The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: Steve Brusatte

all right so uh good evening everyone and uh welcome to all members of namie the geological society of london and the paleontological association but their foremost to for agreeing to present tonight's lecture i shall pass you on now to our honorary secretary uh andrew dubransky for our council report andrew lovely so a very good evening to you all uh it's fantastic to see such a great turnout for what i'm sure would be a very fascinating and entertaining talk indeed um so just a few things given given we've got such a large audience and there's just a few notices to get through first of all um we are last talk it was a great success it was about inland jet mining in the north york malls we had a wonderful attendance which i think this one has just smashed um and we have some excellent questions particularly from sarah steele who's a jet expert based in whitby um the closing remarks a excellent vote of thanks by david granger and rick smith if the officers are happy with that report just uh we we do as an institute do have a lot of talks on we uh try and have them monthly apart from a breakout uh during the summer our next talk is going to be a really interesting talk given by our uh our very own david bell on the geology mining and narrow gauge railways of uh new zealand so just make it and i'll give you a few notices on how you can find out more about that in a moment and our next february talk uh which is already lined up is a really interesting talk on geotechnics and this is given by dr hannah hughes who is one of the foremost academic economic geologists in the country based down at campbell's school of mines it's going to be a hannah's an excellent speaker and it's going to be a brilliant talk so if you're interested in why certain certain rocks might uh suddenly go bang when you're underground do do come along to that one as well so how can you find out more about us well don't forget uh for more great talks we do every we are the mining institute of mining and mechanical engineers but we're not just mining or mechanical engineering uh tonight we've got paleontology but we do also all sorts of the natural physical material sciences talks as well so if you want to find out more do make sure your view likes here and subscribe to our youtube or we're also on twitter many of you would find us on facebook and for the for our professional events we post on linkedin as well and if you want more information about us do go to our website we've got a range of activities on as an institute you're one of our excellent talks we've got two conferences coming up next year one uh on sustainable mining and another one on the energy transition for the north uh in partnership with the dharam energy institute so do make sure that you sign up to regular updates to find out more about that uh if you become a member you'll get to meet a wide range of people either at our professional events or at our annual dinner which there's a wide range of men and women of lots of different professional backgrounds that you can come and talk to and we also put on some great field trips um so far we've been to the pennines we've got some international field trips planned and if anyone's interested in perhaps organizing us a paleontological field trip as well please do get in touch um the best way to support us uh is of course through membership so uh the higher grades you can even get some excellent prestigious letters the mnemi and ethnic uh postnomials uh you also get invocations to our guest lecture series and cpd events discounts on uh field trips and our excellent publications we've got an annual dinner we've got sporting events and also we are we do have a number of roles uh that people might be interested in volunteering to fill at the institute uh from publications to uh to events so if you're interested don't forget to sign up at uh moneyinstitute.org dot uk forward slash membership and get in touch if you want to be involved more so that's all my notices and i'll hand back hand back to steve we can get to the talk proper thank you very much right thank you very much indeed andrew you'd make an absolute uh excellent salesman that was a good line thank you very much indeed um but now i'm going to pass you on to leslie dunlop of the geological society of london leslie would you like to give us an address what are we doing well um leslie i've asked you to unmute i can't see you that's it right okay thanks um hi there um just wanted to say good evening i'm here representing as steve said the geological society of london i'm also chair of the northern regional group of the dolce and a former council member and part of their geoconservation committee um like everyone we have a range of lectures as well we have a lecture coming up in second week of december on radioactive waste information can be found on the geological society's website what i really want to do tonight is just put tonight to talk into context for the geological society because this year 2020 not sure it was a good wise choice in the pandemic reign is the year of life um and i'd really like to thank steve our speaker for agreeing to talk about the rise and fall of dinosaurs and linking this to our 2020 year of life because as we know it's the origin of life and extinctions and all of the other things that cause it are something that the public and everyone is fascinated in and usually there's no easy answer so it'd be really nice to see what um steve's got to say about the rise and fall of the dinosaurs and the extinctions within that i'd also like to say thank you to the northern northeastern institute of mining and mechanical engineers and to the paleontological association for co-hosting this because i think these co-hosted lectures are really important for building links between different societies we can exist in silos otherwise so i'll hand you back to steve now and just say welcome and thank you for coming along tonight right well thank you very very much leslie that says that was excellent uh um and no doubt you're just as good a salesman as andrew but uh for now uh i'd like to pass you one for a word from fiona gill of the poly ontological association which i'm sure she's got something interesting to tell us too you wanna yeah okay uh can you sorry i thought i'd be i was expecting to see myself on the screen sorry about that and well i'm very happy to be representing the paleontological association tonight for what i'm sure will be a fascinating lecture by steve the paleontological association otherwise known as the palace was founded in 1957 and in the 60 or so years since then it's expanded from a small london-centric organization to become one of the world's leading learner societies in this field with well over a thousand members from at least 53 different countries and we hope that there are many palace members in the audience tonight the association is a registered charity that promotes study of paleontology and related sciences through a diverse program of activity including our annual awards in fact tonight's speaker was a recipient of the 2017 hudson award which is the association's award conferred on a paleontologist who has made a notable contribution to the subject at an early career stage and i think this shows how highly steve is regarded by the association the paleontological association is very pleased to support the geological society in their year of life initiative many of the joint events that were suggested for this year have sadly been disrupted by covid but we're delighted that this one has been able to go ahead thanks to the mining institute and i'm sure it will be an excellent and enjoyable talk from steve so i'm back now to to steve well thank you very much for your honor and it was wonderful to hear a little about your society which uh i look forward to seeing more of you in future so take care uh right so uh now i have the pleasure of uh introducing our speaker for tonight and our speaker of course as you know is the preset and uh he's a paleontologist who hunts and writes about dinosaurs uh he's a professor at the university of edinburgh but grew up in the midwestern usa uh steve has traveled around the world digging up dinosaurs uh and working with many international colleagues um his name is more than fifteen she's named more than fifteen new species uh of which i'm not going to name them myself because i'll make a mess of that i'm sure um he's written several books for kids and adults most notably the adult pop science book the rise and fall of the dinosaurs in 2018 which was a new york times bestseller in the usa uh a sunday times best seller in the uk and uh globe and males best seller in canada uh his works often covered by the popular press and he's appeared on several television shows such as the national geographic extravaganza t-rex or thomps autopsy where he was part of the team that dissected a scientifically accurate life-size model of t-rex so we're going to have an interesting talk tonight so i'm not going to go any further with that and i'm pleased to hand you over now to to steve brissette steve thank you okay thank you very much thank you very much steve and thank you very much for the institute of mining to palace to the geological society for putting this together um and i'm really pleased i can do this i'm really pleased that it looks like we have a nice crowd of people from all over the world joining in which is a great thing because uh at least in the pre-pandemic days uh although the pre-pandemic days were much better in almost every regard one of the things that's better now in a sense is that we can do these things and bring things online and reach out to a much wider group of people so i'm very pleased that that you're joining us this evening at least this evening uh uk time for those of us who are over here and for those who may be back home in the u.s you know good afternoon to you all okay so okay rather than small talk um i want to tell the story of dinosaurs here and there's there's a long history of dinosaurs we're talking about over 200 million years of evolution and i want to do this in 40-ish minutes so we have enough time for questions so i'm going to jump right into it i'm going to start sharing my screen here uh in a second me do this first all right and hopefully you can see the slides does this look good for everybody okay great okay so the rise and fall of the dinosaurs that's the story i want to tell you today i'm one of those fortunate people that gets to dig up dinosaurs and study fossils for my job i'm a paleontologist and i'm based here at the university of edinburgh in scotland it's a long way from home i grew up around the chicago area but i found my way here and i really couldn't be luckier because edinburgh has such a long legacy in the earth sciences and in the evolutionary sciences the science of geology was invented here many of the world's most famous fossil sites are right here in scotland uh so it's a real privilege and pleasure to work here and uh since the time i've been here we've built up our paleontology group and we have what i think is a really nice diverse international group of people of students of post docs and faculty that are working on all sorts of interesting questions and evolution and we have a master's course a one-year master's course for any of you that might be interested for that bridge between undergrad and phd so please do get in touch if you're interested in studying with us that's my edinburgh pitch but again i don't want to take too much time from the dinosaurs because i want to tell their story today and it's the story that i tried to tell in this book that was mentioned that i wrote a few years ago and this is the uk cover for those of you back home in the u.s there's a different cover with a bunch of dinosaurs not just one blood red t-rex uh but uh this book is it's actually a little bit out of date now it's a few years old and as you'll see we're learning so many new things about dinosaurs that so many new species so many new discoveries has been they have been made since the book came out but by and large what i do in the book what i'm going to try to do here is tell you that grand story of dinosaurs where they came from how they rose up and became dominant how some of them grew to huge sizes how others grew feathers and wings and became birds and how the rest of them went extinct so let's start the story and the story begins here this is the setting for the rise of the dinosaurs this is what the world looked like about 250 million years ago at the end of the permian period this was before there was any dinosaurs the dinosaurs were still to come and as you can obviously see this world is so different from our world today this was the time of pangaea the single super continent that was formed from all of the world's land globe together it stretched from north pole to south pole and this was a pretty harsh world if you were in the interior of pangaea you might be 10 000 miles from the closest ocean there were no ice caps at this time it was hot it was humid it was dry in many places in panchayat big desert stretched across much of the super continent but as always there were plenty of plants and animals that were adapted to that world including many of the ancestors of us many of the early mammal relatives along with giant amphibians and various reptiles and all kinds of things but that world was thrown into chaos about 250 million years ago as the permian period ended and it ended with an extinction and not just any extinction but the biggest most terrible mass extinction that's ever happened in the history of the world where 90 maybe even 95 of all species died out and the culprit volcanoes but not just any volcanoes not the sort of volcanoes we're used to not the kind of volcanoes you see you know spewing out lava on hawaii today or releasing clouds of ash like pinatubo or mount st helens these volcanoes at the end of the permian were mega volcanoes and they were located in what is now siberia and for millions of years essentially the earth opened up it's like the earth was gashed open by a giant machete and lava was constantly flowing out of these wounds and there was so much lava that it covered an area that at least was equivalent in in area to all of western europe today that's a huge amount of space that was drowned in lava but it wasn't even the lava that was the biggest problem it was all the nasty gases that came up from the deep earth as the lava percolated upwards from the mantle and cooked the rocks that it passed through carbon dioxide methane these toxic greenhouse gases that as we know from what's happening today they warmed the planet led to a runaway global warming event and that caused the extinction and this was the closest that life has ever come to completely dying out ever since life originated four billion years ago but there were survivors there's always survivors at least so far they've always been survivors the earth is resilient and from those survivors an entirely new world was forged now when i was a student studying in bristol i did my masters in bristol with mike benton and i started to work on the triassic the period that came after the permian the recovery from that extinction and i became fascinated with what lived and what died and how long it took for things to recover and to heal and i started to look for places where we could find fossils to tell that story and i teamed up with richard butler is now a professor in birmingham and for a few years we hopped all around europe looking basically at any triassic rock that we could find and our journey took us to poland which is one of the best places in the world to study what happened across that extinction because although you may not suspect that poland is the kind of place that may have a lot of fossils because it does not fit that stereotype that we see of paleontologists on the discovery channel brushing bones sand off of the dinosaur bones in the desert and so on that's not poland but there's lots of fossils in poland there's layer after layer of permian and triassic rocks and those rock layers have fossils inside and they're mined for clay to make bricks in many places so we can go to these quarries and look layer after layer read those layers like the pages in a book to tell the story of the extinction and the recovery now the fossils in poland which have been studied for many years by our good friend gregor smith's vicky here who grew up in this part of central poland called the holy cross mountain started collecting these fossils when he was a teenager these fossils are not skeletons they're not for the most part bones and teeth but they are trace fossils they are footprints and handprints the marks of the animals living in the permian and later in the triassic left behind and just one or two million years after the extinction we start to see these tracks appear in the polish record and what we have here is a hand print right here the smaller hand print and a bigger footprint very small just a few centimeters long about the size of a cat's paw print and they were made by an animal that looked like this believe it or not this is the type of animals that dinosaurs evolved from it is what we call a dinosaur morph and it's basically the dinosaur equivalent of lucy the famous hominid skeleton lucy is not a homo sapiens like us but it's a really really really close relative it's the type of primate that humans evolve from and this is the dinosaur equivalent it is from this type of small long-legged fast-running reptile that dinosaurs erodes and this thing doesn't look anything like a t-rex it doesn't look anything like a brontosaurus but from small things of course great things sometimes come and that was the story of dinosaur evolution in the triassic period now the triassic the first several tens of millions of years of dinosaur evolution was not a time of dinosaur dominance the dinosaurs did not rapidly spread around the world and take it over that did not happen instead there were other animals that ruled the triassic world and we found some of these in portugal richard and i worked in portugal with octavio mateos who's a great expert of portuguese fossils he started collecting when he was a teenager too his parents were local amateur historians and archaeologists they started their own museum in lorna and portugal and richard and octavio and i teamed up with people like jessica whiteside who's a very skilled geologist and we looked in the triassic age rocks of the algar just about 20 miles inland from the beaches that were full of british tourists but we were inland it was hot it was dry much more like that stereotype of finding fossils now we hoped we would find dinosaurs we still haven't found dinosaurs there maybe we'll find them one day we probably haven't found them yet because they were still quite rare and small in the triassic it's hard to find their fossils but instead we found a graveyard a bone bed of what looks to be dozens or probably even hundreds of skeletons of these type of things which are these monstrous grotesque car sized amphibians that ruled the lakes and the rivers during the triassic if you were one of those small little early dinosaurs you would want to stay far away from the lake shores and far away from the rivers because these things were there lurking they ruled those ecosystems but it was no better no safer for those first dinosaurs on dry land because the triassic was the heyday of the crocodile line archosaurs and what i mean by that is that today you have crocodiles there's just about 25 species of crocs and alligators they all kind of look the same they all kind of live in the same places they're tropical or subtropical they live at that interface between water and land but the modern diversity of crocodiles is nothing compared to the diversity of the crocodile group back in the triassic there were hundreds of these things they lived all over the world some of them were top predators that had heads that looked like the heads of t-rexes some of them were plant-eaters some of them had armor and spikes covering their bodies some of them had cells on their back some of them walked on two lakes some of them lost all of their teeth and grew beaks instead it was these crocodile animals that were the dominant species on land really for the entire triassic now the dinosaurs were diversifying at this time but it was really these crocodile line animals that were the ones that were succeeding and if you could have gone back to the triassic and surveyed the scene i think if you had to guess which group of animals would eventually go on to evolve monstrous enormous colossal sizes or go on to start flying and go on to become dominant you would guess it would be these crocodile line archosaurs not the dinosaurs but of course we know what happened the crocs dwindled the dinosaurs took over and that again seems to have come down to a contingency a bit of random dumb luck of earth history because about 200 million years ago as the triassic period was ending the supercontinent of pangaea that these first dinosaurs were growing up on that supercontinent began to break apart and of course it did of course it did if it didn't we wouldn't have separate continents today now when pangaea started to split it began to unzip down its middle along what's now the atlantic coast so north america separated from europe south america from africa and today the atlantic ocean fills that gap it marks that dividing line but before water rushed in the earth bled lava and there was another interval of time this time about 600 000 years of more mega volcanoes more lava more greenhouse gases coming up more global warming another mass extinction not quite as bad as that one at the end of the permian but still one of the biggest five extinctions in earth history the crocs and the giant salamanders were some of the most notable victims of this extinction they survived but the crocs for instance they were truncated they were decimated they were reduced to just a handful of lineages the ones that would eventually lead to modern crops whereas dinosaurs for some reason they were the survivors they sailed right on through the meat-eaters the plant-eaters the long-necked dinosaurs the early theropod dinosaurs the major dinosaurs that were there in the triassic living in the shadows of those crocodile lion animals they made it through and i wish i could tell you why the dinosaurs were the great survivors and not the crocs i wish there was an easy answer maybe there is but we don't know it yet and i i do think and i tell this to my students all the time uh that this is the biggest mystery of dinosaur evolution that remains to be solved or at least to me it's the most interesting mystery and i have no doubt that some young student a bright young new person in the field will figure this one out and there are ideas out there maybe the dinosaurs grew faster maybe they were warm blooded maybe they had feathers maybe they could run faster all different kinds of ideas so far very difficult to test which of these if any were the overriding reason but regardless of what that answer is the pattern is clear when pangaea split and the volcanoes happened and it led to an extinction and the dinosaurs survived afterwards the triassic turned to the jurassic period and there's a reason that it's called jurassic park and not triassic park because in the jurassic is when the age of dinosaur dominance really began this is when dinosaurs spread all around the world this is when some dinosaurs evolved long necks and and stupendous size and became the largest animals to ever live on land this is when others some meat eaters started to become bigger than cars and then up to bus size this is when others started to grow horns and spikes and thrills and duck bills and dome heads and all of these fantastic features that make dinosaurs so fascinating to us this all really started in earnest in the jurassic and it was in the jurassic when the dinosaur family tree really started to grow this is when so many of the the most recognizable subgroups of dinosaurs got their start and we're learning more and more about this all the time especially now because right now we are in the golden age of dinosaur research we're finding more dinosaurs than ever before at least we were before the pandemic canceled a lot of field work this year but i'm sure this will just be a small blip because up until this year for the last 15 years or so on average people have been finding somewhere around the world a totally new species of dinosaur once a week once a week on average so every year there's 50 some new species of dinosaurs that are announced and they are being found all over the world and to me the reason for this is really clear there's more people looking for dinosaurs than ever before and it's a much more diverse group of people looking for dinosaurs than ever before this is the jurassic park generation people of my age and especially people that are younger that were inspired by the film and it's largely people growing up in these enormous developing countries that are building more museums more universities i'm talking about china argentina brazil south africa to name just a few it's not just little boys that become paleontologists anymore young women many young women for those of you that know about our group in edinburgh it's dominated by young women which is a wonderful thing people from all over the world have come to edinburgh to study with with us and that's true of so many paleontology labs these days it's a great thing more people than ever before all over the world out looking for dinosaurs finding dinosaurs in many places where people used to think you would never find dinosaurs at all including believe it or not right here in scotland so you might not believe it but we do have dinosaurs here of course some of you know that quite well what you might not realize is that it was only in the 1980s right around the time i was born actually that the very first dinosaur fossil was found in scotland and that was a single footprint that had fallen off a cliff on the one place where you can find good dinosaurs in scotland and that is this place but i think it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and that's the isle of skye this enchanted island the set of so many big hollywood blockbusters recently because it is such a gorgeous landscape and this picture i think says it all and it is an incredible privilege to be able to hunt for dinosaurs in a land that looks like this now one of the great things about sky we go there pretty much every year uh is that we can use it as a field laboratory to train our students and uh i mean this when i say it it's not um it's not something i'm just making up it's dead true that the best fossils at least on our trips are always found by the students and i wish i could claim the best discoveries for myself of course like all fossil hunters i'm competitive i want to find the best fossils but all the time the students from the best stuff and there's no better example of this than this moment here in the field in the middle there is amelia penny who did her phd in edinburgh with rachel wood a few years ago and amelia studied the origin of animals and the origin of skeletons and she came to sky with us really just for a little bit of a break and lo and behold what did she find she found the skeleton of a pterosaur of a pterodactyl at this spot right here and this is really an amazing fossil we're working on it right now i have a phd student natalia dielska who's uh grew up in poland and then moved with her family to northern england she's now in scotland working with us and she's working on this fossil she's presenting on it this year at palace in just a few weeks so stay tuned for natalia's presentation there but that's all i'll say about that because pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and we don't want to get too sidetracked from our story so anyway so on the isle of skye we bring our teams out many of our students uh and we get to train our students uh in in field techniques so this is a picture of moji who did her masters with us a few years ago and moji studied the fossil fishes of the jurassic rocks on the isle of skye and so she's using an angle grinder to remove some of the little fish bones and fish teeth she has to do that because the rocks are really hard you can't use your hammers and your chisels here very easily because these rocks have been baked by volcanoes more recent volcanoes and so she's using this angle grinder to cut out the small bones when it comes to dinosaurs we have to use bigger tools to get at the bigger bones and here's our good friend doogie ross cutting out a dinosaur bone literally sawing it out of a rock with the diamond tipped saw and lucky for us doogie is a builder so he has his own sauce he knows how to use them and in fact he's such a builder that he built his own museum he literally built he started collecting fossils and um archaeological artifacts when he was a teenager growing up on the isle of skye and when he was quite young he took the ruins of a one-room 19th century schoolhouse rebuilt it and turned it into what he called the staffon museum and now that museum holds many of the most important fossils from sky and just a few years ago doogie was honored by the paleontological association with its marianning award for contributions from an amateur educational paleontologist so it's a joy to work with doogie on his home island finding new dinosaurs okay i could talk about sky forever i just want to tell you one story of what i think has been one of our more interesting finds and we made this uh discovery a few years ago about five years ago now at the northeastern tip of the island at a place called duntoa and now i'm taking this picture not too far from the shadows of the ruins of a 14th century castle very scottish experience and you can see the sun is out the sky is almost entirely blue this is a rare thing for skye so why are we not collecting fossils well it's because the tide is high the tide is right up to the beach and so many of the sights on sky almost all of them really are along the coast so we're always battling the tides but when that beach is at low tide it turns into a rock platform that juts out about 100 meters into those very cold waters of the north atlantic and several years back john hudson our friend who's the eminent expert on heberty in geology john mapped this area and he found a little bone he found a tiny little bone and it turned out to be the jawbone of a crocodile that lived in an ancient lagoon and so this got us very excited we went to the site we hoped we would maybe find a skeleton of one of these crocodiles maybe even a dinosaur we looked all day and we found nothing it was just one of those days in the field and these happen a lot more than we like to admit where you just don't find anything i mean it's hard to find fossils it's hard to find new things and so about seven o'clock at night you know we figured it's time pack up for the day let's go get some dinner so we started to walk back towards our vehicles and i was walking with tom challens who's uh another paleontologist here in edinburgh who many of you know tom is a fossil fish expert in addition to many other things and as we were walking uh we started to notice some holes in that rock platform big holes holes about the size of car tires and at first we thought they were just little tidal pools and they were tidal pools they were filled with seaweed and barnacles and so on but then we started to notice that wait a minute there was actually a lot of these things there was more than a hundred of them on the rock platform and they formed a bit of a sequence a bit of a left right left right zigzagging sequence and we could see them from the side and we can see that these things were actually impressed into the rock they couldn't just be random tidal erosion they must have formed by something pressing into the soft sand or the mud before it was turned into a rock and then some of these holes were filled with the harder rock and they stood out like pedestals and we could see little bits sticking out one two three four and sometimes we could see that these things were paired together and there was a bigger horseshoe shaped one with the smaller crescent-shaped one in front and these things were big bigger than car tires in fact the biggest ones were and after a few minutes it dawned on tom and me that wait a minute we've seen these things before not on sky but in other places and in fact these things were fossils we had been silly we had been so despondent that we didn't find anything in fact we had found something but we hadn't found skeletons or bones or teeth we had found trace fossils the footprints and handprints that were left by jurassic aged animals and there's really only one animal that ever lived not only in the jurassic but ever in the entire history of the earth on the land that was so big that it would make a hole the size of a car tire every time its hand or foot touched the ground and we're talking of course about the sauropod dinosaurs the brontosaurus or diplodocus type dinosaurs with their long necks and tiny heads and pot bellies and columnar limbs and these were the dinosaurs that later on after the jurassic in the cretaceous would evolve in to colossus's that were bigger than boeing 737 aircraft the biggest things to ever live on land the ones making their tracks on sky though were among the wave of the first giant sauropods to spread around the world and we're talking about things that were the size of a few elephants put together that could stretch their necks a couple of stories into the sky now the more we look on the sky the more we find other tracks and not just of the giant sauropods but also meat-eaters and plate back dinosaurs and duck bill dinosaurs all kinds of things and again it's student research that is leading a lot of this effort and this is paige de polo who's doing her phd now in edinburgh she's actually studying mammals with us we have a big active group studying the early evolution of placental mammals topic for another day but paige first came to edinburgh to do a masters in our master's program and lucky for us paige not only has a background in geology but also in engineering so she's very good at building contraptions and instruments and running experiments and so on uh so paige started to use drones to map these tracks and she's mapped a lot of these sites and and and they they give us a lot of information they help us to paint this sort of picture of what the world looked like back then and this is an artwork that's been done by john hoad who's one of the world's great paleo artists and he's from right here in scotland just up the road in perth john is a master at setting the scene and what he's showing here is a few of these giant sauropods venturing into one of the jurassic lagoons right after a storm looking for food we can tell from the rocks and from the maps the page made that these sauropods were actually waiting in shallow water when they made their tracks so this is one possibility of why they were there now you can see in this image that there's another type of dinosaur in the foreground and this is a smaller dinosaur and this is a dinosaur that's walking only on his hind legs and if you could zoom in you can see it has sharp little teeth so this is a theropod dinosaur one of the meat eaters and in fact this type of dinosaur we think is an early relative of t-rex the great t-rex now what we know for sure is that in other places in the world a little bit later in the jurassic there were definite bona fide primitive tyrannosaurs and this is the best example this is called guanlong from china now i should say that the sky fossils are about 170 million years old they're from right in the middle of the jurassic period and it's just slightly after that time that we see these unequivocal early tyrannosaurs in other parts of the world and maybe they lived here in scotland too we just don't have enough fossils yet to prove it we know there were meat-eating dinosaurs we know they left their footprints we have a few bones and teeth but not enough to make a definitive id but in china for instance there are complete skeletons of this early tyrannosaur called guanlong and it's from this type of animal just about the size of a human just about my size that the great t-rex evolved from so over time tyrannosaurus got bigger much much bigger and you might wonder why well we have a new clue from another unexpected place uzbekistan this vast country in central asia which actually has great potential for future discoveries and a few years back my colleague sasha abhiranov and russia and hans dieter seuss in the u.s they led a field work trip to uzbekistan and they found this bone which is actually a fused mass of bones from the back of the head of a dinosaur and you're looking at it from the back this hole is where the spinal cord goes into the brain cavity and this is one of many bones of a new tyrannosaur that they found which we described together a few years ago we called it timberlandia it comes from after the jurassic in the cretaceous so it's basically in age it's between the oldest tyrannosaurs and t-rex which lived at the very end of the cretaceous right at the end of the age of dinosaurs and it's also intermediate in size it's about the size of a horse so it falls in between those human-sized first tyrannosaurs and the double-decker plus size t-rex's now what's interesting about timberlandia is that we can put that skull in a cat scanner and this is ian butler my colleague in edinburgh he's a geochemist but he's also a great builder of machines and he built his own scanner which is in the basement of our institute the grant institute and ian scanned this skull and we were able to use software to digitally reconstruct the inside parts of it through those scans and that allows us to see what the brain and the sinuses and the ear and other structures of this tyrannosaur look like and what you're seeing there in blue is the back end of the brain of this tyrannosaur and that thing that looks like a pretzel in pink is the inner ear a long story short this is a big brain for a horse-sized dinosaur and also we can tell from the length of the cochlea of the ear the bit that's sticking down from the pretzel that it could hear a wide range of sounds we know that because in modern animals the longer the cochlea the wider range of sounds what this means is that tyrannosaurs were involving bigger brains higher intelligence keener senses while they were still relatively small probably to survive in some of those niches when they were still being lorded over by other giant dinosaurs allosaurs and spinosaurs and so on so what made t-rex truly special really is that it descended from animals that had already evolved gene intelligence and sharp senses so when some of those other giant dinosaurs that were incumbent in the top predator niches started to die off later in the cretaceous those brainy horse-sized tyrannosaurus took advantage and that's where t-rex came from they took over those niches and so what makes t-rex really really special is not just that it's huge of course it's huge everybody knows it's huge it's one of the biggest predators to ever live on land in the history of the earth it is the size of a double-decker bus its head was the size of a bathtub it did have over 50 railroad spiked teeth that could crush through the bones of its prey that's all true but it wasn't only brawny it was also brainy and it was that combination that made it the ultimate dinosaur predator now tyrannosaurus over time got bigger but there was another group of meat-eating dinosaurs that did the opposite they took the reverse journey they got smaller and smaller over time and what i'm talking about here are the raptor dinosaurs the ones like velociraptor itself and what you see in this piece of art this is by todd marshall and other of the world's great paleo artists who illustrated my book what todd shows here is what the real velociraptor would have looked like we're not totally sure about the colors although we can tell the colors of dinosaurs in some cases but we know the real velociraptor was nothing like it's shown in jurassic park the real velociraptor would not have been green and scaly and drab colored the real velociraptor had feathers and it even had wings and we know this because of actual fossils not only a velociraptor but of many other dinosaurs and the best of these are found in northeastern china in a place called liaoning in this unassuming landscape close to the border with north korea way tucked up there a land of factories and a land of farms and rolling hills and it was in the mid 90s that farmers started to find fossils like these when they were out working their land dinosaurs skeletons of dinosaurs not only the bones but those skeletons there are sheathed in others dinosaurs covered in feathers now the first of these was found a few years after the jurassic park film came out so mr spielberg would have been silly to put feathers on his dinosaurs before these fossils were found so he wins the reprieve there uh i'm now the science consultant for jurassic world so i'd just say stay tuned uh as those of you who are um on the pulse of these things know colin trevorrow the director's already announced some of the new animals that will be appearing in the next film which will come out in the summer of 2022 and so we're doing our best to get you know the latest science in in the next films but in any case when the first jurassic park came out they didn't know dinosaurs had feathers now we do and now we know that many dinosaurs had feathers it was not a rare thing these fossils from china are probably the most important dinosaurs certainly they've been found in my lifetime maybe in even the last century they tell the story of how feathers evolved and how flight evolved and how birds evolve the first thing they do is they tell us for sure definitively birds evolved from dinosaurs there used to be a debate but once you find feathers on dinosaur fossils it's case closed so birds evolved from dinosaurs but how they did it is really interesting these chinese fossils tell us that many dinosaurs had feathers many meat eaters did but also some plant eaters small dinosaurs did but there are even fossils of nine meter long tyrannosaurus from china covered in feathers but the feathers of most dinosaurs were simple they looked like this and what you see in this picture are a couple of tail bones of a primitive tyrannosaur and those things above the tailbones that look like little scratches in the rock those things are feathers but again simple feathers individual little strands they would have looked much more like hair the hair that we have than the feathers of modern birds now that's how most dinosaurs kept their feathers and it goes without saying but these dinosaurs couldn't fly with those kind of feathers any more than we can fly with our hair that's ridiculous so feathers must have first evolved as simple structures probably to help keep these dinosaurs warm the same reason mammals evolved hair and again most dinosaurs kept it that way except one group of dinosaurs started to do something different with their feathers as their bodies were getting smaller and these were the raptors they started to pack those feathers ever more tightly all over their bodies they started to line up those feathers on their arms those feathers got longer those feathers started to branch out they started to flatten out until you see raptor dinosaurs that have full on wings with quill pen type feathers attached to the arm into the hand in the same position the same orientation the same layout as the wings of birds today and this is a prime example of a raptor dinosaur with the wing and it comes from this dinosaur right here it is not a bird because it could not fly and it doesn't fall within the bird group on the family tree but in fact it's a very close relative of velociraptor and i have the privilege to study this dinosaur and to describe it a few years back with my dear and sadly dearly departed colleague jin one of china's great dinosaur hunters who passed a couple years ago jin chung and i here are looking at this fossil the most gorgeous fossil i've ever seen those chocolate brown bones just seem to levitate out of that cream-colored limestone and those bones are surrounded with feathers there's feathers on the tail there's feathers on the body and there's feathers on the arms making wings there's one wing and there's the other wing that's the one from a few slides ago there it is a raptor dinosaur with wings now if you saw a genuine long alive you probably would have been faced with an animal like this and i think if you saw this thing alive you would consider it a bird no weirder than a turkey or an emu or an ostrich but we don't call it a bird because it couldn't fly that's basically it there's a phylogenetic part of that definition too but genuine long had feathers it had wings but his wings were too small to keep an animal of its size in the air it was about the size of a saint bernard a large dog something like that and in fact the first wings and the dinosaur fossil records show up on horse-sized dinosaurs but those wings are no bigger than my laptop screen here no way those things could keep an animal in the air so those first wings probably evolved for display as advertising billboards sticking out of the arms of some of these dinosaurs but then you can imagine as these dinosaurs got smaller and smaller and those advertising billboards got bigger and bigger at some point one of those dinosaurs would start moving their arms around and by the simple laws of physics that billboard could create a little bit of lift a little bit of thrust and as you can imagine it wouldn't take evolution very much to take an animal like genuine long make it a little bit smaller make its wings a little bit bigger and turn it into something like archaeopteryx the first true bird in the fossil record which had wings that were big enough and powerful enough that when it flapped those wings it could keep itself up in the air and it's at this point that we say birds evolved and this is how birds evolved from dinosaurs incredible story now a lot of people still try to argue with me and i'm sure those of you that teach courses on dinosaurs or just talk about dinosaurs to your family to your friends you often get this pushback okay birds evolved from dinosaurs but they're so different than dinosaurs we should call them something else we shouldn't say they are dinosaurs and my retort to that argument is always showing a picture like this this is of course not a bird not a dinosaur that's a bat this is a bat another animal that can fly now bats are mammals of course bats are mammals nobody would argue with that bats have hair bats feed their young with milk bats have molars and premolars in the whole suite of mammalian teeth bats are a type of mammal they're just a strange type of mammal that got small evolved wings and developed the ability to fly but they're mammals nonetheless they're part of the mammal family tree and birds are the dinosaur version of that they're a strange type of dinosaur that got smaller evolved wings and developed the ability to fly and what that means is that in our world today there are still over ten thousand species of dinosaurs including majestic things like our bald eagle here i'm prouder of our bald eagle now that the way the election went i'll put it that way but our bald eagle majestic bird and majestic dinosaur some not so majestic at all and this of course is a gall one of those nasty nasty little jerks that you confront at the seaside that come down and try to dive bomb you and steal your chips and steal your ice cream and it's a nuisance it's annoying a little bit terrifying these birds but when they do this when they behave this way i think you can sense the inner velociraptor inside a seagull and that's because they are dinosaurs birds are dinosaurs and they survive today as part of our world but no other dinosaurs do and that's because as the jurassic turned into the cretaceous and the cretaceous marched on and the continents continued to move apart from each other the dinosaurs found themselves in a world like this 66 million years ago in the very last day of the cretaceous there were still dinosaurs living all over the world different ones on different continents it was the heyday of their diversity but then one random tuesday evening let's say this six mile wide asteroid fell out of the sky was traveling faster than a speeding bullet it smashed into the earth with the force of over one billion nuclear bombs put together it punched a hole in the crust in what is now mexico over a hundred miles wide and within an instant it unleashed a chain reaction of chaos that reshaped the world forever wildfires tsunamis earthquakes hurricane force winds all that stuff happened in the moments and the hours and the days afterwards but then there was all the junk that was kicked up into the atmosphere from the explosion and that went around the world it covered the earth in darkness a nuclear winter that lasted many years maybe even a few decades and that meant that plants didn't have sunlight to make their own food photosynthesis couldn't happen forests and other ecosystems collapsed like houses of cards and then even longer term over the course of a few thousand years global winter nuclear winter switched to global warming because of all the carbon dioxide that was kicked up from that explosion so you have this catastrophe of unimaginable scale it was the worst single day in the history of the earth i'm convinced and it led to many thousands of years of pain dinosaurs were there to see it t-rex itself was there the day the asteroid hit so was triceratops so were herds of duckbill dinosaurs and they did not make it through a few birds did actually most birds die but a few birds made it through but all the other dinosaurs were gone and now as my research continues i'm becoming increasingly fascinated with what happened after the asteroid what lived what died how quickly it took the earth to recover and what sort of new world was forged out of the fire and so i've started to spend a lot of time in new mexico one of the best places in the world that has a record layer by layer rock layers full of fossils spanning the late cretaceous past the asteroid impact into the next interval of time called the paleocene now this does look a lot more like those stereotypical fossil fields that you see on tv this is desert this is badlands and it is chock full of fossils and you can actually go up through the rocks you can see dinosaur bones falling out of the rocks and the cretaceous and then suddenly they disappear you never find a single shard of a dinosaur bone again and they're replaced by a new type of fossil now we've been collecting these for a while i worked with tom williamson who's the world expert on these rocks and their fossils tom's been working there for about a quarter century he's collected tens of thousands of fossils and we've started to train a lot of our own students sarah shelley was my first phd student and sarah is now an eminent expert on the animals that took over from the dinosaurs in fact she's going to be the author on a nature paper that comes out soon which i'm insanely proud of as a supervisor i'm not involved with that by the way that's her post that came out of her postdoc but she's coming back to edinburgh to do a postdoc to work with our growing team that paige is a part of and also i have other phd students zoe and sophia and hans they're all working on the animals that took over from the dinosaurs the animals that left her fossils in new mexico the fossils look like this these things might look familiar to you because all of us or at least most of us have these things inside our own mouths these are teeth and these are the classic molar and premolar teeth of mammals so it was mammals of course that survived the extinction and took over from the dinosaurs along with some birds and some wizards and turtles and so on now within a few hundred thousand years at most in new mexico we see all kinds of new mammals diversifying they're getting much bigger and they're evolving new diets and new ways of moving and within a few million years of the asteroid we see fossils of this creature a small animal just about the size of a house cat long gangly arms and legs a humble creature and it had opposable thumbs it could grip the branches and this was a primate one of the very first primates a distant cousin of ours and if that asteroid never hit these sorts of animals would have never had the chance to evolve so i think that goes to show how the story of dinosaurs is really the story of us all of this is related this is all one great towel of evolution if that asteroid was a near miss 66 million years ago on that tuesday evening and the dinosaurs lived on as more than just birds but as t-rexes and triceratops that continue to evolve and go their own ways primates probably would have never gotten their chance and therefore we probably would not have either so this is all connected is all one great grand story of life and we learn more about it with each new fossil that we find so i will end there and just say thank you to all of my colleagues and my funders and especially my students i'd say the only student i haven't mentioned yet here a phd student is julia because she studies crocs it doesn't fit into the story here but a big thanks to everybody who works with me mark young or nella bertrand greg funson who are my excellent postdocs now all of our master's students all of my colleagues in edinburgh rachel wood dick croon sean mcmahon incredible team of paleontologists my friends at the national museum nick frazier and stig walsh and their colleagues neil clark in glasgow i could go on and on but i'm so fortunate to be part of both a scottish community that has welcomed me with open arms and a global community of people like me that are obsessed with fossils so thank you very much and i look forward to any questions that we have in the next 30 minutes or whatever we have until i have to go down and put my 13 month old to bed so thank you all great thank you very much steve that was an absolutely fascinating uh lecture we've got quite a lot of attendees on youtube as well as those joining us on zoom so i'm going to open the floor to questions from from all of you if you're joining us on zoom if you could please pop a message in the uh zoom chat and i will unmute you to ask for a question uh or or just wave on the screen um and if you're joining us on youtube please pop the questions into the live chat and i will put them directly to steve all right sounds good yeah so um i can't see anybody initially on the zoom chat so i'll start with a question from john clayton on youtube and that is i know that fossils are rare but is there a missing link fossil which you would really like and expect to find a gap in our knowledge well uh you know we're always looking for fossils that can um either test you know particular hypotheses about evolution or that fill a gap in um maybe a sequence or or a gap in a story that we're trying to put together um you know we're spending a lot of time in new mexico looking for these first placental mammals that we're really blossoming after the dinosaur extinction so we're always looking for newer and older mammals but the one thing that would be amazing to find would be the archaeopteryx version of a pterosaur so i know it's supposed to talk about dinosaurs and stuff but you know we have all these feathered dinosaurs that show us how birds evolve from dinosaurs kind of step by step we don't have that with pterosaurs so the fossil that amelia found on sky uh is a full-blown pterosaur you know it's got its wings and big wings and so on it could fly really well we don't really have the precursors of those animals these pterosaurs just appear in the fossil record so somewhere somebody will probably find one one day we have some fossils in scotland that could be part of that story from up in elgin uh the problem is there's things like um scleremophilus uh that maybe could have something to do with the origin of pterosaurs really hard to tell the fossils are pretty poorly preserved but my former phd student davide fofa is doing a postdoc now at the national museum here in town and he's ct scanning those fossils so i think that's going to give us a lot of new insight and maybe this scottish thing will be the the pterosaur archaeopteryx so stay tuned to davide's work for that great thank you very much steve i'm going to hand over to leslie to ask a question to you hi hi steve um thank you you made me go and dig out my ah yeah very nice i thought when you were talking about portugal i'd better get that out but what i wanted to ask about is um what impact on research does indiscriminate fossil collecting have because i'm aware that on the sky at the moment the nature conservation order to prevent bottle collecting and obviously you know if they're taking away stuff that's going to affect your research and i wondered what your thoughts are on that yeah i'm very pleased with um you know how things have developed developed on sky with the nature conservation order um doogie ross and neil clark and nick fraser and i and others you know played our part in helping um scottish natural heritage get that order together and there's some nice signposts of the major sites on sky now that tell people what the rules are um you know there have been things on sky that have been uh illegally collected that have been damaged in most cases those are people that just haven't known the rules but there have been some cases where bad actors have tried to take something uh including one very nice dinosaur skeleton sadly that was pretty much smashed to pieces and and for those of you that know sky we don't really have a lot of skeletons you know we have a lot of footprints and individual bones so that's a tragic towel there um and it's irreplaceable it's a problem in many places um you know the the topic of fossil collecting and commercial fossil collecting and so on is a big topic and one that would you know take many days of discussion to get down pat every what i'll say those every country sometimes even different provinces and states have their own laws and the most important thing is to follow the laws know the laws and follow the laws when i was a teenager i really got into paleontology first through reading all my brothers books on dinosaurs but then by going out you know when i got my driver's license back home in the u.s going out and taking my you know parents car and going out to collect brachiopods and corals and bryozoans and so on i mean there is nothing more intoxicating than going out and being the first person to find this thing that's 290 million years old and and i tell that to people all the time that ask me how can i get involved in the field go out and find your own fossils if you can but no the laws always know the thank laws great thanks i'll head over to um john beatty to ask our next question yeah thanks uh steve the the the primates that you discovered the post bones was that was there any trace of them while the dinosaurs were actually still still treading the earth that's a great question john it's a big debate actually about when placental mammals so mammals like us that give live birth to well-developed young when placental mammals evolved did they evolve alongside the dinosaurs or did they spring up right after the extinction they almost certainly evolved with the dinosaurs and there's a lot of genetic evidence that i think it's closed the case there but now the debate has kind of shifted to did some of the major groups of placental mammals like primates get their start in the cretaceous in a dinosaur world and then survive the extinction and prosper afterwards i don't know the answer to that question that's one of the big things we're trying to work on with our mammal research group now um you know with many of the people that i mentioned in the talk we're building a huge family tree of early mammals and we're putting these mammals that live with the dinosaurs in the context of the mammals that came later and we're dating that tree using fossils and so on we're including anatomical data and also molecular data for modern species uh so i think the answer to that still is is to come so i'm very excited to see what that answer will be and i don't know the answer at least not yet thanks to you great thank you um we've got a question from um amy potts also on our zoom meeting just asked you to unmute amy um so admittedly coming from someone who hasn't actually studied paleontology but very interested were there insects around sort of before you know the dinosaur extinction event and what happened during that extinction event between dinos two insects but um during that time great question amy i'm not gonna probably be able to give you a very good answer because insects are so far out of my specialty there's a great insect expert at the national museum here andy ross who i'm sure he could tell you the exact answer that question um what i do know is insects involved a long time ago the first insects are many hundreds of millions of years old and the fact you know back in the coal swamp days uh you know long before the dinosaurs not only were there insects but there were giant insects giant um dragonflies and so on that were living in those worlds and even before that you know in in some of the fossils from scotland after the rhine shirt which is the first really good terrestrial ecosystem in the fossil record you have a lot of little arthropods i don't know if they're technically insects i don't know for sure what kind of arthropods but you have little buggy things that are there so they were some of the first things along with plants that you know colonize the land uh there are plenty of insects that live with the dinosaurs i i do know that um it seems like there was a diversification of insects in the cretaceous alongside the diversification of flowering plants as would make sense because we know today so many insects pollinate flowering plants and those plants only got their start in the cretaceous a brontosaurus would have never seen a flower which is an amazing thing to think about and then a lot of those insects had to survive the extinction i don't know if the rates of extinction what they were like presumably they were hit pretty hard but i don't know you know i'm not quite sure so um that's as much as i can tell you and i i guess i'll just say maybe um you know go and do some web searches and some reading and see if you can figure out the rest of the story and then let me know send me an email thank you very much um great thank you um there's quite a few questions on youtube looking at uh or asking about diversity and the evolution of the dinosaurs i just put this one um from matthew status what's the relationship between dinosaur diversity and temperature and do they uh do better during the warmer cooler intervals of the mesa so good question matt you know matthew is one of our excellent masters students who've just started and this is most remarkable of years to jump into a masters uh matthew's doing a really cool project on some of the microfossils that lived in the ocean when the dinosaurs kind of during the dinosaur extinction time so all of you out here watch for matthew's work in the next few years um it's a good question matthew we should talk about that in one of our paleo group meetings um there have been some studies that have looked at long-term trends and dinosaur evolution with things like sea level and temperature people like um richard butler and roger benson and and their group looked into some of those topics um as far as i recall there's there's not a really tight relationship between dinosaur diversity and temperature at the same time you know you're looking at very coarse level uh comparisons like over you know time bins of many millions of years so i think i think that is a very open question um when it comes to mammals though i can tell you i mean there's much of mammal evolution that's been driven by changes in temperature when you talk about things like paleocedia seen thermal maximum the spread of more modern style placental mammals or the cold snap that started at the legacy and then it led to the opening of grasslands and evolution of grazers and so on so i would think similar things might have happened with dinosaurs but we might just not have the resolution of the fossil record yet to know it or maybe there's literature out there that i just uh have missed or forgotten about so that's one we should look into thank you very much um i'm going to hand over to roy plotnick um zoom to ask the next question hi first of all this is the orlando smith road cut behind me i love it i love it which is where he his very first paper i think was done on that um i was wondering about the hold on a second i gotta reject your phone call here okay anyway um i was wondering about your your thoughts on the recent revision of the higher level taxonomy the dinosaurs you're changing the classic one fish and source issue division yeah great question ryan you know many of you probably know roy but eminent professor in chicago and roy knows the places i'm talking about well like the one in his background where i did when i did get my driver's license and went out to collect fossils it's places like that in northern illinois and roy has been instrumental in getting some of these sites preserved now and protected especially this one very important quarry to your question roy um the dinosaur family tree there have been some big revisions recently the biggest one was the one that was published a few years ago by baron at all in nature that uh moved the the orna fishing and dinosaurs the bird hip dinosaurs um next to theropod so the classic idea was that the meat-eating theropods the long-necked sauropods formed their own sister group called the sauritians and then the ornithischians were outside of that in effect they reshuffled the cards and they put the ornithischians with the theropods with the sauropods outside i was part of a response to that uh article that was led by max langer who's the great brazilian expert on early dinosaurs and we looked in detail at that data set and we had a lot of you know differences of opinion with the way characters were scored and when we scored things the way that we favored them uh the the traditional view came out so i still think the weight of evidence is on the traditional view however um it doesn't take much as those of you that know you know phylogenetics over the test it doesn't take much to really change things it can be a few characters here and there so i think it's really kind of an open question as to what the relationships are of the earliest dinosaurs i think it's far from settled um if i had to put money on it i'd put money on the traditional view but uh you know i could very easily be wrong so what we need now are just well as always more fossils and there are a lot of more fossils of early dinosaurs coming out particularly of brazil and argentina but also just new people younger people fresh eyes looking at the evidence and and taking a new look at it so open question great thank you very much steve um i'll take one more question from from youtube before we um hand over back to the president um so this is from amy from amy do you believe that certain theropod dinosaurs might have had similar sexual dichromatic feather displays that birds do today um apparently amy's doing a project on on this so be interested tonight that's calling that's a good question i you probably i suspect yeah i think so i think we know through the work of you know people who have pioneered the the discovery of melanosomes fossil melanosomes and dinosaur feathers to tell color you people like yaakov vinter and maria mcnamara and you know many of their colleagues um what they've shown is that there is incredible diversity in the handful of dinosaurs i've been studying so far there's so many different feather colors black and brown and white and ginger and there's camouflage patterns and ring patterns and iridescence and all kinds of things so it looks like that dinosaurs did a lot of stuff with their feathers that birds do today which would make me think that those sort of displays sexual displays or dimorphic displays would be things that that some dinosaurs would do i don't think there's any evidence for it yet there isn't some actual mesozoic birds i believe like confucius soreness but i don't think there's any non-bird dinosaur where that's been shown i might be wrong um but maybe you know given the large number of things like microraptor and inkyornis fossils from china it's the kind of thing that maybe could actually be tested so i think that's a really cool thing to look into great thank you very much steve i'm gonna hand back now to um our to newbie president steve martin uh just asked you're telling me steve okay well thank you steve that was an absolutely brilliant lecture it gave me so much to think about myself but i'm going to pass you on here because uh i know fiona gill is going to give you a vote of thanks on behalf of all of us which would be so much probably so much better than i could give so fiona can i hand across to you thanks steve and it's it's my pleasure tonight to to thank um our speaker steve for such a fascinating talk on the rise and fall of the dinosaurs and steve has really taken us on an amazing journey through 200 million years of geological time and all around the world from poland to portugal china uzbekistan and of course scotland and it really was a fascinating story of dinosaur evolution and personally i especially enjoyed hearing about the importance of dinosaur footprints and other trace fossils in unraveling the story of dinosaur evolution and of course hearing about and seeing the images of of the amazing feathered dinosaurs from china i was also really fascinated to hear about the brain and the ear structure of the ancestors of t-rex and as well as telling the story of the rise and fall of the dinosaurs what i especially liked about steve's thought tonight was that he managed to to weave in the stories of the people he find and work on dinosaurs and other fossils and it was fantastic to see the diversity of people who were working with fossils um so i would just like to finish by thanking steve for giving us such a great talk tonight and for being a fantastic ambassador for paleontology so i'd like to invite everybody to um show their appreciation in the usual manner please thanks to all of you you

Channel: The Mining Institute

Views: 11,455

Rating: 4.7234044 out of 5

Keywords: dinosaurs, mass extinction

Id: nYe0iwaZzT4

Length: 77min 45sec (4665 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020