The Story of Scotty The T.rex - Biggest in the World

[Music] [Music] [Music] this is the story of scotty the biggest t-rex in the world so the measurement that describes scotty as the biggest was actually based on a metric that basically extrapolates from the length of the femur so that's the upper leg bone called the femoral circumference length from that metric you can actually extrapolate the size of an animal and specifically the weight of an animal and so this was the metric they used they looked at scotty measured the femur and used that that calculation and that was how they extrapolated the size of the animal so this is the real femur of scotty so this is the actual fossil this thing weighs about probably close to 200 pounds this is very heavy and it gives you a sense of how the bone is prepared so this stuff in here is plaster so what they've done is they basically poured plaster into the gaps between the bones where it's broken and that just strengthens it which makes it safe to transport as well as to store [Music] believed to be a female scotty measured over 13 meters or just over 42 feet long and with a weight of 8.8 metric tons discovered in the dinosaur rich frenchman formation scotty's bones have been carefully preserved and are stored at the t-rex discovery center in east end saskatchewan this is where the actual bones of the animal are the real bones that were dug out of the ground they were brought to east end they were prepared here they're now curated here basically stored here and when people want to come and study scotty this is where they come and so what you see in our gallery both in east end and regina is effectively a copy or a replica of those bones so what the the paleontologists did was they would take the original bones they would make a cast of them fill those casts with a molding material and then that is what is made into the skeletons so there are actually four casts of scotty in the world the one here in east end the one in regina there's one in japan and there's also one in australia so scotty is a world traveler just a little history emily i believe in 91 we're wandering around somewhere about here and so in the afternoon we found a vertebrae of mrs t-rex discovered by retired teacher and east end resident robert gephardt his fascination with paleontology led him to become friends with paleontologists tim tacarrick and john store and in august of 1991 robert volunteered to be part of an expedition with tim and john that would forever change the world of paleo in saskatchewan yes they got in contact with me and said we're going out i want to come along so i went out and it was a matter of collecting some fossils like begging some material and hauling it back to the vehicle and then we had our lunch and in the afternoon it was exploration time which i thought was fantastic a nice way to top off the day if you consider the local terrain there's the top of the hills and then it can drop down and then it may flatten out a little bit and then drop down and then there may be a gully and then water erodes as it normally does and what i came across the first thing that i noticed was a vertebrae which was the size of a pie plate if one has lived in the countryside the fair debt you get to know the size of vertebrae of a tower or a horse this was considerably larger although it was positively identified as a t-rex vertebrae it would take another three years before scotty would be unearthed a distinction that falls to tim to carrick visible at the site was bones encased in iron stone you can tell there's bones but you really couldn't tell what part of the animal it was or was it in fact t-rex but as i dug back a couple of feet from the original site the original layer i found a tooth which in itself was very exciting that made it a little more exciting then to to this other side here we dug down i dug down a bit and i found the other tooth i found the other tooth that was same position a little bit smaller but same position same angle and was going back into bone that automatically confirmed that we did have t-rex since the teeth are still in the in the jaw that's when it got exciting because if the teeth were being trapped then the rest of the body should be trapped too for five minutes i went running around chain smoking and swearing that was the realization that we had a t-rex skeleton the question was how are you going to get it out as excitement grew several details still needed attention with the discovery occurring on private land approval by the landowner was mandatory in moving forward the site was also difficult to get to creating challenges for the transportation of the fossil remains as well additional financial resources were required to fund an unscheduled excavation of this size by june of 1994 the funding was in place courtesy of the royal saskatchewan museum and the province of saskatchewan tim and his team were now free to unearth the secrets that had been hidden for millions of years we worked our butts off to see if we can find out where the rest of the skeleton was and we kept finding bone and bone bone and bon bone but it wasn't making any sense it wasn't like a chicken lying on its side it was a regurgitated omelet bones were stacked all over the place there was no rhyme or reason for where the next bone was but we knew that those new bones that we were covering were racks so we knew we had a skeleton of some sort the problem again became the how thick the layer of the bones were we were able to take off some of the smaller bones over top of other bones but we're looking at a bone that's three feet long say a rib partially embedded with other ribs you can't separate them so you get a big block and these blocks are getting humongous with the dig now underway interest from the public began almost immediately seizing on this opportunity the east end community tourism association began offering tours soon people from all across the world were watching the discovery unfold this opened up quite quickly because our organization in town here decided that what we would do with the approval of rsm is that we just set up tours out to the dig site and that's one of the things you don't hear much about in terms of paleo people for example down the states they do all this somewhat secretively until they have thing out and about then it's brought to the public's attention this one public could come out and we had people from all over the world coming out to view the day and that was a tremendous effort by the community to do that they were responsible for all the tourism activity that was around well it wasn't our responsibility we were focused on just on the skeleton over this successful summers of extracting this thing all in front of tourism stuff like that we ended up flipping one of the biggest blocks that i've ever flipped that's the most religious moment paleontology is that flip because even though you've cut down underneath it you're not 100 certain that you've captured everything [Music] with huge pieces of fossil being unearthed it was decided that a temporary research facility would be established in the east end this would serve as a temporary space for ongoing fossil research and also a place where the public could view the remains however there were even bigger plans in 1991 the community of east end had commissioned a feasibility study for the creation of a paleo museum and now thanks to the discovery scotty would become the star attraction and help make the museum a reality in 1998 construction began on the t-rex discovery center with the doors opening in 2002 trx discovery center when it first opened was owned and operated by the town of east end so for about 10 years the center was operated by the town and the royal saskatchewan museum rented this lab space and so in 2012 the rsm took over what we call the front end operations so that's programming the research the gift shop was taken over by our friends group but the town continues to own this building [Music] [Music] today the discovery center is a destination for both tourists and researchers from around the world the facility features a fully equipped laboratory where fossil preparation study and curation occur there is also a gift shop filled with a number of souvenirs and dinosaur paraphernalia main gallery is divided into two eras [Music] the cenozoic gallery or life after the dinosaurs feature several life-size skeletons the mesozoic or time of the dinosaurs features life from 66 million years ago [Music] this is scotty's home [Music] standing in a menacing pose scotty measures 13 meters long and 3.8 meters high her powerful jaw is filled with 60 large serrated teeth perfect for tearing into the flesh of her prey there are several other t-rex skulls that give the visitor an even greater appreciation of the animals meat-eating abilities despite its appearance guests can't get enough of scotty along with her sheer size scotty also holds another important distinction if you like cut open the t-rex bones they actually have growth rings like a tree does so you can go in and count those and you can estimate how old the animal was so scotty was over 30 years old when she died and that is actually the oldest known t-rex in terms of the age of the individual so it's possible scotty might just have died from natural causes like just might have gotten old and died scotty does have a whole bunch of what are called paleo pathology so these are injuries that the animal got while it was alive but injuries that healed so scotty has things like broken bones that have healed there's marks on the face that are consistent with fighting other t-rexes uh so t-rexes did this thing called face biting where they would just like bite each other's faces and that was their kind of territorial dispute or their competition for mates so scotty has some of those scars as well so these are some of the original bones of scotty these are a lot of the ribs and some of the teeth and so this the skeleton basically is all in our lab here in east end some of it's in boxes some of it's in crates some are in shelves and some of the smaller pieces are in cabinets like this one so this is one of scotty's actual teeth and this is one of the more spectacular specimens t-rex teeth have actually got a couple of unique features to them from this time period t-rex is the only large carnivorous dinosaur and so whenever we find a tooth this size we know for sure that it comes from a t-rex one of the indications that it is a carnivorous dinosaur is this ridge along the edge of it here these are called carne these ridges and along the ridges there are serrations so just like a tiny steak knife so if you were to run your finger along you would feel it you would feel those serrations there this is something that all carnivorous dinosaurs had and this we think is an adaptation for slicing through flesh t-rex basically didn't chew its food it had no molars or anything so these teeth are basically for for killing and tearing would be their main [Music] function so as one of two paleontologists that are located in east end emily discusses the important role she and her colleagues play in today's world the saying they always use is the past is the key to the present paleontology is the study of ancient life through fossils and it is so much more than just going out and digging up dinosaurs which is important like the dinosaur is an important piece in understanding ancient life but the dinosaurs are only a very tiny tiny part of the history of life and so what a paleontologist's job is to do is to go out there find these fossils so that we can reconstruct the past history of earth [Music] this deposit is about 38 million years old and it dates to a time period called the late eucene and the the biggest animal at this time was these big rhino-like bronders that were approaching well they were the size of elephants basically [Music] we can't understand where we are and where we're going in terms of biology and ecosystems unless we understand where we've come from [Music] the big issues today things like climate change and sea level rise ocean warming all of those things have happened in the geologic past there's very little that earth has not experienced and so we can find those things in the fossil record if we can understand how biological systems respond to those kind of things we can help understand how our ecosystems might behave in the future meanwhile back at the t-rex discovery center rows of cabinets reveal the thousands of fossils that have been cataloged over the years upon closer examination these fossils reveal a marine reptile heritage so here in east end we do have some fairly substantial marine reptile collections from around saskatchewan we have marine sites up near herschel which is closer to saskatoon and many sites along the south saskatchewan river and then also there's marine material coming out of the west block of grasslands so my specialty is ancient marine reptiles reptiles that lived during the mesozoic era so at the same time as dinosaurs but actually are not related to dinosaurs most of them are more closely related to today's snakes and lizards so i've studied both plesiosaurs which are the ones with the big long necks and the big paddles that the loch ness monster is usually based off of and my dissertation my phd was about moses sores which kind of look like giant marine komodo dragons they're not directly related i am pretty much one of the experts in the world right now on mosasaurus and some of the other closely related mosasaurs just because i've spent five years studying mosasaurus and seeing more specimens of mososaurus than nearly anyone else alive right now as emily and haley continue their work based at the t-rex discovery center their passion for what they do as well as the love they have for the area continues the tradition that was started in 1994 unearthing the secrets of the east end area scotty the t-rex another story of saskatchewan's great southwest [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: trex, scotty the trex, scotty the t.rex, eastend saskatchewan, frenchman formation, royal saskatchewan museum, trex discovery centre, t.rex discovery centre, t.rex, biggest trex, biggest t.rex, emily bamforth, hallie street, tim tokaryk, robert gebhardt, dinosaur hunters, royal sask museum

Id: rLYwYo0GbwM

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020