you
I got this job at the University of
Chicago as a young guy that barely shave
and I felt for the big tent
I give him try me I had no experience in
finding anything I didn’t know I’d be
good at it
these are cervical and that’s part of
the fun and excitement about science you
never know where it’s going to take you
Here I am now having uncovered the man
approaching a hundred tons of the
charile in Africa last year and worked
in India we’ve worked in Asia we’ve
worked in South America we’ve discovered
dinosaurs right and left flying reptiles
crocodiles 40 feet long who could have
predicted that nobody can and that’s
what’s the excitement of really of what
research science is about thank you sir
okay I’m delighted to be here tonight it
was a big family six kids over eight
years and one of them we’ve all become
professors that wasn’t the plan one of
them a Paul Calista Sereno was a bit of
a black sheep for quite a while I had
brilliant siblings but when the teachers
got me oh my gosh they never forgot and
I had quite a rough up being in terms of
just really liking school didn’t like it
never operated well in school I was also
a bit of an accident-prone kid so that
by sixth grade I think I was unconscious
at least 20 times I was nearly killed by
one gym teacher who held me vertically
in a move that caused me to swallow my
tongue I was knocked unconscious with a
volleyball by the other gym teacher whom
I would later work with in summers when
I became a college student I learned how
to feint in church as a way of getting
out of church
I tried to derail a train it wasn’t
successful and it was generally I had
this kind of a feeling about school I
remember distinctly in sixth grade
thinking I’ve only gone through six
years and if I can calculate correctly
six minus minus twelve at six six more
years I’m not going to make it out of
high school a lot of people didn’t think
I would make it out of high school and
there are lots of kids like me and see
them all the time
I ended up really learning about science
and getting a love for biology and
actually a feel for adventure and all
the things I was doing outside of the
classroom some of them good some of them
bad one of the good things I did was my
my father bought me a butterfly
collecting clit I was afraid to admit
that in school but I went around and
with my brother later collected these
butterflies outside our fancy suburb of
Naperville wasn’t so fancy event outside
Chicago and that was my first taste of
biology but this was a real big event
for me this painting my first on a piece
of canvas my mother was an art teacher
my father a postman ex engineer they
just told us to do things something
satisfying in life make no small plans
well I didn’t really come to fruition
for me until I made this painting and
then I felt for the first time that I
could do something now those pots were
made by my brother and I felt I had a
career I was going to be an artist so I
got a dictionary and I actually read the
dictionary because I was so far behind
in vocabulary that it was a question
whether I would get into college I
worked my way into northern Illinois
University as an art student and these
were drawings I did in life drawing
class screw there was some talent there
but there’s something else going on
subliminal e even before I thought about
paleontology I was seeing bones when I
shouldn’t be this was actually a living
person and actually it turns out that
the line between science and art is a
fuzzy one and a very short one indeed to
this day I have people telling me that
the art in what I do is in making up the
parts or don’t exist
the imagination is only limited to what
doesn’t exist and I think that’s a very
limiting view of what art actually has
to offer a scientist like myself I think
it comes into play in every aspect of
what we do I think it’s why I can find
things in the field because I can take
the anatomy of bones that well when I
see only a part of it I can think about
the other part that’s in the ground a
specimens of nature source but here’s
the transition from the neck to the back
we may not have that in any other
specimen there’s anything we need to do
in science it’s to think about ideas
that haven’t been thought about before
think about hypotheses that maybe you
don’t have a lot of evidence for but
then you can go out and test and what I
spend the last twenty five years doing
is trying to do that with dinosaur bones
what I try to do is understand the
distortion and use your source I realize
the distortion is your assurance might
link it to another dinosaur and try to
understand what those distortions mean
we’re going to go back on a time time
trip back to the Mesozoic a story I
tells the Mesozoic story this is a
picture of the continents floating
around a little bit after when the
chapter I’m going to talk about today
but it’s about 80 million years ago you
see how small the Atlantic Ocean is well
it got smaller as you go back in time it
gets so small that Africa touches South
America and just at that point when
there was still some contact that’s when
we’re going to go into Africa and see
what was alive hundred and ten million
years ago Africa of course now has a
large desert in the North here there’s
no roads that actually cross it and the
country where my colleagues come from is
blessed measure it’s located about here
is blessed and I say blessed with a
section of that desert it’s a gorgeous
place to visit I always wanted to cross
it just like I wanted to go down the
Mississippi River as a kid I said I
can’t live a full life unless I’ve
crossed the Sahara once it is such a
magnificent enormous habitat you can be
in a place and look all around you for
miles and miles and see sand and rock
and in fact in some places you can see
more dinosaur bone than anywhere else on
the continent that’s the place I’m going
to take you now it’s called gateau fowl
the place where camels fear to tread
and humans must fear to tread there more
if camels don’t like the place you can’t
take your normal thermometer that only
goes up to 120 otherwise you’ll never
know how hot it is and you need to think
about other things like dehydrated food
you’re going to take a big group of say
20 people and they’re going to be
working as hard as they’ve ever worked
in their life digging up 10 20 tons of
rock and bone you got to feed them so
you got to think of a lot of things you
got to put it all in a car you can’t
take anything that’s not absolutely
necessary and everything that is except
water that you’ve got to find and
transport which is the major problem in
and of itself and then you go driving
into the desert this is actually one
time which we actually drove all the way
down we’ve done it twice drove all the
way down to me share from Europe and
drove back
this is Algeria it’s a land inhabited by
a very interesting nomadic people the
Tuareg these people have lived for
hundreds in fact thousands of years in
the desert leading a nomadic life at
first without camels and then later
during historical periods with camels
raising goats and and mutton and Trading
camels and it’s an absolutely fantastic
culture where the men wear veils and
carry swords you go to their homeland
the the biggest Oasis where Tuareg
culture can be seen up close at Agadez
you probably heard of the town located
on the edge of a small and low mountain
range called the eye ear and there you
see the eye ear and there you see the
Tenere Desert coming into the eye ear
from the east side you follow those
dunes and try to avoid them as you go
east into the place called data foul and
it looks like this if you’ve got good
eyes you’ll see our camp look at that
with GPS of course we can find our way
in we can often find our way out
we can find fossils that we found it
makes planning a year’s expedition a
great pleasure and something that’s much
more possible to do because we can
always find a fossil once you’ve left it
a month later but this is the playground
for where we have spent several years
finding fossil there’s more fossils here
in these little patches of rock than
anywhere else in Africa it’s going to
give us and it’s going to give all of
Africa an incredible picture of fossils
110 million years ago difficult places
you can move up in time 290 Mon you go
other places you can move back in time
to 135 million years that’s why before
we leave me share we have to leave it
with the world’s best dinosaur museum
which we intend to do in the next years
now I’m just getting you know this is
way out of date now because we’ve number
added a number of species to this
picture but going back to that map that
I showed you in the Mesozoic world
especially in the latter part of the
Mesozoic world those continents have
drifted apart it doesn’t take long five
to ten million years before species in
isolation will diverge on their own path
evolution is a creative process that
ultimately takes advantage of
opportunities so varied that we can’t
predict its path over time it repeats
itself in different ways and shapes but
you can’t predict it if you take a
continent send it on its own course
somewhere new forms new species will
evolve and so the world that I’m going
to describe to you is extreme by our
standards we don’t have anything to
judge it by our standards being North
American dinosaurs which you’ve known
for more than a century the dinosaurs I
grew up on the books it’s nothing like
that and I’m going to tell you a little
bit about it I’m going to tell you about
this layer here in the middle 110
million years ago and some of these
species here that we’ve named from that
love that level you’ll walk into the
desert you find a six-foot jaw but that
jaw doesn’t the butt doesn’t belong to a
dinosaur
it belongs to an enormous crocodile here
we are laying down behind the John a
photograph that was published in
National Geographic it took us a lot to
later the ground was 150 degrees we were
baking and they said just one more
photograph this animal
we found a lot of it was quite a story
in terms of putting it together but we
got most of this animal together we
sized adjusted the parts it was to our
mind the world’s largest crocodile in
fact here it is with a modern crocodile
jaw in its jaws truly how big it was
however was something to really marvel
at and marvel at indeed when you
reconstruct it in three dimensions I
contacted an artist we adjusted all the
sizes I gave him a cast of the skull
Akash’s the scoots and he needed two by
two tons of putty he built something
which looked like an airplane to which
he covered with putty and he did a
beautiful sculpting job I never thought
it would take me to Costa Rica a fossil
crocodile from was inherit taking me to
Costa Rica and also to India measured
aerials but it really has stood the test
of time as as as the bona fide test of
actual figuring out how big that the
largest crocodile was let’s get the
state measure on him Wow different crack
was one of a couple of strange things
that we found in the desert one of the
other ones was found here look at that
claw was sitting there I think
no nomads even past this corner data
file the way someone probably wouldn’t
picked up that claws with me magnificent
claw and what I saw when I came to the
site was a fibula here it’s a little
bone the leg that claw in general
matched the fibula in other words I
could use my hardest mine and I could
use my anatomist mine to think that this
really was matching that fibula belonged
to a predatory dinosaur that’s that’s a
indicating that there could be more in
there and we dug in and some years later
on this stage we put together for the
first time the spinous are called suka –
it was the first – or that was
resurrected in three dimensions it’s a
very strange kind of predator but the
skull more than anything else took the
cake no one had actually found enough of
a Spinosaurus skull to realize that
their skull was as it were just pulled
out like putty it’s like you took a
Tyrannosaurus skull shaved off the
eyebrows and just pulled it out to a
length that just is extreme
no one had ever seen a predatory
dinosaur that looked like that the most
appropriate name crocodile mimic is
trying to be a crocodile
wrong it had a skull that looked like
one almost a little bit narrower than
most it had teeth that were for scenario
and probably also eating other kinds of
animals but none that it would take down
with such a fragile skull for that it
emphasized the four limbs four foot long
four limbs with foot long claws that in
life would have been about 16 inches it
has been most powerful hands and four
limbs of anything that ever walked on
land on two legs closest thing maybe a a
giant ground sloth this thing was
monstrous and it probably used its for
them to take down things that it
couldn’t with its skull absolutely
bizarre animal now one bizarre animal
that we brought here on the display
outside and so I want to talk about that
one in particular a little bit more as
this pterosaur we haven’t given a name
to this territory yet we plan to name it
when we publish at length on the
scientific on the remains of the
pterosaur but we we have reconstructed
it here and what we found was one of its
beautiful winged fingers and we also
found parts of the skull and so I’d like
to show you a little bit about what this
pterosaur caused us to think about it
has teeth clearly for snaring fish and
yet how did that work could it have done
it from the air if not we think we have
a very clumsy animal you’re doing it
from all fours it perplexes
aerodynamicists because they think that
it would have to stall at too slow of a
speed for an animal that size to
actually be covered without falling into
the water yet we look at the animal look
at its neck look at footprints and they
say it’s clumsy four-legged and really
couldn’t catch a thing with its jaw as
if it was on the ground here’s another
problem we found in 1997 it’s a creature
you see outside underneath the pterosaur
that I’m going to spend the rest of the
time talking about an animal that will
challenge biomechanics as to how it ate
and fed that elephant-sized body for
years to come it’s found by this team
1997 here we are taking a photograph a
couple of minutes after finding the
skull pulled apart with little
at the surface there and fragile neck
bones coming to the surface and being
planed off actually by the desert wind
the bones are so fragile that the sand
and wind plane them off almost flat
moment they come to the surface so this
had seen several centuries of weathering
before we found it now Jeff then a
student now professor at University of
Michigan and I butted our heads updating
over the specimen to figure out what
what it was it was originally thought to
be maybe a predator it was so fragile
but we quickly saw a stack of teeth and
one of the jaw bones we both realized it
was some kind of funky sauropod lighter
than anything we’d ever seen before we
had no idea what it looked like that
point that would require a lot of
digging this is a little closer up view
of the rock to show you this is purple
sandstone pure sandstone you can carve
it with a good chisel and a bit of work
and that’s what we have to do we have to
carve it out we have to wrap it in wood
cover we’re using the wood for struts
cover it with plaster and then actually
get under it we’ve got a chisel you’re
way under it the bigger the block the
harder that is that’s just the beginning
then we take it back to a laboratory and
there’ll be hours and hours of cleaning
how about this one
this is a skeleton of easier soros found
in 2000 that’s Gabrielle Lian in the
middle of this tale tails curving this
way that’s the distal end coming around
here’s the pelvic girdle and here’s the
dorsal column we’ve brushed back the
sand of the desert you see the tan sand
that’s the purple rock underneath so
fragile that it was planed completely
flat you’d walk right over a 30 foot
animal without even knowing it in fact
we did a couple of times before someone
spotted it some of these blocks
extremely fragile like this tail black
here she’s working her way around
somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds
by the time we turned it over yet to
turn it over the vehicle inside the
bones of a fragile animal so fragile
that you could see light through some of
the cranial bones this is the cheek bone
with a light passing through it it was
so fragile that we said we really
couldn’t take the chance of casting and
molding it by normal procedures which is
putting silicone rubber
over it making a mold pulling it apart
putting plastic inside it wouldn’t
survive we can withstand a break or two
but not ten or fifteen or twenty they
would destroy the bone and so we opted
to take these bones plead with the
airlines so we can take a big box on
board and take it over to the best cat
scanner we had industrial cat scanner so
we could make computerized versions of
these bones see inside them and make
copies and when we didn’t have a right
but had a left we could make that right
with a flick of a switch and so we did
we took this bone this is a cat scan of
the bone and that’s a cheek bone and see
those two extra holes those are extra
holes found only in Asia or source just
for the fun of it they’re five extra
holes only found in this dinosaur so not
pathologic there’s nothing pathologic
about them but it gives you some idea of
how thick this bone is it’s about a
millimeter thick forms the side of the
cheek of this dinosaur now here’s a look
at a reconstruction of the tooth
Batteries I found a bone that was so
bizarre initially when we had begun to
clean it off in the lab I disowned it I
said all the rest of the bones belong to
this dinosaur but not this one I tried
anything I went to a colleague worked on
in fib Ian’s for this belong to a fish I
knew there was a coelacanth and the
rivers there and he said no and I said
well one day I was watching and studying
and fiddling with these bones and all of
a sudden it came to me maybe it had no
two sockets maybe had a giant trough
because the bones were replacing you
know sauropod like that maybe all the
bone all the teeth were at the end of
the jaw somehow in my mind my artists
mind I turned it around and I began to
see the face of a dinosaur that we
really had never seen before and I
called up Jeff on the phone types of
Jeff you’re not going to believe this we
have a fern mower at that point I was
just getting an idea of what this
dinosaur looked like that its teeth
worked in sockets like a few very
distant bird hip dinosaurs who had
developed truth betters on the sides of
their jaws
this dinosaur had done what no other
dinosaur done to put all the teeth at
the end of the jaw increase the tooth
replacement rate till it had hundreds of
teeth in its jaw holding themselves into
place and coming out of the jaw on mass
several hundred below several hundred
above but different than an order this
can only one tooth in each column would
be active at a time creating a scissors
edge ten inches wide above and below to
crop plants like we’d never seen before
now we had never seen a set of jaws like
this before in any dinosaur so I excused
myself for not recognizing the jaw bone
until it was almost virtually clean we
began to put the skull together and what
emerged with a Darth Vader dinosaur
something I’ve never really imagined
until we really tried to put it all
together but we had so many of the bones
that there was no cause for thinking
that we had made a mistake we went back
over and over again but you’re left with
very little wiggle room when you have
80% of the skull so here we have storia
to the nice round eye socket here’s the
nose it’s the nose opening in the skull
here’s the tooth and the teeth extend
all the way up into the jaws here’s a
couple of extra holes in the lower jaw
all of it very thin and well we took
that model which was made from
computerized prototypes the first at
time that had ever been done and we
passed it back through the cat scan
machine so we can have a complete
computerized version of the skull then
in the computer we could cut it in half
we could cut it in any direction we want
so the red cross-sections you see I did
in the computer and I calculated the
area of those cross sections because
that bone is the bone that connects this
eating machine at this end to the back
end of the skull whatever forces are at
work at the jaw are going to have to be
transmitted and absorbed by the bone
connecting it to the rest of the skull
which is connected to the neck less than
a square half-inch of bone taking all
the bone into account as staggering and
it’s going to keep those engineers
puzzled over how this dinosaur did it
but truly it is a dinosaur and a face
that nobody has ever seen on land
for when you see that as a
paleontologist that’s a pretty heavy
statement that no tetrapod in the last
350 million years on land has ever taken
the jaws and put all the teeth at the
distal end why not because it’s the
farthest point from the muscles the
farthest point from the jaw joint no
dinosaur has ever put truth batteries at
the end of their jaws no dinosaur has
ever taken the jaws and extended them
beyond the side of the face why because
it is a dangerous thing to do you grab
something in this side of your jaws it
better be something awful soft so we
have an animal here that really broke a
lot of rules
those rules are anytime you want to make
chewing a true matter of lifelike
mammals you’re going to develop big
muscles you’re going to develop coronoid
processes you’re going to make your
bones more robust you’re going to close
the openings of the skull we’ve seen
this happen several times especially in
those dinosaurs that developed the tooth
batteries but not knees your swords is
able to break the rules and so we wonder
why we look at the skull now the cat
scan of the skull rotating just to see a
little bit how thin some of these bones
are it really is a featherweight skull
but that’s not where our investigation
would would stop we wanted to understand
what was the orientation of such a
bizarre skull such an extreme skull well
I had my notions with a big flat muzzle
like that I had my notions that it was
probably munching something close to the
ground but how could I prove that
independent of of the bones themselves
well turns out if you look into the ear
region of the dinosaur from the cat
scans we could in fact reproduce its
brain space we could do more than that
we could go in and visualize the organ
of equilibrium the semicircular canals
inside the side wall of the brain case
the only way you can see that without a
cat scan is take a hammer to the skull
and break it apart we weren’t going to
do that so the only specimen but we
could see it on the cat scan we rebuilt
it here it is here in pink the three
semicircular canals that allow me to
talk without falling over and move
around
there’s one canal the horizontal canal
on the side that in a human skull will
give you the habitual posture when you
put it into a horizontal position in
human to put your head like this we’ve
used that in other kinds of living
animals and fossil animals to determine
the orientation of the skull so
naturally that was what I was after in
easier Soros I wanted to know what was
the habitual posture of the skull and so
after we had extracted the brain which
was the first for a sauropod where we
could see the cerebrum the forebrain the
thinking part of the brain this little
swollen area a little less impressive
when I tell you that yes it is the size
of the proverbial walnut but it was
enough to live on for this animal live
very successfully the part that smells
the olfactory bulbs here we have one of
these out of the display colored so that
you can see them but this internal organ
here is what I was after in particular
and when you put that in a horizontal
position like this here you can see the
rotation I’m irika we put this in we
built this in a computer and you see the
little semicircular canals that’s the
solid bone what’s around that and we
oriented the skull this is the
orientation that we got and it was a
shocker to me I didn’t tell the person
who was who I had brought onto the
project to reconstruct the semicircle
canals where it was positioned in the
skull and he sent me those results and I
was just I was amazed and stunned we had
in fact found a fern mower that was
sticking its snout directly towards the
ground most of the time now this is how
we were taught the skull at an
anatomical description 90 degrees to
what we would normally do this is not
the top of the skull on average that’s
the front of the skull and here’s the
lower jaws again bizarre by all
standards we wanted to investigate the
teeth as well because when we unveiled
this thing it was going to be quite a
sensation it’s going to cause a lot of
people headaches from what they had said
in the past and maybe headaches from
trying to predict how the skull handled
it and we wanted to get as much
information as we could from the teeth
so here’s a tooth blown up there’s a
weird facet on the inside this is an
upper tooth and aware facet on the
outside the perfect tooth would look
like a cone it would come to a top and
as you
or it developed facets where facets that
would tell us what it was doing with his
teeth one was pretty clear enough this
was produced by another tooth nice
flatware facet as the jaws came together
they came together very precisely and
slid past each other
sniffing off plants along the entire row
synchronously there’s another where
facet on the outside of the teeth a
wedge-shaped where facet this one when
you look at it under microscope was
caused by abrasion abrasion against
plants abrasion against something
because it’s on the outside of the teeth
and when we look inside the teeth you
cut a cross section like this and I
found we had one spare jaw with a couple
of teeth in it and so here’s that slice
and here’s a piece of the tooth expand
it up it looks like you’re looking at
petrified wood with tree rings because
that’s what it is it happens in our
teeth too under a magnifying lens you
can see rings in our teeth they were
laid down every day in the development
of the tooth so you can tell how old
that tooth is and if you calculate and
add up the rings in one tooth and you
happen to have the tooth of succeeding
it you can calculate the rate at which
they were replacing and we calculated
that rate and it sets an all-time record
for dinosaurs 30 days plus or minus a
few one month is what a tooth lasted in
the jaw of need your source which is
incredible incredible rate of tooth
replacement as part of the reason why it
had to have ten teeth in a column
because it takes a certain amount of
time to create a tooth and so if you
want to wear your teeth down that
rapidly you have to start reproducing
your teeth before you know before the
other one wears out you have to have
many teeth in the process of formation
so with that we’re able to sort of get a
picture of what this dinosaur was like
it was muzzle down most of the time it
had hundreds of teeth in its jaws and
one sharp edge like a scissors at the
front of its jaws were operating now
that’s the first stage of reconstruction
and this is painting we are good in good
stead with Dinosaurs when we’re doing
reconstruction a lot of people think
that it’s just all guesswork I mean
after all there’s no skin preserved
right it’s just all
well not really it’s guesswork to a
certain level but a lot of it is based
on what we know from living reptiles
fortunately this is a human face and not
a real ones of drawing a painting but it
shows all the muscles in the face the
muscles I’m using to talk and articulate
with and so on these are actually not
present in any living reptile we don’t
think they’re present and dinosaurs are
not present in birds or crocodiles so we
don’t have to worry about those
fortunately it’s really much more hard
to reconstruct a mammal face because of
all these extra muscles that migrate out
into the face especially a human to give
us muscles of expression we think
dinosaurs were less emotive that way
they would have grunted and groaned but
they couldn’t make faces at you quite
that way
so reconstructing them is a lot easier
you just need to stick to the bones and
you need to look at those bones you need
to see if you can see any vessels if you
see impressed vessels that means the
skin was tight you don’t see them the
skin was a little bit looser you see
ornamented ridges in living reptiles it
means there was scales it might have
been a little bit larger because there
might have been some contact there and
so this is we’ve done in the computer
putting skin over a cat scan of the
skull and so here you see the skull and
here you see the skin over the skull so
it’s done by a student we can also do it
physically and we think this is one of
the most accurate reconstructions of the
sauropod built right over a copy of the
skull again ornamented where we see
rough skin turning to keratin like a
bill where we see the impressed vessel
and that’s our best guess if there was
some kind of a bill again for protection
against rubbing against something in the
course of the life of this animal we put
a big tongue in here because in fact
almost all dinosaurs have two big tongue
bones that indicate they did have a
loose and free tongue that was used for
manipulating plant matter this was a
dinosaur that was a this was a fern
mower it was dedicated and an eating
machine for cropping plants slicing them
off it was not chewing its cud like a
cow the tongue would rapidly move the
food back plant matter back for
processing and perhaps ferment
in the gut what about the body
well knees your asaurus loser sources
body was on our mind for quite some time
this is that what we do for fun in the
middle of the Sahara we take open up the
exposure on a flashlight and you take a
flashlight open up the camera you draw a
dinosaur in pitch blackness throw the
camera to throw the flashlight down and
then pose for a little flash with your
drawing and not a bad rendition when we
hadn’t built the skeleton yet so here’s
a look 10 years after the initial
discovery after all the bones that were
prepared it was a forensic case we had
to take about 5 skeletons and overlap
them I chose the skeleton with the skull
that skeleton went back to the base of
the neck there was another skeleton that
started before the base of the neck and
went into the back series then there was
a skeleton I showed you a picture of
that took from the base of the neck went
through the dorsal series and out
through the pelvic girdle into the tail
and then we had another one that started
in the middle the tail went out to the
end of the tail we were missing some
bones
we had about 80% of the bones where we
had a right limb it was just as good as
having a right in the left limb you put
all the information together we had 80%
of the skeleton and I think we we have a
pretty good idea of what it looked like
it had a long neck but short by sauropod
standards neosaurus belongs to a tightly
knit group of species most of which we
found last 25 years with a weird name of
robots sorted sauropods named after a
good Italian robot II no one has ever
seen one of these dinosaurs look like as
a whole skeleton this is the first skull
more distantly it’s related to
Diplodocus and like Diplodocus many of
its bones are hollowed by air sacs that
extend from the lung in the neck this
leaves a very hollow vertebra not only
is it pushed in from the side with
hollow air sacs but they invade the bone
to hollow out the inside you can see
this extreme condition in a in a
vertebra from the back here’s a big hole
air tracks coming back from the lungs go
inside the vertebrae leaving you this in
cross-section it’s more air than bone
there’s more air
in the column that is supporting the
weight of this animal then bone you want
to calculate the weight of this animal
you calculate its volume and then you
subtract about 20% or 15% for air we
don’t think of that normally when we
think about elephants and rhinos and
hippos because these are mammals and
mammals never do this you got to
remember that as far as this looks from
a bird a bird is its closest relative
among living animals and birds do this
all the time their birds are typically
about 20% air air sacs from the line
this animal was trying to lighten itself
to the point of absurdity we’re going to
hand that off to the biomechanics to
explain how it could get away with
lightening the skeleton as much as it
did it wasn’t I don’t think a flotation
device I think it was just trying to
reduce the amount of living tissue it
had to support and still get by and it
was doing it quite successfully because
it was the most common large herbivore
of the day along with one other
herbivore in the in the beds in issue
Galasso this is a closer look at the
dorsal vertebra to show you what a
cross-section looks like through here I
mean you can’t pick up these vertebrae
when they’re fossil they just they just
crumble in life there were been stronger
than that but they are really a
biomechanical wonder that they supported
an animal that even taking 15% air would
weigh as much as an indian elephant and
here we have the picture of nezer soros
after putting that story together now
sauropods have gone through a lot what
was near soros doing with a head like
that a body like that
well first we thought that the bodies of
these animals were so heavy they must
have had to lived in water we had them
in marshes and all the time when I was a
kid they were always in the marshes
pulling up I don’t know marine plants of
some sort at the top of a tall net as
I’m telling you most of these animals
are at least 15% air because they all
have air pockets although neither shores
takes it to an extreme the neck well the
longest necked animal we build our
models on is giraffe and drafts neck
obviously is to let it eat and browse in
the trees
but ourselves and our mammal cousins are
not necessarily the best model for for
bird like animal and so closer study of
the neck of brachiosaur and many other
sauropods but including brachiosaur s
shows us that the neck was much lower
we cannot justify turning the neck at
almost 45 degrees upwards to justify
this pose and so the next came down but
it’s a giraffe that ultimately this was
built on and so on we would typically
get these kinds of images of sauropods
we’re not sure at this point if many
sauropods had the next up at all but
certainly they didn’t have them up that
high now some people did think that some
dinosaurs were low browsers browsing
close to the ground but they were
usually late in the cretaceous and the
idea from from Bob Bakker published in
1986 was that well maybe they even
invented flowers by destroying plants
lows to the ground they gave rise to the
weedy angiosperm flowers and plants that
we have today they occur about the same
time the duckbills at the end of the
cretaceous and angiosperms
but we’re dealing with already with
neither source which is older 110
million years and quite frankly if you
look at others of its kin Diplodocus in
particular these go back to the Upper
Jurassic so what were these animals
eating well first again diplo das is the
group that that needs our sources
closest to have very long necks and Bob
Bakker also said that these might have
given rise to the tallest the canopy
eaters
maybe they got up on their tail and
their hind legs in a tripodo posture
allowing them to get up to 40 feet to
munch on these conifers these are
occurring or monk monkey puzzle like
trees in the canopy
well again studies in detail really have
not justified that in the last 15 years
the vertebrae in natural pose when you
pose them carefully and look at their
look at their articulations in fact show
a very horizontal neck and this was
reconstructed correctly by some who
actually had some scientists who
actually had to reconstruct the bones in
museums in fact you don’t see a curve
like this maybe it could have taken that
curve
but you don’t see a curve like this and
we don’t imagine it arising like this
from the back and the other thing is at
the head well the first time a good
Diplodocus skull and an anterior part of
the neck was found the scholar here in
Washington said in nineteen in the
19-teens I can’t reconstruct the head
pointing forward just like the problems
we have with nature Soros
he said the head had to be reconstructed
tip down but we tend to forget these
things because our model always tends to
be mammals the animals were closest to
in fact the other thing about an animal
like a giraffe is that if it was eating
up in the trees it tends to have a
narrow muzzle mammal workers have known
this for years you can go into the
Serengeti lineup all the ungulates
measure their snouts the ones that are
abroad or eating grass the ones that are
sort of in-between or eating some grass
some leaves the ones that are narrow
like this are always browsers you
wouldn’t want a big muzzle you’re
reaching in between the trees to get at
leaves you want something that’s narrow
neither Soros gave us all pause because
there were so many constraints it was
such an extreme dinosaur you couldn’t
get its face any more forward than in
the model outside about tipping 45
degrees you could not put the face
pointing forwards otherwise the neck
would have to come directly from
underneath there’s absolutely no way
then that could handle that position the
ear region told us it’s now is pointed
down it has a giant flat muzzle what
could it be doing except cropping plants
close to the ground that’s what we have
to argue it was doing the problem is it
has where facets on the teeth that
closely resemble Diplodocus not only
that here’s the front part of the jaws
Diplodocus has the big front jaws
Diplodocus has teeth that are almost all
up front not all up front but almost all
up front Diplodocus when you x-ray
Diplodocus like we did has five or six
teeth in a column in these innocent
looking jaws in addition it’s your
region says that this not this is the
habitual posture of the skull it too had
a downwardly down really directed snout
as was reconstructed in the
be part of this century so we’ve come to
the conclusion that we really have
missed the boat on some of these
sauropods indeed there were large areas
of land in the Upper Jurassic covered by
ferns covered by horse tails covered by
Lika pods other kinds of plants by
nature sources day it’s entirely
possible that some angiosperm has
angiosperms that come into play and that
these dinosaurs were actually browsing
near ground level so here’s a picture of
this is the first time that we’ve you
know been able to cat scan and
reconstruct the brain a variety of
dinosaurs and look at an evolutionary
transformation here’s the brains of all
these dinosaurs this is a SPRO sauropod
or early sauropod a morph
it’s from where a closely related an
ancient group that the sauropods came
from and here there’s a horizontal canal
this is Camarasaurus this is Diplodocus
and here’s Nijo source and you can see
how the snout slowly moves down while we
hold the brain in a constant position
there really was the evolution of the
down turning of the snout in the dipwad
acids at the same time the snout was
becoming square at the same time that
tooth replacement was being increased
against the wear that was occurring on
them so maybe it wasn’t monkey puzzle
trees the counter furs that were common
that we have a big chunk of outside we
didn’t find them it needs your soros
that’s all the plant remains you
typically find in the field unless you
can get pollen and we couldn’t so far
get any pollen you’re left with the big
trunks of these aracari and conifer
trees there’s a 300-pounder outside for
you to take a look at those are very
useful you can cut them and slice them
look at them under the microscope and
tell all sorts of things about the
climate and how lovely it was during
these are sources day but did neater
source really eat the leaves of these
plants the jaw to me how weak it was in
terms of its construction how wide it
was in terms of what it was cutting and
the orientation of the skull say no it
was the ground level browser and that
ground level browser so extreme has
opened my mind to viewing other dipwad
assets also as ground browsers ground
level browsers the cows of the Mesozoic
if you will so here’s a firm
it was a common plant all through the
early part of the Mesozoic here’s a
horse tail these are common today they
grow everywhere from the Arctic down to
my garden in Chicago
they’re called scouring rushes because
you can actually scour plants there’s so
much phytolith in there the outside
levels of their of their structure that
they they really are very abrasive and
in the Mesozoic it’s not well studied
some of them were less abrasive some of
them more it’s not really well studied
but maybe that was what was abrading the
teeth at such a rate and then of course
around the that you see around this
plant here you see some of the
angiosperms that were coming into
disturbed environments maybe along the
Riverways but for knees are sorts again
you have to ask yourself this is a
common dinosaur whatever food it was
accessing it had to been common and then
it had relatives like Diplodocus living
in arid environments so I think we may
have to reinterpret how these dinosaurs
were making a living now there are
certain areas that dinosaurs never
adapted to one of those is an aquatic
lifestyle no dinosaur has ever really
got a fin a tail fin or anything like
that
and yet this is an animal the only
mammal that we know of that actually
grazes underwater one of the questions
with neosaurus is could it be eating
aquatic plants
well we have one grazer of grass under
water and this is what it looks like and
it to me it it bears a remote
resemblance to knees your source but it
doesn’t have teeth at all that resemble
anything like nezer Saurus and there’s
other environments that we are just
learning now that some dinosaur is
invaded that we had previously never
thought house dinosaurs burrowing habits
this is of course as an armadillo we
just described a burrowing dinosaur and
I think we found another one in Africa
that we’re going to announce soon it’s
got arms that are stubby it has legs
that can run there’s nothing quite like
it alive today there’s nothing that
burrows that runs as fast as a zebra
there’s nothing because the burrowers
today and in fact all mammals came from
a quadrupedal heritage of four-legged
heritage
dinosaurs even sauropods come from a
bipedal heritage we are very unusual
among mammals in walking on two legs
it’s a very late feature in the course
of our evolution so when you go outside
you look at nature store as you say it’s
four-legged yes it is but it returned to
four legs and its past as a two-legged
animal it never left far behind look at
the size of the hind limbs relative to
the four limbs it once was in the very
distant past and its lineage a bipedal
animal so when you devise a way to
burrow and make a living they’re doing
it with their hands but they’re
retaining the ability to run fast with
their legs it’s sort of like a burrowing
ostrich I mean it’s just a really an
incredible kind of animal in the trees
well not too many but we’re now getting
a few dinosaurs that we think actually
were are boiled before the bird
radiation appeared to occupy those
niches but we must admit that in the
trees in burrows and in the water
dinosaurs had but a precarious existence
so there are areas that dinosaurs didn’t
excel at particularly well but we hope
that we have at least at least revealed
some of the mysteries of an extreme
dinosaur because an extreme dinosaur
like major stores quite frankly gives
you clues as to what many of its kin
might have been doing sometimes it takes
an extreme dinosaur to do that thank you
very much take questions
I got this job at the University of
Chicago as a young guy that barely shave
and I felt for the big tent
I give him try me I had no experience in
finding anything I didn’t know I’d be
good at it
these are cervical and that’s part of
the fun and excitement about science you
never know where it’s going to take you
Here I am now having uncovered the man
approaching a hundred tons of the
charile in Africa last year and worked
in India we’ve worked in Asia we’ve
worked in South America we’ve discovered
dinosaurs right and left flying reptiles
crocodiles 40 feet long who could have
predicted that nobody can and that’s
what’s the excitement of really of what
research science is about thank you sir
okay I’m delighted to be here tonight it
was a big family six kids over eight
years and one of them we’ve all become
professors that wasn’t the plan one of
them a Paul Calista Sereno was a bit of
a black sheep for quite a while I had
brilliant siblings but when the teachers
got me oh my gosh they never forgot and
I had quite a rough up being in terms of
just really liking school didn’t like it
never operated well in school I was also
a bit of an accident-prone kid so that
by sixth grade I think I was unconscious
at least 20 times I was nearly killed by
one gym teacher who held me vertically
in a move that caused me to swallow my
tongue I was knocked unconscious with a
volleyball by the other gym teacher whom
I would later work with in summers when
I became a college student I learned how
to feint in church as a way of getting
out of church
I tried to derail a train it wasn’t
successful and it was generally I had
this kind of a feeling about school I
remember distinctly in sixth grade
thinking I’ve only gone through six
years and if I can calculate correctly
six minus minus twelve at six six more
years I’m not going to make it out of
high school a lot of people didn’t think
I would make it out of high school and
there are lots of kids like me and see
them all the time
I ended up really learning about science
and getting a love for biology and
actually a feel for adventure and all
the things I was doing outside of the
classroom some of them good some of them
bad one of the good things I did was my
my father bought me a butterfly
collecting clit I was afraid to admit
that in school but I went around and
with my brother later collected these
butterflies outside our fancy suburb of
Naperville wasn’t so fancy event outside
Chicago and that was my first taste of
biology but this was a real big event
for me this painting my first on a piece
of canvas my mother was an art teacher
my father a postman ex engineer they
just told us to do things something
satisfying in life make no small plans
well I didn’t really come to fruition
for me until I made this painting and
then I felt for the first time that I
could do something now those pots were
made by my brother and I felt I had a
career I was going to be an artist so I
got a dictionary and I actually read the
dictionary because I was so far behind
in vocabulary that it was a question
whether I would get into college I
worked my way into northern Illinois
University as an art student and these
were drawings I did in life drawing
class screw there was some talent there
but there’s something else going on
subliminal e even before I thought about
paleontology I was seeing bones when I
shouldn’t be this was actually a living
person and actually it turns out that
the line between science and art is a
fuzzy one and a very short one indeed to
this day I have people telling me that
the art in what I do is in making up the
parts or don’t exist
the imagination is only limited to what
doesn’t exist and I think that’s a very
limiting view of what art actually has
to offer a scientist like myself I think
it comes into play in every aspect of
what we do I think it’s why I can find
things in the field because I can take
the anatomy of bones that well when I
see only a part of it I can think about
the other part that’s in the ground a
specimens of nature source but here’s
the transition from the neck to the back
we may not have that in any other
specimen there’s anything we need to do
in science it’s to think about ideas
that haven’t been thought about before
think about hypotheses that maybe you
don’t have a lot of evidence for but
then you can go out and test and what I
spend the last twenty five years doing
is trying to do that with dinosaur bones
what I try to do is understand the
distortion and use your source I realize
the distortion is your assurance might
link it to another dinosaur and try to
understand what those distortions mean
we’re going to go back on a time time
trip back to the Mesozoic a story I
tells the Mesozoic story this is a
picture of the continents floating
around a little bit after when the
chapter I’m going to talk about today
but it’s about 80 million years ago you
see how small the Atlantic Ocean is well
it got smaller as you go back in time it
gets so small that Africa touches South
America and just at that point when
there was still some contact that’s when
we’re going to go into Africa and see
what was alive hundred and ten million
years ago Africa of course now has a
large desert in the North here there’s
no roads that actually cross it and the
country where my colleagues come from is
blessed measure it’s located about here
is blessed and I say blessed with a
section of that desert it’s a gorgeous
place to visit I always wanted to cross
it just like I wanted to go down the
Mississippi River as a kid I said I
can’t live a full life unless I’ve
crossed the Sahara once it is such a
magnificent enormous habitat you can be
in a place and look all around you for
miles and miles and see sand and rock
and in fact in some places you can see
more dinosaur bone than anywhere else on
the continent that’s the place I’m going
to take you now it’s called gateau fowl
the place where camels fear to tread
and humans must fear to tread there more
if camels don’t like the place you can’t
take your normal thermometer that only
goes up to 120 otherwise you’ll never
know how hot it is and you need to think
about other things like dehydrated food
you’re going to take a big group of say
20 people and they’re going to be
working as hard as they’ve ever worked
in their life digging up 10 20 tons of
rock and bone you got to feed them so
you got to think of a lot of things you
got to put it all in a car you can’t
take anything that’s not absolutely
necessary and everything that is except
water that you’ve got to find and
transport which is the major problem in
and of itself and then you go driving
into the desert this is actually one
time which we actually drove all the way
down we’ve done it twice drove all the
way down to me share from Europe and
drove back
this is Algeria it’s a land inhabited by
a very interesting nomadic people the
Tuareg these people have lived for
hundreds in fact thousands of years in
the desert leading a nomadic life at
first without camels and then later
during historical periods with camels
raising goats and and mutton and Trading
camels and it’s an absolutely fantastic
culture where the men wear veils and
carry swords you go to their homeland
the the biggest Oasis where Tuareg
culture can be seen up close at Agadez
you probably heard of the town located
on the edge of a small and low mountain
range called the eye ear and there you
see the eye ear and there you see the
Tenere Desert coming into the eye ear
from the east side you follow those
dunes and try to avoid them as you go
east into the place called data foul and
it looks like this if you’ve got good
eyes you’ll see our camp look at that
with GPS of course we can find our way
in we can often find our way out
we can find fossils that we found it
makes planning a year’s expedition a
great pleasure and something that’s much
more possible to do because we can
always find a fossil once you’ve left it
a month later but this is the playground
for where we have spent several years
finding fossil there’s more fossils here
in these little patches of rock than
anywhere else in Africa it’s going to
give us and it’s going to give all of
Africa an incredible picture of fossils
110 million years ago difficult places
you can move up in time 290 Mon you go
other places you can move back in time
to 135 million years that’s why before
we leave me share we have to leave it
with the world’s best dinosaur museum
which we intend to do in the next years
now I’m just getting you know this is
way out of date now because we’ve number
added a number of species to this
picture but going back to that map that
I showed you in the Mesozoic world
especially in the latter part of the
Mesozoic world those continents have
drifted apart it doesn’t take long five
to ten million years before species in
isolation will diverge on their own path
evolution is a creative process that
ultimately takes advantage of
opportunities so varied that we can’t
predict its path over time it repeats
itself in different ways and shapes but
you can’t predict it if you take a
continent send it on its own course
somewhere new forms new species will
evolve and so the world that I’m going
to describe to you is extreme by our
standards we don’t have anything to
judge it by our standards being North
American dinosaurs which you’ve known
for more than a century the dinosaurs I
grew up on the books it’s nothing like
that and I’m going to tell you a little
bit about it I’m going to tell you about
this layer here in the middle 110
million years ago and some of these
species here that we’ve named from that
love that level you’ll walk into the
desert you find a six-foot jaw but that
jaw doesn’t the butt doesn’t belong to a
dinosaur
it belongs to an enormous crocodile here
we are laying down behind the John a
photograph that was published in
National Geographic it took us a lot to
later the ground was 150 degrees we were
baking and they said just one more
photograph this animal
we found a lot of it was quite a story
in terms of putting it together but we
got most of this animal together we
sized adjusted the parts it was to our
mind the world’s largest crocodile in
fact here it is with a modern crocodile
jaw in its jaws truly how big it was
however was something to really marvel
at and marvel at indeed when you
reconstruct it in three dimensions I
contacted an artist we adjusted all the
sizes I gave him a cast of the skull
Akash’s the scoots and he needed two by
two tons of putty he built something
which looked like an airplane to which
he covered with putty and he did a
beautiful sculpting job I never thought
it would take me to Costa Rica a fossil
crocodile from was inherit taking me to
Costa Rica and also to India measured
aerials but it really has stood the test
of time as as as the bona fide test of
actual figuring out how big that the
largest crocodile was let’s get the
state measure on him Wow different crack
was one of a couple of strange things
that we found in the desert one of the
other ones was found here look at that
claw was sitting there I think
no nomads even past this corner data
file the way someone probably wouldn’t
picked up that claws with me magnificent
claw and what I saw when I came to the
site was a fibula here it’s a little
bone the leg that claw in general
matched the fibula in other words I
could use my hardest mine and I could
use my anatomist mine to think that this
really was matching that fibula belonged
to a predatory dinosaur that’s that’s a
indicating that there could be more in
there and we dug in and some years later
on this stage we put together for the
first time the spinous are called suka –
it was the first – or that was
resurrected in three dimensions it’s a
very strange kind of predator but the
skull more than anything else took the
cake no one had actually found enough of
a Spinosaurus skull to realize that
their skull was as it were just pulled
out like putty it’s like you took a
Tyrannosaurus skull shaved off the
eyebrows and just pulled it out to a
length that just is extreme
no one had ever seen a predatory
dinosaur that looked like that the most
appropriate name crocodile mimic is
trying to be a crocodile
wrong it had a skull that looked like
one almost a little bit narrower than
most it had teeth that were for scenario
and probably also eating other kinds of
animals but none that it would take down
with such a fragile skull for that it
emphasized the four limbs four foot long
four limbs with foot long claws that in
life would have been about 16 inches it
has been most powerful hands and four
limbs of anything that ever walked on
land on two legs closest thing maybe a a
giant ground sloth this thing was
monstrous and it probably used its for
them to take down things that it
couldn’t with its skull absolutely
bizarre animal now one bizarre animal
that we brought here on the display
outside and so I want to talk about that
one in particular a little bit more as
this pterosaur we haven’t given a name
to this territory yet we plan to name it
when we publish at length on the
scientific on the remains of the
pterosaur but we we have reconstructed
it here and what we found was one of its
beautiful winged fingers and we also
found parts of the skull and so I’d like
to show you a little bit about what this
pterosaur caused us to think about it
has teeth clearly for snaring fish and
yet how did that work could it have done
it from the air if not we think we have
a very clumsy animal you’re doing it
from all fours it perplexes
aerodynamicists because they think that
it would have to stall at too slow of a
speed for an animal that size to
actually be covered without falling into
the water yet we look at the animal look
at its neck look at footprints and they
say it’s clumsy four-legged and really
couldn’t catch a thing with its jaw as
if it was on the ground here’s another
problem we found in 1997 it’s a creature
you see outside underneath the pterosaur
that I’m going to spend the rest of the
time talking about an animal that will
challenge biomechanics as to how it ate
and fed that elephant-sized body for
years to come it’s found by this team
1997 here we are taking a photograph a
couple of minutes after finding the
skull pulled apart with little
at the surface there and fragile neck
bones coming to the surface and being
planed off actually by the desert wind
the bones are so fragile that the sand
and wind plane them off almost flat
moment they come to the surface so this
had seen several centuries of weathering
before we found it now Jeff then a
student now professor at University of
Michigan and I butted our heads updating
over the specimen to figure out what
what it was it was originally thought to
be maybe a predator it was so fragile
but we quickly saw a stack of teeth and
one of the jaw bones we both realized it
was some kind of funky sauropod lighter
than anything we’d ever seen before we
had no idea what it looked like that
point that would require a lot of
digging this is a little closer up view
of the rock to show you this is purple
sandstone pure sandstone you can carve
it with a good chisel and a bit of work
and that’s what we have to do we have to
carve it out we have to wrap it in wood
cover we’re using the wood for struts
cover it with plaster and then actually
get under it we’ve got a chisel you’re
way under it the bigger the block the
harder that is that’s just the beginning
then we take it back to a laboratory and
there’ll be hours and hours of cleaning
how about this one
this is a skeleton of easier soros found
in 2000 that’s Gabrielle Lian in the
middle of this tale tails curving this
way that’s the distal end coming around
here’s the pelvic girdle and here’s the
dorsal column we’ve brushed back the
sand of the desert you see the tan sand
that’s the purple rock underneath so
fragile that it was planed completely
flat you’d walk right over a 30 foot
animal without even knowing it in fact
we did a couple of times before someone
spotted it some of these blocks
extremely fragile like this tail black
here she’s working her way around
somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds
by the time we turned it over yet to
turn it over the vehicle inside the
bones of a fragile animal so fragile
that you could see light through some of
the cranial bones this is the cheek bone
with a light passing through it it was
so fragile that we said we really
couldn’t take the chance of casting and
molding it by normal procedures which is
putting silicone rubber
over it making a mold pulling it apart
putting plastic inside it wouldn’t
survive we can withstand a break or two
but not ten or fifteen or twenty they
would destroy the bone and so we opted
to take these bones plead with the
airlines so we can take a big box on
board and take it over to the best cat
scanner we had industrial cat scanner so
we could make computerized versions of
these bones see inside them and make
copies and when we didn’t have a right
but had a left we could make that right
with a flick of a switch and so we did
we took this bone this is a cat scan of
the bone and that’s a cheek bone and see
those two extra holes those are extra
holes found only in Asia or source just
for the fun of it they’re five extra
holes only found in this dinosaur so not
pathologic there’s nothing pathologic
about them but it gives you some idea of
how thick this bone is it’s about a
millimeter thick forms the side of the
cheek of this dinosaur now here’s a look
at a reconstruction of the tooth
Batteries I found a bone that was so
bizarre initially when we had begun to
clean it off in the lab I disowned it I
said all the rest of the bones belong to
this dinosaur but not this one I tried
anything I went to a colleague worked on
in fib Ian’s for this belong to a fish I
knew there was a coelacanth and the
rivers there and he said no and I said
well one day I was watching and studying
and fiddling with these bones and all of
a sudden it came to me maybe it had no
two sockets maybe had a giant trough
because the bones were replacing you
know sauropod like that maybe all the
bone all the teeth were at the end of
the jaw somehow in my mind my artists
mind I turned it around and I began to
see the face of a dinosaur that we
really had never seen before and I
called up Jeff on the phone types of
Jeff you’re not going to believe this we
have a fern mower at that point I was
just getting an idea of what this
dinosaur looked like that its teeth
worked in sockets like a few very
distant bird hip dinosaurs who had
developed truth betters on the sides of
their jaws
this dinosaur had done what no other
dinosaur done to put all the teeth at
the end of the jaw increase the tooth
replacement rate till it had hundreds of
teeth in its jaw holding themselves into
place and coming out of the jaw on mass
several hundred below several hundred
above but different than an order this
can only one tooth in each column would
be active at a time creating a scissors
edge ten inches wide above and below to
crop plants like we’d never seen before
now we had never seen a set of jaws like
this before in any dinosaur so I excused
myself for not recognizing the jaw bone
until it was almost virtually clean we
began to put the skull together and what
emerged with a Darth Vader dinosaur
something I’ve never really imagined
until we really tried to put it all
together but we had so many of the bones
that there was no cause for thinking
that we had made a mistake we went back
over and over again but you’re left with
very little wiggle room when you have
80% of the skull so here we have storia
to the nice round eye socket here’s the
nose it’s the nose opening in the skull
here’s the tooth and the teeth extend
all the way up into the jaws here’s a
couple of extra holes in the lower jaw
all of it very thin and well we took
that model which was made from
computerized prototypes the first at
time that had ever been done and we
passed it back through the cat scan
machine so we can have a complete
computerized version of the skull then
in the computer we could cut it in half
we could cut it in any direction we want
so the red cross-sections you see I did
in the computer and I calculated the
area of those cross sections because
that bone is the bone that connects this
eating machine at this end to the back
end of the skull whatever forces are at
work at the jaw are going to have to be
transmitted and absorbed by the bone
connecting it to the rest of the skull
which is connected to the neck less than
a square half-inch of bone taking all
the bone into account as staggering and
it’s going to keep those engineers
puzzled over how this dinosaur did it
but truly it is a dinosaur and a face
that nobody has ever seen on land
for when you see that as a
paleontologist that’s a pretty heavy
statement that no tetrapod in the last
350 million years on land has ever taken
the jaws and put all the teeth at the
distal end why not because it’s the
farthest point from the muscles the
farthest point from the jaw joint no
dinosaur has ever put truth batteries at
the end of their jaws no dinosaur has
ever taken the jaws and extended them
beyond the side of the face why because
it is a dangerous thing to do you grab
something in this side of your jaws it
better be something awful soft so we
have an animal here that really broke a
lot of rules
those rules are anytime you want to make
chewing a true matter of lifelike
mammals you’re going to develop big
muscles you’re going to develop coronoid
processes you’re going to make your
bones more robust you’re going to close
the openings of the skull we’ve seen
this happen several times especially in
those dinosaurs that developed the tooth
batteries but not knees your swords is
able to break the rules and so we wonder
why we look at the skull now the cat
scan of the skull rotating just to see a
little bit how thin some of these bones
are it really is a featherweight skull
but that’s not where our investigation
would would stop we wanted to understand
what was the orientation of such a
bizarre skull such an extreme skull well
I had my notions with a big flat muzzle
like that I had my notions that it was
probably munching something close to the
ground but how could I prove that
independent of of the bones themselves
well turns out if you look into the ear
region of the dinosaur from the cat
scans we could in fact reproduce its
brain space we could do more than that
we could go in and visualize the organ
of equilibrium the semicircular canals
inside the side wall of the brain case
the only way you can see that without a
cat scan is take a hammer to the skull
and break it apart we weren’t going to
do that so the only specimen but we
could see it on the cat scan we rebuilt
it here it is here in pink the three
semicircular canals that allow me to
talk without falling over and move
around
there’s one canal the horizontal canal
on the side that in a human skull will
give you the habitual posture when you
put it into a horizontal position in
human to put your head like this we’ve
used that in other kinds of living
animals and fossil animals to determine
the orientation of the skull so
naturally that was what I was after in
easier Soros I wanted to know what was
the habitual posture of the skull and so
after we had extracted the brain which
was the first for a sauropod where we
could see the cerebrum the forebrain the
thinking part of the brain this little
swollen area a little less impressive
when I tell you that yes it is the size
of the proverbial walnut but it was
enough to live on for this animal live
very successfully the part that smells
the olfactory bulbs here we have one of
these out of the display colored so that
you can see them but this internal organ
here is what I was after in particular
and when you put that in a horizontal
position like this here you can see the
rotation I’m irika we put this in we
built this in a computer and you see the
little semicircular canals that’s the
solid bone what’s around that and we
oriented the skull this is the
orientation that we got and it was a
shocker to me I didn’t tell the person
who was who I had brought onto the
project to reconstruct the semicircle
canals where it was positioned in the
skull and he sent me those results and I
was just I was amazed and stunned we had
in fact found a fern mower that was
sticking its snout directly towards the
ground most of the time now this is how
we were taught the skull at an
anatomical description 90 degrees to
what we would normally do this is not
the top of the skull on average that’s
the front of the skull and here’s the
lower jaws again bizarre by all
standards we wanted to investigate the
teeth as well because when we unveiled
this thing it was going to be quite a
sensation it’s going to cause a lot of
people headaches from what they had said
in the past and maybe headaches from
trying to predict how the skull handled
it and we wanted to get as much
information as we could from the teeth
so here’s a tooth blown up there’s a
weird facet on the inside this is an
upper tooth and aware facet on the
outside the perfect tooth would look
like a cone it would come to a top and
as you
or it developed facets where facets that
would tell us what it was doing with his
teeth one was pretty clear enough this
was produced by another tooth nice
flatware facet as the jaws came together
they came together very precisely and
slid past each other
sniffing off plants along the entire row
synchronously there’s another where
facet on the outside of the teeth a
wedge-shaped where facet this one when
you look at it under microscope was
caused by abrasion abrasion against
plants abrasion against something
because it’s on the outside of the teeth
and when we look inside the teeth you
cut a cross section like this and I
found we had one spare jaw with a couple
of teeth in it and so here’s that slice
and here’s a piece of the tooth expand
it up it looks like you’re looking at
petrified wood with tree rings because
that’s what it is it happens in our
teeth too under a magnifying lens you
can see rings in our teeth they were
laid down every day in the development
of the tooth so you can tell how old
that tooth is and if you calculate and
add up the rings in one tooth and you
happen to have the tooth of succeeding
it you can calculate the rate at which
they were replacing and we calculated
that rate and it sets an all-time record
for dinosaurs 30 days plus or minus a
few one month is what a tooth lasted in
the jaw of need your source which is
incredible incredible rate of tooth
replacement as part of the reason why it
had to have ten teeth in a column
because it takes a certain amount of
time to create a tooth and so if you
want to wear your teeth down that
rapidly you have to start reproducing
your teeth before you know before the
other one wears out you have to have
many teeth in the process of formation
so with that we’re able to sort of get a
picture of what this dinosaur was like
it was muzzle down most of the time it
had hundreds of teeth in its jaws and
one sharp edge like a scissors at the
front of its jaws were operating now
that’s the first stage of reconstruction
and this is painting we are good in good
stead with Dinosaurs when we’re doing
reconstruction a lot of people think
that it’s just all guesswork I mean
after all there’s no skin preserved
right it’s just all
well not really it’s guesswork to a
certain level but a lot of it is based
on what we know from living reptiles
fortunately this is a human face and not
a real ones of drawing a painting but it
shows all the muscles in the face the
muscles I’m using to talk and articulate
with and so on these are actually not
present in any living reptile we don’t
think they’re present and dinosaurs are
not present in birds or crocodiles so we
don’t have to worry about those
fortunately it’s really much more hard
to reconstruct a mammal face because of
all these extra muscles that migrate out
into the face especially a human to give
us muscles of expression we think
dinosaurs were less emotive that way
they would have grunted and groaned but
they couldn’t make faces at you quite
that way
so reconstructing them is a lot easier
you just need to stick to the bones and
you need to look at those bones you need
to see if you can see any vessels if you
see impressed vessels that means the
skin was tight you don’t see them the
skin was a little bit looser you see
ornamented ridges in living reptiles it
means there was scales it might have
been a little bit larger because there
might have been some contact there and
so this is we’ve done in the computer
putting skin over a cat scan of the
skull and so here you see the skull and
here you see the skin over the skull so
it’s done by a student we can also do it
physically and we think this is one of
the most accurate reconstructions of the
sauropod built right over a copy of the
skull again ornamented where we see
rough skin turning to keratin like a
bill where we see the impressed vessel
and that’s our best guess if there was
some kind of a bill again for protection
against rubbing against something in the
course of the life of this animal we put
a big tongue in here because in fact
almost all dinosaurs have two big tongue
bones that indicate they did have a
loose and free tongue that was used for
manipulating plant matter this was a
dinosaur that was a this was a fern
mower it was dedicated and an eating
machine for cropping plants slicing them
off it was not chewing its cud like a
cow the tongue would rapidly move the
food back plant matter back for
processing and perhaps ferment
in the gut what about the body
well knees your asaurus loser sources
body was on our mind for quite some time
this is that what we do for fun in the
middle of the Sahara we take open up the
exposure on a flashlight and you take a
flashlight open up the camera you draw a
dinosaur in pitch blackness throw the
camera to throw the flashlight down and
then pose for a little flash with your
drawing and not a bad rendition when we
hadn’t built the skeleton yet so here’s
a look 10 years after the initial
discovery after all the bones that were
prepared it was a forensic case we had
to take about 5 skeletons and overlap
them I chose the skeleton with the skull
that skeleton went back to the base of
the neck there was another skeleton that
started before the base of the neck and
went into the back series then there was
a skeleton I showed you a picture of
that took from the base of the neck went
through the dorsal series and out
through the pelvic girdle into the tail
and then we had another one that started
in the middle the tail went out to the
end of the tail we were missing some
bones
we had about 80% of the bones where we
had a right limb it was just as good as
having a right in the left limb you put
all the information together we had 80%
of the skeleton and I think we we have a
pretty good idea of what it looked like
it had a long neck but short by sauropod
standards neosaurus belongs to a tightly
knit group of species most of which we
found last 25 years with a weird name of
robots sorted sauropods named after a
good Italian robot II no one has ever
seen one of these dinosaurs look like as
a whole skeleton this is the first skull
more distantly it’s related to
Diplodocus and like Diplodocus many of
its bones are hollowed by air sacs that
extend from the lung in the neck this
leaves a very hollow vertebra not only
is it pushed in from the side with
hollow air sacs but they invade the bone
to hollow out the inside you can see
this extreme condition in a in a
vertebra from the back here’s a big hole
air tracks coming back from the lungs go
inside the vertebrae leaving you this in
cross-section it’s more air than bone
there’s more air
in the column that is supporting the
weight of this animal then bone you want
to calculate the weight of this animal
you calculate its volume and then you
subtract about 20% or 15% for air we
don’t think of that normally when we
think about elephants and rhinos and
hippos because these are mammals and
mammals never do this you got to
remember that as far as this looks from
a bird a bird is its closest relative
among living animals and birds do this
all the time their birds are typically
about 20% air air sacs from the line
this animal was trying to lighten itself
to the point of absurdity we’re going to
hand that off to the biomechanics to
explain how it could get away with
lightening the skeleton as much as it
did it wasn’t I don’t think a flotation
device I think it was just trying to
reduce the amount of living tissue it
had to support and still get by and it
was doing it quite successfully because
it was the most common large herbivore
of the day along with one other
herbivore in the in the beds in issue
Galasso this is a closer look at the
dorsal vertebra to show you what a
cross-section looks like through here I
mean you can’t pick up these vertebrae
when they’re fossil they just they just
crumble in life there were been stronger
than that but they are really a
biomechanical wonder that they supported
an animal that even taking 15% air would
weigh as much as an indian elephant and
here we have the picture of nezer soros
after putting that story together now
sauropods have gone through a lot what
was near soros doing with a head like
that a body like that
well first we thought that the bodies of
these animals were so heavy they must
have had to lived in water we had them
in marshes and all the time when I was a
kid they were always in the marshes
pulling up I don’t know marine plants of
some sort at the top of a tall net as
I’m telling you most of these animals
are at least 15% air because they all
have air pockets although neither shores
takes it to an extreme the neck well the
longest necked animal we build our
models on is giraffe and drafts neck
obviously is to let it eat and browse in
the trees
but ourselves and our mammal cousins are
not necessarily the best model for for
bird like animal and so closer study of
the neck of brachiosaur and many other
sauropods but including brachiosaur s
shows us that the neck was much lower
we cannot justify turning the neck at
almost 45 degrees upwards to justify
this pose and so the next came down but
it’s a giraffe that ultimately this was
built on and so on we would typically
get these kinds of images of sauropods
we’re not sure at this point if many
sauropods had the next up at all but
certainly they didn’t have them up that
high now some people did think that some
dinosaurs were low browsers browsing
close to the ground but they were
usually late in the cretaceous and the
idea from from Bob Bakker published in
1986 was that well maybe they even
invented flowers by destroying plants
lows to the ground they gave rise to the
weedy angiosperm flowers and plants that
we have today they occur about the same
time the duckbills at the end of the
cretaceous and angiosperms
but we’re dealing with already with
neither source which is older 110
million years and quite frankly if you
look at others of its kin Diplodocus in
particular these go back to the Upper
Jurassic so what were these animals
eating well first again diplo das is the
group that that needs our sources
closest to have very long necks and Bob
Bakker also said that these might have
given rise to the tallest the canopy
eaters
maybe they got up on their tail and
their hind legs in a tripodo posture
allowing them to get up to 40 feet to
munch on these conifers these are
occurring or monk monkey puzzle like
trees in the canopy
well again studies in detail really have
not justified that in the last 15 years
the vertebrae in natural pose when you
pose them carefully and look at their
look at their articulations in fact show
a very horizontal neck and this was
reconstructed correctly by some who
actually had some scientists who
actually had to reconstruct the bones in
museums in fact you don’t see a curve
like this maybe it could have taken that
curve
but you don’t see a curve like this and
we don’t imagine it arising like this
from the back and the other thing is at
the head well the first time a good
Diplodocus skull and an anterior part of
the neck was found the scholar here in
Washington said in nineteen in the
19-teens I can’t reconstruct the head
pointing forward just like the problems
we have with nature Soros
he said the head had to be reconstructed
tip down but we tend to forget these
things because our model always tends to
be mammals the animals were closest to
in fact the other thing about an animal
like a giraffe is that if it was eating
up in the trees it tends to have a
narrow muzzle mammal workers have known
this for years you can go into the
Serengeti lineup all the ungulates
measure their snouts the ones that are
abroad or eating grass the ones that are
sort of in-between or eating some grass
some leaves the ones that are narrow
like this are always browsers you
wouldn’t want a big muzzle you’re
reaching in between the trees to get at
leaves you want something that’s narrow
neither Soros gave us all pause because
there were so many constraints it was
such an extreme dinosaur you couldn’t
get its face any more forward than in
the model outside about tipping 45
degrees you could not put the face
pointing forwards otherwise the neck
would have to come directly from
underneath there’s absolutely no way
then that could handle that position the
ear region told us it’s now is pointed
down it has a giant flat muzzle what
could it be doing except cropping plants
close to the ground that’s what we have
to argue it was doing the problem is it
has where facets on the teeth that
closely resemble Diplodocus not only
that here’s the front part of the jaws
Diplodocus has the big front jaws
Diplodocus has teeth that are almost all
up front not all up front but almost all
up front Diplodocus when you x-ray
Diplodocus like we did has five or six
teeth in a column in these innocent
looking jaws in addition it’s your
region says that this not this is the
habitual posture of the skull it too had
a downwardly down really directed snout
as was reconstructed in the
be part of this century so we’ve come to
the conclusion that we really have
missed the boat on some of these
sauropods indeed there were large areas
of land in the Upper Jurassic covered by
ferns covered by horse tails covered by
Lika pods other kinds of plants by
nature sources day it’s entirely
possible that some angiosperm has
angiosperms that come into play and that
these dinosaurs were actually browsing
near ground level so here’s a picture of
this is the first time that we’ve you
know been able to cat scan and
reconstruct the brain a variety of
dinosaurs and look at an evolutionary
transformation here’s the brains of all
these dinosaurs this is a SPRO sauropod
or early sauropod a morph
it’s from where a closely related an
ancient group that the sauropods came
from and here there’s a horizontal canal
this is Camarasaurus this is Diplodocus
and here’s Nijo source and you can see
how the snout slowly moves down while we
hold the brain in a constant position
there really was the evolution of the
down turning of the snout in the dipwad
acids at the same time the snout was
becoming square at the same time that
tooth replacement was being increased
against the wear that was occurring on
them so maybe it wasn’t monkey puzzle
trees the counter furs that were common
that we have a big chunk of outside we
didn’t find them it needs your soros
that’s all the plant remains you
typically find in the field unless you
can get pollen and we couldn’t so far
get any pollen you’re left with the big
trunks of these aracari and conifer
trees there’s a 300-pounder outside for
you to take a look at those are very
useful you can cut them and slice them
look at them under the microscope and
tell all sorts of things about the
climate and how lovely it was during
these are sources day but did neater
source really eat the leaves of these
plants the jaw to me how weak it was in
terms of its construction how wide it
was in terms of what it was cutting and
the orientation of the skull say no it
was the ground level browser and that
ground level browser so extreme has
opened my mind to viewing other dipwad
assets also as ground browsers ground
level browsers the cows of the Mesozoic
if you will so here’s a firm
it was a common plant all through the
early part of the Mesozoic here’s a
horse tail these are common today they
grow everywhere from the Arctic down to
my garden in Chicago
they’re called scouring rushes because
you can actually scour plants there’s so
much phytolith in there the outside
levels of their of their structure that
they they really are very abrasive and
in the Mesozoic it’s not well studied
some of them were less abrasive some of
them more it’s not really well studied
but maybe that was what was abrading the
teeth at such a rate and then of course
around the that you see around this
plant here you see some of the
angiosperms that were coming into
disturbed environments maybe along the
Riverways but for knees are sorts again
you have to ask yourself this is a
common dinosaur whatever food it was
accessing it had to been common and then
it had relatives like Diplodocus living
in arid environments so I think we may
have to reinterpret how these dinosaurs
were making a living now there are
certain areas that dinosaurs never
adapted to one of those is an aquatic
lifestyle no dinosaur has ever really
got a fin a tail fin or anything like
that
and yet this is an animal the only
mammal that we know of that actually
grazes underwater one of the questions
with neosaurus is could it be eating
aquatic plants
well we have one grazer of grass under
water and this is what it looks like and
it to me it it bears a remote
resemblance to knees your source but it
doesn’t have teeth at all that resemble
anything like nezer Saurus and there’s
other environments that we are just
learning now that some dinosaur is
invaded that we had previously never
thought house dinosaurs burrowing habits
this is of course as an armadillo we
just described a burrowing dinosaur and
I think we found another one in Africa
that we’re going to announce soon it’s
got arms that are stubby it has legs
that can run there’s nothing quite like
it alive today there’s nothing that
burrows that runs as fast as a zebra
there’s nothing because the burrowers
today and in fact all mammals came from
a quadrupedal heritage of four-legged
heritage
dinosaurs even sauropods come from a
bipedal heritage we are very unusual
among mammals in walking on two legs
it’s a very late feature in the course
of our evolution so when you go outside
you look at nature store as you say it’s
four-legged yes it is but it returned to
four legs and its past as a two-legged
animal it never left far behind look at
the size of the hind limbs relative to
the four limbs it once was in the very
distant past and its lineage a bipedal
animal so when you devise a way to
burrow and make a living they’re doing
it with their hands but they’re
retaining the ability to run fast with
their legs it’s sort of like a burrowing
ostrich I mean it’s just a really an
incredible kind of animal in the trees
well not too many but we’re now getting
a few dinosaurs that we think actually
were are boiled before the bird
radiation appeared to occupy those
niches but we must admit that in the
trees in burrows and in the water
dinosaurs had but a precarious existence
so there are areas that dinosaurs didn’t
excel at particularly well but we hope
that we have at least at least revealed
some of the mysteries of an extreme
dinosaur because an extreme dinosaur
like major stores quite frankly gives
you clues as to what many of its kin
might have been doing sometimes it takes
an extreme dinosaur to do that thank you
very much take questions
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