Secrets of the Fossil Hall

I use National Museum of Natural History has inspired an odd visitors for generations exploring life from it's very beginning the whole moves through time from life's creation in the seas to the diversity of ancient plants and dinosaurs and the eventual evolution of mammals that now dominate this earth let's start our tour in the world of ancient plants so fossil plants are kind of interesting because when plants live they fall apart the leaves fall apart they live fall off the trees fall down they kind of rot the roots are in the ground and unlike an animal where you know what the skeleton of an animal is you find a leg bone you think it must be the other leg bone animals are symmetrical plants tend not to be symmetrical so fall they falling apart as they live and they're not symmetrical and you have big leaves on a little tree or little leaves on a big tree so it's actually pretty hard to put ancient plants back together against him like Humpty Dumpty fell apart you can't like put them back together again and sometimes plants get preserved in different ways too sometimes the leaf gets imprinted as an imprint on a rock or sometimes it gets petrified where the actual three-dimensionality of the plant is injected with solutions that have minerals that precipitate on the inside of the plant and preserve the plant in three dimensions and that's what these giant pineapple like things are and these are really obscure most people don't know what they are because they're a kind of plant that went extinct 80 million years ago so if it's hard to put them back together again and they're 80 million years old no one's ever seen one of these things in a living plant or even has a really good idea what they look like but what's cool about these things these are called site cards or Benneteau tallies is that they are petrified with silica which means you can swallow them in half and see at the cellular level the internal anatomy of the plant so you can actually see the cell by cell structure and because of that you can tell what their biology was you can see cross-sections of their flower like structure cross-sections those stems and leaf bases and even though we don't know what they look like really in real life we know really well what their Anatomy was these are petrified slabs of wood cut in half and then cut in half by fossil loggers people use Diamond bladed saws to saw stone logs these logs are over 200 million years all from the Triassic of Arizona from the Petrified Forest National Monument and they have incredible colors as oranges and yellows and greens and reds and those colors are actually all different states of minerals that are you that actually seeped into the wood after it was buried in the sand and as the wood was being replaced with silica actually those spaces in the pores in the wood which felt it was looking at a lot of those colors were embedded in the wood at that point in time so it's not the actual color of the wood it's the color of the petrifying minerals that infill the wood and if you go to that place now it's called Petrified Forest National Monument but when you go there all the logs are lying on their sides in sandstone layers the sand stones used to be stream beds so there's basically floating logs in ancient streams so it's actually not a Petrified Forest it's a petrified log jam so it should be called petrified log jam National Monument not Petrified Forest National when this hall first opened up there was no burgess shale exhibit and that was considered a major hole in the exhibit because there was really nothing about the early life in the Cambrian there were some dioramas down there but they didn't cover the burgess shale which is super famous and we have by far the best collection in the world so the then Collections Manager who incidentally hated dinosaurs decided to put the burgess shale exhibit right as you walk in to the hall to block the view of the dinosaurs which pleased him no end and when people pointed this out the excuse was well it will have a bigger impact when they walk around the core and then see the dinosaurs and he took great delight in blocking the view not only with the exhibit but he put up a giant slab of invertebrate trace fossils called climactic 90s which we called the kawasaki memorial slab because it looks like a bunch of road tracks from motorbike what I'm gonna miss the most in this dinosaur hall is the early dinosaurs that were collected during the first Golden Age of dinosaur hunting which was the late the latter half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century and we have many historically important specimens starting at the Triceratops natural year but also all through the hall their specimens from the time and these specimens really come from a time when American museums for the first time really presented dinosaurs to the public and also dinosaur research really took off here in the United States well I'd like catcher the best because he really so represents one of the fossils from the very first days of the institution's dinosaur collecting he was collected by a very colorful character John Bell Hatcher who worked for various museums over the years but it's this specimen was collected when Hatcher worked for famous dinosaur researcher named OC Marsh who was at Yale University Hatcher was a phenomenal character most people who collect fossils are unusual and somewhat quirky people but he really took things to a new height he was for instance renowned for being an ace poker player who financed many of his paleontological exploits by going to little towns and basically Queen filming them of all the money that they had and that has been more than 1/10 situation where he had to hastily depart in the area because of his poker playing skill as you can imagine well people didn't take kindly to losing a lot of money to some outside the reason that we started working on the Triceratops in the first place was back around nineteen ninety four or five we got a call from security a woman and her son we're standing here next to the Triceratops and she happened to sneeze and a piece of his pelvis fell off and no cause and effect we don't think but she was very alarmed and she immediately went to security and they came to us and so we start looking they're like oh yeah that was pretty weathered and kind of cracked and we started looking at the mount a lot closer to been up since 1904 so it was the first remnant or the first representation of the Triceratops can we start looking at it was like wow this guy is in pretty bad shape not you know it was it was there but obviously pieces were falling off and so that started us thinking about getting a Cathy Hawks team in here at conservator to look at a lot of our exhibit mouths to see what kind of shape they're in and we realized that a lot of them were not doing so well out here and we knew that sort of anecdotally we over always come out here gluing pieces back on to the Camptosaurus or the Stegosaurus when you start looking at those closely you realize that the way they had been erected they did what they could back in the you know the teens the 20s 30s but they drilled straight through bones put bolts and bolted them right to the steel armature and the fossils just couldn't take that they're actually very brittle fragile things they're not just rocks things have turned into rocks it's a fairly misconception and so they're reactive to vibration and humidity and temperature fluctuations and so Cathy's team looked at a lot of the mounts around here and we sort of high graded which ones needed to be done we needed to conserve them take them take him off exhibit molded and cast them and put the cast on exhibit so Triceratops was the first one and that was kind of coolest one because we were able to it's a such an iconic specimen and dinosaur in general we were able to draw interest from private industry for scanning and we have a cup we had a couple companies come in a new scanning they processed all that scanning data turned it into the first representation of a digitized dinosaur this is back around 1999 we started doing the actual scanning and by 2000 we had a full digital dinosaur that we could pose which was really nice for remounting it and so we had a company who did that we had a company who did Hasbro helped us they made one-sixth scale replicas there was one on exhibit of what the pose used to look like and a bronze skull that people could touch and we were able to use those really small handheld bones of the actual bones and really work out the articulation of how these things went together the range of motion something some real things rather than just using trying to use the sculpted real things or full-scale things so we think what we got was a fairly accurate articulation of the mouth and now it's being done with almost everything it's it's such an easy process now but it was a really labor-intensive thing back in in 1999 to 2000 and so Triceratops was the first thing and we were able to replicate mismatched pieces like this guy was a was a composite mount so some of his left side was taken from a different animal that was a different size or it just wasn't there and they face fabricated it we were able to take the right side elements mirror-image them and then mill him out or prototype them out into full-scale replicas then we could put on the mount look really cuz his left humerus here the upper arm bone was much smaller than the original right and so we just mirrored imaged the right and sculpted this or milled it out of this special material another company did that for us and we did that with his part of his pelvis or that big long bone called the ilium on his pelvis we did that with his scapula it was just fabricated and we we got new real feet for him so we made him a nice full real size dinosaur and the last thing was the skull the skull came from a different animal but we were able to enlarge it digitally about 10 to 15 percent based on femur length ratios of other complete Triceratops that we have and we enlarged that prototype that and molded and cast that and now we have a real full scale size skull that would go with the actual amount that was a huge project that that was like a two-year project that was it was groundbreaking in many ways and also showed the utility of three-dimensional scanning and we also x-rayed and did all kinds of other stuff to it too and so that started us going which we got that list of mounts that are at risk the Stegosaurus mount was the next one in line the Stegosaurus was the guy with the plates on his back and some of those plates were just held up with two two pieces of half round steel 1/2 inch wide with two little bolts holding it up and that was holding up like a 20-pound plate so it's just a matter of time before that things gonna start falling apart too so we took him off exhibit we molded and cast him put the cast on the next one was the camp to Saurus that was always falling apart the adult Camptosaurus that was a holotype specimen and those are the name bearers of the species and so those are really important ones and we didn't want that one to fall apart anymore so we molded and cast that one and put that on and now we're full-blown doing all that stuff for the for the new hall so it was all started by this woman's sneeze you may say this is the type specimen of Stegosaurus STEM ops so it's the original specimen collected for off Neil Marshall University in the 1880s and it's in the position it was discovered in which happens to be the position that died in so it's mostly intact with the head in the neck and the front leg the ribcage the back leg and the plates and then you could see sort of at the far end if you look at the far in the tail to sort of come apart a little bit it's an important specimen because up till then it was not really clear how you would put a Stegosaurus together especially the plates what border they went in did they go in the back that's our thing so this was a pretty important specimen and the new hall we're gonna try and mount this vertically and the underside is also free of rock so you'd be able to see both sides of the skeleton which would be really nice we'll see if that comes true but that's the plan at the middle so one funny story to me is is less about being in the hall than it is about the history of the hall so there are three examples of Stegosaurus there's this one there's the one behind me to my left which is standing up and then there's a big paper mache Stegosaurus so there's three signs in the hall that describe Stegosaurus and the three signs do not agree and nobody here noticed that until like an eight-year-old wrote us a letter and said you have information on the labels that contradicts it to each other which ones right so that's kind of thing that happens when halls evolved over time in pieces well Stegosaurus has made of paper mache and it's been painted on the outside and it's dearly loved by the public could see where they've forgotten about the railing and they've reached over and petted it lovingly and rubbed all the paint off but this was made by the milwaukee paper mache works in nineteen four for the Louisiana Purchase International Exposition the story Jim Balin and exhibits had the story that it was made of ground-up the paper mache was made of ground-up money and I was pretty sure that wasn't the case so I called the Treasury asked when what did they make what did they do with worn-out money back at the turn of the century and they said well they used to call it in and wash it and they could do that several times before the paper currency ever wore out and so but then they got the burning it and the place they did it was over in Kenilworth there's a big plant but the stuff that would up the smokestack was full of heavy metals from the printing process and so EPA got on them for that and so they just shredded it but they didn't start doing that until about the 1960s or 70s but you could go to a Federal Reserve Bank and you could buy a truckload of ground-up money but that was way after the fact so I said well could you possibly come over here and take a look so they came over well the hall was empty it was in limbo for about two years while construction was going on in other areas and so they came into this dark dismal hall with planks and dirt everywhere and the supervisor picked out Gracie Gracie was the person who was to take the biopsy and there was a railing but it wasn't like this and Stegosaurus wasn't at this level it was down Gracie was an ample woman and so for Gracie to go over the railing and out of the pit and get on the backside and get a scraping was something and I think he'd been waiting for all his life and so she came up and she said ordinary paper my favorite dinosaur is up in the sky because it was originally those two specimens at Mauna Soros and Albertus were originally right over there on the ground but there was no room for him in the new hall so they stuck him way up high and when I found out they were gonna do that I went to the curator in charge and I said you can't do that you know people need access to it and back then they said well has already been described and published on so no one you need to see it but it turns out the Edmontosaurus is the original type specimen or name bearer for it mono source inductance and we have had requests over the years to get to it and we've had to turn people away so one thing I know about the specimens in the hall now that I know more of than I used to is the history leading up to this exhibit so we've had a lot of research done on the previous exhibitions and all the things that went on there and so for example we have two downstairs up on the wall at monza source and Albertosaurus and or and now and they were elevated up there in the 80s the edmondo source though has been here since before the building it actually was on display in arts and industries building and it was moved over here and one of these I was discovered in the notes were the the day books which were literally the journals that everybody kept while they were working here for the government record and the the day book for moving that specimen into the building which included a part where they dropped the skull of the specimen on the stairs and shattered it and then spent weeks putting it together which explained to me why it's in such a terrible shape I never really understood what had gone wrong because it's very nice specimen but this horrible mangled up looking head and my name is advised uper and I'm a volunteer here at the fossil lab at the Museum and I'm currently working on a project for the curator of dinosauria Matt Curran oh I'm sorting through a whole bunch of micro fossils that OC Marsh one of the founders of American paleontology collected back in the 1800s these were found in Wyoming in a formation that's about as old as the floor as the rocks that the new t-rex came from so all of these animals are our contemporaries of the t-rex I'm sorting through them and I'm classifying them trying to figure out what animals lived alongside the t-rex and second and secondarily I'm also doing some morphometric analysis on the small meat-eating dinosaurs from this formation of course all of the dinosaurs are cool but I'm really interested in some of the smaller animals that lived around 530 million years ago in the Cambrian so the Cambrian is rarely the first explosion of complex multicellular life and some of the animals that we find there are really really strange like they've got five eyes and and some and some and some of the the animals that we find back there are just so different from everything that we see today and some of them don't even exist today some of the groups that he's playing back then hi I'm Carol Hudson and I'm a living fossil because I cut the ribbon at the opening of the 1963 fossil Hall which is a predecessor to the current Hall now being dismantled and I just wanted to talk very briefly about my father's favorite specimen my father was Nicholas autumn the third curator of fossil reptiles and his special theme was mammal-like reptiles and the specimen behind me trying accidently Orionis is a meat-eating representative of that group and he collected it in South Africa I believe in 1960 as such a beautiful exquisite little specimen that he nicknamed it baby doll he loved that specimen and I have to say it had a bit of of an adventure because it was actually stolen from the collections sometime in the 60s and was a byte by I believe a volunteer who was a real fossil mocked and the FBI actually eventually tracked it down and returned it after about to leave a year and a half or something like that it was only slightly damaged but anyway we were all extremely glad when it was returned this specimen which is adaptive catalyst we honest EPS which means lion headed devourer head or something along those lines is a man like reptile and despite its name it was a peaceful vegetarian and this is my favorite specimen and the reason why is because I had a very small hand and collecting it so the story behind this is my my father brought his family to South Africa to the Karoo basin to collect fossils for a year because that's where you find the the best man alive reptiles in the world and that was his specialty so we spent about nine months mainly in the field going from ranch to ranch and collecting fossils we were living in tents and of course we would get permission from the ranchers and they were invariably Hospital hospitable and happy to have us and so what we would do is we would just spread out and walk around looking on the ground for bits of bone because you don't just go and start digging when you're looking for vertebrate fossils you actually look for surface expressions so you pick up a piece of bone and that might lead you to another piece of bone so that's what we were doing one day my mother and I were walking up a dry stream bank a stream bit which is the kuru basin is a desert so there's lots of rock and exposed and dry stream stream beds are a real really good place to find fossils because you have constant erosion so I bent down I looked down and I picked up a piece of bone and I showed it to my mother and my mother was excited so we started walking up this dry stream bank picking up these other pieces of bone and the stream bank went curve to the right and I for some reason went off to the left my mother continued up the stream bank in about two minutes I heard her say very sharply Carol come here right away you must see this so I ran up to see what she had found and I found up she had she had found this entire skull and skeleton of that Decapolis spread right across the stream Bank completely exposed the head the forearms the ribs the the back and this is extremely unusual to find a fossil in this position in this condition usually you just find a small piece exposed and then you have to excavate it and so when I saw the specimen I let out this shriek as only a ten-year-old girl could and my father was in earshot and he immediately thought oh my god somebody's been bitten by a snake because there are a lot of poisonous snakes around the Peru and so he thumb's rushing over and he sees this magnificent specimen he's just tremendously excited he's start seeing oh my gosh this is incredible so the first thing he does is she says I've got to get a picture of the discoverer of this specimen my my mother Ruth Houghton and so he sets her up with her buuut resting on the scope of this adapter carefulness and she's standing looking very proud she's carrying on a marsh pic which is the tool of the trade and wearing a suit oh hat a straw hat to keep the Sun off her eyes and so this is the specimen this is the very same specimen laid out as you can see almost completely preserved and quite spectacular in the mammal Hall as a series of murals each associated with a group of skeletons all these things comes from Western North America and it turns out that Western North America is perhaps the best place in the world to look at the evolution of mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs so this room has got a series of different time periods represented in the one I'm standing in front of here is the fossils from the Green River Lake basins of western Wyoming northwestern Colorado and eastern Utah the painting shows a lake of swamp and these lakes were huge these were the Great Lakes the United States between about 45 and 50 million years ago some of them covered in areas large as the entire southwestern corner of Wyoming and they are great places for the preservation of not only the big animals that are living next to the lakes the lakes themselves produce fossils of things like birds and fish snakes turtles and fibia and lizards plants often the plants have great evidence that the insects were chewing in a plant sometimes the plants and the insects are found in the same slabs and this allows for a really detailed reconstruction of this world that here's reconstructed as sort of a and you can see the bald cypress trees these flamingos like birds a variety of extinct mammals these are mammals that are from the Rogerian and you winton land in wage this guide is this weird saber-tooth herbivore called you what to theory em he's got these great big saber teeth but all of his other piece are actually plant chewing teeth so he's a great big rhino like these from a group of animals that later extinct reserve dance' 'play the biggest animals on the shores of the lake the painting itself is kind of interesting because it sets the tone for this hall where you have murals where every single known animal or mammal is shown together in the same painting view it's not what you see if you were walking on the side of the beach today you'd walk along the beach moves through the beach into the trees just a bird flying overhead to be pretty surprised to see an animal walking by and what we see in all these murals are great agglomerations of every single known animal all in one particular spot terms of that turtle fossils are really common turtles live in these shells that are just like little homes and they live in places like ponds and streams and rivers so they actually are living in places where sediments being deposited so you think about it they're living in their own coffins and they're living their own graveyards because they are animals that are predisposed to being fossilized as a result when you're walking around in western Wyoming or southern Wyoming you'll often find little chunks of fossil turtle laughing joke that Turtles used to rule the world because there's fossils are so common it's really just they live in places where sediments are being deposited and their shells are predisposed to making great fossil here are two pretty amazing fossils from southwestern Wyoming in front of me is a skeleton of a big animal called the you into fear these are big saber-tooth herbivores tremendous body sizes some of them got up to the size of small elephants their pelvises were much wider than their shoulder but it's a sort of a pear-shaped aspect to them and this group of animals migrated into North America from Asia we're here for about 10 15 million years then with came extinct but they're sort of the iconic early Eocene animal of Wyoming and this skeletons been here for a long time blocking this fantastic fossil behind me which is a palm frond that was collected from near fossil Butte National Monument near camera Wyoming in southwestern Ohio this is a spot called fossil Basin it's an ancient lake bed about 50 to 52 million years old and it has tremendous amounts of fossil fish in it the quarry for the fish but every once in a while when digging for the fish they'll find a gigantic palm frond you can see the stem on this thing is almost as tall as I am maybe 6 feet taller here's the Frog himself and if you think about Wyoming today high mountain desert think back bet it was like 52 million years ago this is a real strong evidence for a subtropical to tropical climate in the state of Wyoming so palm trees giant herbivorous mammals starts to paint a time where the world was quite a bit different than it is today I may not have a favorite mural but one of my favorites is the one behind me by Jamie Ternes Jamie Ternes is probably the the grand old master of of paleo art and his he's fabulous and his choice of colors and the way the the movement of the animals and the way you animals interacting what they're doing this landscape backgrounds and so forth and Jay would start with by drawing reconstructing the skeleton and then he would take a drawing and add the musculature to that and then he would pose the the animals into some sort of a nice scene where the animals were very very realistic and sort of twisting and turning always and then finally would do the painting and when Jay finished his doing this murals he donated to the museum a set of one-to-one facsimile is of his work sketches and so we have those in our paleo art collection as well as the nice murals that are the final product of his research at his work with our scientists I'm standing in front of what is called the shed roni and mural right now this records the time between 37 and 34 million years ago in Nebraska and Wyoming and Colorado and I'm standing with two big parisa deck tiles what's in front of me is it as a rhinoceros called tri go Gnaeus and this was this quarry that produced this animal was found in the 20s in northeastern Colorado and was quarried during the Depression by the WPA workers and they collected more than a hundred different skeletons from this one quarry so some kind of herd of small round rhinos called tragoedia's ended up being buried in great masses and at the time museums would then find sites like this and trade the animals they would trade a rhino and this one was clearly traded by the Denver Museum of Natural History to the Smithsonian in exchange for something often the records aren't very good I don't know what the Smithsonian gave up to get a try go Gnaeus the Denver Museum but we know from looking at this skeleton it's one side in Colorado on just up by Ray Colorado produced literally over a hundred of these skeletons and became trade goods for museums across the country this guy is a is a tight an affair a gigantic rhino sized relative of rhinoceroses it's also a proceeded active today projectiles include horses and rhinos this is an extinct protect or there's great big knobs on his head we're probably used for just what horns and rhinos are used for today some sort of mating selection as you see a little crash into each other these guys are really common they're sort of the biggest mammal of the Eocene and they go extinct abruptly at thirty four million years ago at the Eocene Oligocene boundary so they're their extinction marks the end of the Eocene period at the beginning of the legacy ins period the shed Ronnie and Badlands of Nebraska and Wyoming in Colorado also produce a whole bunch of small mammals and we have an array of things that appear for the first time in North America or have been here for a while and have evolved things like this little camel very small camel this is a small saber-toothed animal it's not necessarily a cat it's related to cats called hop Lithonia s-- there are big rodents then the most common kind of animal are these little sheep or cow like herbivores called Oreo dots these guys and these guys they're in the mix with some dogs some true cats and some small horses in a variety of different rodents occasionally you find tortoises and turtles that every once in a while there are alligators this makes twos I am very interested in how bones accumulate and create sites where paleontologists can get a lot by digging little and so bone beds become a major focus and there's one right here that represents the accumulation of two species that died together apparently or at least their bones were washed together and those two species are represented as whole skeletons and they're also reconstructed in the painting that's behind us and they their bones accumulated by the thousands and it's still a little bit of a mystery as to how that happened why they all died whether they died at the same time or whether there was some weather disaster and so one of the ways I study this is to look at how modern accumulations of bones occur in East Africa so on the panel that was here there was a picture of accumulation of very white bones of domestic animals that died in one place in Kenya and I those and I studied them in another ecosystem as well called Ambus le where drought killed off a lot of animals recently so all these it's like a detective story trying to figure out how how organisms died in the past and I try to accumulate Clues both from the fossil record and from the recent time I'm standing behind an animal called stego Mastodon an animal that was here about in North America about ten million years ago up till about two million years ago and it was one of these many migrations of elephant like animals that came across the Bering Land Bridge into North America they're really abundant as fossils because when one of these things dies as he scraped big ivory tusks giant skulls huge limb bones they sort of kick around and most of the fossils you find aren't isolated teeth or chunks of tusks or leg bones but every once while they find complete skeletons this mural is mature noses next image the middle miocene one and now has a whole host of other animals you have multiple kinds of elephants at any given point in time in Nebraska large bodied rhinos and in fact the story of rhino evolution in Nebraska is almost as interesting as a story of elephant evolution in Nebraska but also the slingshot horned antelope like animals a whole variety of horses giant pigs a variety of bone-crushing bear dogs and the most incredible animal of all in my mind the ultimately saber-tooth Barbara Phyllis the great saber-tooth of all time an animal had nine a 10 inch long Sabres in its mouth that were razor-sharp and extraordinarily thin this was a killing cutting animal to lived in Nebraska with elephants rhinoceroses bear dogs and a variety of courses and Ryan the last period the pleistocene the ice age is an amazing time for you because it has these animals collectively called the mega fauna are the big animals mammoths mastodons giant shrub oxes great big musk ox this great big moose huge bison giant horse sized bears saber-toothed cats huge sloths all these animals lived in North America and our preservative places like LaBrea isolated spots around the country including places like this amazing discovery we had in Snowmass Colorado in 2010 but very commonly up in Alaska and the Yukon and the gold working so people use hoses and pump fresh water against the permafrost to melt out the gold-bearing gravel and while they're doing that they encounter tusks and bones of Ice Age animals most of the bones in this display come from Alaska and the Yukon where they were collected by the American Museum and for the American Museum in New York and were then transferred here to the Smithsonian so things like this gigantic mammoth this huge moose this amazing Bisons Priscus huge bison and this is even one of the largest bison some of these bison had horn spans up to seven or eight feet in width and these animals all disappear sometime around ten to twelve thousand years ago more or less coincident with two things one the arrival of humans in North America and to the end of the Ice Age so is it a climate story or is it a human overhunting story or is it both in death in Los Angeles there's a place near La Brea where oil seeps the surface and evaporates it's the city park now next to the art museum and if you walk out into the lawn in the city park the oil is evaporating making a sticky asphalt and if you walk into and step into just a little pool of it your feet get stuck that's the famous La Brea Tar Pits it's been like that for almost thirty thousand years and over the time of the end of the Ice Age between about thirty thousand years ago to about fifteen thousand years ago here was the world's most Fame predator trap what would happen would be that an animal like this big ground sloth the para mallet on who would get stuck in the tar would be unable to move and would be irresistible to this saber-tooth Smilodon cat and this Smilodon would then pounce on it it would get stuck so another saber-tooth would pounce on the pair and it would get stuck it's pretty soon you had a sloth that was covered in stuck sabertooths and what's amazing is it's something like 75% of the fossils in LaBrea are carnivores or scavengers this Folgers there's american lions as sabertooths they're coyotes there's dire wolves and surprisingly mammoth sloths and bison are relatively uncommon it's an amazing spot it is the best place in the world to find the famous saber-tooth cat Smilodon they have found parts of more than 1600 different sabertooths at LaBrea the animals like the sloth a little bit more rare and the sloths are these amazing immigrants from South America's across the Isthmus of Panama moving to North America and it at LaBrea they find parts of three different slots Pamela Don's las etherion and megalonyx but it is really the saber-tooth that tells the story of La Brea we are here in the former Hall called life in the ancient seas the salt was developed when I first joined the museum as a postdoctoral fellow in the mid 1980s and the idea was we had the other hall that we just saw with a history of life on land and we really had given short shrift to the history of life in the oceans which of course is the most important part of life biologically speaking because ultimately everything has its roots in the oceans and today the oceans cover most of the planet this mural was worked on by a Canadian bank life painter le Kish who had done a lot of reconstructions of fossil communities before and the idea was when the public looks at skeletons they just look at skeletons as he sort of odd sometimes or inspiring objects but they can't really sort of make the mental transition say from the Scout of the slash marine lizard to a once living animal because most people simply don't know enough about the way animals are built and put together and so we decided that it would be best to have the fossils against the background where you can actually see an animal fleshed out which piece so you can see one of these marine reptiles here another one here and then you have the skeleton so you can basically look back and forth the skull called corresponds to the head the paddles which have already been taken off this mount we've represent the paddles on this animal rather limbs and so it all sort of people cancer make a little bit more sense of this similarly we sort of created various three-dimensional models like all the fish hanging overhead there that serve the same purpose usually when you find a fossil fish its looks like roadkill it's flat on a slab of rock and very few people can go from two to three dimensions but usually people who make a living as an architect but most other people cannot do this an analyst can do this as well but you know we're really in order to effectively communicate about past adversity we have to come up with ways to animate the fossils to release of represent them as what they were only the remains of once living beings one thing that captures everybody our dioramas and whether they're simple things that you do want to you notice shoe box for school or our dioramas here that are sophisticated works of painting and so on everybody loves the kind of rubber dinosaurs and the rubber plants in it and they capture your imagination in a way you as a person whether you're six years old or all can put yourself into that sight so but one problem with diagram is that they're always just like one frozen moment in time and they don't really I think successfully convey the whole interaction of the ecosystem that I was talking about so what we're trying to do in the new hall is combine that sort of magical wonder of scale items in a diorama with new technologies and of lighting effects and perhaps some video effects to make those come to life and so we really understand the whole interconnectedness of animals plants atmosphere and so on with with in diorama so I think they'll still have a lot of their their magic and kind of a new 21st century kind of magic that'll capture people's imaginations but but invite them to learn and really find parallels between ancient worlds and and our contemporary world

Channel: Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

Views: 131,153

Rating: 4.7935286 out of 5

Keywords: Fossils, Smithsonian Institution (Publisher), dinosaurs

Id: 37agIWpFX9w

Length: 44min 52sec (2692 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 13 2014