Next-Gen Paleontology

[Applause] Thank you Lisa uh thank you all for being here uh thank you for your kind invitation thank you Eric for setting everything up what a tremendous facility this is it's it's very impressive and I can only imagine what a great asset it is to your community and really to the world um so uh congratulations on that who knows where the first substantially complete dinosaur was found New Jersey Haddonfield New Jersey in 1858 so don't mess with New Jersey so you might think it odd that a guy who has spent a year in that tent right there in Patagonia is giving a talk about technology until recently paleontology hasn't changed very much we substantially do it the same way now as it was done 150 years ago and I like the old ways and uh and we're going to continue to do things the old ways which is why I brought my shovel out here so when you're doing field work you're almost never comfortable you're always either too hot or too cold or wind blown or calloused or bruised or bleeding sometimes but what I always tell my students is that in my view my blocking the picture here in my view Comfort is way overrated I mean think about it we try harder and harder to make ourselves more and more comfortable but does that correlate with happiness in my life all of the most profound moments all the most sanguine experiences have all happened while I have been uncomfortable and uh many of them have happened with one of these in my hand a shovel and so sometimes people will say do you think we'll ever get to time travel and I say yeah I have a time machine right here geology has laws and the very first law of geology is steno's law of superposition and that simply says that the old stuff is on the bottom and the young stuff is on top now that seems like a pretty simple law right but that was not obvious 300 years ago so you can take this time machine here and dig into the ground and you are digging back in time you're traveling back in time you're going back to past Landscapes you're going back to a time where there are extinct organisms that people have not yet seen you're going back to a time where Humanity is irrelevant where Humanity does not exist you're going back to a time when the earth is ruled by the laws of nature and you can go back with a very simple tool and you can deal with that world you can deal with nature with things that you can buy in the hardware store how many of you know this guy you ever watch the woodright shop on PBS Roy Underhill great guy so Roy does this amazing Ted Talk where he comes out on stage with a log and an ax which is where I got the idea he comes out on stage with an ax and he talks about how he takes nature with that simple item and turns it into culture with nothing more than an ax and I would say that you can take nature and turn it into science with nothing more than a shovel or a hammer or a chisel or a pickaxe it doesn't take a lot more than that and I was very fortunate in that I learned the value of uh and and the rewards of physical labor early in my life from my father who was a carpenter and a jokester as you can see and he really taught me how satisfying it is to work with your hands one of my favorite authors is Michael Pollan who writes a lot about food and one of his first books was about building a cabin this cabin in his backyard where uh where he could go and write a place of his own and he didn't grow up working with his hands so it was a big struggle for him but he wrote I think in the most beautiful way possible about the satisfaction of physical work and what he wrote is that at the end of a hard day of Labor you stand back and you see what you've done and you have made an unassailable contribution to the stock of reality beautiful way to put that and that's the same thing in paleontology after a hard day of cutting your knuckles and and digging at the ground you stand back and you see something that no human has ever seen before and it's this unassailable contribution to the stock of reality something is a little bit different in the world today than it was yesterday because you use the shovel to dig a hole in the ground and all of my predecessors knew this this is Roy Chapman Andrews the real Indiana Jones who led a series of the central Asiatic expeditions to Mongolia found a lot of dinosaurs found protoceratops oviraptor here is a nest of what he thought were protoceratops eggs they turned out not to be protoceratops eggs they turned out to be oviraptor eggs and he gave this crazy looking dinosaur the name oviraptor it means egg Thief he thought it was he found bones nearby and he thought this predatory dinosaur was praying on these eggs it turns out not to be the case it turns out to be those are Obi Raptors eggs and many decades later this amazing fossil was found by researchers at the American Museum you're looking top down on a mother oviraptor who is brooding a nest of eggs these are feathered dinosaurs so she has her feathers covering the nest and this mother was so devoted to her clutch that she allowed herself to be buried by a sandstorm and then was later fossilized as you see there another one of my heroes in paleontology Ernst Strummer here you can see with his pickaxe and his adult refreshment which is common for both paleontologists and Germans he did a lot of work in the Bahari Oasis in the Sahara Desert of Egypt discovered some magnificent dinosaurs that no one had ever seen before including this one Spinosaurus Spinosaurus is as long as a school bus it's as big as a T-Rex lived in this Mangrove swamp on the south coast of the tethy Seaway 95 million years ago through a lot of effort he excavated those bones he brought them back to the Bavarian Museum of Natural History and mounted them on the wall as you see here really changing reality and certainly there are plenty of dinosaurs in the United States and this is a very famous locality Garden Park fossil locality in Colorado where some of our most beloved dinosaurs have come from Allosaurus brontosaurus AKA Apatosaurus um uh stegosaurus uh and uh who am I missing Diplodocus and um so this area has been worked by lots of paleontologists including OC Marsh who you see up top here these are his students from Yale I can't imagine what Drexel risk management would do if I armed my students before I sent them out on the excavation but you got to admit that's a pretty cool picture and uh and these guys found stegosaurus and here's the first reconstruction of Stegosaurus that Marsh worked with uh an artist to do again this is you can see back to the early days of paleontology there's this there's this conversation between scientists and artists and here's my crew in Patagonia and we do things essentially the same way that our predecessors do we do things the same way as the the Giants whose shoulders we stand on did and so our life in the field is probably pretty comparable to OC marshes and and Ernst Stromer and Roy Chapman Andrews and and everybody else who continues to do this work and so we work in the same method and we find dinosaurs in the same method and probably this is sort of a preemptive strike the the most common question that I get asked when I give talks is how do you find a dinosaur we all use the same formula but it's a secret but I can tell you guys um so organisms live for a certain number of years right a certain geological interval so you have to find rocks to the right age depending on what you're interested in if you want to find trilobites don't go to the Cretaceous right you need to go to the Paleozoic if you want to find dinosaurs you have to find rocks that are between the late Triassic and the end of the Cretaceous unless you're interested in the dinosaurs that we call Birds which survive until today so it's fairly easy to find rocks of the right age now because the Earth is geologically mapped it didn't used to be the case and so if you go back to the 18th century we would have had no ability whatsoever to predict what strata might occur in a particular place the the discipline of stratigraphy had not yet been invented and it wasn't until 1815 when William Smith published this first country scale geological map that really for the first time gives us predictive insight to say oh I think I can find Jurassic deposits there oh I think I can find the Carboniferous over there and so when we go to a field site now we have the benefit of stratigraphy we have the benefit of all those geological maps so if you want to find trilobites you go up there to the Paleozoic and if you want to find dinosaurs from the late Cretaceous like I do you go down there to the deposits at the bottom of course you can only find fossils in sedimentary rocks you can't make a fossil in an igneous rock or in a metamorphic rock and so the process of fossilization requires both sediment and water and so you have to limit yourself to that rock type and then today it has to be a desert dinosaurs were Cosmopolitan they all lived on land but they lived in every different environment you can imagine if you watch the Discovery Channel or National Geographic you'll see paleontologists usually working in deserts it's not that dinosaurs lived in deserts is that deserts provide the exposure into that window of time deserts provide the the outcrop and the erosion to bring the fossils to the surface so that the dinosaur and the paleontologist can meet so if you get yourself in that right situation rocks the right age sedimentary rocks and um and a desert thank you you will find dinosaurs every time in fact when you go down to that filled area in Patagonia you see all these Pebbles on the ground every one of them is a piece of dinosaur bone and so when you get yourself in that situation it's not really a question of where you find fossils or not you're going to find fossils that is a question of do you find something that's scientifically significant or not and that's you know the the Serendipity that's involved so my field second Patagonia is down near Tierra del Fuego down near fin del mundo and if you could fly there directly from Philadelphia which you can it's about a 10 airport trip round trip but if you could fly there when you cross the Amazon River you're not yet halfway there as you sit here tonight in Kansas City you're closer to the Amazon than I am when I'm at my field site in South America you have to go up to Newfoundland to be as far away so it's very remote in an area about the size of Connecticut there are three houses this is one of them my friend Gaucho Ramon beautiful you see the the cordajara or the Andes there we see these Andean Condors every day they have a nine foot wingspan and they're scavengers of course so if you want to see a condor you lay down in the desert and you pretend to be dead and about 20 minutes later you'll see the Condors start circling and you can take your pictures that way so although we enjoy the Condors we go down there for the sauropods go for the Condors stay for the sauropods um and sauropod dinosaurs are the long neck long tail quadrupedal uh animals there were some diminutive ones that got to be the size of an elephant but some of them got to be 60 maybe 70 maybe 80 tons they are just Titanic creatures and in fact this group of sarpods is called the titanosaurs so 60 tons is the mass of a dozen full-grown bull African elephants and so it kind of staggers the mind that this could be an individual animal right How Could An animal like that possibly survive how what's their physiology like how could they respire how could they regulate their body temperature how could they take it enough calories how could they reproduce they obviously did all those things but it's amazing that uh that they could the first field season down there uh was a very tough one we had no road to get into the site we had to Raft down a glacial stream to get there we found some very big bones and they were all what we call per mineralized they became mineralic copies of iron minerals so we found some of the biggest bones ever seen that had turned to iron so I thought we were going to need a helicopter to get the fossils out of there and actually I met with the Argentinian Air Force and they said c and the general said c and on the day it was supposed to happen that turned out to be a presidential level sign off and president was in Spain and so at 10 days left in the Expedition I found out that there wasn't going to be a helicopter so I had to come up with Plan B so plan B involved rafting supplies across the river hiring a gaucho and a team of horses to take these supplies to the top of the mountain jacketing the bones and plaster and burlap I went into town four hours away and had a welder build a metal toboggan put the jackets on the metal toboggan belay them around my hip down to that Gully over there clear out a two mile path of Basalt Boulders hitch them to another sled toe the bones out to the desert to the point where we could get a front end loader in we only had a few days to get all this done so here's taking the uh the supplies across this River this river is really fast moving and it was Ice yesterday literally it's very very cold here's one of the horses taking a couple packs of plaster up for us they weigh about 70 pounds each and here's a jacketed dinosaur bone being hauled out of the desert by two Gauchos there and so I've been down there with uh with this crew here and with this crew and they get a little more kind of field hardened each time and with this crew and we find lots of Bones these are ribs that you see here and the bones that we find are generally pretty big here's a big bone here and you can see we're wrapping it with a paper towel first act as a separator and then we start to cover it with bandages of plaster and burlap for a big bone like this we'll jacket some metal in there as well this is a single vertebra in the neck of a dinosaur jacketed again to save money I've learned to drive the front end loader which is probably the most fun a professor can have so this is my favorite part of the Expedition and so we kind of get everything ready for a couple days of extraction with the front end loader at the end there's that one I showed you coming out there's uh about eight bones in that jacket since I was in Kansas City I thought I'd show you a bucket of ribs and then we load everything into an ocean container out in the desert with a nice Argentinian Customs Agent following me around with the board the entire time sometimes he brings the dog that wears the vest as well and then I I literally have a day when I can say my ship came in and this was the day and so one of those containers has 16 tons of dinosaur bones in it and then there's still a lot of hard manual work after that there's preparing the fossil so we have to open the jackets we leave a lot of rock on the bones on purpose to protect them and stabilize them so we have to remove that rock very carefully we have certain chemicals that we use to stabilize the bones there's stuff made for this actually commercially there's paleobond which is a glue and there's a putty called Jurassic gel which which we buy a lot of and so we stabilize the bones so that they'll last as long as possible in a future Museum then of course the science begins and we we measure the bones very carefully we describe the anatomy and excruciating detail we'll have a student doing a whole dissertation on neck another student doing a dissertation on a tail and so forth there's so much material and then in some cases what happens next is that a dinosaur will go to a museum to be mounted and mounting very big dinosaurs like sauropods is a tough Endeavor and it's not necessarily great for the bones as well so when you mount big dinosaur bones you have to create this huge steel or iron Armature and then you attach the bones to that in some cases in the past they have drilled holes through the bones so that they can run pipes through or in some cases they put bolts in the bones or clamps and things like that so none of that is really good for these ancient fossils and then once the bones are erected uh it looks nice but it's kind of a problem for the scientists that come later because if you want to do some work on that dinosaur it's almost impossible to disarticulate that mountain then and to take an individual bone out you have to do something like this but even if you can come in on a day when the Museum's closed and in some cases you need to get a cherry picker some bones are touching others they're articulated and so you can't get the certain aspects of the bone when they're mounted like that and so the alternative to this has been to mold and cast fossils in in traditional sorts of ways and this is a little bit better but it still has some problems so when you mold a fossil and you could use different compounds to do this but you don't get perfect Fidelity that way and you'll see on display some casts are very very good this picture is from a company that does very very nice work some casts are just terrible They Don't Really portray the anatomy of these animals very well at all plus the actual molding and casting can damage fossils and once you make a mold you only get so many pulls from that mode you only get so many casts to come out of the mall before the mold degrades and in the meanwhile you have to curate the mold which is even bigger than the dinosaur right and so it's it's somewhat problematic so that's the old way of doing paleontology which I like and we're going to keep doing the old way but now I want to talk to you about some new ways of doing paleontology and in the last 10 years but especially in the last five years there's been some amazing brake fluid breakthroughs that have occurred that scientists are using synchrotrons very powerful radiation going through fossils to image embryos and the insides of Bones and the insides of fossil feathers and such Stefan Schuster out at Penn State University a few years ago he sequenced the entire Genome of the woolly mammoth The Woolly Mammoth genome was sequenced before the elephant was sequenced which is pretty amazing my friend Mary Schweitzer down at NC State in Raleigh she has been recovering protein and blood vessels and blood cells and other tissues from uh T-Rex from a duckbill dinosaur this protein can still be sequenced so you can see that if it's truly ancient protein it should fall out between crocodiles and and birds today and it does Hans Larson up at McGill University in Quebec is tweaking the genes in chicken embryos and chickens are dinosaurs and he's making them grow their dinosaur Tails again which is pretty amazing and so there's a lot of really high-tech stuff going on in paleontology right now and so with a shovel you can turn nature into science but then you can take it Way Beyond that with what's happening so now we're going to add some modern tools in here like a 3D laser scanner here which I have in my lab and with the 3D laser scanner you can take this hard one bone chipped out of the Earth with with stuff you buy at the hardware store and you can then scan it capture the 3D morphology of it and then turn that into a virtual object and that virtual object then has the the potential to do many things that the actual physical object cannot do for you and so when you capture the digital images of the bone one of the things that you are doing is you're digitally curating that fossil and so a digitally curated fossil it doesn't degrade it can be ported anywhere in the world effortlessly right it doesn't take up space and it's wonderful let's go back to our friend Ernst stremmer Von Reichenbach here from The bajaria Oasis in Egypt so this was stromer's life work finding these dinosaurs in baharia that he brought to the Bavarian Museum and Spinosaurus is a very famous dinosaur how many of you have heard of Spinosaurus before tonight not as famous as I thought it was but it's still pretty famous um how many of us have you saw the Jurassic Park three ten years ago all right so if you remember the homicidal maniac dinosaur that was trying to kill off the entire cast that was Spinosaurus okay so Stromer found the spinosaurus brought it to the museum where it was on display for decades until these guys got involved in April of 1944 and so it turns out that Hitler's Nazi party headquarters in Munich happened to be across the street from the museum which really kind of shoots the neighborhood when Hitler makes him and so in April of 44 they they bombed Munich they took out the headquarters but they took out the museum and they took out the one Spinosaurus skeleton that the world has ever had and the facades of both buildings remain standing and they have built those since then and I've gone back to this place and here you can see the the standing facade of the Museum of Natural History and this is this building right here and Hitler is walking out there and I went in there and now there is a Starbucks there so take that Hitler but it's a sad story because the the world lost this uh wonderful enigmatic One of a Kind dinosaur can so can you imagine if Ernst drummer had a 3D scanner in his lab they could have scanned Spinosaurus and even though the original was destroyed we would still have a perfect copy of it a perfect copy that could be replicated that could be studied that could be used for biomechanical analyzes and what a tragedy that we have lost that specimen but think of all the dinosaurs that will be preserved in the future now because we have this technology so this is a way to Foster virtual collaboration last year um I wanted to examine the snout of a dinosaur that was found in Morocco and it's probably another specimen of Spinosaurus we're never going to know for sure because strummer's type specimen of Spinosaurus didn't have a snap so unless somebody finds another Spinosaurus that has overlapping Parts you can't really say for sure but it's probably a Spinosaurus now and so not that I'm complaining but I had to get on a plane and go to Milano um to see the spinosaurus now with virtual collaboration you can map out say not only the the growth morphology but the the muscle attachments very carefully and transfer those onto a virtual model and then two paleontologists could collaborate even if they're not on the same continent much the way that Physicians collaborate today across continents across the country Physicians today use Virtual Technology to to bring Health Care to remote areas where there is no doctor or to get expertise from other places around the world where where it may not exist in in their own country and so I think that we'll be able to take this kind of approach and apply it to paleontology and um and we'll have paleontologists from other continents then working together on the same dinosaur virtually and these virtual copies of dinosaurs allow you to do experiments in ways that weren't possible before I a femur of a big sauropod dinosaur is taller than I am and since it's been mineralized in part it might weigh 1100 pounds we're not really going to be able to do a lot of experiments with an object that weighs 1100 pounds but you can print out a copy of one and so here's a copy of a humerus that we found in Egypt of a dinosaur called parallel Titan and the original humerus would come up to about my ears and so this is printed at 1 10 scale and it's very very accurate preserves a lot of details and we can now do experiments and we can do experiments in two different ways we can do them in the physical world so we can do actualistic experiments by creating robot dinosaurs and the advantage of doing it in the real world is that even if you're not smart enough to include all the variables that you should include or maybe you don't have the computational power to include all the variables that you should include in an actualistic model in a real world model they're in the model because this bone exists in the real world just like you and I do and all the forces that are acting on us is acting on this bone so it has what roboticists call agency right this thing really exists in the world and you're really testing a real model when you do that the other way of doing it is to do it in a virtual sense and when you do that um you may not have all the variables but you can do a lot of iterations and one one idea that really fascinates me is we can get to the point where we can use Evolution to help us figure out Evolution and so if you if you assemble a virtual skeleton of a dinosaur and you test it biomechanically for efficiency you can make random changes to that skeleton run other iterations and see if it's more efficient or less efficient the more efficient ones you keep the less efficient ones you assassinate and then you mutate the one that's more efficient and you can do that thousands millions of times and you're using natural selection then to improve your model you're using a genetic algorithm then using Evolution to figure out evolution and so we can add a tool to our Arsenal here which is a 3D printer and 3D printers come in many varieties 10 years ago this was you know multi-million dollar technology now you can buy the MakerBot printer for about fifteen hundred dollars and so they're you know people are literally getting them in their garages now um and you can create these uh replicas and turn them into robots and do experiments the way these 3D printers work mostly they're a couple different ways of doing it but the most common way is a device that extrudes two different kinds of material one that's for positive area one that's for a negative area and then you can either dissolve or break away the negative area material and you're left with a 3D object then there are a couple different ways of doing that so here we have um a limb of a dinosaur that we scanned in my lab and shrunk it down the one-tenth scale printed it out identified the muscle attachments on that limb and then verify those muscle attachments because you can't generally just open a book and see the musculature of Any Given dinosaur it's actually not published so you have to you have to kind of figure this out as you go and so we verify those muscle attachments by dissecting birds and crocodiles like this and and such to make sure that it comports with our model and then once we think we have that right then our next step is we use a glue gun and we put rubber bands in the muscle insertion spots just to see if the model is stable if we have it wrong it's it's got a flop over or not hold itself up and once we think that's pretty good then the next thing we do is take off those rubber bands and insert wires hooked up to Servo Motors controlled by a computer driven by biomechanical algorithm that we write and in that way we get an actual working model that then can be used to test our biomechanical hypotheses and so we have a little imitation cartilaginous pad here and we can measure the force that goes into that movement and we can measure the force that's consumed by that movement and then we can tweak the model to see if we can achieve a greater level of efficiency the one thing that we can assume with these really big dinosaurs is they had to be hyper efficient creatures I would say that a sarpat dinosaur can do more with a calorie of food than any animal on the planet today any animal and land certainly and so to get to be 60 tons you have to have not only a lifelong obsession with eating but you have to really use your calories well so I'm guessing that these guys didn't do anything that wasn't efficient I imagine a sauropod day looks something like this you stand on four feet you have access to a huge feeding envelope because of your 30-foot neck you clear out that envelope over the course of a couple hours and then you go like this and then you do it again you're expending very little energy by doing that they probably don't need to expend any energy regulating their body temperature because they're literally as big as a house so their main metabolic challenge is going to be shedding heat not acquiring heat and have very efficient mechanisms to shed heat they're very pneumatic in fact the a big sauropod is kind of similar to a hummingbird they have very pneumatic skeletons lots of air cavities not just lungs but air bladder up here an air bladder down here they have that they probably have that avian one-way method of breathing that's very efficient for gas exchange and so they're really just these hyper efficient animals so again when we make a model more efficient we think it's parsimonious right that we're getting closer to the truth as we make a more efficient model and so another tool that we can add to our odd Arsenal here is a CT scanner and paleontologists have been using CT scanners for probably 15 or 20 years and this allows us to peer inside of the bone then which can be very useful when you're trying to do biomechanics so here's a bone that we had we took it down to Drexel's Medical College and we have to wait until three o'clock in the morning when nobody needs it and they'll kind of send it through on the sly for us and here you can see a model of the bone and this hollow here this wasn't really air in the bone but it's it's what we call spongiose tissue so it's tissue that's kind of honeycombed so it's it lightens up the bone but it allows for um in some cases air and in some cases vessels to go through and so by doing this now we can correctly model the strength properties of this bone now that we rather than cutting it open now that we know what it's like inside and so this is on the virtual side now this is the work of a colleague but you can assemble these virtual models and then put them through their Paces they might not be as accurate as an actualistic one right because they don't have agency they don't exist in the real world but you can do a heck of a lot of iterations which is another useful way of doing it here's an extinct crocodile that we found in New Jersey called hyposaurus rogeri and we scan this and I have a student who's working on the brain case anatomy of this crocodile from this CT scan another exciting use of this technology is is that it you know it's these are all very visual technology so they really follow the Nexus between Art and Science and we've had some very interesting collaborations with artists paleontologists typically I work with artists and so you can use this kind of data these kind of data for virtual reconstructions for Museum displays for Educational Tools this is a an 18 foot long crocodile that we excavated in New Jersey about I guess about six years ago and so the way we got into 3D scanning was from an art student in our College of media Art and Design Evan Boucher and the first thing we did was to scan the skeleton of the rackasaurus neocessariensis and um once we had that 3D data Evan went to work bringing it back to life and so he dissected crocodiles to learn their musculature he videotaped crocodiles in zoos to learn how they moved he went down to Costa Rica to videotape what would be similar to a Paleo environment for Cretaceous New Jersey and then his master's thesis was this short movie of a reconstruction of thoracosaurus neocessariensis and um he won that year National Geographics prize for digital paleo art which isn't a student award it's a professional award he later took that DVD into his interview with Dreamworks Studios and now he's an animator for DreamWorks today so we're very proud of him and so what you see here is the scan of thoracosaurus and then what he'll do we almost never find a complete skeleton of anything and so what he does next is he models the bones that are missing to put back together a complete skeleton uh and then you'll see he begins to teach it to move he begins to add the musculature what's really great about the way he did this is if if you watch an animated cartoon or an animated movie um what you're seeing is they they say they want the leg to go from here to here so they basically pull the leg right and then it just translates there over a number of frames that's not how he moved this rig the way he moved this rig was to virtually actuate the muscles the muscles themselves are pulling the bones which then pulls the skin and the rest of the body and so this crocodile is walking like a crocodile it's not walking like a cartoon and in doing that the science and the art the information is Flowing both ways we're learning from the art the artist is learning from the scientists a couple times he came to me and said Dr lackover you know I don't think that it can work exactly like you think it does because when I try it this part keeps rubbing up against this part or this part slips out and so the information flows both ways in this and so now you can see he's putting the muscles on the crocodile here and then he'll put the skin on foreign parts of this crocodile that we find are the Bony plates on its back called scoots they have a lot of those and then he starts to teach it to swim and teaching it to swim was quite a challenge that was the part of the project that was the hardest for him and finally he developed this sine wave function to move the tail that seemed like it was very efficient this and it seemed to do a really good job and I love this shot of that's those are the bones that we actually found swimming now there's the muscles back on and the skin and next he'll put it in the Paleo environment so we know what the environment was like 65 million years ago the world was much warmer than today verdant high levels of CO2 sea levels much higher so the coast of New Jersey is all the way up against where Philadelphia is today if you know the geography there basically the Delaware River is where the coastline is sea level was so high that the Gulf of Mexico had connected to the Arctic Ocean and were underwater at this location in in Missouri this is a InterContinental Seaway so if you dig down here in the Cretaceous you're going to find marine animals like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs and and things like that and So based on the sedimentology of our Quarry in New Jersey he was able to reconstruct the ancient environment here and put it back in and one of the more common fossils that we find there is this little fish called encodis and encodis this big will have fangs that are this big it's called the Sabertooth herring and um so we put poor encodas in here as a prey species and there are still crocodiles closely related to thoracosaurus alive today called Gabriel crocodiles and most of them are Ambush Predators they have very low caloric requirements because they're they're cold-blooded right they don't need a lot of energy and so they can sit in one spot for a long time literally with their mouth open waiting for something to swim in right and there's pouring CODIS and so that's kind of the promise of the scientific artistic collaboration that's possible with this 3D technology which I think is wonderful and this is really a great way to show people what's in the The Mind's Eye of the scientists it's much easier to see it this way so this is going to be the next victim this is a 65 million year old turtle that we found in New Jersey it's about a yard across we have this scanned and now I have another uh art student who is going to begin to recreate the skeleton put the muscles back on teach this thing to walk and how to swim all those bones we've recovered from Patagonia we have all of them scanned it took thousands of volunteer hours to do that and so we're going to be robotizing part of that skeleton eventually we'll be able to cast it for display we could cast it for educational purposes at a smaller scale or for display at a at a one to one scale so Beyond Art and Science is technology has the potential to really democratize this little portion of science to democratize paleontology not all areas of science are funded equally well and not all countries have the same resources in terms of funding and so if you can port a bone around the world it kind of levels the playing field and there are some amazing efforts going on in this regard just last week the British Geological Survey announced that they're releasing twenty thousand scan type specimens of fossils that are in their collection you can go online when you get home tonight you can go to the British Geological Survey and download these 3D models anybody can now and so you can have these amazing fossils that you would have had to have traveled to Britain to see but now you can have them to look at have them for Education have them for experimental purposes the Smithsonian has gotten big into this and here's a great site that they set up on human evolution and it's the evidence for human evolution so you don't have to take it from us scientist here's the fossils you take them you spin them around you look at them you can see the evidence for yourself and that really is a way of democratizing the process right of encouraging citizen science this summer The American Museum of Natural History ran a a digital fossil camp for high school students how fun would that be right and so they got to scan and print and assemble dinosaurs during their summer camp there and so the uh the future of paleontology includes lots of tools I'm not giving up my shovel not to not to sound like Charlton Heston right but um but I plan on using the shovel but we can take the real and the physical and blend it with the virtual I think to really Advance the field in the future and I think the combination of these two things is the future of paleontology thank you all right we have time for a few questions raise your hand I'll come by with a microphone go here and come back doctor um are there any tools that you can use for identifying the bones below the surface things like satellite imagery um things that you haven't talked about tonight but are you know advances in technology or do bones do not or do they just put off anything that satellites will pick up that's a dream that paleontologists have had for a long time and every year when I go to conferences there are talks about remote sensing techniques to prospect for fossils and everybody goes to the talks and and it turns out it didn't work this is what the talk is but they still get a talk out of it um so ground penetrating radar doesn't really work bones are per mineralized with minerals dissolved from the surrounding Rock so they end up essentially with the same specific gravity as the sediments that are surrounding them so there's nothing for the radar to look at to bounce off there are a couple of special circumstances where it's worked a little bit but it it's unfortunately it hasn't become a very useful Technique One remote sensing technique that actually works in the West in the Morrison formation dinosaur bones in the Morrison formation concentrate uranium so you can Prospect for them with a geiger counter going back to the shovel age from the 1800s and the 1900s and these fabulous collections of large-scale dinosaurs and museums that are mounted is anybody digitally archiving these so that anything should happen to them that they have them for future use and study it's just starting so five years ago almost no one had a laser scanner today probably most museums have a laser scanner and so the the Smithsonian is is doing that the I think the LA Museum that's certainly the American Museum we're doing it every bone every fossil that comes into my lab now just as a matter of protocol gets scanned yeah oh I see I haven't heard of that happening yet but I think it would be wise eventually it's a pretty major Endeavor if you go to say the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh you know they just redid dinosaur Hall and they just remounted the ploticus it would cost a lot of money and be a big effort to um disassemble that amount but I imagine the next time they renovate their dinosaur Hall that will be done yeah yes sir oh sorry I'm in my teaching mode um I was wondering you said that the the sauropod uh in order to process out all that heat that it had a skeleton that was formed very similar to bird skeletons well I know Birds tend to have very very fragile skeletons because of the the hollowness um how can something that has bones that are that Hollow I guess is the best word I get up to 60 tons yeah it's a great question so sauropods have uh really tough solid bones where they need them so their limb bones are are solid right and they can bear a lot of weight with their limb bones but if you go into their axial skeleton they're cervical vertebra their neck vertebrae very very pneumatic more air than bone and they have a structure that's very strong sort of a honeycomb type structure lots of Lamina and struts that provide strength without using a lot of material and then as you go into the dorsal vertebra there's more pneumaticity and some of them you see the pneumatic cavities invading into the ribs invading into the hip even down into the tail a little bit and they get more pneumatic as they age so these pneumatic cavities when they come into contact with the bone they remodel the bone and they actually invade into the bone and so as the dinosaur becomes larger in Mass it increases its capacity to shed air to the environment through the pneumaticity in its skeleton it's a great question though I thought I saw the towers of pain in the background and some of your Patagonia shots were you near there and if so how do you deal with the weather because it's really bad I didn't catch the name of the town towers of pain the large towers and they're very very hard to climb so you're not in in Patagonia yeah yeah uh we're near uh uh ceratore and uh and Fitzroy we don't climb those we look at them yeah they're um so we're we're on the plains of Patagonia it's High Plains pretty analogous to what the Highline of Montana would be like or maybe the Badlands of of South Dakota but we're right up the cordilleren range of the Annie's right up to it but it's um it's not like our Appalachian Mountains where you kind of roll up into them it's sort of like this and so although we have this beautiful Mountain View we don't have to deal with mountain topography there does that answer your question oh the weather it's terrible yeah it's just awful yeah um so we're down there in the austral summer and sometimes it snows on us it's frequently cold you'll see pictures of us working down there in the Patagonia in summer in parkas um not many t-shirt days down there we see these weather systems pop up over the Andes and we know we're going to get nailed in a half hour and we batten down the hatches some of them go around the world and hit us again because it's the only spot I land down there when we get a win from the south we know we're getting a storm coming up from Antarctica and so the weather is just horrible um how can I find your presentation on Netflix what's the name of it um I think it's called Uh biggest Dino killer colon Spinosaurus I didn't name it but uh yeah I think it's called biggest Dino killer and it's about Spinosaurus which actually I think probably behaved like a 45 foot long grape blue heron um I think it was a fishing dinosaur and probably not the maniac that they portrayed it to be yeah I said that a lot on camera but a lot of Becca edited out yeah the other question mine was about the structure of the Bones based on how big sauropods were is were they at the limit of how big an animal can be or would it have been possible to be even bigger that's a great question um the dinosaurs that we're working on uh don't show what we would typically see osteologically as signs of senescence so we don't know if this group of animals had um if the biggest ones had determinant growth or indeterminate growth and um nobody has really found of the of the few very very massive ones nobody has found evidence that they have hit senescence and stopped growing it before the time of their death so I don't think we know yet what the maximum size is there's there's a couple things there's preservational bias right it's very very hard to get a big dinosaur fossilized it's easy for a little dinosaur it dies it gets covered with dirt and it may turn into a fossil but when you're as big as a house when you fall over on a floodplain say very little of your body is in contact with the Earth and so there's a lot of time for weathering there's a lot of time for Scavenging to pull that skeleton apart and so the fossil record for the biggest of the big is not very good so that's one bias and the other bias is a professional bias which a lot of paleontologists will literally step over a big sauropod to get to a little dinosaur because it takes 10 years to dig up a big dinosaur and you have to be a little bit crazy to do it Dr lacavera back here at the last row um what was the strangest dinosaur you've ever found hmm well I know the strangest one I never found which was Spinosaurus I I tried for two Winters with friends and colleagues of mine to recover a Spinosaurus and we didn't find one but we found a new type of dinosaur most of my work has been with the sauropod dinosaurs and they're not um they're not the dinosaurs that you think of as the bizarre ones right so they don't have the crazy feathers or big claws or strange things like that so um they're unique in that they're so large but they're not especially strange all right due to the time we have time for one more question yeah I saw a hand up here earlier or dinosaur bones subject to National laws of Antiquities absolutely so the United States is one of the few countries in the world this that does not have laws that governs our fossil patrimony so you could go out here on private land tomorrow and dig up the most significant fossil ever found put it on eBay and ship it out of the country the next day it would all be perfectly legal in most countries that's regulated in Argentina when you put your hand on a fossil in the field it becomes property of the government of Argentina at that moment whether it's on private land or public land it doesn't matter as it should be I think so wherever I go in the world I have to work closely with the capital with the provincial geologists or provincial Museum and we of course do all this under permitting but it's that's one of the more complex parts of my job the part that I don't usually talk about because it's mundane and bureaucratic but the permitting for this kind of thing and and the shipping insurance and just all that stuff is pretty uh daunting thank you Dr lacavera thank you very much and thank you for attending tonight's lecture remember two more two days left for crayon and Stone come here tomorrow or Saturday and October 10th 6 PM is the opening of our next exhibition on the science of color thank you and good night thank you

Channel: Linda Hall Library

Views: 3,751

Keywords: Paleontology, geology, science, engineering, technology, fossils, fossil bones, 3D printing, museums, dinosaurs

Id: s4pMwCIMMqM

Length: 55min 6sec (3306 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023