Paleontologist Answers Dinosaur Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

i'm paleontologist sans seuss today i will be answering your questions from twitter this is dino support [Music] at tokaji sensuna us what's the scariest dinosaur i think the scariest looking dinosaur would have been spinosaurus simply because it had this huge sail on its back but i think here in the united states the t-rex is definitely the people's favorite here's part of a t-rex tooth the largest tooth including the root gets up to about seven or eight inches in length these cutting edges are serrated like a steak knife t-rex ate the whole prey we have fossil droppings of t-rex and they show us that it ate the meat and the bones crunched up the bones much like some big crocodiles do today at rickeydell's ask scientifically and historically speaking how do we know what dinosaurs sounded like surely the sounds the movies have taught us are just guesses no well indeed they are just guesses in fact it's quite likely that dinosaurs were much quieter than people give them credit for birds sing but most reptiles don't make much in the way of sounds except for hisses and grunts so we think that dinosaurs would have done things like that but certainly not this lion roar that hollywood wants us to believe ev4 n2 k4 us when i die and go to heaven first thing i'm asking god is what did jurassic park get wrong jurassic park was made as an entertaining movie not as a science documentary the star of the movies are the raptors here is an actual skull of an adult velociraptor the filmmakers decided that it looked too puny and they needed something bigger strangely enough shortly after this was filmed people found a really gigantic raptor out in utah and since then other giant raptors have been found in south america and in asia so there were giant raptors around but they were in fact much bigger than the ones in the movie the movie claims that t-rex could only detect prey by motion in fact when we study the brain case of a t-rex we find that it had very large olfactory bulbs which are the part of the brain that picks up information from the nose it had very large opening for the optic nerve which is the nerve that transmits information from the eye to the brain and it had a very complicated inner ear that allowed it to hear at least the wide range of low frequency sounds so it would have smelled the actors in front of its snout and it would have been a very short movie indeed at emo hair a western how did the asteroid kill every dinosaur like doesn't an asteroid hit like one general area rather than like the entire world the asteroid theory is a very flat earth theory there's no flat earth the earth is a sphere what happened was when the asteroid happened to impact it released the equivalent of a hundred million megatons of energy and this basically melted this huge asteroid which was six miles in diameter and this sent up a gigantic cloud of glowing material up into the atmosphere this would spread around the world we see this even today when a volcano erupts volcanic dust sweeps all around the world imagine a world where suddenly it's raining drops of molten glass that's what was happening and so basically every larger animal at that point died and that's why the dinosaurs were wiped out probably within a matter of hours at most a matter of days at laurenberger us how do they know what color dinosaurs were for many years we really had no idea what color dinosaurs had in fact people sort of assumed that like many of the modern lizards snakes crocodiles turtles it would have been sort of greenish brown and that's what you see in all the old dinosaur books however in recent years thanks to some remarkable discoveries in china we actually found out what some dinosaurs looked like and it was a real revelation we found that some of the little feather dinosaurs actually had color patterns as vivid as those in modern birds there is a dinosaur called cow lung and it had beautifully iridescent feathers so it would have looked like a big starling with nasty cloth so the dinosaur world was far more colorful than we were previously thinking at t6 lee us so why were dinosaurs so big back then but now animals are small scientists go a lot of dinosaurs were big but they were also small dinosaurs in fact there's one dinosaur that's barely over two feet long do you live in an environment was advantageous to be big for your particular mode of life and there's some places on earth where the roots are reversed often on islands generally large animals become dwarfs about 15 million years ago a gigantic hedgehog lived on an island and what's now italy in other parts of the mediterranean there were tiny elephants running on our that would have actually sort of been nice little pets if we had been around at that time gods teddies us how many species of dinosaurs are there i want to know all of them right now there are about 1100 described species of dinosaurs other than birds even very conservative estimates put a number much higher anywhere between 2 000 and 5 000 and there may have been even more one important thing to keep in mind is we are much closer in time to a t-rex than the t-rex was to a stegosaurus we now have classified this myriad of species by looking at various parts of their skeleton the most obvious part of the skeleton is the hip region when you look at the t-rex over my shoulder here you can see a hip girdle that has three bones with the front bone the pubic pointing downwards worse in the so-called birth tip dinosaurs which is unfortunately misnomer since they had nothing to do with birds you get a hip region that has the pubic bone pointing backwards there are many more subtle anatomical differences but basically there are two large groups of dinosaurs the lizard hip dinosaurs also called soritia and the bird tipped dinosaurs called ornithischia at lust clouds asks why did t-rexes have little ass arms that does not sit right with me for a dinosaur t-rex had really small but very powerful arms and you can see this here on our pride and joy nobody really knows why t-rex has tiny arms it has been calculated that the arms were still strong enough to lift up to 600 pounds of weight earlier relatives of t-rex still have longer arms other predatory dinosaurs actually get increasingly longer arms which eventually become wings in birds at solar wings us since when were pterodactyls not dinosaurs since ever dinosaurs and pterodactyls are related but pterodactyls have nothing to do with dinosaurs they have a early common ancestor but they diverged in their evolution quite dramatically pterodactyls became flying creatures wings very different from those of birds which dinosaurs were mostly land-dwelling animals and only a few forms later on evolved into birds which have very different looking wings at troopers looks asked the question of the day why did the early mammals and birds and fish like sturgeon etc not become extinct when the dinosaurs did that's a very good question and in fact it's one of the great mysteries of paleontology it's basically different life strategies small animals can hide a lot of small animals are also able to go without food for long times whereas a large animal cannot most dinosaurs went extinct and only one group of dinosaurs birds survived birds as i just said are dinosaurs because they descended from small meat-eating dinosaurs just like we are primates because we descended from other kinds of primates we now have a beautiful series of fossils documenting all of the stages between little predatory dinosaurs like that and birds that would have been recognizable as a bird to anyone alive today it's very rare that you get such a nice continuation of fossils between one group and a group that it gave rise to at tree boat paleo who would win in a fight chimera source or anato titan and nato titan and camarasaurus lived at very very different points in time in adult titan at the end of the cretaceous period about 66 to 68 million years ago and chimera source about 150 million years ago my money would be on the camarosaurus simply because chimera got a lot bigger both flowers were harmless plant eaters and so i don't think they would have really fought each other at harry bud cheek earth what was the climate when the dinosaurs roamed the world in which dinosaurs lived was generally a fairly warm one however at high latitudes where the sun would disappear for months at a time it would have been quite cold and we actually have even evidence from fossil salts that there were permafrost salts in some areas yet dinosaurs lived there dinosaurs really could cover almost any environment that you can imagine we know dinosaurs that live essentially under sub-polar conditions we know dinosaurs that lived in really tropical regions we know dinosaurs that lived in deserts so basically in a warm period of geological history they were everywhere at udonis haslam 69 us how are fossils a thing don't those beep just disintegrate well fossils are a thing they're real three-dimensional objects here's a limb bone of an ostrich mimic dinosaur that's about 90 million years old basically what happens is after death minerals infiltrated this bone from the ground water around it and they contained a lot of iron that's why it has this yellowish-brown color and gradually filled in all of the spaces in the bone sometimes the actual bone is still pretty much preserved but in most cases the bone has changed just ever so slightly so that it's no longer possible for instance to extract biomolecules like dna from it at the arc 315 asks what dinosaur feathers dinosaur scale or did they have a lot of bird-sized feathers the really gigantic dinosaurs by and large did not have feathers we only know one really large tyrannosaur from china that lived in a very cold environment and had feathers most of the dinosaurs that we know that had feathers were animals up to maybe five or six feet in length and they had bird sized feathers and we know this because the bones have little bumps on them and you can see them when you take a chicken apart they're called quill notes and that's where the large flight fells in a bird insert at mr soak us idea what was the smartest dinosaur like would they have used tools build shelter how much could they understand about the world some of these little predatory dinosaurs have really large brains they have the sort of bulging area here much like you would see on a bird's skull so these little dinosaurs probably had cognitive abilities similar to those that we see today in hogs owls and particularly in crows and ravens crows and ravens have repeatedly shown their ability to solve relatively complex problems and some birds have sort of minimal kinds of tool use as well and something like that is not beyond the possibility for these early dinosaurs as well at biolog from hell us when did the first humans discover that they were dinosaurs i really want to know how we first figured out giant giant giant dinosaurs robed the earth the first record that we know of a definitive dinosaur is from the 17th century in england when robert klotz described a part of a thigh bone he didn't know what to make of it he compared it to giants of legend president thomas jefferson couldn't conceive of the fact that animals had gone extinct even though he found fossils of extinct animals on his estate in virginia he thought that these animals still existed somewhere alive out west and that was one of the reasons he sent the lewis and clark expeditions out the smithsonian got into the dinosaur business early in the 20th century and here's an old photograph this was taken in the 1930s an excavation in progress and you see people here chipping out large blocks of rock that have bone in them and then are taken back to the laboratory where the actual excavation begins we can glue it back together clean its surface and ultimately it's ready for study and exhibit at half past stoned us who comes up with these dinosaur names like what if a dinosaur were named hank why do you gotta make names so complicated the scientists who described the dinosaurs come up with the names each animal has a genus and a species name and in the case of dinosaur names it's the same it's tyrannosaurus rex in that case it's actually one of the best names ever chosen for a dinosaur because the researcher wanted to portray it as the tyrannical creature that ruled its ecosystem and because of its big size it was called rex which means king i've been very fortunate that somebody named dinosaur for me there's an animal called han sousa which is a little bone-headed dinosaur which i sort of take at a backhanded compliment that i'm born at it but it's a nice thing because it kind of immortalizes you ed mark bessen asks how did t-rex sleep like curled up roosting like a chicken asking for a friend t-rex presumably crouched down just like a lot of birds do when they're resting however we actually have found dinosaurs that were preserved in boros where they presumably were sleeping or at least hanging out and some of them are kind of curled up at paul garcia nba asks how did the brontosaurus weigh 23 tons when it only ate plants you have to imagine that these dinosaurs probably spent every waking minute eating the other reason that brontosaurus is so big is if you eat plants you have a big problem much of the plant food that animals and people eat is made out of cellulose and so you need a very large gut to accommodate bacteria and other microorganisms that can break the cellulose down into fatty acids and in sugars like glucose that the host animal can actually digest so in order to be a full-time plant eater you need a really large gut ed allen elegant asks were dinosaurs cold-blooded or warm blooded i genuinely have no clue well this has been a matter of scientific debate for many years but we now think that dinosaurs have a mixture of body temperature strategies the little feathered dinosaurs were warm-blooded much like the descendants birds but some of the really large dinosaurs actually were either warm-blooded or cold-blooded because when you have a really large body mass and live in a warm climate it doesn't really matter either way at r 3 i k o x us how long did the dinosaurs live for weren't they around for like a million years or something well dinosaurs as a group first show up 230 million years ago most dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago and of course their descendants birds who are also technically dinosaurs fix this to the present day we don't know much about individual dinosaurs lifespan in the case of the t-rex we have found now that the oldest known and largest t-rex was only about 30 years old when it died these dinosaurs grew apparently at an amazing pace early on and sort of died young and left in some cases a good-looking corpse so those are all the questions for today i really enjoyed seeing all of them and seeing the level of interest in dinosaurs out there thank you for watching dinosaur support [Music]

Channel: WIRED

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Keywords: dino, dino support, dinos, dinosaur, dinosaur bones, dinosaur support, dinosaurs, dinosaurs dr. sues, dr sues, dr. hans sues, jurassic park, ott tech support, paleontologist, paleontologist answers dinosaur questions, paleontologist dinosaur questions, paleontologist interview, paleontologist jurassic park, paleontologist wired interview, science & technology, t rex, tech support, tyrannosaurus rex, what does jurassic park get wrong, wired, wired tech support

Id: YvZPU-KBCiQ

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022