ALAN: When you go out
looking at rocks that
are millions of years old, you never know what
you're going to find. As we came through
a little clearing, I spotted a rough looking bone. Yep, this is the
spot right here. Where it all began. KATJA: One bone after
the next revealed itself. This was the Holy Grail. ALAN: Finding a dinosaur bone
tells us only part of the story. There's so much more to
these amazing creatures
than just their skeletons, which leaves the movies
with a lot of artistic license. KENNETH: The
colors are made up, a lot of the
behavior is made up. KATJA: But now, remarkable
new fossil finds are opening a window on the prehistoric
world as never before. AJA: Technology is allowing
us to answer questions that were previously unanswerable. We get to make dinosaurs
move again for the first time in millions of years. And we can
figure out their color. And even how they lived. ALAN: Can recent discoveries
force us to put aside the movie magic and finally see
dinosaurs as they truly were when they ruled the Americas? MATTHEW: I think that we're
closer to uncovering the truth of the age of dinosaurs
than we've ever been. AJA: Fact is stranger
than fiction. (thud) (whip) KENNETH: My first exposure
to the dinosaurs was probably <i> The Flintstones.</i> (laughs). Which is not a very accurate
portrayal of dinosaurs. You know, like all kids, I was sort of immersed
in this dinosaur culture. I've always been fascinated
by the biggest, the smallest, the highest flying,
the lowest diving. That's where you
really start to learn the limits of evolution. I wanted to find creatures
that were among the largest to ever walk the
face of the earth. Usually the largest dinosaurs
are also among the worst preserved because it's so
hard for a creature that size, the size of a house,
to become a fossil. There is a group of plant
eating dinosaurs called Titanosaurs that we know
relatively little about. So I was very attracted
to finding one of those. 'How do you find a dinosaur?' It's the number one
question I get asked. The world is
geologically mapped. And so to find
dinosaurs you have to
find rocks from the Triassic, the famous Jurassic
or Cretaceous period. I'm looking for the
green colors that are
cretaceous aged deposits, rocks that are at
least 66 million years old. There are some rocks here
but this is the Congo basin, too many plants here. Northern Patagonia, rocks
are the right age but quite a bit of work has been done here. But here down in Southern
Patagonia we have everything that I was looking for. Patagonia is an amazing place. Vast sweeping landscapes. Sometimes it's called
"Fin del Mundo", the end of the World. It's the last stop
before Antarctica. To get to this site from the
US is a six airport trip and then once you're there,
you have to get<i> Jeeps</i> and you have to navigate
up very rough dirt roads. No other paleontologists
had been working within maybe 1,000 kilometers. This is the field area and
you get yourself on the ground and you walk and
you just look for bones
sticking out of the rocks. That year in 2004 we
were about a month into the expedition and we
hadn't found anything that
I would say was really great. So at this point,
the pressure's on. You start to worry. We had a week left. And then finally
we found something. A piece of bone exposed. It had weathered
out of a cliff-face, so it was super
easy to excavate. It doesn't take us long
before we uncovered a very, very large femur. 2.2 meter long, that's
about seven feet one inch long. We know that we're
looking at one of the
largest dinosaur bones that had ever been seen. This was an incredible result. But where are the
rest of the bones? We dug and dug and dug around
there but there wasn't another bone to be found. But still, that told us giant
dinosaurs lived here and that was enough for us to know
that we had to come back to this place. A year later, I was ready
for a return expedition but I needed a bigger team. And I called up my friend,
Matt Lamanna. MATTHEW: This was somewhat
of a professional gamble, I would say, for Ken. Ken, in a lot of ways
was putting all of his eggs in one basket. I think that there was
some pressure upon arrival that second year in 2005. You know, we're not
there for, you know, for a month long
vacation in the desert. We're there to find dinosaurs. KENNETH: On the first morning
I was prospecting for bones, and saw a dinner plate
sized piece of bone exposed in the desert. I GPSd the location, I give it a field number,
and I move on and, I start to prospect
for some other sites. MATTHEW: This is 2005 so
I put on my iPod... (laughs). And put on some heavy metal. And I walked basically up the
side of a mountain, you know, thinking that I was going
to find the next big thing. But, I turned around when I
got to the top of the mountain, and I saw my three
Argentine colleagues, Marcelo Luna, Lucio Ibiricu
and Gabriel Casal, all kind of gathered
around this spot, that didn't really look like
it was much of anything. And so I go down there
because they're lingering there. Maybe they'd found
something interesting. KENNETH: I returned to the
spot where I'd found the bone and I saw something astonishing. They have about a half
of a leg bone exposed, half a femur. MATTHEW: The bone is
six foot three long. So we knew we had
a giant Titanosaur. KENNETH: And soon other
bones start appearing. When we began to excavate
the tail it was really a thing of beauty. It was articulated, meaning the bones were
still touching each other like they were in life. We started to see that this was
giving us our best window yet into the anatomy of the largest
creatures to walk the planet. To protect the bone in
transport we wrap it with bandages of burlap and plaster. This is what we call
jacketing the bones. We had excavated about
200 square meters of rock, as hard as concrete. After four more really
grueling field seasons, so that's five years, we end up with 70% of the
skeleton from the neck down which was almost three times
more complete than the next best preserved super giant. We had this huge creature, maybe the most massive
dinosaur ever discovered. MATTHEW: Where does
this thing rank compared to other giant Titanosaurs? There's an equation you can
use based off of modern animals that allows you one way to
calculate an estimate of the weight of an extinct animal, using the circumference
of the upper arm bone, the humerus and the femur, the thigh bone. KENNETH: But for most
of these dinosaurs, they don't have the fossil
remains so the weight is more of a guess. But, we have the two
bones that we need. Now we have the key to
understanding the mass of this great creature. We start to do the math. We know this individual is one
of the largest ever discovered. Is it the largest? MATTHEW: When we finally
did crunch the numbers, the number that came out was
something like 59 metric tons, 65 short tons that we
use here in the U.S. Which was mind boggling to me. KENNETH: An animal
that's 65 tons is the
mass of 13 African elephants, the most massive land
animal for which we can calculate a weight. This was a very exciting
and very tantalizing result. Our next question was, is this
a new species of Titanosaur? The only way to find out was
to study it in minute detail. ♪ ♪ AJA: I loved dinosaurs so much,
by the time I was 13, I was volunteering at our
local dinosaur museum. That's when I started hearing
whispers of this giant dinosaur that was coming from
the edge of the world. You know, it was,
"It's the biggest dinosaur". Really? Okay, I'll believe
it when I see it. And we went into the basement, when we opened the
door and saw 300 containers, all with bones. It was way more than I
ever could have expected. I was a fossil preparator
and my job was to extract
the bones out of the rock, so we could examine
them in close detail. KENNETH: We didn't know
whether it's a new species, So we had to look for
novel features in its skeleton. AJA: You're making maybe a
dime size of progress a day. But little by little, day after day it all
starts coming together, it's really slow but I love it. (laughs). KENNETH: To establish a
new species of dinosaur, you have to see at least one
feature in its bones that hasn't been seen in
any other dinosaur. Eventually, after three years, we have the full skeleton just
laid out on every table top. The 30 foot tail was laid
out along one wall and down part of a next. The humerus standing
by the door. Now we could see the 77
million year old skeleton it all its glory and
finally work out what it was. We began to get a full
set of measurements. This animal would have
been 85 feet long that's almost the size of a basketball court. At the shoulder it would
stand 2 stories high. This was an immense animal. KENNETH: Now based
on all our lab work, we could see that it had
unique features that hadn't been seen in any other dinosaur. So, this was a new
species of Titanosaur. Now we need a name. What would this animal
have to fear in its landscape? Essentially nothing. And I come up with the
name Dreadnoughtus, which means fears nothing. AJA: The first chance we got,
we ran outside, screamed it as loud as
we could Dreadnoughtus! It was like the best feeling,
it's such a cool name. KENNETH: Now we had identified
this dinosaur as a new species, but we still had so many
questions about how an animal so large could live. AJA: The largest animals
today are the whales. They don't have to contend
with walking on land. And it really sparked in me
this question of how is this animal moving? All the parts that
would tell us everything
that we need to know, like muscle, cartilage,
tendons, don't preserve. KENNETH: You can't just
open up a book and look up the muscles for a new dinosaur. We have to discern those
from the bones themselves. AJA: The big limb bones are
six feet two, about 800 pounds. We can't move that and try
and figure out how it moved. So our solution
was to go digital. KENNETH: We used a 3D scanner
to capture all the bones. This was one of the
first dinosaurs to be
captured in a 3D scan, and this opened up
avenues of investigation that would have been impossible
by using the real bones. AJA: So this area right here, that is a palm-sized
muscle scar. Which means the muscle
was pulling on this part of the bone so much
that it left an imprint. KENNETH: Now with these
scans we could begin to reconstruct Dreadnoughtus. It enabled us to have these
3D bones that we can easily manipulate in a virtual
environment and do our biomechanical experiments with. One of my colleagues,
Kristyn Voegele, has mapped out
those muscle scars, attached virtual muscles to
test how these dinosaurs move. Let's contract this muscle, let's contract this muscle and
we'll see what the limb does. So we're actually
letting the anatomy inform us about its life. Our analysis of its largely
complete skeleton helped us put flesh on the bones of
this amazing creature. First, we could see that the
bones themselves were big and strong it could
easily walk on land. There's really nothing
like these creatures on the planet today. But, there was one
strange anomaly in the tail that puzzled us. Underneath each of the tail
vertebrae was a pair of bones that were hanging down and
instead of tapering to a point like they do in other
dinosaurs they flare out into this big paddle for
muscle attachment. It was housing these hugely
powerful muscles that would go from its leg to its tail. AJA: When we looked at it
carefully we realized that these muscles would have
provided powerful leverage in the tail. We thought, oh, if they
pull on this fast enough, that's going to hurt. It's not only that it was
so big that nothing wanted to eat it. It was that it was
weaponized in the case that something did try. KENNETH: This was
something we hadn't seen before in Titanosaurs. This was a tail that could kill
or maim the largest predators. I think in comparison to other
Titanosaurs Dreadnoughtus looks like about the toughest
that I've ever seen. MATTHEW: I think that plant
eating dinosaurs probably are often made out to
be these, you know, like sort of gentle giants. But we're starting to
understand that just eating plants does not, by
nature, make you docile. KENNETH: I think it's time to
recast these giant animals as the surly beast that they were. Look out meat eating dinosaurs
because you do not want to mess with a Dreadnoughtus! AJA: We put virtual flesh on
Dreadnoughtus to visualize dinosaurs more clearly. Up in Canada another
discovery has got even closer to seeing dinosaurs
as they really were. ♪ ♪ DONALD: For me, fossils tell us
that there's more to the world than what we see today. There's this huge buried past. Normally when we go
looking for them, we're only looking
at the surface. But, sometimes we get a
helping hand from miners, who are used to digging down
far deeper than we would ever dream of doing. So, it's no surprise that every
once in a while they're going to bump into something. One day out of the blue I
received a set of photos from <i> Suncor,</i> a mining company
working in northern Alberta. They'd found something they
suspected might be a fossil and they wanted to know if we
could identify it for them. And that was our start to
dealing with this mystery animal from the far north. Two days later myself and a
technician were on a plane. Fort McMurray exists in
the middle of nowhere
in northern Alberta where they're digging
out bitumen soaked sand. We were driven out to a site. Initially all we saw was
a few broken fragments. We were told where it
happened and when it happened. SHAWN: I was digging
right in this area right here with my shovel. I could see some really big
slabs with that big around of, with that really
distinctive pattern. I've never seen anything come
down the bank that had this distinctive uniform
pattern to it before. DONALD: When Shawn Funk made
the initial discovery it was hit by the excavator bucket
and it shattered into pieces. And the technician,
Darren Tanke said, what if it's a dinosaur? And then all the pieces
started to make sense, and we knew this was
going to be a big deal. So, if it was a dinosaur, what kind was it? Most of it was still stuck
up in the cliff face, completely encased in hard rock. But when we looked
carefully at the clues, we could begin to imagine
what sort of animal it could be. All we could see was this
cross section in the cliff. Then I began to see a shape
of where the body was. Then we knew this was not
your typical dinosaur fossil. We could see bony
plates exposed, so we knew we were dealing
with an armored dinosaur. We noticed the arc of the
armor was curving upwards. So that meant this dinosaur
was lying on its back. This is curved. It was all rather puzzling. The rocks that we were
finding this fossil material in are early cretaceous, are about 110, 112
million years old. And at this time, this place
was a shallow inland sea. It would be underwater. This thing's on its
back on the seabed. But, this, it's a land animal. It's not evolved to be in water. And then you start
to wonder, well, how did it get
washed out to sea? The only way to find out
more would be to get it out of the rock. But to try and dig it out
would risk the collapse of the whole cliff. We were under major
time pressure. We were told we had three
weeks to get this thing out. We couldn't start
from the cliff face. We had to come
down from the top. So, they got one of their
best shovel operators. Some of them could
do brain surgery, they're so good with the bucket. MAN: It's peeling
off very, very well. Ooh, stop. MAN 2: Stop! DONALD: We had most of it
exposed and it looked like a giant grey lumpy potato. This large, seemingly bombproof
mass had resisted being struck by a giant excavator and having
a kilometer of rock piled on it for tens of millions of years, so the thinking was that
this thing could withstand being lifted in one go. (overlapping chatter) You look at that big grey lump
and you'd have no idea that there's an absolute
treasure sitting there. All we had to do is lift
it up and plop it on the back of the truck. No one had ever
done this before. So, no one knew
really what to expect. MAN: I'm like the
expectant father here. DONALD: They got their best
hoisting and rigging people, started to lift it. MAN: There we go,
come on baby. (loud crack and thuds) DONALD: They said we're
sorry we broke your dinosaur. MAN: We only just started to
move the dirt and she let go. MAN: Yeah, she didn't
take much pressure. DONALD: The question now was, how were we going
to salvage this? DONALD: Getting a fossil
out of the ground is just the end of the beginning. We quickly saw that
we'd lost nothing. It came out in convenient
chunks instead of one epic five ton block. We now had to remove the
rock from around the fossil and reveal what this animal was. So, we needed someone with
experience and who had the delicate touch but also had the
muscles to shift these blocks. MARK: Dinosaurs are basically
like real life monsters. And I've been interested
in dinosaurs since I was five years old. Because I'm good
working with my hands, I wanted to become a
preparator of fossils. So, what I'm doing right now is
slowly removing away paper-thin layers of rock away from the
bone's surface using a pin vice. This will go on for many
many hours, if not days. (laughs). Usually when we
work with specimens, we just work with the
actual bones themselves. But as I removed
the rock I started to
find sections of black, I was amazed. This wasn't just bone, it was actual
fossilized dinosaur skin, something that hardly
ever survives, and if it does, it's usually just small patches. The biggest challenge was
basically finding where all the skin was and kind of
knowing where to stop. Sometimes it's
really distinctive, kind of a very black in color, and other times it
kind of fades out. You don't want to start
digging too deep of a hole trying to find something
that's not quite there. DONALD: Mark was just
the person to do that. It takes special skill to go
from this unbelievably hard rock to something that's
instantly soft and delicate. MARK: We have the skin
over most of the surface. So, it's kind of
like mummified, even though it's
not a true mummy. Once I had finished
preparing all the blocks, my next task was
to reassemble them. When you start putting
those pieces together and the shape of this
dinosaur begins to emerge, that's when it really
became exciting. It became like a
three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. DONALD: Now we could
finally identify what
kind of dinosaur we had. It's built like a tank. It's covered head to
toe in body armor. It has a narrow muzzle and
it has big shoulder spikes and that could only
mean it's a nodosaur. It was a plant
eater and it lived about
110-112 million years ago. This was a new
type of nodosaur, one that had never
been seen before, and this meant we could
give it a new name. MARK: The name of the dinosaur
is Borealopelta markmitchelli. Named after little old me. (laughs). It's just fantastic. This specimen has taken
about five and a half years of my life. Now it looks like a
sleeping dinosaur. DONALD: It's absolutely
magical how it turned out. CALEB: One of the things that
makes this dinosaur unique is that it's preserved in three
dimensions with all that skin. Beautifully preserved, but are there details
that it reveals that we didn't know before? I was brought onto this
project to help figure this out. Given that the skin is
so well preserved it held
a tantalizing possibility, to find out the
color of this animal. The colors either in children's
books or in documentaries, were largely just estimates. Estimates based
on modern animals. MARK: A lot of dinosaurs
are portrayed as sort of basically greens or greys. DONALD: We don't know the
colors of extinct animals because the pigment
molecules don't preserve. It takes exceptional conditions
to preserve skin and even better conditions to
preserve any traces of the chemistry of that skin. CALEB: This is a fragment from
Borealopelta and this dark grey is the fossilized skin. We sent a small sample of
this for geochemical analysis. Using mass spectrometry, we could find out if
any organic compounds were preserved in it. Those organic
compounds can tell us about some of the pigments
that were there originally. More than five years after
we found Borealopelta, we were on the cusp of knowing
whether or not its skin was preserved well enough to
tell us its color, and finally, we got the news. The results of the geochemistry
revealed that one of the common organic compounds was
a compound called Benzothiazole, which is a breakdown
product of the reddish
brown pigment, pheomelanin. MARK: The color was
definitely a big surprise. I think there's only been a
couple other cases when that's ever been done. CALEB: It was very
exciting to see how these
animals actually looked. You almost don't
need to use your
imagination to reconstruct it. DONALD: It's the best-preserved
armored dinosaur in the world because it was preserved in the
better conditions found at sea. But, that presented us
with our final puzzle. CALEB: We have this odd
situation where we have this animal that lived on land, but
it's preserved in what was an inland sea quite a ways from
where the coast would have been. So, what was this animal
doing in the middle of the sea in the first place? DONALD: We could see right
from the first day we were in the field it went to
the seabed upside down, and it hit the seabed with
such force in the cliff we could see the impact crater. CALEB: And the question is, how does this happen
and why does it happen? DONALD: Large animals
when they die, bacteria start right away to
digest their bodies and these animals fill up with gas
and they become bloated. For many years I've been
studying how animals float. So, I have this program I
wrote to test these ideas. It takes basic physics,
and it lets you take a body, put it in water, you
can see what happens. Let's try a body that's full of
gas and you can see it becomes unstable and then it starts
to roll and then very quickly it rolls over. And this happened every
time without fail. And since they're full of gas,
they're extremely light. And that allows them to be
transported great distances just by floating. It's called bloat and float. Fortuitously, our floating
carcass got swept out to sea. Eventually the gases burst, the body loses all buoyancy
and goes bonk onto the seabed. And there was so much energy
of it going down great clouds of sediment would have
quickly covered it over. And so it was
quickly sealed away from the air and scavengers. That's why it's
so well preserved. CALEB: We were finally able
to fill in missing pieces about how dinosaurs actually looked. Learning how they behaved from
bones alone can be even harder. But, sometimes a site reveals
discoveries so remarkable it changes the way we
view an entire species. ♪ ♪ ALAN: Most tourists travel
half way around the world to see the red rocks here. But the grey rocks can be
beautiful in my opinion. And I'm probably biased
because I know that the grey means there's fossils in them. I jokingly refer to the area as
"50 Shades of Grey" because that's basically
what you've got. I've been making this
commute for 22 years
and it never gets old. When I first started we
had no idea what we would find at the end of this drive. I know there are dinosaurs
out there, but where are they, and what will they tell us? Essentially we have
2 million acres, and the middle million we
knew virtually nothing about. It was just one
giant question mark. As district paleontologist, it was my job to
find some answers. (thunder and lightning) We had actually planned to meet
a crew of volunteers coming up to dig on a hadrosaur site. But, flash floods the previous
night had basically taken out the road and made it
so they couldn't come in. So, I had Mike Knell with me,
who was a turtle expert, and I had Katja Knoll,
my intern with me. Now what?
What are we going to do today? I remembered that there was
this place nearby that had lots of fossil turtle fragments and
off we went to this turtle site. KATJA: Previously a really
beautiful river turtle has been excavated there. So, we took him out there
and walked that whole area. ALAN: We expected to
find more turtle fossils. So, what we saw instead
came as a complete surprise. The deluge had actually
caused some erosion and created a little gully. As we came through
a little clearing, I spotted something that
had just been exposed by the recent rains. It was fairly large,
about the size of my fist. It was a rough looking bone. You immediately run
through a catalogue
of shapes in your mind, you're thinking, what is this? This is so familiar.
Have I seen this before? It had this unusually rugged, rough texture on it and the
texture to me suggested that I really have something here. KATJA: I don't quite recall
what he actually screamed. It was maybe just grunts.
I can't remember. Or something really crude. ALAN: Hey! Guys! KATJA: You want to go and check
because when Alan screams, it's, it may be something. (laughs). And it turned out to be
something pretty amazing. ALAN: I think we've got
a Tyrannosaur, guys. (laughs). And then there was lots of
high fiving and whooping and hollering and dancing around, because that just
doesn't happen every day. KATJA: It's pretty mind blowing
to know that you're the first person to ever lay eyes on it. Tyrannosaurs are
relatively rare. ALAN: We kept digging
and by the end of the day we'd uncovered 50 bones KATJA: We were wondering, how
much more can there possibly be? How extensive is the site? ALAN: After the first
day's excavation, we came back with a larger crew. KATJA: We had groups of
people out there pretty much four or five days a week. Everybody was sitting in the
singeing sun for 8 to 10 hours. ALAN: As we worked, we were
astounded to see that there didn't seem to be an end to
the bones coming from the site. We expanded the quarry out
to about 100 square meters. The largest bone bed that
we'd ever documented. It became clear that the bones
were a complete chaotic mass, that they were just a jumble
that looked like they'd been randomly rolled and
tossed out like dice. But, there was something
even more remarkable here. KATJA: We kept finding
bones that were very clearly belonging to tyrannosaurs
of different sizes. ALAN: We're now certain we
had not just one tyrannosaur but at least two
individuals at the site. And then we started seeing
more parts of skulls and more toes that indicated we
had more than two individuals. By that time all of our
minds were totally blown. (laughs). We did not expect this. KATJA: It's not uncommon to
find a mass death sites for prey animals that
perhaps lived in large
herds but for a predator, like a tyrannosaur,
it's just so incredibly rare. Everybody always imagined
Tyrannosaurs as being those lone mavericks. I mean, it is almost
unthinkable to find a tyrannosaur mass death site. How many tyrannosaurs
were at that site and why were they all together? Of course, everybody knows
about Tyrannosaurus Rex and everybody thinks they're cool
but Tyrannosaurs are in a fairly large group and T Rex is
only one representative. The fossils had been encased
in burlap and plaster jackets. And the first thing we needed
to know was what kind of tyrannosaur was inside. It's kind of like opening
a really cool package for
Christmas, yeah, mmm-hmm. In order to be able to identify
an animal with confidence you really have to be able to look
at the elements of the skull because there are
slight variations between all the species. This is a jaw of a not fully
grown tyrannosaur from our site. I would venture to say it is
probably the most iconic part of a tyrannosaur. In this instance it's a little
bit smaller than the jaw you would expect from
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Tyrannosaurus Rex's jaw
was significantly larger and the teeth were also
significantly more massive. The tyrannosaurs that we
found at our site is perhaps a completely new kind. ALAN: The tyrannosaurs that we
found are 76 million years old. They're older cousins
to the famous T-Rex. Very similar in appearance, but about three quarters
to two thirds scale. We're talking about some of the
largest terrestrial carnivores that ever lived on our planet. KATJA: Now we knew what kind of
dinosaur we were dealing with, there was a big question
we needed to answer next. ALAN: Just how many individuals
do we have at this site? We knew we had all these
toe bones of varying sizes. We had a really big one
and we had a really tiny one that was obviously
another individual. And then we had sort
of inbetweeners. We compare, just exactly
how many left feet are present in the collection. The pattern slowly emerges. Oh, ok I've got one left foot. Okay, I've got two left feet. Oh, my gosh, here's
a third left foot, then finally a fourth, now five. There you have it,
you've got a baby, you've got teens and you've
got a fully grown adult. Oh, my gosh. We've got an entire pack. We were forced to
face the question, was this a social group? Was this even a family group? KATJA: Tyrannosaurs
were always perceived as being solitary predators. But, after spending months
separating the skeletons out, we finally knew for sure
that we had five individuals. The big question is, how did
they all end up together? There are just
two possibilities, either they all died separately
in different areas and they were flushed in by
some big river system, or they all just died together. ALAN: When we inspected
rock samples from the site, it became clear this whole
area used to be a lake. So, we think a
flood drowned them and
washed them into the lake. But, how could we be sure our
tyrannosaurs had actually died together rather than just being
washed in from different places by coincidence or
accumulating there over time? What do we have in our toolkit
that can answer this question? The geochemist on the project,
Celina Suarez, had a eureka moment. She's like, we can study
the rare earth elements. As animals decompose in the
sediment rare earth elements get incorporated into their
skeletons as they're initially turning into fossils. They're a fingerprint. They will show us whether or
not these bones were buried together from the get go. So, we, of course, sampled
the bones and voila. They all had the exact same
rare earth fingerprint. So, they definitely died in
the same lake at the same time. The chances of individual
tyrannosaurs all ending up together are almost nil. And the age spread almost
screams or mandates, interpreting it as a family. These had died together
and been buried together. Which brought us back
to the bigger idea, that this was a social animal. Scientists and popular culture
alike have viewed Tyrannosaurs essentially as these lone
killers functioning at the level of a crocodile
or an alligator. But what if that's not right? What if everything we thought
we knew about tyrannosaur behavior is in fact wrong? The only reason large predators
start forming groups is to guarantee success of taking
down large dangerous prey. And then the
question begs itself, could these have
been pack hunters? Had anyone else come across
something like this before? There is this other site in
North America, in Canada. "Lethal Albertosaurus
was a family man!" "Fossils found at
Dry Island Buffalo Jump suggest this
predator hunted in packs." And then I heard that there
had been another mass mortality site in Montana. These events represent a
capture of tyrannosaur behavior. So, now we've got three sites
in North America with three different species
of tyrannosaurs, all of which are relatively
closely related to T Rex. Perhaps T-Rex would have
engaged in similar behavior. Paleontologists often use
bones to learn about anatomy, but these sites tell us
something about how the dinosaurs actually lived. KATJA: It is really amazing to
see how we're starting to put more of sort of a face on this
creature that everybody just kind of knows about but really
doesn't know a lot about. If they all, in fact,
belong to the same family unit, it could be very
important to understand the dynamics of Tyrannosaurs. ALAN: So, they were social,
not just as families, but also as hunters. I think finds like these are
challenging the idea that tyrannosaurs were
not that intelligent. They may in fact have
actually been able to co-operate during hunts. The idea now that we've got
the largest killing machine that ever walked on dry
land now with the smarts of a wolf and the complexity to
pack hunt, um, it's terrifying. We're certainly
in a renaissance. Technology is allowing us to
tease ever greater detail out of the fossils that we find. KENNETH: Discoveries that
paleontologists are making now are going to change the way
that dinosaurs are portrayed in popular culture. AJA: We are approaching truth. Let's give these
dinosaurs the gravitas
that they have well-earned. Captioned by
Cotter Media Group.
