Sauropods: The Behemoths of the Dinosaur World - Lyle Carbutt

Adam State College great stories begin here good evening everyone and welcome to the first lecture in the beginning of the fifth year of Adam State College lectures landmark and we're kicking off the fifth year of psychology faculty lectures with a repeat offender mr. Latta thyroid has been a suite before us before I think he's only getting one evening lecture before he's nearly lots of daytime lectures he always be great lectures on dinosaurs in that period of time he finished his bachelor's degree in geology here at Murray State College two years ago two spring and he's now an adjunct professor of Earth Sciences here so please join me in welcoming tonight's speaker mr. Lyle Department all right as you can see and I'm sure by the advertisements I'm talking on sauropods and the picture I have right in front of me is of Gertie the dinosaur made back in 1914 it was a short animated film and from the little research I was able to do on dirty uh actually helped inspire Walt Disney doing some of his animation later on so these sauropods have been around a long time the first one discovered in the 1800s and the behavior that is shown in this little short animated film is actually fairly accurate even for today they had Gertie doing all sorts of kind of crazy things back then that dinosaurs weren't supposed to do but now it actually kind of fits and we'll talk a little bit about that some of the topics will be just discussing tonight or the history of sauropods their evolution and their life style and ecology how they would have lived in their environment and some of the newer discoveries that have been made in the past few years very fascinating one just out just in Morrison this this past year so they're history sauropod by definition means lizard foot and honestly the only thing that they have in common with the feet of lizards is they have five digits if you actually look at the footprints that sauropods leave behind their back limbs we leave behind these big deep circular depressions and their front for you to actually look a little bit like horseshoes they have absolutely you know as far as the feet goes nothing other than the five digits that a lizard also has a first sauropod was discovered in 1842 discovered by a man by the name of Sir Richard Owen oddly enough he is also the guy who coined the word dinosaur means terrible lizard there had been some other discoveries prior to this we had at least three other dinosaurs that we know of those three being they go on and on Megalosaurus and highly asuras all different kinds of dinosaurs and there's a good picture of mr. Richard Owen and actually the when he coined the term dinosaur it's like one of the last words that's mentioned in that paper the first sauropod he discovered was named CT asaurus which means quail reptile the vertebra reminded him of whale vertebrae they were nice and big around and looked pretty heavy and so he thought this was an animal that would have hung out in an aquatic environment and at the time it was the largest dinosaur that had been discovered it's a length is about 45 feet and by sauropod standards that's not very big but considering it was larger than Megalosaurus the Iguanodon and the highly asaurus it was at the time that was saying something and here's a picture of the CTS horas kind of taking a waiting trip and this is another fun little piece of history that we'll get into as well so one of the first things that they had to figure out was how did these guys stand up they stand with their feet underneath them where they sprawled what was what was it how did they do that so now because early on dinosaurs were thought to be these big giant lizards they must have had a sim our posture and this is the posture that lizards have it's out in the side and it's sprawled there's a problem with sauropods if you want to continue to have this sprawling stance now up there is a skeleton of Diplodocus and this is this was funded by Andrew Carnegie and they mounted it just like this back in the late 18-hundreds early 1900s and they put the feet directly underneath and some guys in Europe one in particular said no what do you what are you doing this is a lizard should look like this it's got to have more of a sprawling stance and he made he went ahead and made his argument for that and he drew a nice little picture of this sauropod what it should look like according to the science at the time and I don't know about you but he looks a little little goofy and and a little like he's had too much to eat but that was that was a good sprawling stance I mean they drag their bellies lizards tend to do that well we had a problem in order for that to happen this guy would have had to had a ready-made ditch for him to crawl in because they sauropods have these massive guts and they wouldn't have been able to move very much at all and this was a banter back and forth between European scientists and American scientists and Carnegie wasn't about to change the mounting of the skeleton in fact had several copies made so that the Europeans could also mount them in that same manner and this went on for quite some time but we finally had the debate solved in the 1930s we found some dinosaur tracks it belonged to sauropods they looked for big old ditches and for belly dragging and also for tail dragging they didn't find any there weren't any so that problem was solved but of course we also have a brand new set of problems each one of these guys so here are the tracks these are the rear feet here and the front feet here and they kind of tend to they don't move they weren't moving particularly fast this piece over here is actually the thumb claw that these guys had on their on their feet as well fairly large but considering their size they didn't really need to use it for much some of the other controversies that we had is that we have them living in the water all this time and one of the problems that we had with that is well they would have run into the water to escape from predators well there's a couple of things wrong with that they're huge and the biggest predator is maybe the quarter of their size maybe a quarter of their size there wasn't really any need for them to run away the other thing that we we have is well they have their their nostrils are placed higher up on their skull meaning well it probably could have gone in the water and used that as like crocodiles do up from the water the problem we run into with that is in order for them to get totally submerged they had to go pretty deep because these animals on average or 80 feet long and in the neighborhood of at least 25 tons in order for them to get that deep they have to bury themselves pretty deep and the water pressure in a sense would just crush their lungs now there's some new some new ideas that we have with that that they didn't really need to do that they didn't necessarily were afraid of the water they could actually swim but we'll discover a little bit about that here in a bit as far as their evolution is concerned their ancestors were bipedal they walked on two legs and some of the early ones were called pro sauropods meaning before the sauropods they were thought to be their closest ancestor and these pro sauropods had nice long necks they had the long tail that beginnings of that body plan they had a small head these guys were both bipedal and quadrupedal we're not sure of oh yeah well this one is the one that's basically this is the one that is not quite a sauropod not quite a getting a more advanced on the pro sauropod they're still not sure if they've found that you know quote-unquote missing link but we do have some pro sauropods that are bipedal and some that are absolutely quadrupedal now the other thing that's kind of interesting is both of these guys so our pods and pro's Pro sauropods are live at the same time in the lake Triassic about two hundred and five million years ago we find both of them now maybe there needs to be some more examination made on the skeletons now the pro sauropods do show up at the earlier in the Triassic before we have our first sauropod so maybe they'd already branched off and become modified enough that they were totally quadrupedal this is one of the first ancestors that we have it's called our Don --ax and as you can see he's got nice long arms so that he could be both bipedal but he could also get down on all four legs he was about Oh 20 feet long good-sized and the skull is actually fairly fairly long and deep for sauropods and this is again a pro sauropod so the teeth are a little different in these guys and of course their size isn't very big this is another one this is probably the most common Pro sauropod when we think of them this is called a Plateosaurus and as you can see nice good long arms you'll note that this guy has a nice big thumb claw and most of these pro so our parts did have these gigantic thumb claws they're still not entirely sure what they were for they could have been used for defense some of the meat-eaters were almost this big and Plateosaurus isn't terribly big he's only about 26 feet but we had theropods back in the back in those times there are at least 20 feet long and of course there are some rather large crocodile like animals that were bigger as big and a little bit more robust than some of these other guys so one of the things that these guys need to survive you'll notice they don't have anything real specialized for defense so one of the things you need to do is get big because that's a that's a great defense you don't see many wolves going out and attacking larger prey unless there's a whole lot of them so one of the other things that was curious about these guys we have these sauropods and our original ideas was well we have him in the Jurassic and then they're not around after the Jurassic so it was thought that they'd gone extinct by the end of the Jurassic but we now know that they survived until the end of the Cretaceous in fact these animals are one of the longest survived types of dinosaur around they go from the Triassic all the way to the very end of the Cretaceous which is much more than any other kind of dinosaur can really throughout the fossil record it's probably the most the longest lived species or type of dinosaur around and they're found on every continent except Antarctica no they went everywhere Africa Europe North and South America and Asia as well and they tended to do a little bit better on the southern continents for whatever reasons they tended to survive a lot longer here in North America we have very once we get into the Cretaceous we start having them dwindling off at least as far as the fossil record tell us now and their body plan is pretty much the same have long neck long tail nice stout body there are some variations and that's where the diversity comes in we'll see some some pretty interesting interesting takes on some of these designs here in the body plan so here the four different kinds of skulls the one up top is from a Chinese sauropod and you can see the teeth are not much more than pencils then we have one here called Camarasaurus which had more spoon shaped type teeth and then we have this guy called Brachiosaurus and it's kind of a little bit in between here and then we have the de plata seeds and there they have really just peg like tea and they're mostly right up front and these guys they all would have fed on good plant material you can see the nasal cavity here here kind of way up top so you can understand why there'd be some confusion and why they might scientists might think well they could use that for when they were underwater this is one of the earliest sauropods that we know of and once I tell you its name I bet you can guess where it's from it's called Camelot eeeh so that's a nice big clue European sauropod is about 29 and a half feet long it's it's making that transition again they're not sure if this is the one because of the time frame because we still have some dinosaurs or little sauropods a little bit more advanced and had a little bit more robust body plan than that then we have another dinosaur below it called berapa soros again fairly early sauropod and it's about 60 feet long and then this one is from Thailand its name is Ison asaurus and it's in a pose that has caused some some hand-waving arguments among science it's positioned back up on its rear feet and there are still some questions as to whether or not they could do this but looking at some of the where their center of gravity is it would be right about here and using that tail as a nice counterbalance it could still support itself they might not do so much hand waving on this one but when we get to some of the larger ones they might have a problem with it the Ison asaurus was about Oh 55 feet long and it was this is from the Triassic so we have a nice good sauropod still you know not sure where the ancestor came from or what sort of transitional forms we might have had then we have this one from China and we start to get some of these nice little modifications as you can see his tail is a nice little Club on it this guy is called shonisaurus and he's fairly small he's only about 28 feet long but possible that use that tail for some sort of defense because it was a smaller sauropod and then in China this is during the middle Jurassic we also have one of the more common modifications we start to get this elongated neck and the Chinese sauropods are famous for their incredibly long necks this dinosaur is called Omiya soros and it's about 49 feet long most of that's neck and you know start elongating your necks so you can start exploiting a new resource that hasn't been exploited before the very tops of the trees this next one is you hell ops and this is the skull that you guys saw that was at top right corner another long-necked sauropod from china but none so long as and this is another one that would have had not quite the long neck it had a bit more stocky build this is called doubt to asaurus it's about 50 feet long but the by far the sauropod with the longest neck as this guy here called memang k soros it's 85 feet long and over 40 feet of that is neck now the problem is they're not sure if it could really raise its head very high because of all that weight in fact most of these guys that have these really long necks had their neck bending this way really good flexibility this way but not as much this way they've done some biomechanical studies and just for your interest these two guys in the foreground this is the ancestor of Tyrannosaurus Rex and there's the ancestor of Triceratops and yeah they were fighting even back then I say it's at least 15 feet maybe higher and this one here of course causes its own controversy this one's from Colorado this is called an phacelia s' it is by far if estimates are right by far the largest of the sauropods and thus far of any dinosaur discovered estimates put it in about 160 feet long and a weight of well over 100 tons thus far a problem that we have with empathy leus is it was discovered by Edward Koch and I've been to the site where where they found him the backbone was really well weathered it was falling apart and they shipped it back to cope and he made a nice drawing of it and extrapolated how large it would have been his vertebrae the backbone would have been eight feet tall very large vertebrae and extrapolating comparing it to other sauropods that's where they're getting these these very large estimates problem is we don't have the backbone anymore nobody's sure what happened to it oh we don't know if it was lost in transit we're just not sure what happened to it and they've gone through in a scientist by the name of Ken carpenter who used to be with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and is now working for the College of Eastern Utah did a lot of study into this and said well looking at copes work there's really no reason to doubt what he said he didn't make this up to Trump his rival Marsh which they had a really heated rivalry back then because if he had Marsh would have called him on it as he called him on several of his discoveries in fact one of the talks that I'm given in the next couple of weeks there is a particular sea creature that Koch had put together but he put the head on the wrong and marsh very publicly pointed that out to him and but if there was any any doubt Marsh would have pointed that out right away and Marsh took them in his word so problem is and with gun back looking for him but we just haven't found anything that the section that they've looked at all the bones are really well weathered we're not sure if we just got to it at the last bit and the 1800s or what happened to them but by far and away the estimates are right this is the biggest sauropod ever and then this one is probably the most numerous and the one we know the most about because we found juveniles of it adults several different growth stages of this is camarasaurus also found in Colorado Utah Wyoming very common dinosaur it's about 60 feet long probably about seven or eight feet there the hips probably would have been if its neck went up a little higher probably would have been about fifteen feet tall but one by far one of the most common dinosaurs in the Jurassic at the time would have hung out with the likes of Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus the big meat-eaters and of course we have to get to a pad asaurus and for those of you who have watched the Flintstones this is Dino this is also the one that everybody calls the brontosaurus and of course it's a great name the Thunder lizard but unfortunately when they found it they also found they never found the head and with it being such a large animal and the heads are actually small compared to the rest of the body they named it anyway called it brontosaurus and there was another one very similar body plan but they'd actually found the skull too it was called Apatosaurus pata soros was named a couple of years earlier and so when they found the skull of another one that they found in the same quarry they found the skull they'd actually put a Camarasaurus skull and called it brontosaurus on this wonderful animal when they found the skull to this other dinosaur that they dug up in the same quarry well the body plans the same as this guy but we know what the skull looked like now well it looked just like pata Saurus so brontosaurus name dies because science states that whoever names it first that's the name stays not the most popular but and of course this this would be the guy either him or the Diplodocus down here that is the logo on the Sinclair gas station so Apatosaurus 85 feet long anywhere between 25 and 30 tons often thought to be one of the larger sauropods Diplodocus there is a a skeleton very much like Diplodocus down in New Mexico that they call seismosaurus but recent studies have shown that it is just a very large very old Diplodocus so this guy could get anywhere from ninety to well over 100 feet long another very large dinosaur and this one very fascinating is the Brachiosaurus of course he's made appearances in Jurassic Park and Disney movie as well the fascinating thing about these guys is they're built more like a giraffe the legs are up higher in the front giving it this more giraffe like posture and the fascinating thing about this is there isn't the modification for this Brachiosaurus is right in here in the toes and the feet they're very elongated compared to the other guys they sit a little lower they don't have those kind of modifications but those modifications actually allow it to be up a little higher than the rest of them gives it a a different look and probably would have made free treetops much easier than the rest of them so I didn't have to rear up or anything like that this one is very fascinating and it's called mushara soros found in Nigeria Africa and the fascinating thing about this guy is in its skull it's got a fairly short neck so it's kind of bucking the trend here but in the skull is this battery of teeth found just at the front of the skull they call him the dinosaur vacuum this battery of teeth would have been very close to some of these other plant eating dinosaurs but again it's only in the front so it was possibly related to these other sauropods that had their teeth mostly in the front the skull is absolutely fascinating and very hollow held together by just small thin little bones and they've done some CT scans on it and found that its neck would have been its head would been pointed down they've been able to pinpoint where the inner ear is and where its balance would have been and it would have actually been towards the towards the ground which considering the nice little dentition that it has would have been great for feeding on lower plants and you'll notice that we have the nostrils down here and not up there that's something I'll get to a little bit later then we buck the trend even more they're supposed to have long necks this one has the absolute shortest neck of all of these sauropods and has this wonderfully long tail and it is called Brack etrak checkol upon and it's a it's a smaller one it's about 32 feet long again you'll see that even though the nasal cavities here we have the nostrils all the way down here this guy probably would have been a very low browser of any kind again totally different adaptation so it probably would have been feeding not on the tree tops but but down lower and then we get into some of these other modifications within the spine this is Dyke ray asaurus much larger spine maybe had a fleshy sale on it maybe there was some changes between the guys and the girls so if you wanted to impress a female diarrhea soros you just kind of waved your spine and again more spine modification this is Rebecca Soros very high towards the middle possibly it made it even look larger to some of the predators around you know I could see some eye spots there or whatever if you wanted to artistic license and it's about 65 feet long but early cretaceous with some of the larger theropods that lived there back then size doesn't doesn't hurt at all and then here's another fascinating one this is a Marga source this guy's from South America related to the Dyke Raya Soros and mr. Avakian Soros and it's right in here these really high spines that are it's wonderful little modification they're not entirely sure what they're for there's been argument whether or not it had some flesh in between those spines but could have been used for display if it had the flesh in between it it's I thought that it would have restricted the movement of the neck so there's some argument of as to what that was for and then as a more extreme example this is called agustina Nate after Agustin this guy's also from South America looking almost a little bit like a stegosaur but again for whatever reason this modification whether it was for defense or for intimidation these guys were a little bit again more on the small side it's maybe about 30 feet long maybe used it to for intimidation or or for attracting a mate for whatever reason but it's just a fascinating little fascinating sauropod and then this one here is called tight up from a family called the titanosaurs this one is called salta source again it's from South America and as you can see we have armor on the back like the ankylosaurus did so we had one that had a club tail and now we have this guy here and these titanosaurs were the last surviving of all the sauropods and one of the largest in fact these these titanosaurs in South America India and Africa produced again some of the largest sauropods that we have today which we have much more information on than we do for ampere caelius one of these is Argentinosaurus you can see the nice little Armour that it has it's well over a hundred feet long about a hundred tons and this is an entire pack of Giganotosaurus these guys for scale are 40 feet long 45 feet long and they are about 12 to 13 feet tall here at the hip Argentinosaurus very large in fact they found the vertebrae of these guys and the skeletons about 30% 30% complete one of the larger vertebrae is the size of your fridge I mean the entire fridge it's that tall it's that wide it's that deep so yeah earth shakers very large now about their lifestyle and where they would have fit in their environment of course there were the largest animals in their respective ecosystem nothing got bigger some of the smaller ones were 30 feet long there was one that was actually a little smaller than that and largest were 160 feet long their weight varies from that of a horse to that of at least 18 elephants and if each elephants roughly six tons well you can do the math it's well over 100 tons but not not approaching blue blue whale size although they're getting there and these guys lived on land which is something else now their size is their biggest defense if you're a big animal elephants don't get attacked very often giraffes roughly the same thing the bigger you are you always tell I always tell this to second graders that I go visit every year I said okay if you're going to get in a fight do you want to fight with me or do you want to fight with one of your fellow students like I'm not taking you on your you're too big and they would have fed primarily on the tree tops although we do have as you've seen there some that are modified to feed a little bit lower and in some areas we have more than one type of sauropod count if these guys are tree browsers we got a problem there's only so many trees so they would have fed on different heights of trees each one has a slightly different modified modified neck they would have reached one spot or the other during the Jurassic these trees would have gotten well over 100 feet tall so there would have been plenty of vegetation to go around we have a good example in Colorado we have at least three different kinds of sauropods found all in the same area the camarasaurus not quite so tall you know seven eight feet at the hip feeding on you know mid-level here this is supersaurus related to Diplodocus and Apatosaurus would have fed on a different height this guy's oh I'd say 15 to 20 feet tall here would have fed on something a little bit higher and quite possibly could have reared up and fed even higher we also have the Brachiosaurus now the other thing that we have to is we have more than one of those de plata sets found in Colorado and in Utah all in the same time period same timeframe possible explanation for that is they might have had different migration routes the other thing that well we have to consider is the plants would have had to have grown enormous ly fast one of the things that's found in the ecosystem is there's evidence that there was a very high water table and oxygen content would have slightly increased at that time so these guys would have had a good good chance of growing and it was also there were no polar icecaps at the time either so fairly warm good environment for plant growth to happen so the big big question is well why are they so big we know it's for defense but how did they get that way one of the things that we look at is that has been looked at is their ability to take in oxygen the more oxygen you're able to take in the more your body can grow and the quicker it can grow the more efficiently you take it in the better off you are back in the triassic oxygen content wasn't quite what it is today it was actually lower dinosaurs are thought to have had a lung system very much like birds birds have a lot of air sacs and because of this birds can fly over the himalayas without huffing and puffing where we have to have oxygen tanks and everything else they have no problems with that they're able to take in air incredibly efficiently and it was thought that the sauropods would have had this same same system now they also have a complex system of air sacs and the other thing is how would they have been able to hold these hold their necks and their tails in these nice you know upright positions because they would be fairly heavy well they have a nice complex system of air sacs and there are air spaces in between the vertebrae which helps lighten the skeleton and actually help stabilize it as well in fact these guys are built like giant suspension bridges these declawed assets and we don't find anything like this in nature as far as engineering at all anymore mammals don't have that they're built much more stockily these guys they're scale their bones are actually fairly Hollow and they had nice space between them they call it a new mattias skeleton so it's filled with air actually helps lighten them and then that goes back to the point of well if these guys jumped in the water they would have sank well if you're filled with air you float you're pretty buoyant so there goes that idea thankfully it's it's well over 100 years so I don't think any will be terribly upset with me the other thing is growth rates some recent discoveries they've looked at is that these guys grew and how they grow now sauropod babies we find their eggs their eggs are roughly the size of cantaloupe good size when they're born they're only a foot long they're cute they're very cute they grew incredibly fast within five to ten years they reach their adult size so they would have been packing on some serious pounds in order to get all the muscle mass and everything else the closest I found for the equivalent those of you that have children if you could feed them the way that sauropods ate by the time your child went to kindergarten they'd be over eight feet tall with this same growth rate so you need a house with very high ceilings and luckily they don't grow that fast they grow fast enough as it is but now on their feeding they don't chew their food they can't their jaws don't move side to side like ours they just move up and down they're not designed for chewing whatsoever so what do they do they strip off the vegetation and they swallow it whole now if you notice from that picture of Gertie that nice circular object that she had on her mouth was a rock and seismosaurus when they found him down in New Mexico had a lot of these big stones found in the gut area they're nice and shiny and polished in the column gastroliths and they did some studies to find out well did they swallow him to help grind up their food and at first it was a great idea I thought yeah they could do that well they started studying birds because birds will swallow stones to help digest their food and they looked at the stones that these birds had swallowed after they've been in their guts for some time and they found that they weren't nice and shiny and polished they were a little different so they're thinking that and they they also they don't find these gastroliths in all sauropods that they find just a few here and a few there they're also not the only type of dinosaur that swallows stones like this so it's thought that maybe they swallowed them on accident and they just kind of wound up in the gut and stayed there but they didn't do the churning and everything else or it was a it could have been a possibility that those stones kind of washed there and you know it's still unclear but they're they're fairly sure that those they didn't swallow them to help digest their food well if you're eating plants the other thing that you're going to have to have is a very enlarged gut because if you don't plant materials incredibly hard to break down you need something to help break it down lizards the iguanas that look for seafood off the Galapagos actually have an enlarged gut and they also have partitioned colon where this the food will sit there for a while until it's digested and because it's partitioned and elongated it actually helps and aids in the digestion so maybe they had that again we haven't found any sauropod guts they just don't fossilize all that well but something to hope for in the future and again some of them may have been able to rear up on their hind legs and feed from the treetops this is still a controversial idea you could I guess start a good argument if you just yell that out in a paleontology conference and you know then you can leave and have somebody record it for you later but again this is this is plausible because of where their center of gravity is now you can imagine something like this Diplodocus or the supersaurus because the treetops are so high even higher than a Brachiosaurus could reach Brachiosaurus was only about 40 feet tall with its leg neck extended and if these treetops are over a hundred feet tall if you can feed up on the very tops of those you're in pretty good shape and if your neck also bends this way if you're feeding and you have you have your neck straight up it makes sense for it to bend down to kind of grab all these different heights of from the trees so it is plausible however there will still be arguments about it in the future now their movement they're viewed as very slow-moving and actually the the footprints tend to suggest yeah they were pretty slow moving although there has been some recent studies that may make all that into question most of the foot that we find form suggests the move anywhere from one to three miles an hour so don't go cruising with a sauropod it's not in a hurry you're not going to get there at all now the new evidence that we have suggests they may have been a little faster than this now why it isn't the footprints why don't the footprints suggest that well because of the different areas and where fossilization happens that kind of would have been gone so oddly enough if those sauropods were the same weight as an elephant they could move just as fast 25 miles an hour if they were smaller probably even faster and looking at the musculature and where the where the muscle attachments would have been on some of these guys the larger ones might have been able to run even a little bit faster than this now some of the cool thing that they found up in Morris and they found some baby sauropod tracks they only found the back legs which to the scientists that found him suggest him that they may have been able to run on their back legs like some lizards do today so here's the footprint of this baby sauropod and there's a blinking four scale not very big but again they only find the hind feet and these guys would have been running on their hind feet something like this although possibly with a bit more grace again we have this nice little sprawling stance these guys would have been running a little bit more like you and me their legs are directly underneath them and they would have needed to because these guys had predators no matter what size they were when they're small roughly a foot long they have predators to deal with that are six foot long and and they would have been a nice little snack for them now nesting we found a lot of sauropod nests a lot of them some of the biggest ones are down in South America they found hundreds of them all of them were destroyed by a flood they found the embryos of them so one of the other things is you're a large animal one of the things that tends to happen to you as far as evolution is concerned you don't tend to have many young it's just too much energy so things like elephants their gestation time is very long they have one maybe every so many years takes them a while to have that baby sauropods kind of circumvent it by laying a lot and a lot of eggs you find hundreds of them a little bit more like sea turtles today trying to you know flood the flood the market so that you still have some that are surviving and of course it would have been much much like what happens to some sea turtles I would imagine they start heading towards the beach and there's a there's a giant buffet for whatever wants to eat him possibly what happened to these guys as well again the sheer numbers would have would have secured their survival and if they could in fact run maybe they got away a little bit quicker no parental care sorry they didn't sit on their eggs would have been very painful they wouldn't have lasted very long there are there are arguments that they would have had sentries posted at some of these nesting sites but we don't really see any evidence for that that's something the Discovery Channel promoted but oh how much weight to give to it but probably no parental care but again they don't necessarily need it and the young were on their own for years they probably would have formed a little groups of their own and then as they grew five to ten years old they would join a herd as they came by so here's a nice big sauropod nest tough to kind of see the real size of the eggs so there's this picture for you these are chicken eggs for scale again nice big and round they would have had a hard shell just like chicken eggs no soft leathery shell and yeah now pops a nice little one-foot sauropod and starts its journey to grow now the other thing that we have it's a nice really cools discovery is we have some nice our pods we found in Europe and there from Transylvania so Transylvania is famous for other things than Dracula at first they thought well this is just a juvenile sauropod it's just a baby they started looking at the bones did some cross sections of the bones and there are growth lines on these bones kind of like a tree and they're also interesting things where the bones start to fuse so you know when when your little guys are born their bones are still fairly loose and not not fused together as they grow they start to fuse the same thing was found on this guy that all the bones were fused so it was an adult so why was it so small well there's a picture of it and it doesn't really give you a good good idea of how big it is a there's supposed to say that that tree's supposed to indicate something it's name is Megara soros it's about 17 feet long so it's not very big it's related to those titanosaurs like salta soros and Argentinosaurus but there's a little bit better size for you so yeah there's Dino right there to be ridden and this is a human that's roughly 6 feet tall about the size of a horse again why was it so small well if we look at the map here this is 94 million years ago this is Europe there's Spain and Portugal there's England and Ireland and a few places in between not a whole lot of land there it was a series of island arcs and was that way pretty much since the Jurassic if you get stuck on an island and there's not a lot of food you can't get very big in order to survive we've seen the same thing with elephants there have been some big me and dwarf dwarf elephants as well so it's very possible that this happened and it wasn't just with sorry they found smaller versions of some of the other animals as well that would have preyed on some of the other new findings we have and of course this one has caused its own deal of controversies sauropods could whip their tails and make a crack like a bullwhip it's long enough it could have withstood the shock and in fact it might have actually been able to break the sound barrier there is a problem with that though because what happens to a bullwhip the end gets frayed so take it for what it is possible that they would have used it probably not to break the sound barrier they might have been able to use it to signal to one another possible the other thing that we look at is where are their nostrils positioned we've seen him up here we've seen him down here and it's very high up on that skull that nasal cavity is very high they started looking at it and one of the things they looked at also was that there's this big opening in the front of the skull so there were some scientists that said well maybe they even had little trunks like elephants so they proposed that it actually looks pretty absurd on a sauropod and owing to the delicate nature of the trunk and how not needs to be manipulated it actually doesn't add anything to them when they're feeding and these guys needed a lot of food so that that idea has been kind of tossed to the wayside and when they started looking at him it's just the end of the nasal cavity they needed nice wet sinuses so they could take in good amounts of oxygen so they actually had these nice big fleshy natural fleshy fleshy nostrils where they could keep it moist keep everything the way it should be and so you can see a progression of where we've got it again right up here there's the nasal cavity and again there's this nice opening at the front so yeah they thought there might have been a little trunk and it just doesn't make sense to me so yeah this is where they'd had them probably up until the last ten years ago and here you can see where it's positioned now and just so you got more than just a side view here you see it from the front and again this would have been one of those that had been found on most of these guys it was just a recent discovery and again they found out all kinds of fun things about these guys they weren't terribly bright their brains were very small in fact out of the dinosaurs they were the least intelligent I guess is the nicest way to put it cows and and so forth actually would have looked like rocket scientists to them but the thing is they didn't need a whole lot of smarts and if you have a very big brain you have to feed it with enough blood the bigger it is the more blood it takes and if you are positioning yourself on your back legs and you're reaching way up and you have a big brain you'd pass out before you actually got to eat anything so it's a trade-off these guys are just eating machines they're not going to do any math for you they're not going to solve any calculus problems for you they'll eat and then probably step on things as well but all right are there any questions thus far if you'd like I can also show you the little short of Gertie the dinosaur so you can see it it's possible that they would have lived a very long time I'd say 50 years or better most of the meat-eating dinosaurs most of their lives were ended within 30 years they didn't live very long at all and in fact 30 years were for a guy like Tyrannosaurus Rex is actually grandpa's stage so these guys once they got to that size and once they got to their full size they're not going to have any enemies and they could have possibly lived to some sometimes - scientists it even estimated well over 100 years and they probably continued to grow that's why they found that giant seismosaurus down there that's well over 100 feet long that supersaurus is over 130 feet long the fun thing about sauropods is if you find one you've got you've got work to do three years because they are so large any other questions yes it was just outside a canyon city in a little place called Garden Park I was up there just this last summer working on some movie some of the bones up there and it was some hard work we were working with jackhammers to get the bones out the the rock there was very much like cement and in fact when köppen marsh were there in those same areas they were using dynamite not terribly careful in fact you can find the pieces of foam that they didn't dig up everywhere but yeah it was right here in Colorado right outside Canyon see if you go to the museum of western Colorado in fruta you can actually see a replica of that backdrop and you're standing here and the top of it is here it's just a nice little cardboard cutout but you get eeeh of just how large the thing was other questions yes sir he had mentioned at the longer necks were to feed on the higher treetops but you also mentioned that the sauropod the really long necks well they weren't able to lift him up they've done some the mechanical study said they didn't lift him up this way they would have actually had more maneuvering this way if they were to feed on treetops they would have had to rear up and do it and if they did that then the flexible note the neck being flexible this way we've helped him reach those areas so those huge ones were able to there's their center of gravity is right in the back of their hips right in the back so if they did lean up they would have been able to support themselves and then they had that nice long tail to give them a counterbalance so they would you know fall nice little tripod stance there other questions yes sir do you have an idea the way the continents were laid out on the drift about this area um it varied during the Triassic Nga all of them are together as you separate into the Jurassic North America and South America gets separated towards the end of the Jurassic in the Jurassic and towards the Early Cretaceous Europe and North America are connected which would have made a nice little land bridge there also we would have had some some migration from from Asia at times the northern continents end up splitting from the southern continents and then you have Gondwana which is South America Africa Antarctica and Australia in the subcontinent of India as well they're kind of towards itself they start to break up South America and Africa start to separate and we actually find very similar fossils on both sides of South America Africa very similar types of dinosaurs Oh a new year called Carcharodontosaurus in Africa looks very much like the Giganotosaurus in South America also have some of these larger sauropods like Argentinosaurus in South America we also very similar ones found in Africa as well Australia breaks off during the during the Cretaceous and actually partially connected to Asia and potatios and there would have been a small bridge there and at that time in the early cretaceous australia would have experienced polar winters at the time and there were actually dinosaurs that survived and stayed there during those plato ventures they had incredibly large eye sockets for the darkness that they would have had for six months there were some that migrated in and out of there but over time things those continents shifted until and then during the Late Cretaceous it's a talk I'll be giving on the 9th at noon there's a nice Seaway that actually cuts North America completely in half so that you have the eastern United States you have the the breadbasket is underwater and you have the West on the other side and evolution actually took different paths on both sides you have these nice horn ceratopsians in the West you don't even have that in the east the Tyrannosaurus from the East Coast have long arms and three claws the Tyrannosaurus from the west coast have short arms two claws and a much more robust body and that interior seaway is is partially responsible for some of that other questions yes you said that sauropods were not found in dark no but were there other dinosaurs that were found yes yes there were some in Kailua Sora's home there some pro sauropods were found in that area and then the dinosaur that they've nicknamed Elvis was also found there his name is Cryolophosaurus the frozen crested lizard and if any of the kids have ever seen the show Dinosaur Train they actually make crylophosaurus sound like Elvis he had a very depressed actually kind of went up like this on inside his head making him look like he had a cool little hairdo there are others that are found there and a quite a few of seagoing reptiles down there but the digging is a little rough down in Antarctica there's a few few places to go the Crowell office horse was discovered on mount Kirkpatrick which I'm not entirely sure the geography of where that is but it's a place where you can actually do some being course they have some nice big size to help there I'm not sure I know they have to go down there during this time of year because it's their summertime so they have the least amount of getting frostbite other questions yes sir well that's a whole fun argument in and of itself I've actually seen people try to practice it and it's a kind of frightening to watch the other question too is they're up so high off the ground what about their eggs well there's a couple arguments on how they would have laid their eggs they could have actually had a shaft that would have come out and actually kind of gone closer to the ground to protect them as they're as they're being dropped as far as reproducing it's still unknown I'm imagining they would have to have something similar to how crocodiles with Reuters because their tails aren't and then unlike lizards their tails aren't as flexible as those of lizards so there's not that kind of a position going on but they would have had to have had to have something whether the tail would move and then Doosan cooker it's still a bit of a mystery all we know is yes they did and they were quite successful at it the method is something that I'm sure scientists have argued about them I remember watching a TV show where they were actually trying to show the position of this actually no those that have tried to block out a lot of memory it's quite frightening um I don't if it was anything it'd have to be something close to lizards and Crocs but other than that I just isn't enough information yes any other questions we care to see Gerty just for fun inside not sure a pine remember it's 1914 and then that's a sea monster so there goes swallowing a stone or she very large appetite accurate accurate but the jaw movement of course not she's a dancer of course this is a director is trying to treat her like a regular animal so very well behaved sometimes there's a sea serpent Perseids of dragging she's dragging and tail you toddler see very agile of course that's not right at all you I'm wearing don't know if it was bad you that is revenge and it did have four wings figure out that it actually didn't have forward here's the little drink and there you have it Adam State College great stories begin here

Channel: Adams State University

Views: 48,372

Rating: 4.7552743 out of 5

Keywords: dinosaurs, sauropods, lecture, faculty lecture series, Adams State, college, creature, geology, environment, science

Id: SzzwGkRys8o

Length: 64min 12sec (3852 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2011