The Secrets of Giant Dinosaurs | Dinosaurs Inside & Out

[Music] millions of years ago the forest thundered with the footsteps of giant dinosaurs they were Unstoppable and dangerous at least to the plants these were the herbivores today dinosaur hunters are using new methods and sheer Ingenuity to uncover the bizarre and clever ways eting dinosaurs fended off attackers and devoured vegetation experts are revealing how some grew to be the largest animals that ever walked on Earth and how others relied on magnificent and deadly armor as they struggle to protect themselves as scientists probe deeper they're finding out why these seemingly harmless plant eaters were the most plentiful and diverse of all the dinosaurs big or small they Ruled the Land of the [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Giants meet Nancy the world's largest touring dinosaur she arches three stories into the air and soon she'll stretch longer than an 18wheeler then she'll be center stage at dinofest International a traveling dinosaur exhibition but first a road crew must finish unpacking her 250 bones more than half are real discovered in Mongolia by a Chinese [Music] Expedition the rest are life-size [Music] cast from her frame scientists can infer much about how she lived the adaptations and defenses that made her a success her great size was her best weapon and most useful attribute 8ft ribs once walled in a stomach so big that massive amounts of food might spend days inside being converted to energy long legs as thick as tree trunks could carry her crushing weight for Miles with minimal exertion her huge feet were twice the size of an elephants as they pounded the ground they left a trail of craters revealing Clues to the way she moved and where she [Music] went nany's one of a group of the largest dinosaurs called [Music] sods their remains are found in giraff classic and early Cretaceous sediments about 200 to 100 million years old that's when they were the dominant Plante eaing dinosaurs sorop pods had a variety of features that fell between two extremes on one hand was depicus it had a long tail relatively short front legs and slender pencil-like teeth on the other was Brachiosaurus its front legs were taller tail shorter neck more upright and it had broad spatula like Teeth Nancy was more like a Deus found in the middle Cretaceous she was the last of her kind none were mental Giants perched to top the long neck was a small skull which encased a brain estimated at about one quarter the size of a cows [Music] at the other end was a huge tail that could send attackers flying with a mere [Music] flick what were these giant dinosaurs really like how could an animal get so big it's a puzzle that challenges scientists while some rely on Cutting Edge technology others seek answers from surprisingly simple experiments at Indiana Purdue University paleontologist Jim farlo uses a method to estimate just how much cods weighed he starts with a model of the dinosaur its precise proportions are based on fossil evidence and scaled down he submerges it in a container of water and measures how much is displaced that gives him the model's volume next knowing the model's scale you can figure out the volume of the actual dinosaur and convert it to weight Faro's calculations show that a large sorod might have weighed nearly 60 tons the really biggest sorop pods the ones that would have been at the upper end of the size range you may be talking about animals that would have weighed 10 maybe even 20 times as much as a large elephant and that's just something your your mind finds hard to comprehend as often happens in science solving one puzzle leads to another so the obvious question is why were they able to get so big when very few land mammals have been able to do the same thing well truth in advertising here I don't know if you want the absolute truth but I can offer some educated guesses farlo and other scientists believe the sod's era had become greener than the one before it evidence shows that carbon dioxide levels Rose since plants use carbon dioxide as food plant life flourished with more food to eat sorop pods could grow to enormous sizes but farlo thinks these plants were lowgrade and nutrient poor how then did sods grow and and stay huge on such inferior food to learn more about large Plante eaing animals farlo is visiting Jed freel's Farm in Auburn Indiana Jason's up there you want to ride along he'll get the gates for us Jed raises herds of today's most famous plant eaters cows [Music] how much of that you would one cow need in a day well you know it takes about a half a bail a day per cow is what we kind of figure in the winter time we like to see them have about 25 lbs of hay per cow to get them through the winter every day digesting hay is a complicated matter once it's swallowed it's softened in one one of the cow's four stomachs microorganisms then break it down even more extracting vitamins then it's regurgitated and chewed again known as chewing the cut sods also had help [Music] digesting some scientists believe they swallowed stones called gastrus like modern birds do the gastrus may have rolled around inside their stomachs or gizzards grinding the vegetation into small digestible bits also according to farlo it takes a long time for food to pass through a huge animal's enormous digestive tract giving microorganisms more time to extract nutrients so sorop pods could digest even the poorest quality plant PL material I like to say the equivalent of shredded newspaper and I suspect that sorap pods could get by on that stuff if they were among the best herbivores that have ever lived I suspect in their ability to survive on really crummy food sorap pods were built to eat they took full advantage of whatever plant life grew around them but how much food did one of these giants eat well if Jed was feeding sods instead of cows he'd probably need a lot more land Jed was telling me that a,b cow if you were going to pasture it about 10 acres which is about the size of the field that we've got around us here if we want to compare that with what a sorod is doing a 50 ton Sora pod that's warm-blooded you're probably looking at something like 270 Acres which is basically a little bit farther than as far as you can see from this hill we're on a single sorod could consume almost 700 lb of vegetation in a day that's if it were warm-blooded but not all scientists are convinced dinosaurs were warm-blooded in fact farlo thinks warm-blooded sorop pods would have devastated plant life so fast nothing would have been left for them to survive on so they must have been coldblooded warm-blooded animals like cows need to keep their internal temperature high by eating lots of food cold blooded animals like lizards rely on the Sun for warmth and eat less if coldblooded a sorod would still need to eat almost 250 lbs of plants every day whether warm-blooded or cold sods must have had voracious appetites they amble through forests devouring the scenery with each thunderous step they left a trail of Clues hinting at their behavior tracks that are now being uncovered millions of years later by a new breed of dinosaur [Music] [Applause] expert Flying high in the sky dinosaur expert Christian Mayer has spotted traces of huge dinosaurs in a Swiss mountain range known as the Jura the place where the Jurassic period of the age of dinosaurs got its name he's discovered dinosaur trackways here covering an area three times the size of New York City it's called a mega track site mayor knows that bones can tell a lot about Anatomy but only tracks can reveal clues about the movements of [Music] dinosaurs mayor also knows that it takes years of experience to interpret tracks so he's asked track expert Martin lley from the University of Colorado at Denver to help Andy and I walked up to that the first order of business for lley mayor and assistant Dorothy hippler is to map the track site using aerial photographs and the same with these over here for example they examine the photos to establish the pattern and direction of each trackway which holds Clues to the dinosaur's Behavior but sometimes irregularities in the Rock can masquerade as dinosaur tracks some of these look like tracks but they're not so for every good track there's probably um at least one bad one so they're probably four or so far mayor has discovered nearly 15 separate trackways scattered throughout the mega track site but how did they get here in the heart of the Jura mountains the answer lies in a layer of rock that formed 150 million years ago in the Jurassic period back then the geography here was very different the continents were just beginning to move apart from the single land mass they had once formed known as Pangia the Jura mountains were a level Shoreline of a now vanished ocean the Tey [Music] sea After Dinosaurs trampled a soggy Shoreline sun and wind dried their tracks which Harden like concrete the next rainstorm or flood deposited a layer of sediment over the tracks preserving them then 15 million years ago as the land masses continued to shift and Collide the shoreline was pushed upward forming [Music] mountains sediment covering the tracks eventually eroded revealing the fossilized prints today Christian mayor and his team of trackers are piecing them back together step by step oh but the slab is still dry that's okay among his most recent discoveries are trackways at a quarry near the town of muchier yeah I wanted to set the Rope up there where the casting people come but take the old the oldest one and have after the aerial photographs the team must examine the tracks up close so they've pounded repelling bolts into the Rock to pull themselves [Music] [Music] up studying tracks made by animals millions of years ago is dangerous to Martin lley the risks are worth taking he's after the thrill of the hunt it really is like being a Tracker of uh modern animals it's like following a creature that uh passed by yesterday sometimes you feel it it's much more recent you know time doesn't mean anything you're following a Jurassic animal one day you're following a recent animal the next day clinging to the Rock Martin and Dorothy give each massive footprint individual attention to the trackers the footprints are snapshots of living breathing creatures and we're used to thinking of dinosaurs as skeletons but these are the uh evidence of the living animal in motion people have referred to them as Motion Pictures of dinosaurs so they're a very Dynamic type of evidence we can see with the sorod track for instance it had a big fleshy foot like an elephant so the first thing we learn is the shape of the feet not the shape of the bones in the foot skeleton that we see in the museum but the actual shape of the feet the prints are scrutinized to identify the kind of dinosaur that made them these Impressions lacked fine detail but their round shape and large size up to 3 ft across for the hind prins show that they were made by the Burly footpads of sorod dinosaurs next stride length is measured to figure out how fast the dinosaur was moving the prints of a slow moving animal are fairly close together as it accelerates its stride lengthens the distance between the prints and average leg lengths known from skeletons are used to calculate speed mayor has determined that these massive creatures were soering at about 5 mph the average walking speed of an elephant track sites like these have also changed the way we think about sods when their bones first appeared in the 19th century scientists speculated that the creatures they belonged to lived in swamps water must have provided the buoyancy necessary to carry such enormous weight and because it was thought that dinosaurs were related to reptiles some believe they crawled low to the ground dragging their tails like crocodiles or Lizards but trackways have told a different story the lack of tail drag marks shows that the animals walked with their tails in the air the narrow width between each footprint shows they walk with their legs directly ly beneath their bodies like modern elephants a stance that could support their tremendous weight without the help of water until now mapping dinosaur tracks has been a low Tech operation away today Christian mayor is testing a new method that uses lasers and computers one help point the device fires a beam of light to a small reflector placed in a footprint by measuring how long it takes for the beam to return the computer calculates the distance to the footprint it's very simple I can do the like this I can just put one point on this area yeah and he's calculating immediately the area the surface and surface will appear here I'm looking forward to the results I think this will be great thing the dep of each print is also recorded from the data the computer will generate a 3D contour map of the site because prints of the same depth were made at the same time mayor will be able to single out an individual trackway from multiple Crossings with the click of a mouse the new equipment promises to speed up the process of mapping trackways but for now the dinosaur trackers rely on slower time-proven methods after photographing and measuring the track site a better picture of what the giant dinosaurs were doing at the ancient Shoreline is emerging the surface of the wall appears to be trampled over many times it appears that hundreds of sods returned here time and again perhaps to cool themselves or maybe Lush vegetation along the banks provided a favorite feeding place as dinosaur trackers follow in the footsteps of giants active roaming dinosaurs seem to come to life elsewhere a new discovery is fueling a long simmering debate about how some of the smaller dinosaurs got around now this is these are the bad lands of North Dakota 80 million years ago this region of North America was crisscrossed by rivers and streams a lush lowland leading to the edge of an inland sea throughout this land Rome the most exotic of Plante eating dinosaurs Triceratops they lived from about 100 to 65 million years ago at the end of the final period of the Dinosaurs the Cretaceous like most other dinosaurs they were smaller than the sorod but they were large animals in their own right some grew as big as a bus Triceratops was a member of a family of dinosaurs called ceratopsia creatures armed with a variety of sharp horns and large fan-like Shields but beneath all that remarkable armor is a heated debate that has simmered since these creatures were first discovered how did they stand it began in 1896 when the first known illustration of a ceratopsian skeleton appeared on a poster of specimens from Yale's Peabody Museum the creature was shown with its front legs straight underne in an upright stance like a rhinoceros but it was a guess fossils from several discoveries were combined because a complete skeleton had not yet been found in the same year a Triceratop skeleton was mounted by the Smithsonian Museum also a composite it was shown in a sprawling stance front legs bent crocodile style to many an upright stance implies an agile warm-blooded dinosaur that could charge attackers a sprawling stance means an animal that's slower more reptilian and possibly cold blooded with no way to resolve the issue ceratopsians have been depicted both ways for years now a remarkable Discovery may end the dispute you know they're going to be thick though after that rain yesterday in the summer of 1994 with garta a biologist from the University of Alabama and paleontologist David Burnham found a fascinating Triceratops in the bad lands of North Dakota gska had spent weeks scouring the land for dinosaur remains then one day as he was coming over a Hilltop he noticed what looked like a rib bone sticking out of the ground he contacted burnam they put together a crew and set up a dig site as more and more bones were exposed gska and Burnham realized they had stumbled upon the most complete Triceratop skeleton ever found over millions of years dinosaur skeletons tend to get broken up and the bones scattered over a wide area but this skeleton was articulated most of the bones were still connected they named their find Raymond as Raymond emerged gska and Burnham Could See For the First Time The Natural position of the front legs they were straight underneath his body Raymond and all his catopian kin must have had an upright stance had the debate finally been settled it looked that way but Ralph Johnson of the Milwaukee Public Museum has some doubts before Raymond was found he made a discovery of his own the foot so it's got to be rotated on an expedition in 1981 his team found a complete shoulder and front leg of a torosaurus another ceratopsian okay hang back in the museum he devised an ingenious way to test how the bones fit together he made plastic cast of them which he connected with metal joints to simulate muscles he used elastic straps fixing them where the bones showed evidence of the actual muscle attachments then he hung the 7t model from scaffolding and tried walking the leg in both sprawling and upright positions if the position worked the bones would stay in their sockets if not the bones would slip out the result surprised him him in this kind of traditional reptile sprawl with the front leg everything works the joints all line up the way they should the muscles act on the bones the way they should it works you can actually get this thing to walk forward which is what you want it to do now if we go into the other idea straight underneath the body but when Johnson tried to walk the leg underneath the body the bone could only move sideways it's actually going sideways right not back and forth into the animal stomach there's a way to get around when he twisted the bone around to make it move back and forth he found another problem well now you've got the elbow going in the right direction toward the head of the animal but now our dinosaur looks a little bit like popey with a foot uh pointing out to the side so this thing is going to be walking like this actually won't be walking at all there's no way biomechanically to get this animal to move forward by putting these legs directly underneath the body according to Johnson's experiment the case was closed ceratopsians must have sprawled like crocodiles but where does that leave raymon gska and Burnham's prize Discovery Raymond's for liim and hind Lim are clearly in an upright position this is not what you'd expect from a lizard-like posture he's standing on his tippy toes and so that enables him to move at greater speed it's kind of poised like a runner in Johnson's version the shoulder blades are pulled back enabling the legs to sprawl but when GSA and Burnham uncovered Raymond they found his shoulder blades much farther forward allowing his legs to be pushed under the body an upright stance Johnson's impressed but not ready to give in yet Raymond's bones await further study once scientists have had a a chance to thoroughly examine them then the question may be settled Johnson's already confident about the results and I'm glad about Raymond because it's a complete leg it even has the bones in the hand we know it's from one individual and now what they can do is actually try to put those legs together to put those bones together and I'm pretty confident that they're going to find that once they try to articulate those bones get the balls and sockets to line up that they're not going to be able to get them underneath the body and you can see here with a stance that hints at his behavior Raymond clutches the secret to how his kind lived meanwhile Innovative use of medical technology is revealing how a dinosaur 80 million years older may have [Music] died stegosaurs were innocent looking dinosaurs that feasted on Jurassic vegetation about 145 million years ago but should the need arise these generally docile creatures had the equipment to defend themselves against predatory dinosaurs plates along its back intimidated enemies by making the stegosaur appear larger than it really was and lethal spikes at the end of a powerful tail could fend off the toughest opponents but even though the spikes were as lethal as daggers it seems they could also be a point of vulnerability July 1992 at a remote location in Colorado an unusual stegosaur skeleton was uncovered trapped at the bottom of a deep Gully lay one of the most complete specimens ever found with most of its Bones still embedded in rock it was prepared for transport out of the canyon it'd be better earlier in the excavation paleontologist Ken Carpenter and his team discovered that the otherwise well-preserved skeleton had a deformed tail spike it peaked their curiosity but before they could study it they'd have to get the stegosaur to the lab as the final layer of rock was removed the team faced a problem the encased skeleton was too heavy to lift determined to get it out they called in reinforcements a US army helicopter was sent in to airlift The Remains out of the Ravine they could then be taken to the Denver Natural History Museum where Carpenter could give them a thorough examination the helicopters are designed to raise 20th century battle tanks lifting the remains of a 145 milliony old stegosaur wasn't much different [Music] back in the Museum's lab technicians painstakingly removed the Bones from Rock finally Carpenter was ready to perform the autopsy he began by focusing on the disfigured tail Spike I didn't quite know what to make of it I thought maybe it was due to crushing from the weight of the rock that was encasing it I mean certainly if we look at this uh more normal Spike we can see that there's quite a bit of difference in the shape as Carpenter studied the Bony Spike he noticed that it showed signs of healing and regrowth indicating that it wasn't damaged after death he also detected small holes on the surface of the bone suggesting disease one possibility was a bacterial infection called osteitis if a bone has been broken and is left untreated bacteria can invade its marrow the blood producing tissue held within a honeycombed structure at the center within days fluid builds up and the bone develops small holes to relieve the pressure eventually the Bone's inner structure is destroyed the infection can spread throughout the body and cause death could this have been the fate of Carpenters stegosaur to find out he would have to look inside the spike but there was a problem doing this would require breaking open the rare fossil something he wasn't willing to do the answer lay inside Kaiser Hospital in Denver Lori mcin one of his lab volunteers work there she suggested using the hospital's CAT scan medical technology developed to harmlessly cut through human tissue and Bone could expose the spikes interior without destroying it I want to see uh if we can see some detail in that area Okay first they scanned a normal Spike the kind found on healthy stegosaurs next the deformed Spike then the scans were compared this represents a normal tail Spike you can see the dense outer bone represented here the bone marrow is in the center this is the pathologic spike and you can see the dense outer bone but the bone marrow is no longer where it should be in the infected spot Spike the honeycomb structure of the inner bone is gone a clear indication that it was not crushed by Rock but destroyed by bacteria before the creature died L now Carpenter can be quite certain the stegosaur suffered from osteomylitis possibly caused by a broken tail Spike but how did the dinosaur break its spike in the first place it may have been a casualty of War the weapons and armor of stegosaurs are clear to see but dinosaur expert Bob Bacher has drawn some conclusions about the defenses of sarod dinosaurs other than size that aren't quite so obvious he claims to have uncovered The Secret of how the sarod he calls brontosaurus protected itself I'm standing in the unprotected underbelly of brontosaurus right here there's no bone there's no cartilage and above me would be this huge vat of sloshing digestive fluids we had thought that if you bit brontosaurus here you could kill it we thought that if brontosaurus sat down hard on a rock back here could injure its abdomen but we were wrong we have just found the first perfect set of brontosaurus belly armor rods of bone up to three feet long which were embedded in the belly muscle right up here and these rods of bone have big knobs on them proving there were strong ligaments in the belly muscle this would give brontosaurus the strongest abdomen of any animal that has ever lived if you were a meat eater and tried to bite here you'd break your tooth if you're a meat eater and jabbed a claw in here it would pull out and if you're a brontosaurus these belly bones and muscles would keep your great slashing gut stiff and firm if you wanted to move fast left or right or if you wanted to stand straight straight up you see with a gut protected and stiffened like this a brontosaurus could go from all fours to straight up in a few seconds but a brontosaurus was huge so strong belly or not lifting its body off the ground required a few fancy tricks with leverage brontosaurus has a strange set of balancing organs now the neck was Hollow all the bones were Hollow and here would be the lungs full of air but you get back here and it's all fluid-filled gut and then the mother of all rumps these gigantic hip bones and thigh bones surrounded by muscle with its light front end and heavy rear a brontosaurus was like a seesaw with the weight on one end tilting its front end up was no problem the animals designed to go up and go up quick why would you want to tilt up well this is a Plante eater I lived in an environment where the Summers were dry nothing to eat eat at ground level but there'd still be leaves green leaves on trees tall trees by tilting up quickly you can access foliage that no other plant eater could get with its massive legs and long neck brontosaurus could reach perhaps 40 ft high but that flexibility came with a price this is the front end of brontosaurus and there two problems here they're related number one the body is designed to tilt up that's true how you going to get blood from the heart way up to the head seems impossible problem number two this animal has a tiny brain a smaller brain than its ancestors brontosaurus Evolution was dumbing down are the two problems related yeah see brontosaurus would survive better if it could rear up and get those plants the only way to get those plants would be to remove the need for blood to be pumped up to the head how are you going to to do that eliminate the brain in this case reducing the brain was adaptive little brains don't need a constant flow of blood this is a Hightech successful 40,000 lb perhaps but not everyone agrees there's an alternative Theory it goes like this brosaurus had a heart so big it could pump blood up at the velocity of a fire hose it could get that blood way up to the head even when the head was held really high but what would happen when the Brontosaurus lowered its head The Rush of Blood would blow the skull off the rest of the skeleton we may never know for sure how much heart a brontosaurus had but we do know that its kind were huge and if size was its best defense then perhaps the safest sarod would be the most immense an honor now bestowed on a dinosaur uncovered in in the rugged bad lands of [Music] Argentina below the equator in a region of Argentina known as Patagonia lies the small town of Plaza hunal its tiny museum is home to the remains of what could possibly be the largest dinosaur that ever lived with a patriotic touch it's been named Argentinosaurus for the past 8 years paleontologist rolul Korea and his team have been assembling the bones of this previously unknown syod from the Cretaceous Period but even with the creature still in bits Korea believes the massive bones leave no doubt about its size the back bones of Argentinosaurus were 50 at least 50% longer than any other ber from any other known sorath around the world the bones of Argentinosaurus were first spotted on a remote Ranch outside Plaza hunal in 1988 word got back to Jose Bonaparte head paleontologist at the Argentine Museum of Natural History in Buenos he sent Korea then a student on a 1,000m journey to inspect the discovery didn't take long for Korea to appreciate the Bone's importance determined to get this giant creature out of the ground he moved his family to Plaza hunal then arranged a job at the little Museum assembled a crew and started [Music] digging after many months of hard labor he and his crew freed enough bones to begin taking them back to the museum once there the Careful Cleaning of the bones progressed and Korea began to think about the enormous importance of his enormous dinosaur Argentinosaurus it seemed had become the latest in the series of discoveries of the most gigantic dinosaurs it started a century ago when dinosaurs were first being Unearthed in the American West a rivalry emerged between two great paleontologists Philadelphia's Edward Drinker cop and Yale University's ail Charles Marsh it quickly became one of the most vicious battles in modern science hostilities intensified in 1877 when a huge bone bed was discovered near KO Bluff Wyoming according to Legend teams sent out by Marsh and cop lied and cheated even destroyed fossils to prevent their Rivals from collecting them for 12 years these destructive Wars raged in the end Marsh's collectors had Unearthed some of the biggest bones ever found among them was a nearly complete skeleton Marsh later called brosaurus at an estimated 75 ft in length and 15 ft tall it stood about as high as a one-story building and Spann the length of about five midsized cars a new giant appeared in 1910 when the Berlin Museum mounted one of the biggest dinosaur excavations of all time in East Africa 500 men labored to dig out 250 tons of dinosaur bones their Greatest Prize was brachiosaurus with a height of 40 ft and a length of 85 ft it Remains the biggest dinosaur ever assembled in a museum it was taller than a three-story building and as long as six cars 70 years would pass before a bigger dinosaur was discovered in 1979 in Colorado a dinosaur was found that was so big it was called Ultrasaurus it stood 9 ft at its shoulders possibly stretching more than 100 ft in length it's likely to have towered four stories high and spanned as long as seven cars 6 years later from a rocky outcrop in New Mexico came the longest dinosaur ever found the earthshaker seismosaurus it had a horizontal posture but seismosaurus still may have reached a height of a three-story building with its long whip-like tail it's estimated to have spanned 150 ft nearly the length of nine cars and what about Argentinosaurus how does it compare it could have been nearly 120 ft in length and 60 ft in height five stories high and nearly 8 cars long in overall size Korea believes Argentinosaurus to be the biggest dinosaur ever found the bones of Argentinosaurus are representing an animal 100 tons in weight which is equivalent to 20 African elephants all together in the same time in the same bodyy today Korea's team has uncovered all the bones they're likely to find now Korea faces A new challenge finding a building large enough to house them how long will Argentinosaurus hold its record no one knows for sure but a new Challenger is already gearing up to take the field dinosaur hunting used to mean digging vast amounts of Earth to find fossils geophysicist Alan Whitten from the University of Oklahoma hopes to change that he's merged firearms and computer technology with Geo physical knowledge and come up with a method to locate dinosaur bones deep underground Whitten has come to help a colleague find the remains of a giant sorod from the early Cretaceous about 110 million years ago it might be a future record breaker but they need to to find more of it to be sure by the time we get out there here in Southeastern Oklahoma paleontologist Richard selli and his team have already dug out three gigantic neck bones our guess is U that this is this bone here is about the seventh bone down in the neck sort of towards the middle of the neck series um and it's a good deal larger than Brachiosaurus I mean this is this is a lot bigger than Brachiosaurus which is a huge huge animal so this could uh rival the very biggest of described dinosaurs how yall making out down here but just when saell thought he might be on his way to discovering the biggest dinosaur ever his luck ran out we found this neck and then it just abruptly came to an end and so we're missing uh the vast majority of this huge huge animal where is it you can't just dig forever it's just not uh not prac practical it was time to call in Alan Whitten and his gear first the overlying soil must be scraped away and the ground flattened then Whitten can start looking for more bones he uses a huge 8 gauge shotgun mounted on Wheels when fired it sends sound waves into the Earth the vibrations are detected by an assortment of buried microphones sound waves travel more quickly through the dense bone than the sandy soil so they arrive at the microphones first a computer analyzes the patterns of waves then reveals the location of the underground objects with his device Whitten might just be able to tell spelli where to dig next but I'm planning is to run the gun down the tape measure in this Direction all right shooting it every 2 ft and what we'll get is a vertical slice an image of a vertical slice right below this tap meure is that all right with the array of microphones in place and signaling to the computer Whitten begins his assistant stays with the computer to confirm transmission now what do we have even with help from technology it's hard ating dinosaur bones deep underground but Whitten won't give up so easily he's brought along other devices one of the most promising is ground penetrating radar or GPR it's been used for years in archaeology but now it's being adapted to paleontology instead of sound waves GPR beams radio waves into the Earth radio waves respond to the the chemical composition of an object instead of density and the results are easier to read if the waves hit an object underground with a chemical composition of bone they'll bounce back to the surface showing up as an isolated blip on the computer screen despite technological advances sometimes bones are still found by sheer luck Celli found a few more while bulldozing the site we just stopped just in the nick of time with a bulldozzer that came down to like about this level right where we had those bags gone another three or 4 inches this would have been hamburger if whitten's work proves successful it will prevent close calls like this and revolutionized dinosaur hunting but the use of geophysics in dinosaur exploration is in its early stages and this time the Giant's Bones have proven elusive so the challenge will have to wait with further refinements Whitten is confident that his technology will be a wave of the future that will help us see deep into the past the subtle designs of Plante eating dinosaurs don't yield Clues easily but today's technology has aided in piecing together the adaptations and behaviors that allow them to flourish in a world of vicious predators in the end it's the energy and Imagination of men and women that have helped us to better understand these unique dinosaurs and recreated a world that was lost millions of years before the first human walked the Earth today the bones of perhaps only 1% of all the dinosaur species that live have been uncovered imagine what still waiting to be [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] found [Music]

Channel: Real Wild

Views: 24,532

Keywords: Jim Farlo paleontologist, Jurassic era, Jurassic giants, Real Wild, ancient world exploration, decoding footprints, dinosaur fossils, dinosaur kingdom, earth's history, ecological balance, educational journey, environmental education, extinct species study, geophysics, herbivorous dinosaurs, natural history, paleontology discoveries, prehistoric creatures, specimen examination, water method, wildlife studies

Id: 7VqC2aWhros

Length: 51min 57sec (3117 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024