they mysteriously vanished they left behind them a record locked in the earth fossilized secrets that only hinted the majesty millennia later man would call them the dinosaur great for the terrible lizard terrible because we initially perceive them as giant monster but as we learned more about them our attitudes change fear became one curiosity became concerned but their destiny become ours could their fate preview our own when we first began to learn about dinosaurs only 150 years ago we didn't realize how successful a creature they were but with each new bone came new knowledge and that we learned about their life became to learn about their death from the beginning they intrigued us who earth how did they live why did they die modern science and technology are now being utilized to solve the mystery of the dinosaur it's the ultimate detective story as scientists unearthed more clues about their faith they may also find an answer to the question if dinosaurs can perish what dinosaur it's a magical word to some to others it has a negative meaning something too big and too old last however it has a special place in our imagination and in our movies it's big and it's ferocious it's deadly and more often than not an enemy to man what do you call this thing why something from the dinosaur family dinosaur a prehistoric fish movies abuse the dinosaurs not only by what they do to them on screen with the myth they originated man did not live at the time of dinosaurs dinosaurs however are part of our lives today we see them in movies and on television our kids play with them the toys are stuffed or mechanical a giant one soars above us as a balloon in New York's Thanksgiving Day Parade which begins every year right outside this building and every year almost a million people come into the building the American Museum of Natural History to look up into wonder at this and other magnificent animals I can remember the first time I saw this giant collection of bones I came here with my family when I was about five and I can remember bringing them to life in my imagination join us now for this first time ever look at a world authentically recreated especially for this program the world of the dinosaurs the end always fascinates how could a hundred and forty million year reign be extinguished so mysteriously and was such find out what terror came out of the skies to end the dinosaurs or was it terror of another kind whatever it was it stripped the earth clean 75 percent of all plant and animal life and all the dinosaurs among them the hadrosaur a gentle giant over thirty feet long and weighing three tons called a duck-billed dinosaur because of the shape of its mouth these giants were vegetarians they lived on the edge of forests it is speculated that unlike modern reptiles they lived in herds to protect themselves from predators Hadrosaurus brontosaurus tyrannosaurus rex the names themselves are exciting pterodactyls stegasaurus monoclonal that's just fun to say the words themselves become pictures you look at these fossilized bones and you say the words and you can see into their world a world that's not unlike the animal kingdom of today mating calls nest building laying of eggs and the dramatic and suspenseful battle to survive we're going to see how a family of duck bills tries to do just that how animals like these lived out their life span of almost a hundred years we're going to take these animals out of our dreams and our nightmares out of the dark corners of our fantasies to enjoy the uniqueness we're going to try to understand why they populate not only our museum's but our landscapes these are dinosaurs built from the remains of automobiles spare parts taken from junkyards and hammered welded into prehistoric Giants for sculptor Jim Garry they represent the realization of a childhood dream he's been able to populate his world with the creatures that fascinate Jim Garry has sculpted scores of dinosaurs and he's transported them to shows around America where they've enthralled children of all ages I've always liked dinosaurs and I always wanted one for a pet so now I have my own so I had to create my own because nobody else could find one for me children of all ages search for and find dinosaurs everywhere from comic books to Disneyworld space-age new Epcot Center dinosaur parks draw huge crowds throughout Canada and the United States dinosaurs welcomed us along our highways and infiltrate the most private domains of our home and they find a way not only onto our plates with into our winter carnivals in our summer festival they caught on quickly the dinosaurs in 1922 Sherlock Holmes author promoted a hoax today the national magazine recognized the popularity toys t-shirts pajamas all there the signature of this unique giant and on television one of our favorite characters lives and works among them well like most children I was fascinated from dinosaurs right from the beginning as long as I can remember of course say each six her before because dinosaurs were exotic animals and unlike the monsters you see in the monster movies they were real my favorite diamond star is ivy it's a trying to start absolutely the brontosaurus probably Triceratops because I don't like meat eaters brontosaurus because he's a sweet guy is it tyrannosaurus rex is that gonna fly dinosaurs are really cute but I wouldn't want to marry one unless you were rich I think Fred Flintstone hasn't made he has a live dinosaur for a pet ah Luca Dino over there look how he's lying there missing me hey Dino Dino here Dino come to Daddy come to Daddy and show him how much you miss him that's a good Dino you miss your dad dad don't you honey like that and he's supposed to be man's best friend man's best friend woman dinosaurs were part of the earliest films from the beginning as with this 1919 animated cartoon Gertie the dinosaur the movies have represented at least some of them is gentle and is having modest appetites the 1922 film the lost world paralleled the discovery of a nest full of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert in Asia as the worldwide hunt for dinosaur bones continued the film audience's appetite for the giant monsters on the screen increased in the recent film caveman the dinosaurs appetite was satisfied by Ringo start thinking quickly he saved actress Shelley long by feeding the dinosaur and intoxicating herb fortunately an inquisitive world's knowledge of dinosaurs did not depend on the movies scientists like Jack Horner transformed their childhood enthusiasm for dinosaurs into an adult discipline Horner of Montana State University has only recently uncovered a major find of hadrosaur bones he has made the duck-billed dinosaur a household word to scientists the reason we know more about duck-billed dinosaurs is that is that we have found a small area where we have concentrations of nest nest containing eggs some containing babies juveniles and an area right nearby that that is so far has yielded 40 or 50 dinosaurs but we have that remains of 10,000 individuals from a herd so in this one area were able to see the life history of the duck-billed dinosaur from the time it hatch until it was at least half grown with an adult Horner's finds which illustrate that some dinosaurs lived in herds and cared for their young tell us that some dinosaurs had traits more common to warm-blooded mammals than cold-blooded reptiles Horner Stig is near Montana's Glacier National Park it is known as egg Mountain his findings confirm how the duckbills may have built their nests based on the evidence that these dinosaurs herded some scientists assumed that a nest building was a collaborative effort within the herd like reptiles today the nest is protected before and after the egg-laying Horner has recently discovered a fossilized egg which he believes contains the embryo of a duck-billed dinosaur at a Montana Medical Center the fossil was subjected to a cat scan or computerized axial tomography a cat scan is normally used to take a three-dimensional computerized color picture of the brain here it will photograph the insides of an 80 million year old egg the cat scan was able to establish that an embryo is inside the fossilized egg the embryo is identified marked it's a remarkable find a duck-billed dinosaurs believed laid 2225 eggs in a circular pattern scientists don't know how long it took for the eggs to hatch but they do know that the eggs were about eight inches long about the size of a grapefruit surprisingly small for what would eventually become a three-ton Duckburg life for the duckbills was hazardous from the start the struthiomimus an agile and fleet-footed dinosaur that resembles the modern-day ostrich was a predator that mother duckbills feared most the struthiomimus with little in the way of a defensive arsenal no horns no giant tail no sharp talons was a natural victim for other more aggressive dinosaurs the speed of the struthiomimus normally at strongest asset occasionally failed especially when matched by that of the Deinonychus the Dynamix great for terrible claws were fierce creatures that weighed less than 200 pounds they may have traveled in hunting packs like wolves today their speed and their dreaded claws made them fear some enemies for the duckbill survival was possible by the number of eggs originally laid life the species could continue dinosaur eggs hatched like those of other reptiles today at Birth the baby dinosaur was only 12 inches long and about one-and-a-half pounds if he made it to adulthood he'd grow to be 6,000 pounds how do we know what we know about dinosaurs well for one thing we know how duckbill eggs look because Jack Horner has found hundreds of them fossilized in Montana we know that this giant creature probably made a deep bleating noise not unlike a goose because of the size of its nasal cavity in the length of its air passage given these clues we can guess at the type of sound it actually would have made it's like a jigsaw puzzle or detective story you find one piece and it fits into another and it all begins with digging holes first somebody finds a fossilized bone more often than not a tourist or an amateur and that signals a scientific bone rush expedition because where there's one bone there may be others what survives usually is not actually bone most bones turn into dust fortunately some fossilized becoming hardened mineral deposits once extracted often still encased in rock the fossils are then put in a plaster of Paris cast to be moved to a museum or a lab for further cleaning and study dinosaur finds have been discovered on every continent except Antarctica and in at least 20 states with the biggest finds in the rocky mountain area paleontologists don't always agree on how to put the fragments of bones together it's as if one were to go into an auto junkyard to try to assemble a car out of all the scrap you could wind up with an Edsel bumper on a Cadillac body with wheels by Chrysler paleontologists Phil curry if you can imagine that sometime in the future cars have been replaced by some other mode of transportation and a scientist came across this card graveyard he found a lot of partial cars and a lot of spare parts but only certain fenders will fit on certain cars and certain wheels on other cars and so eventually he can get a Best Guest interpretation of what a particular model of car looked like in a similar manner a paleontologist who finds a dinosaur bone bed which consists of a lot of skeletons that are mixed up some are partially complete some are actually completely dismembered he takes the spare parts and buy best gas he tries to figure out what animals they belong to eventually he reconstructs the animal now if he's lucky eventually a complete skeleton will be found somewhere else and it'll confirm what he's suspected all along paleontologists who study prehistoric life through fossilized plants and animals are forced to work with the tiniest of fragments lost for ages these fragments must be dated cleaned and pieced together it's no wonder that a major museum recently replaced the head of its brontosaurus for 50 years if mistakenly had the wrong head mounted on it other museums now re-evaluating their skeletons sifting through the evidence to see if they're presented correctly scientists can also learn about the environment in which the dinosaurs lived by studying the virtually indestructible pollen grains of the flowers around at the time the pollen is identified by enlarging at 30,000 times on an electron microscope a dinosaur may have enjoyed the fruits of this plant for dessert the detective pursues fingerprints paleontologists pursue footprints dinosaur tracks have been found from New England to Texas often they're found before the bones are from the tracks paleontologists can learn how heavy a dinosaur was how fast it might have moved unlike bones dinosaur tracks are frozen moments of history a predator stalked its prey causing a stampede in Australia a dinosaur seemed to hesitate as it walked slowly across a slippery mud flat in prehistoric Arkansas the teaching about dinosaurs in schools today is no longer limited to just book reading and museum trips kids have more fun modeling clay and making movies and youngsters like the scientists have learned how to challenge current hypotheses Charlie Brown's sister Sally for instance has her own theory about extinction my report today is on dinosaurs the largest dinosaur that ever lived was the bronchitis it soon became extinct it cost a lot school children today are being purged of some myths about dinosaurs for example because of museum displays in movies they've always believed dinosaurs dragged their tails yet tail tracks have rarely been found alongside foot tracks but today we know dinosaurs didn't drag their tail some use them for balance others for weapons paleontologist Bob Bakker tells about some other myths the traditional view of dinosaurs has three fundamental tenants dinosaurs were dim-witted dinosaurs were slow-moving and dinosaurs were swamp pound now you go to a museum or look up pictures of brontosaurus in a popular book and you see this great animal up to its armpits in a swamp nearly everywhere brontosaurus is portrayed as being limited to this hot humid Berkey environment that's total complete bunk brontosaurus like dry environments upland environments not swamps they favored the dry conifer forests and their preferred food wasn't some sort of watercress but conifer needles we also used to think that the brontosaurus was the largest dinosaur in existence in 1979 dr. Jim Jensen of Brigham Young University discovered a gigantic pelvic bone which challenges that contention Jensen has done some best-guess arithmetic and designing and he believes that when he finds the rest of this massive giant and assembles it he will have what is being called the Ultra Soros if the brontosaurus weighed 33 tons and was 70 feet long then the ultra Soros may have weighed 150 tons and been over a hundred feet long five times bigger a gigantic creature if you were to take an elevator to the top you would travel six stories up if Jenson's calculations turn out to be correct then the ultra soros would probably have had to eat almost five tons of foreign today the question remains was his mouth large enough to take in that much food in a 24-hour period if the ultra soros is the largest known dinosaur then the most recently discovered dinosaur in Holbrook Arizona is among the smallest unearthed by paleontologist Rob long and his team of University of California scientists the bones indicate this dinosaur is no bigger than a German Shepherd some dinosaurs are believed to have been a smallest chickens long believes this to be a Plataea sore it could be the oldest complete skeleton of a dinosaur this small the baby duck bill would reach the size of the Plataea Suroor a derma Knepper dickly he would still be too short to reach the best foliage duckbills it's estimated eight about 200 pounds of foliage a day and like a cow or elephant today spent most of his waking hours eating eating techniques have to be learned and the duckbill seemed to have spent time with their young teaching them but like all of nature's creatures the child must one day go exploring by himself you the duckbill tail laid 2,000 pounds if it were fortunate enough to catch the Tyrannosaurus Rex off-guard knock it off its feet it would have enough time to escape for once down the Tyrannosaurus Rex couldn't get up easily but if the Tyrannosaurus Rex was denied today he would almost certainly prevail another day he was called to ran asaurus rex the tyrannical king lizard he was carnivorous a voracious meat-eater his teeth were designed for one function and one function only to tear flesh from bones he was probably slow and awkward and so some scientists think that he like his relatives that Gorgosaurus may not have been an effective hunter he might have been a giant scavenger well the chances are that he was both one thing seems certain though he was a loner and the rest of his kingdom lived in fear of him among those who lived in his kingdom were the monoclonal like our duckbills these vegetarians also herded together for protection he was slow moving their single born and they're thick hides were their only defense terror is signaled by the snap of a twig 18 feet tall 40 feet long the Tyrannosaurus Rex had powerful hind legs that could propel him forward relentlessly the triceps Rex is a big lizard like animal and he likes eating everyone up and he's a mean guy well he's big mean he has really long teeth in his arms he can't use it's a day comes animal and it has sharp teeth and a long tail and short hands and long legs if I ever met it was the trusters Rex I probably run him down with his shotgun wasting with a cannon it is the violent Tyrannosaurus Rex and other meat-eaters like the Ceratosaurus and the Allosaurus that have been so strongly impressed in our imaginations the roaring and the screaming of the primordial Titans continues to echo across the years to remind us that we would have only been two quick lights to a Tyrannosaurus Rex he seems to have no equal he has been celebrated as invincible but in the 1932 movie King Kong Tyrannosaurus Rex met his match King Kong was the creation of Hollywood he was fiction but then so much of what Hollywood filmed about the dinosaurs was also fiction we already know the movie makers mistakenly put man among the dinosaurs man didn't even exist for another 60 million years but I wonder if we had lived among the dinosaurs would we really have been such enemies well we are in the movies and the dinosaurs always seemed to have the upper hand or at least the upper horn they came out of caves crossed mountains and roared up out of the Seas these movie monsters always they appeared to be larger than life they're our favorite monsters it almost seems that as an audience we're rooting for them to win some of us would like to think that they still exist if they do where could they be many believe that a dinosaur still lives beneath the waters of this mysterious lake in Scotland Loch Ness each spring a number of sightings of the creature or creatures allegedly live in this lake makes international news recently an expedition set out to get hard evidence to prove the existence of the monster that many claimed is a plesiosaur called Nessie the creature has often been the source of hoaxes and faked photographs a recent expedition placed a high speed camera underwater a sonar device would trigger as the shutter on the camera recorded the passing of any large creature the camera took these two pictures is this the fin of a plesiosaur does a plesiosaur or family of pleasee estores still live in the waters of Loch Ness another unexplained creature is said to inhabit Lake telly in the African Congo located 450 miles inside the smothering jungle Lake telly is largely unexplored the natives say they've seen an animal that resembles a brontosaurus in 1906 African Explorer scoffed at another incredible story one that told of a giant ape-man still undiscovered a gorilla in 1981 explorer hermann raghu stirrers reported that the natives could identify pictures of an animal they called Moki Lima Bembe I believe there's an animal in the Congo Basin because I personally saw it and that's my strongest argument the not only that I see it but there were 22 other people who simultaneously witnessed the animal the best I can describe the animal to someone who wasn't there is that it had long serpentine like neck and a broad back that extended about 15 feet down I estimated that the creature was probably on the order 35 feet long this is a photograph Herman Raghu stirs claims is the surfacing head and neck of a living dinosaur he also claims to have recorded the sound a living dinosaur myth or reality a recent movie called baby decided to refer to it as a legend you don't belong to me just another matter if we let it be paleontologists seem to like the idea of the possibilities like most scientists who work on dinosaurs I'm probably romantic and would love to believe in things like the Loch Ness monster or the brontosaur in the Congo but until some hard evidence comes forth it's very difficult to believe in it it is possible that there is a dinosaur in the Congo it is doubtful that extremely doubtful that a dinosaur could be present in Loch Ness I'm personally rather skeptical but I would encourage anyone who wants to try because in this attempt to understand um they are going to learn something and so are we if there are dinosaurs living today it would be survivors of the extinction that has mystified scientists there are many theories about their extinction one is that the dinosaurs destiny was written in the sky a cosmic shower of asteroids or a large meteor struck the earth with an astounding impact it created an impenetrable dust veil that blocked out the Sun killing off much of the plant life an earth robbed of the life-giving force of the Sun the theory holds would soon be deprived of food for the plant-eating dinosaurs their passing would soon deprive the meat-eating Giants of food it was like a nuclear winter the earth suffered an untold loss of life in a matter of months the food chain would have broken down the largest and the most dominant creatures on earth perished for the dinosaurs it was the end of a hundred and forty million year reign on earth not all scientists agree that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs paleontologist Bob Bakker we've had a nice explanation for dinosaur extinctions starting about a hundred years ago it's simply that the whole landscape of the earth changed that shallow seas drained off the continents that the temperature started getting colder in the winter deep inland and that animals that used to be living on separate continents now could mingle and as they mingled these foreign species brought in foreign diseases and that combination a change in climate and a mingling of foreign diseases always causes extinction today you can see it happening on every continent the end of the Cretaceous would have been no different we don't need a cosmic zap we have a nice well studied earthly mechanism to kill off the dinosaurs I think some scientists the majority of scientists probably believe in gradual extinction of dinosaurs but there's certainly a growing amount of evidence suggesting that may have become extinct rapidly as well I don't care what killed the dinosaurs I mean it's very important to study and learn why the dinosaurs were so successful not all life on Earth was extinguished with the dinosaurs the smaller animals emerge to fill the evolutionary niche left vacant by the demise of the dinosaur among them were those that dwelled in the trees and beneath the ground like the mountain there are among us today animals that lived at the time of the dinosaurs the crocodile as a family survived the extinction they live among us today as smaller versions of the 50-foot Giants they were 65 million years ago why they survived is still a mystery it is the present day birds like this flightless ostrich that may indeed be direct descendants of the dinosaur some leading scientists believe that birds are dinosaurs fossilized imprints of feathers confirm the surprising contention that through evolution some dinosaurs developed feathers and hollow bones this eventually enabled them to fly to safety and survival how might the dinosaurs have evolved if they hadn't disappeared dr. Dale Russell has a theory dinosaurs were on the surface of our planet is a dominant forms of life on Earth for a very long period of time and during that time dinosaurs evolved one of the most interesting evolutionary trends in dinosaurian history is a trend towards a larger brain size and some of the smaller flesh-eating forms how the dinosaurs not become extinct then it is certain that they would have continued to evolve and in the 65 million years it separates the end of the dinosaurs from ourselves it is quite legitimate to speculate that some of the largest brain dinosaurs may have looked something like this creature here dr. Russell's dinosauroid has a hauntingly familiar look about him his large brain body fingers and his two legs Markham really as a dinosaur man dinosaur man well I'm kind of glad I don't look like that but I'm not so happy about the fact that they're gone this is their legacy this and the fantasy of the movies and television toys t-shirts but really the legacy goes beyond these things because dinosaurs teach us about evolution and about survival and they challenge us to learn about their mysteries we are in fact only on the threshold of knowing about these beasts they're still locked in our imagination they're not creatures for museums or fossil beds they're made of more than rock and sand they're eternal because they live in our imagination

Channel: DinosaurTheatre

Views: 404,860

Rating: 4.8169932 out of 5

Keywords: dinosaur, tippett, prehistoric, beast, dino, rex, documentary, vhs, 1980, 1985, 80's, old

Id: gYe3r-wH_1s

Length: 47min 58sec (2878 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2011