Dinosaurs (Smithsonian Video)

[Music] [Music] they stood as high as a six-story building weighed more than the fully loaded city bus lived as long as 300 years [Music] contrary to the roles hollywood assigned them they were the most vital intelligent and highly developed creatures the world had ever seen and they ruled for 140 million years and then they vanished long before the time of the earliest humans the dinosaurs had disappeared as completely as though they had never lived what killed the dinosaurs were they just the first examples of planned obsolescence could they have been the victims of extraterrestrial forces killed by a blow from outer space could the death of the ruling race of dinosaurs now 65 million years in the past contain a warning for another ruling race our human race about our own future after all the dinosaurs struggle for survival couldn't have anything to do with modern problems things like nuclear winter the greenhouse effect or acid rain could it or were there survivors of the great dying survivors of the dinosaurs living among us [Music] dinosaurs hold a special magnetism for children perhaps children can believe what the rest of us can barely imagine these huge beasts the likes of which no one has ever seen once walked the earth and ruled it what is there in us that responds to the dinosaurs these beasts we've never seen know only from their bones we've got company their magnetism has been as strong at the movies at the Museum some have taken a few liberties with paleontological precepts and with their audiences gradual 'ti dinosaurs are so popular so compelling that you might think that if they hadn't existed we would have had to invent them well we did invent them 5000 years before we knew they existed and we called them dragons following the Dragons spoor through history and prehistory takes us one scholar said backward and backward to the very beginning of human philosophy it is perhaps the most antique product of human imagination and its stalks picturesque and portentous through medieval legend st. George slew a dragon so did Beowulf and Siegfried they knew the dragon in creeps and Phoenicia in Sinai and Yemen and the Red Sea on the islands of the South Pacific the East Indies Australia Mexico they knew the dragon well in ancient China and in the cradle of civilization Babylon and Mesopotamia they knew him in the Bible the book of Revelation chapter 12 verse 7 there was war in heaven and the Great Dragon was cast out that old serpent called the devil and Satan the last dinosaur was dead at least 60 million years before the earliest human was born how could the dragon a product of human imagination had looked so much like the real-life but long dead dinosaur and I have both so captured our own imagination perhaps it is because the dragon and the dinosaurs share a common lineage the family of reptiles known and instinctively feared throughout history they shared the reptilian head the scaly looking hide the arm like front legs the stupendous bulk and the aspect of having come from another more forbidding world than any we know [Music] come with us back to the world of the dinosaurs a world created by paleo artists contributors to the dinosaurs past and present exhibit which came to the Smithsonian and bring your imagination [Music] a voyage to the world of the dinosaurs McDonagh vessel fueled by science and imagination is a voyage to a different time and a different world a different time think of the time since the dinosaurs lived more than 200 million years ago as if it were a single year today would be New Years Eve 12 midnight on the last day of the year it was January 1 when the first dinosaurs appeared on the earth they roamed and ruled the world most of the year until September 13th when they vanished not until December 12th that our earliest ancestors the great apes appear not until December 30th at 2:00 in the afternoon did early humans make their entry Neanderthal man came on December 31st at 10:00 till 10:00 at night the Ice Age ended at a quarter till 12 and OC Marsh Dougie's first dinosaur with just 15 seconds left in the air and it was a different world there was no ice at the North or South Poles North America Europe and Asia were still connected when the dinosaurs came the American West the arid West of Martian cope was a subtropical Basin not far inland from the warm shallow sea which covered what is now the Great Plains look at that different world the dinosaurs knew it is a brown and green world but there are no flowers to greet the dinosaurs [Music] and listen you'll hear insects 30-inch dragonflies footlong cockroaches and two-thirds of the species of insects we know today but no birds where there were none on the dinosaurs game what would become the desert Southwest in about 200 million years was populated by creatures that mounted a fearsome looking Arsenal with plates spikes and armor but all their weaponry and heft were no more than the best offense a good defense against the deceptively slim and graceful predators Coelophysis just six feet long including three feet of tail and weighing no more than a hundred pounds Coelophysis could never have won a frontal attack against its much larger prey but the weight of the grazing herbivores became a liability when pursued by the speedy and long-legged Coelophysis and a complicated set of jaw muscles and serrated teeth could open wounds from which a stronger adversary would bleed to death [Music] the skies belong to the pterosaurs with wingspans ranging from a few inches to 60 feet the pterosaur had wings like a bats but it was a reptile not a mammal like the bat and it lived off fish it plucked from the ocean like a pelican but unlike the pelican it had no feathers then and now it was unique and unchallenged in the air for sheer size and bulk no animal that walked the earth ever rivaled the giant sauropods Diplodocus brontosaurus momenta Saurus and the rest they grew to over 60 feet in length over 50 tons in weight the name brontosaurus means Thunder lizard but the sauropods were peaceful creatures whose only defenses were whipped like Tails and the force that massive bulk on huge hooves could deliver [Music] often against the great predators it was not enough [Music] long necks and a taste for vegetation at a rate of about half a ton a day lead Diplodocus and brought asuras to forage among treetops foliage about 60 million years later another herbivore took a more down-to-earth approach at almost 10 tons with a skull as much as eight feet across Triceratops had the strength to bring down a willow or magnolia tree and the appetite to put it away [Music] Triceratops was also living proof that a vegetarian diet did not always breed a peaceful dinosaur Triceratops was built to take care of itself over each eye a four-foot-long horn a third horn grew above a powerful beak like a giant snapping turtles covered by an organic substance which kept its sharp protecting its powerful neck and armored collar of bone covered by tough horny skin at speeds of 20 30 maybe even 40 miles an hour no land animal ever born could take the charge of Triceratops at full gallop including Tyrannosaurus Rex ded 65 million years T Rexes reputation precedes it in life its ancestors preceded including some unlikely forbearers dating back from the delicate and bird-like Coelophysis six feet and a hundred pounds through Megalosaurus 30 million years later a 30-foot one-ton predator through the Alice or up to 40 feet and 4 ton - Tyrannosaurus 20 feet and five tons of fully evolved speed strength and predatory belligerents as the product of more than a hundred million years of evolution the Tyrannosaur was one of the deadliest predators the world has ever known closed set forward-facing eyes gave Tyrannosaur something earlier predators had lacked depth perception thin muscular lizard-like lips pulled the tyrannosaurs face into what looked like a sneer baring gigantic teeth its shortened torso and slender limbs made it graceful and fast dinosaurs like the amphibian duck-billed hadrosaurs were 20 feet high and 3 tonnes but they were virtually defenseless against t-rex but in Triceratops the Tyrannosaurus match speed size and savagery against thick garmr and dangerous horns [Applause] [Music] the scene has been portrayed hundreds of times but it remains thrilling doctor has written it's somehow fitting that these two massive antagonists lived out their co-evolutionary belligerents through the very last days of the very last epoch of the Age of dinosaurs [Music] the dinosaurs past and present exhibit was a showcase for a different kind of artist artists who paint what neither they nor anyone else has ever seen one of the best of the dinosaur artist Elinor Kish the creator of a remarkable alloy of science and art has come to the Smithsonian to create her next masterpiece a new mural for the Museum of Natural History I've got this 150 foot mural that I've got to do and the scientists have given me the pictures and pictures of the bones they've showed me throughout the museum where the bones are and I could measure them and being that I don't trust other people's work that I can copy outright so I've got to work with the bones myself right down to accurate accurate bone measurements and once I get all these models done they're being done to scale an inch and a half to a foot and I'm going to pose these creatures all in a row in exactly the positions we want we want someone some of them diving down to eat the other it's all to eat and be eaten into that world under the sea and when I get this all laid out then I'll be capable of doing my pencil drawing from that from there I go into a inch and a half scale painting of the mural exactly the way it's going to be painted and from this then I enlarge that that inch and a half to a foot onto the wall and begin my painting process and that should take me approximately two years I've judged the dinosaurs have not always looked so active to us as Elinor Kish depicts them early dinosaur artists saw them as sluggish almost inert like the slow-moving cold-blooded reptiles which took their body heat from the environment around them but today there's a new picture an active fast-moving dinosaur aggressive wide-ranging like the warm-blooded mammals and birds which keep their body heat high by quick movement and voracious appetite it's a picture that owes much to the work of Robert Bakker a Colorado paleontologist and no mean artist himself I try to approach the dinosaurs if I'd never heard of it before make no assumptions come up to brontosaurus and you look at it and you watch it you watch it move that is you go to the joint to the ligaments and muscles give it a kick what sort of speed you're gonna get out of that and look at the footprints what sort of speed where they cruising at and cut the bones how fast were they growing make no assumptions that's the best way to approach any unknown animal sort of experiment with it and I started doing that 1965 as an undergrad at Yale and every time I gave dinosaurs a kick experimented with them it would run away like warm-blooded animals or if they grow really fast like warm-blooded animals or they colonized the far north like warm-blooded animals so I I'm very conservative I called him the way I see him you know I mean if if if it walks like a duck it looks like a duck and smells like a duck it's a duck I mean if it grows like a warm blood and runs like a warm blood and it's bone structure looks like a warm blood hey I'm gonna call it a warm blood Smithsonian senior curator Nicholas Haughton watches over a dinosaur collection so authoritative that other museums often consult it to verify their own identification and after 30 years of the Smithsonian Nick cotton is something of a dinosaur authority himself I agree with Barker to the extent that they they were not sluggish the footprints show quite clearly that they were very active and with their hind legs underneath them with with their hind legs underneath her Maul Ford's underneath them they had to remain active in the way that birds and mammals were remain active I think that their their motion was more consonant with their size most of them were quite large and like an elephant he can get around as fast as he has to and that's that's the type of locomotion that you had for most dinosaurs bonkers revolutionary ideas touched off a firestorm of controversy and new research as paleontologists sought to bolster discredit or modify Barker's assertions the debate was scientific at least on the surface but it was personal to where the dinosaurs cold-blooded like the lowly lizard or warm-blooded like us argument for argument example for example Barker and his critics took the dinosaur apart and put it back together now I'm convinced dinosaurs were warm-blooded for the same series of reasons that convinced thomas henry huxley in 1880 or hermann von meyer in 1834 and the reasons or this if you look at dinosaur legs and that's what impressed von meyer they're built for speed they are very strong in fact von meyer called the dinosaurs the packy poda the strong footed animals dinosaurs have such big strong legs that they must have been moving on average fast one Meyer who named these things packy pota that doesn't mean strong feet it means thick feet and dinosaurs had big strong or thick feet to support weight and they had plenty of that it doesn't really imply that there was any speed involved number two if you cut a dinosaur literally cut dinosaur bones and you look at them in thin section you can take their blood pressure the blood has rotted and the blood vessels have rotted but the holes left by the blood vessels preserve with great fidelity you count those holes dinosaur blood pressure their blood flow rates was way up there in the warm blooded hot blooded zone Barker's argument about the fine or the microscopic structure of bone indicating some kind of elaborate control of body temperature a maintaining a high and constant body temperature is I think it's probably sound number three dinosaurs evolved very fast cold-blooded animals do not the crocodiles and alligators alive today haven't changed much and sixty million years dinosaurs evolved very very fast and that's a warm-blooded property he says they're quickly evolving not like crocodiles and alligators the crocodiles and alligators are cold-blooded mammals are warm-blooded mammals are quickly evolving in quotes what about fish teleost fish for crying out loud that's the silliest argument I've ever heard tinea fish are as cold as a clam they're not warm-blooded at all they're one of the most rapidly evolving groups in the world today they're evolving faster than people can study them now what kind of rot is that number four dinosaurs were in every habitat it's far north and south as it was land including places where it was pretty cold in the winter Tyrannosaurus Rex left probably footprints in the snow in Alaska backwards argument the dinosaurs were spread all over the lot that they occupied all continents and a variety of environments doesn't particularly apply to whether they were warm-blooded in it or not except insofar as they were able to penetrate environments that were characterized by low temperatures well it's possible that such things didn't exist during the during the Jurassic and Cretaceous because the geologists tell us that there were there were no polar icecaps during that time and that the temperature range from from the equator to pole was much smaller than it is at the present time number five dinosaur meat eaters are nearly always incredibly rare nearly always just as rare as lions and tigers are and that could only be because on average each meat-eating dinosaur needed a lot of food because it was warm-blooded there are five good reasons if it takes ten plant-eating critters to keep one flesh-eating critter alive you're not going to run a railroad successfully if the numbers are the same so so Bucky's argument for a very high number of prey animals relative number of predators as indicating a high high inconstant body activity metabolism warm-blooded decision won't if you want to say that is probably sound modern dinosaur art and the debate over warm-bloodedness are part of the newest wave of paleontology the search for the living dinosaurs and the living world they inhabited paleontologists hans-dieter Seuss is part of an ongoing Smithsonian project called the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems parent ology for a long time was essentially a handmaiden to the other geological sciences paleontologists were there to describe fossils to use those fossils to attempt age assessments for the sedimentary rocks that contain them and this was pretty much what paleontology was restricted to in recent years has also been a new line of research that has actually started to look at animals in a way as machines how do animals feed how do animals move and due to a variety of sophisticated techniques particularly electromyography where you actually register electrical activity patterns of muscles as they become active say during chewing or moving and combined with that filming animals with x-ray pictures so you get sort of an x-ray sinha radiography you can suddenly see bones as part of a living being and bones thus no longer just dead inert objects but are part of a living organism and once we understand the rules and principles that underlie the bones in living animals we can apply this knowledge to the fossil record but as hans-dieter Seuss points out all our new hi-tech knowledge of the dinosaur is grounded on the same distinctly low-tech source fossils are the only tangible line of evidence about patterns of evolutionary processes in the past they are the only direct evidence everything that we know from population genetics and molecular biology is pretty much restricted through organisms that live right now however if we want to get the grand picture how ecological communities came into being how the entire biosphere developed we really have to look at the fossil record I met a traveller from an antique land who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert near them on the sand half sunk a shattered visage lies my name is Ozymandias king of kings look on my works ye mighty and despair nothing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away this is all the dinosaurs left from their 140 million year reign and for more than a century paleontologists have dug up the West looking for fossils mineralized bones trying to penetrate the secrets of the dinosaur's life and death the Smithsonian is home to much of the collection of oc4 oaths Neil Charles Marsh heir to a fortune Yale professor frontier filibuster er and paleontological plutocrat over a quarter century of digging Marsh led and dispatched regiment after regiment across the West led by guides and scouts like Marcia's friend William Cody the legendary Buffalo Bill and armed to the teeth against Indian Marauders and marshes paleontological archrival Edward drinker cope Marsh a colleague wrote was a crack shot and the fishermen of repute at his best around the campfire where the swapping of tall stories is a highly appreciated art Martian cope and their followers were the lead prospectors in a bone rush and their journals painted scenes of the adventure and discovery of the frontier the Yale party was mounted on Indian ponies and armed with rifle revolvers geological hammer and bowie knife by day hour after hour they marched over burning sand hills without rocks or trees or sign of water while the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten in the shade of the wagons [Music] it was my first visit to the Farwest Marsh Road and all was new and strange reminding me of mid ocean with its long rolling waves brought suddenly to rest it was in fact the bottom of an ancient sea a Marshall attendant wrote of finding dinosaur remains mingled together in the most inextricable confusion and in every conceivable position as though in some ancient mud holes these huge monsters have become mired and died and succeeding generations had trodden their bones down and then left their own to mingle with them [Music] this is not the west of Marcia's time but ours Procter Lake just a few miles from Comanche Texas about a hundred miles southwest of Dallas who's buried fossils may hold the key to a new discovery about the dinosaurs as parents [Music] the lore of hunting dinosaurs has not weakened in the hundred years since marsh and if modern explorers arrived in a pickup truck instead of on horseback the rest of the search goes on much as it did a hundred years ago the chance to uncover what has been hidden for a hundred million years to see something that was last seen by the dinosaurs themselves still has the power to draw people with a hankering for discovery like Nicolas Hutton paleontologist writer dinosaur digger and senior curator at the Smithsonian Institution Lou Jacobs the Southern Methodist University professor and paleontologist who heads up the Procter Lake project Phil Murray head of paleontology at nearby Tarleton State co-sponsor of the project will Downes and Kent Newman expert field paleontologists and Dale Winkler whom Jacobs calls the scientific brains of the operation [Music] that's a toe there the proctor leg crew can see the trail of the dinosaur and what to the untrained eye is a scattering of rock every blow of the pic loosens a cloud of chalk dust working carefully and patiently with brush and all I uncover enough of the bone so that I can tell what I have found those are the words of Charles H Sternberg a dinosaur hunter who worked under both marsh and cope Sternberg's description is a century old but the process of digging for dinosaurs has changed so little that it still fits this material which is very familiar most is actually about as high-tech as we obtained it's called all-purpose pen and logical papers you see it's two-ply well it's closely two flights come on open up their unscented white and we use it to protect fossils against attrition when they're wrapped up to be shipped it doesn't matter if you break them what matters is if you grind them and to keep them from being ground we simply wrap them in paper at this level it's what works is counts and this really works after they have been traced a ditch is cut around them and by repeated blows of the pick the slab which contains them is loosened this is then securely wrapped and strengthened with plaster you kind of get a feel and it's like yes well as to how far that specimen actually goes down and once you think you know how far then like right here we decided that the bone comes down probably six to eight inches and there's no point in carrying all this extra dirt and weight so we're gonna cut all that away surprised last year with a couple of them because their tails just went straight down and we started running into him actually we're digging under kind of have to gauge yourself with the specimen old ideas like the one that dinosaurs abandoned their young at Birth crumble in the face of new discoveries but dinosaurs have been good parents whatever the case you do have to explain why there are little ones here together and what reason was that the animals came to this site for so many years kept coming back at least it tells you in this case that small ones staying around together may may be because they were staying in the nesting area and maybe because the parents were protecting them here after the days of digging and plastering there's time to assess the importance of what's been found with their plant eating dinosaurs that reached maybe 10 or 12 feet and maximum length and stood four or five maybe six feet high unlike many most of the other dinosaurs that we would find in a typical site that's down near the coast which are would be dominated by carnivorous types and much larger surf on brontosaurus sort of thing this has to fit into the whole of paleontological and geological picture of that time in that sequence of rocks in other places here in Central Texas we have lots of other fossils of different kinds and and that's one of the things that makes this so amazing because there's nothing else that's like where were the big dinosaurs we know that yeah where was anybody where was everybody yeah yeah where were the Turtles where were the crocodile yeah where were the clams were the fish how many young are in this occurrence that we have to think in terms of what was the relationship between the parents and the young it does seem as though there was dinosaurs early some dinosaurs exhibited a great deal of parental care and what have we got well the thing that comes to my mind is the Rookery know will has said without eggs um got rookery and that's quite cruel but we may be dealing with a rookery in a timeframe after the eggs have all been hatched or destroyed and the young are still hanging around with their parents you know it's hell is hard for us as human beings to say what a dinosaur was like we can if we had if we were digging up fossil horses here we could tell you with a great deal of detail what what they were like because everybody has got a mental picture what a horse is nobody has ever seen a dinosaur nobody has ever been as intimately associated with dinosaurs as we are with horses and cats and dogs and stuff like that there dinosaur bones that started sites like the one at Proctor Lake go here what I'm doing is just removing the rock off of the skeletons of these little dinosaurs so we can expose them and eventually get them out of the rock it's just pure mechanical operation using a little pin as what we do all the fine work with the block is from a place called Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico inside the block there should be anywhere from 15 to 20 or 30 small dinosaurs and hopefully something else besides Coelophysis the little dinosaur which is by far the most common animal from Ghost Ranch you can see the skeletons come up to about this point here when we prepare out this block in other words remove the rock overtop of the bones these skeletons should continue over the whole rock and there should be about a dozen or two at least and right here you can see the skull of a large individual animal this is an animal that probably weighed about 50 pounds which is pretty big for Coelophysis and this is a reconstruction of what the little guy looked like it's very bird-like animal even though if you were really if all you want to do to make this thing into a bird is put wings on instead of the arms and eliminate the tail and the rest of his Anatomy is very much like a bird except for a mouthful of teeth Alex Don's laboratory has been designed to give museum visitors a window onto the process of uncovering dinosaurs but behind the scenes Smithsonian's paleontologists know a different kind of bone quarry than the one at ghost ranch like marshes finding it requires not merely directions you know the naked guy like the one at Proctor Lake there is the feeling that what you are seeing has lain unseen and undisturbed through eons and epochs at the beginning of the sauropod collection oversize sauropods and we have the brontosaurus claw this paleontological treasure trove lies not in Texas or Montana but in the Smithsonian itself in uncharted territory which the Smithsonian's Michael Brett's ermine nose like the back of his hand [Music] this is the type room of the vertebrate paleontology division a type specimen is the actual specimen used to name a new species and in this room we have over 1,800 type specimens one of which is this specimen here which is the upper right arm bone of Stegosaurus sulcus this is the armor of Edmund tonyia rugosa dens generally armor comes in three different types spikes clubs and plates these are the first series of neck plates which would sit right about here and would act as a physical deterrent this is one of the shoulder spikes which would first act as a visual deterrent and then as a physical deterrent this is the original restoration of Stegosaurus ungulate as' done for professor marks over a hundred years ago the importance of artwork like this shows how we conceived the appearance of Stegosaurus over time it shows what bones were available at the time of the restoration what scientists thought the animal looked like and it also shows the relative position and sizes of the bones for scientists who can't come look at the original material this particular restoration shows the plates in a single row around 1914 another theory came along saying that the plates were in a sort of a staggered alternating row and recently in the 1980s the original single row theory has been resurrected again based upon new evidence this is the skull of Ceratosaurus and as a cornice marche and for the past 100 years all restorations have been based upon this one skull this is the famous nasal horn and this is the only known meat-eating dinosaur that has a nasal horn like this see the teeth are serrated on the front and the back so it's essentially a set of double steak knives in the mouth this is our type skull of Triceratops obtuse which shows several interesting features the tooth row here consists of a single set of teeth that has enamel on the inside and dentine on the outside the enamel being harder than the dentine wears away at a slower rate so this is a self sharpening tooth the tooth battery is oriented vertically so the teeth don't come together as our teeth do but they come together in a shearing plane Triceratops is essentially the first Cuisinart this is a brain cast of Triceratops we've taken a skull of Triceratops and sectioned it right down the middle and peel the halves apart so we can see the inner structure of the brain the front is toward this area this section of the brain is for the sense of smell this is for hormone regulation this is for muscle coordination and this is for breathing and heart rate and thinking occurred right in this area in here it was once thought that a brain this small in an animal as large as Triceratops made these essentially very stupid animals because they were so limited in brain size we can compare it to a similar cast of Tyrannosaurus Rex and as we could see Tyrannosaurus has a little bit larger brain but that's because it's a carnivore and all carnivores have larger brains than herbivores these are the two hands from a duck-billed dinosaur this specimen over here is the left side where the bones are normal this is look on the right side this animal has had his hand broken and the bones have become shattered and because they weren't reset there's been wild uncontrolled bone growth all throughout the size of the bone here and because the nerves doctor is 70 million years away this is what happens when you sustain an injury in the Mesozoic in this cabinet we have one of the back plates of Stegosaurus which occurred over the legs this is a section of the 11 foot long camarasaurus neck this is the first specimen ever found of Triceratops and this is the tail spike of Stegosaurus imagine four of these waving at you turning rocks into bones and bones into exhibits requires a kind of alchemy the kind practiced in the Smithsonian's Paleo preparatory lab presided over by Arnie Lewis you don't come by fossils easily that's the whole thing they come in bits and pieces a paleontologist may get three good specimens in his lifetime I've been extremely lucky that I've been in three or four localities with that had never been prospected before and so I've seen some really good fossils like Santa's elves at the North Pole Paleo prep technicians prepare fossilized bones for exhibit and research Paleo prep artists create spare parts to fill in for what explorers have yet to find and skill dedicated volunteers chip in for the fun of it and it won't find a better guide than Arnie Louis to the place where it all winds up the Smithsonian Institution's dinosaur Hall the process in getting a major mount for four of the dinosaur Hall is first of all collecting the dinosaur each year you should be in the field at least a month and I would back in the olden days we were in the field about three months but for with it with that in mind you have the specimen located in the field you collect that specimen and collecting a sauropod might take as much as three years then you've got three to five years of preparation that has to go on with that specimen then you have to research the the specimen to find out how everything goes together because they're never laid out for you well model has to be made of the way you think this animal might look and like a blueprint that you can follow with the rest of your Mountain the time it takes to do this might be anywhere from a year to maybe two years and once you're able to move forward and to put this animal together actually it doesn't take nearly as much time as you would think the main time has already been put into it in in the thought and the preparation of the specimen this best man like a triceratops for instance could be our matured and put together so it stands up there and from the public as Oh in a matter of six months main thing if you have structural difficulties then you've got to look at cables and things like this and these tend to add a little time to the specimen but I've always felt if you could mount restore and mount a medium-sized dinosaur in about a year and a half it's time here's another way to get your own personal guided tour despite the impression its fearsome spikes give stegasaurus in front of you wasn't interested in attacking any animal mammal or otherwise a plant-eater Stegosaurus swung its tail only in self-defense well model shown here was built in nineteen for and is completely accurate except for the placement of the largest pair of plates which should lay behind the hip joint here's quetzalcoatlus northropi which got its last name because it reminded the scientists who discovered it of a northrop b49 airplane on that long thin bill marks it as a fish eater [Music] [Applause] yes I want to go see that mean these are OC Marsh dinosaurs a lot of them Stegosaurus Diplodocus Triceratops and a lot more a fitting memorial to one of the first of the great bone hunters artist Mark Hallett calls his painting dawn of a new day and from where the tiny mammals our distant ancestors sat it was dawn but the difference between dawn and dusk is one of perspective and from where the dinosaurs lay the Sun had set for a hundred and forty million years the dinosaurs had ruled the world and the mammals had been their timid subjects now the mammals were on top and the dinosaurs had been brought low but how and by whom or what many of us think that it wasn't murder at all but a kind of suicide the dinosaurs did it to themselves they were just too big and stupid and obsolete to stay in business but the evidence says different whatever you say about dinosaurs marts they were certainly smart enough to give our remote ancestors a hard time because our remote ancestors the lineage not the ancestors himself but the lineage was replaced by dinosaurs and then for the 140 million years of dinosaur success our ancestors were the smallest and most inconspicuous tetrapods around so how did the dinosaurs meet their end what could have penetrated the Triceratops defense the Tyrannosaurus offense we're starting out with an assemblage of say 10 or 12 species of dinosaurs in western North America it doesn't take much to get rid of 1000 species but if you had Tyrannosaur say as a Tyrannosaur you have developed a special type of skull which is uniquely different from that of all other mediating dinosaur it's a skull that is very solid that's very strongly implanted teeth and has been suggested that these kinds of skulls evolved to deal particularly with one type of prey namely the horn dinosaur ceratopsians which must have been very fearsome opponents and certainly would have put up an immense fight against being eaten by this large carnivore so something happens to the vegetation the ceratopsians which have very peculiar dentition which suggest that they were adapted to dealing with very specific types of vegetation disappear who are you going to eat well okay say there's some more dark belts around so maybe you can make a living on those for a while but duckbills again haves very specific conditions since I said that there were very profound flora stitching's the docpods may have disappeared as well so here you have a huge five ton carnivore running around trying to make a living there's really nobody fun to pick on who's he gonna eat love opossum sized mouths that could outrun him in any case so as a carnivore suddenly up the creek because your favorite prey items have disappeared and if you have a really substantial environmental deterioration suddenly the ecological opportunities for all these finely attuned forms disappear and you see a mass extinction event what changed the rules what so transformed the dinosaurs world that they could no longer survive for years paleontologists at museums and on college campuses traded extinction theories climate changes continental movement a graters things that over tens of millions of years could spell the end of a one hundred and forty million year old race then in 1977 a university of california geologist walter alvarez checked a layer of italian rock for the presence of iridium an element rare on earth but plentiful in outer space it turned out that there was a lot more iridium in this layer then we could account for except by concluding that a lot of iridium had arrived all at once probably as a comet or an asteroid hitting the earth dust and debris thrown worldwide by the explosion that the impact causes that dust would make it so dark that vegetation would die it would get very cold there wouldn't be anything to eat for large animals like dinosaurs and that the extinction would be fundamentally due to death by starvation the possibility that dinosaurs had become extinct in as little as a few months imploded on the scientific community and in the mass media like a nuclear blast Walter Alvarez didn't have to go far to find opposition to his impact theory it was waiting for him just three floors below in the office of his colleague paleontologist William Clemens the maps that Walter and Louise regularly used in their lectures showing their the various places around the earth where they have found iridium are impressive but they never tell you how many places they've looked and haven't found it and one key area in Montana or some of these animals have come from there isn't a clay layer and there's no iridium associated with the the extinction of the dinosaurs now it may never have been deposited or deposited and eroded we don't know but it it isn't there William Clements had done his fieldwork too and he was concerned not about what he found but what he didn't find these are catastrophes that if they occurred you would expect to see the extinction of Dino not only dinosaurs but a whole variety of other plants and animals and in the terrestrial record we just don't see that Clemens and other critics claimed that Alvarez had only circumstantial evidence for his impact theory but the chain reaction was spreading according to one theory it wasn't a meteorite at all that hit the earth it was a comet according to another idea the collision that extinguished the dinosaurs was just one in a series of collisions which triggered mass extinctions every 26 million years yet another idea came from Robert Bakker what killed off the dinosaurs in large part was very mundane ordinary earthly effects of mixing Faunus big warm-blooded animals in particular of many many many diseases inside their bodies that their Co adapted to but you put that warm-blooded body full of diseases into a foreign environment diseases will escape the biggest threats to to us as a human species are exotic pests foreign diseases diseases that have evolved in a different animal a different place AIDS is an example just the most recent example smallpox devastated North American Indians many tribes the Black Death came out of Asia somewhere in devastated Europe rinderpest is an Asian cattle disease that devastated African antelope look at the end of the age of dinosaurs dinosaurs were on the move they were moving from Asia to North America so were Birds so are other animals that's got a cause extinction it's got to there would be no way to prevent it obsolescence asteroid dust star epidemics and vibrant Elaine jizz which one really killed off the mighty dinosaur after an unchallenged rain of a hundred and forty million years as rulers of the earth my own opinion is that all the lines of evidence indicates that there was one heck of a big event at the end of the at the end of the Cretaceous which coincided fairly closely with the extinction of a whole bunch of animals a whole bunch of organisms not just animals plants as well the evidence of first the iridium concentration they are now finding tektites and evidence of collision in the form of shock quartz and that sort of thing it looks as sure as heck is though some happen so yeah I said my own tendency which is sort of I work mostly on mammal-like reptiles and I'm kind of a side liner in this field but my tendency is to accept extinction as a consequence of some very unusual and nasty event most likely a collision while paleontologists expert on the ancient debated what had happened of the dinosaurs other scientists thought they had found a message for our times and the extinction of the dinosaurs like a note in a bottle of drift for 65 million years a distinguished group of biologists was asked to examine what the consequences would be of a nuclear war that led to a nuclear winter of roughly the sort that I have described to you the fine [ __ ] smoke over each of the 10,000 targets would spread the gaps between them would rapidly fill in and the lights would dim all over the planet well the biologists concluded that the net result might be not just massive deaths of plants animals and microorganisms but massive extinctions of plants animals and microorganisms and they said they could not exclude under these circumstances the extinction of the human species and therefore as I said before there is no place to hide but there was more to come and stranger some scientists think that the dinosaurs could have fallen victim to conditions that along with nuclear winter look eerily like Horsemen of our own modern apocalypse if the impact was in the ocean it would throw a great deal of water up through the atmosphere we spread around the world and that with all of that extra water vapor in the atmosphere you would get a very strong greenhouse effect like we're all concerned about now in terms of of carbon dioxide output but in that case rather than things getting cold they would get very hot and they the temperatures might become lethal worldwide there may have been continent scale wildfires and in fact a graduate student named Wendy wall Bock at Chicago and her professor ed Anders have actually found the soot from these fires now in clay layers like this from that time around the world and they're showing that there just was an enormous amount of soot distributed and continent scale wildfires are clearly a serious health hazard to to the animals and plants living there and then the other the other mechanism which is the sort of the most gruesome of the lot was suggested by a group of chemists at MIT they were able to show that after a gigantic impact as a result of nitrogen and oxygen combining you could end up with nitric acid raining out of the sky all over the world now this is an acid rain that makes our present problems look look rather minimal and is very likely to have been a major contributing factor in the mass extinction suppose just suppose that the dinosaurs hadn't died out 65 million years ago what might have become of them Dale Russell asked himself the same question and came up with an answer the dinosauroid is an interesting thought experiment that we a sculptor Iran sagen and I tried to do we imagined that if the planetesimal that struck the earth had not struck the earth at the end of the age of reptiles then the age of reptiles would not have come to an end now they would have kept on evolving I submit that perhaps since we are so successful and since there is a trend on towards higher brain body proportions through geologic time that we are a reasonable a solution to a biophysical problem but you can't do it exactly with a dinosaur because a dinosaur shows the effects of his genetic background he's not the same our ancestors were never the same as his so that the dinosaurs biophysical solution may not exactly duplicate ours but it may resemble ours at least as much as a bird does a bat I think that whole model of the Russell's is fatally flawed in one respect which is a very common assumption if you look at any science fiction movie or any science fiction television show you see the same thing that any really intelligent lifeform somehow takes on humanoid qualities so what he essentially did from his knowledge of small carnivorous dinosaurs he had one of these creatures evolved first of all away from kin every towards and obviously more herbivorous diet increase its brain size which is no problem but then in terms of posture and gait he made it a bipedal a pride being if they did survive long enough to become intelligent they would look like dinosaurs they wouldn't look like this monstrosity they would just look as they'd always looked they would stood they've been really small for dinosaur I suppose maybe about the size of Coelophysis which is something on the order of six feet from snout to tail they would probably stood maybe four feet off the ground with long hind legs in a long vertical neck and they would have had their little grasping hands out in front and they would be able to move that head around anywhere they wanted to they look liked and they've had a long tail to counterbalance the rest of this contraption just as just as all dinosaurs do the dinosauroid Mayo as much to art and imagination as it does the science but what else do we have the last dinosaurs died 65 million years ago and left no survivors or did they the pterodactyl has a familiar look close as Nick Hutton would say but no cigar the pterodactyls were lizards not Birds they died when the dinosaurs died 65 million years ago but look again Archaeopteryx a hundred and sixty million years ago the forerunner of the birds which fill our skies today a dinosaur no bigger than a crow Archaeopteryx couldn't fly with the ease and grace of today's birds but its feathers allowed it to climb glide and with great effort fly and 65 million years ago when the great dying felled the massive Alamosaurus the fearsome tyrannosaurus rex and a heavily fortified triceratops the tiny birds descendants of Archaeopteryx survived like mysterious survivors of Custer's last stand but the birds aren't really the sole survivors of the kingdom of dinosaurs for in the Red Texas clay yielding up only grudgingly its trove of ancient secrets in the acres of shelves and cabinets which lie beneath the Smithsonian in the laboratories where scientists and technicians reclaim Dinosaurs from stone and artists turned the fossil record into vivid reality and in the great dinosaur hall of the Smithsonian Institution the dinosaurs still live in reassemble skeletons in lifelike restorations and in the imagination of the young the young of all ages for whom dinosaurs have never been more alive [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] founded in 1846 the Smithsonian Institution is now the world's largest museum and research complex in Washington DC the Smithsonian operates 13 museums exploring an incredibly diverse range of knowledge the wonders of planet Earth and the life supports the history of the United States [Music] magnificent works of art from this country and from around the world and the story of human flight [Music] also in Washington is the National Zoo a Center for wildlife research elsewhere the institution operates the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the cooper-hewitt Museum of design in New York you can become an associate member of the Smithsonian and receive a wide range of special benefits including a subscription to Smithsonian magazine for information right to Smithsonian Institution Washington DC to o56 own the Smithsonian Institution America's National Museum [Music]

Channel: Johnny Yanko

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Id: MYjWmK-EGEc

Length: 69min 35sec (4175 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019