over the past two years we’ve tried very
hard to bring in new techniques into
paleontology so it’s not so much a bunch
of folks at the bottom of the hull of
digging for bones anymore that’s just
part of the story we want to take it to
the next stage the next level in terms
of understanding of these wonderful
fossils that we pull from the ground the
key thing is that these fossils can tell
us so much about these extinct organisms
and by studying the bones and studying
the associated sediments The Associated
evidence treating I suppose the dig site
like scene of a crime we were able to
piece together these shreds of evidence
to a much more coherent story of what
life was like in the prehistoric past
the planet so it’s a very exciting time
to be a very intelligent for the simple
reason we’re looking into areas of
science now which we felt the doors were
previously closed firmly shut to our own
particular field of science it’s
becoming very apparent but this is not
the case I’m going to take you on a
journey this evening one which has been
extremely painful for me at some point
AIII apologised people are actually
filming this this evening I’ve already
warned them I’m a nightmare to film
because I’m I sort of run around the
place a bit they were tempted to chain
me to the lectern they have not
succeeded now it is a story and it’s a
wonderful story
unlike most stories it does have a
beginning a middle we haven’t quite
reached the end though what I’m going to
present to you this evening is some of
the science which was actually the
methodology should I say of science
which was shown in the documentary it
was quite clear during the documentary
that we were deeply frustrated that much
of the science that we were working
towards was tantalizing at our
fingertips and we hadn’t quite lit the
victory cigar however the science has
continued over the last few months
and I think it will continue probably
until I’m a very old man because this is
a fossil that’s worthy of such study
because it is a remarkable mine of
information and that is what I’m going
to take you on this journey this evening
however painful it might be it’s like
trauma counseling for me and you’re
going to share this pain with me because
it really is a remarkable story from not
just my own perspective but from a huge
group of scientists and dedicated
volunteers who have lent so much of
their time to make this story well come
to sort of some middly bits we haven’t
got the ending just yet we started 1908
with Charles Sternberg absolute royalty
when it comes to dinosaur hunting in the
world he was based in North America and
he and his family his sons were
absolutely avid collectors of dinosaurs
they brought material to many of the
major museums in North America and
latterly into Canada as well
in 1908 whilst the father was out
collecting new supplies that run down to
a few sacks of potatoes and that’s all
I’ve been eating which is not healthy so
he left his sons back at the ranchers
that were digging away and they
discovered this remarkable find the
first ever and they use the term
dinosaur mummy and this is where the
actual skin has been preserved up
against now I say the skin has been
preserved it is a skin impression the
actual tissues which made up the skin
are gone it is left the impression on
the mud sand sands which was sort of
pushed up against what was probably a
desiccated carcass it’s almost
eviscerated it’s completely dried out
and a lot of the flesh is gone from rest
of the body but we’re looking at skin
impressions but this was the time the
first time the term dinosaur mummy was
applied quite interesting as a hundred
years this year so it’s timely in many
respects for looking at these things
again they did find some other ones
which are beautiful and I sold one for
the British Museum now the nitrogen
museum in London and it was a really bad
time to be transporting things in North
Atlantic because it was during the
period between
1914 to 1918 bad times be taking cargo
ships in North Atlantic a German I ship
spotted it and sunk it sunk our poor
dinosaur mummy carrying cargo ship and
it ended up a few miles away from the
Titanic in very deep water unaccessible
so we can’t even go and recover it even
though it’s British we want it back
anyway III forget looking for the
Titanic if there’s anyone out there will
know submersibles please go and find
this dinosaur it’s worth digging out it
really is we don’t even have decent
photographs of it so who knows what
treasures are hiding in that hold so I’m
still on the hunt for a dinosaur mummy
really this is where a young gentleman
called Tyler licen comes into the scene
Tyler is absolute rockstar he deals in
rocks sorry it’s a bad one but I’ve got
to get that one in now Tyler has been
hunting on his uncle’s land for many
many years looking for the tell-tale
signs that dinosaurs are weathering out
from the Hell Creek Formation Badlands
which are the last sort of gasps of the
dinosaurs and the Late Cretaceous they
are beautiful
barren but beautiful and you can see in
the foreground here even that’s a little
triceratops vertebra poking out of the
ground it is littered with bone across
these surfaces and it was when he was
still at high school he’s now at Yale
doing his PhD and he’s scarily clever
I’ve always been told by my colleagues
be careful of scary students actually
like them as if they scare me I might
learn something as well and that’s
important has to be two-way but Tyler
when he was at high school he spotted
just a few bones weathering out of a
butte he picked them up he realized that
they were though bones of a hadrosaur
dinosaur and thought nothing more of it
he noted it in his field diary took a
GPS reading a few years passed by and he
started working with the mammoth
Research Foundation a group of
volunteers a not-for-profit organisation
excavates fossils in the Badlands of
North Dakota but they Triceratops had
been digging out that summer in 2004
petered out the bones disappeared and
Tyler looked through his field notebook
and decided to go back to the site we
should discover
few years earlier because there might be
a few more bones left in that they
started digging what is remarkable with
any excavation is the amount of time
that goes into the excavation and here’s
two key people it’s a Stephen Cohen
who’s quite active with the American
Museum of Natural History but also works
very closely with a mammoth Research
Foundation each summer and this is Steve
bigan who I described in the book as
wearing inappropriately tied shorts I
rest my case
anyway and Steve is quirky weird strange
he’s one of the oddest people I’ve ever
met on the planet but he’s a genius if I
could clone him I would he’s one of the
most skilled preparator I have ever had
the pleasure of meeting these are people
who actually remove grain by grain and
don’t go mad as they’re doing it and the
the encasing matrix that surrounds
fossils the man is an artist because he
can release these fossils from their
stony tombs in a way that we can
actually see what they look like and
you’ll see some of his work in a minute
he was working on the dig team with us
Tyler came across though as they started
digging into the block but first
telltale signs of our fossil but he also
found skin impressions but these weren’t
any ordinary skin impressions they had
depth skin impressions aren’t meant to
have depth what was going on and Tyler
did something that was the most
important thing and extremely how can I
say the foresight was incredible he
stopped stopped and thought this is
something special it’s probably best not
to let the crew blast into it one of the
crew was Emma who was one of my MSC
students back in Manchester and she came
back to me in the ottoman setup this guy
I’ve been working with in North Dakota
he’s discovered this remarkable fossil
looks like Scott skin impressions and
then she showed me this picture this is
the tail coming towards us here that’s
the leg there’s an e foot down here
that’s the arm coming out there’s the
body block in here the tail hasn’t
collapsed it’s got volume to it
the skin envelope hasn’t collapsed it is
contiguous it is a complete envelope
I I didn’t believe it I’ll be honest
with you I had to see this for myself
and at the first opportunity I jumped on
a plane three actually to get to the
Rapid City and eventually drove the sort
of 4,000 miles it felt like up the
straightest road in Christendom towards
Bowman and then across to Mammoth and I
took this is sad how sad is it when a
road is so straight you get excited when
you can see a bend coming up in the
distance it was perhaps sort of Road I’m
sure you’ve been on them we don’t get
those in the UK it sort of all over the
place anyway when I saw this fossil my
flapper was gassed at I just could not
believe how something like this could
have been preserved and suddenly my mind
missing whoa hang on how are we going to
do this justice we have to treat this as
a crime scene recover every shred of
information for the science we can apply
now but also try and future-proof the
excavation so that when new techniques
develop in the future
we haven’t trashed information that
could potentially buy used by new
methodologies and so on in the future
that was going to be an interesting task
we started planning the excavation
straightaway but before we could go any
further the tail block which had an
actual fracture at the top was filled
jacketed and moved so too was the arm
and leg which had natural fractures
running through them already so he could
actually start the preparation on some
elements of the body the main body block
which you can see Tyler stood by here we
started using aluminium foil sorry
aluminium and we cover it in tea
aluminium and foil and then we do a
field jacket to protect it over the
winter because we had to plan this
excavation and that’s where National
Geographic got involved in 2005 and we
started planning towards the 2006 field
season when we’re going to excavate this
animal and we could not have done this
without support of National Geographic
foundation that’s fantastic
but soon enough we got together a crew
of people who were going to help us
record this amazing find and we started
when I started knocking on the doors of
the petroleum geologists cuz they’ve got
loads of money in the science department
at Manchester and I said you might
hopefully help me dig up this dinosaur
they looked at me as if I was quite mad
but then I said look comin you’ve got
this fantastic piece of kit looks like a
James Bond piece of equipment the sort
of thing which James Bond is usually
rushing towards to defuse a few seconds
for its explodes that’s important to
bear in mind because I’ve got to take
this thing on aeroplanes as hand luggage
and it has things like danger laser
written on it it’s a lot easier actually
than the handheld scanner that we use
that looks like a gun at Chicago Airport
I had a security guard draw his weapon
and say please sir can you remove the
gun from your hand luggage yes don’t
argue with that but it’s the laser
technology we’re using now is actually
very helpful recording in this scale big
scale features this is but digital
mapping not just monochrome but
full-color
let me drag you to Egypt this is one of
our studies we’re working on the rift
project in Egypt and this is what struck
me straightaway that I can record a
three-dimensional digital outcrop map of
the depositional position of our
dinosaur within a succession of rock
because I can I want to know the
relative position of our dinosaur to
what’s gone on and before the dinosaur
died during and after and you’ve got to
know the relative position of the
dinosaur to these big packages of rock
because the rock represents specific
environments and changes in that
environment which might to give us clues
to how it becomes preserved you get
dizzy looking at this after a while I
just I just first heart tried it out
when I was working with a group in the
Spanish Pyrenees and behind us this
motley crew here you can see this wall
is about half miles for three quarters a
mile long and it forms a wall which runs
right way down a mountain it’s more less
vertical because Dooney uplift over the
Pyrenees what was once tidal mud flat is
now right up on its end but on this wall
there’s over 3,000 dinosaur footprints
it was laid down on Late Cretaceous it’s
been impossible to map they’ve tried for
years then we dragged in lidar to see if
we could use it to help in this
particular problem and welcome to
through manya this is just north of
Barcelona and we’ve just cut in because
there are the big files a pad
of dinosaur footprints there to see the
animals walking across the walls it’s
great because imagine three four hundred
years ago if you going up on your donkey
to the top of the hill you can see
animals giants which have been walking
up vertical faces it would have been
pretty scary because they look like
footprints but using this technology
we’ve been out to sort of a preserve in
full 3d and in real color the actual
track sights but it means we can revisit
them at the touch of a button and with
using 3d glasses as well you can
actually really make it totally
immersive and that’s critical when you
can consider this could be a world
heritage site that will weather away
through time we’ll have a permanent
record of it it will not be lost so we
thought this would be a valuable tool to
use on the dinosaur mummy dig so we did
so let’s fly into the dinosaur mummy dig
site for the first time and you can see
these various weathering buttes and
classic Hell Creek Formation Badlands
bring a zip round this beaut in a second
and we’ve dropped in a few
high-resolution scans on top of the
actual mummy itself I had I could stand
on top this hill and get cell phone
reception if the wind was in the right
direction but it’s them down here we can
see there’s the Mummy’s body coming up
that’s the body block and these are
trenches which we dug out so we could
actually take samples of sediment and
make polish thin sections for
understanding something about the poor
water chemistry within this rock to help
reveal some of the secrets of the
environment in which our animal died
with this we can also input later
three-dimensional datasets say if some
mad fool was going to try CT scanning
such a giant block who’s going to do a
stupid thing like that me so once we’d
actually wrap this thing up in a plaster
jacket which took quite a few weeks and
Tyler’s team the mammoth resuts
foundation were absolutely fantastic at
doing this and Tyler’s brother even
welded on a frame underneath it because
it’s just like with a broken bone you
don’t want the bones inside the field
jackets and move so he wants to make it
absolutely as tough as possible then we
realized we had a block that rate rut
weighed roughly between 10 and 12,000
pounds and we’re in the middle of
nowhere doesn’t matter how much man
now you’ve got we didn’t have sort of
2,000 Egyptians to help pull this rock
and build a big pyramid no it come to
mind though what we did do we persuaded
Tyler’s father who works in the oil
industry to get a rather large digger
it made life a lot easier and it’s
making actually the cameraman who was on
that day who sat in the audience at the
moment I’ve got some fantastic pictures
I shouldn’t say this for health and
safety reasons but of Dave the cameraman
hanging off the edge of this with his
camera
if this thing’s bouncing across the
Badlands and all I could think of that’s
an expensive camera he’s going to drop
that but it’s we’ve managed to get it
away from the site and drop it onto this
I don’t know how we persuaded this this
truck driver to drive his truck in the
middle of nowhere but he did and it was
brilliant because just as the body block
hit the flatbed of the truck storm
clouds in the distance started building
now rain in the Badlands equals bad it
means you’re not gonna go anywhere in a
month of Sundays because everything gets
mudded out and you just can’t move it’s
a nightmare
it was a rush to get this thing off the
Badlands and just as we hit the tarmac
of the road it started raining the first
rain in nearly six months we had done it
by the skin of our teeth it was really
well we were lucky very lucky the next
step was preparation but before I take
you to the preparation who could
understand something about death what
happens to a body when it starts
breaking down it’s quite incredible
really but most of the papers I could
find on this were written by the FBI and
it’s usually about bodies and how they
decay in the processes because for the
FBI
like any scene of a crime they wish to
know as much information about these
circumstances by which that body came to
rest and how it came to rest and whether
it was interred where it died and so on
for that reason we learn an awful lot
for a start if the animal dies the
stuffs decomposing and doesn’t move very
far you get something called a CDI it
sounds like something you get on this
crime CSI look we’ve got a CDI no a
cadaver decay island and this you can
see around this
here on the badlands where the body
fluids of our animal have seeped into
the soil but it is not the body fluids
which is going to alter the chemistry of
the soil it is actually the microbes
which are chewing on this gunk which is
raining down on them and the respiratory
byproducts of these various microbes
that live in different types of
environment which giving rise to the
staining that we see in much the rock
and that can be permanent and that is
something that we were looking for in
our fossil which meant when we excavated
it we had as much rock around it as
possible which was a bit of a nightmare
as it made it much bigger than really
would have wanted as soon as we got it
back to the lab though we flipped our
body block upside down so we could start
excavating it from underneath so we had
a much depth of sediment as possible but
before we get to the excavation as soon
as the body block was removed underneath
the body you can see how the sediment
changes color literally this is where
the body block was sat and we took
samples from in and around underneath
and we to produce these what we call
graphic logs which give us sort of as
much information about the succession of
sediments from below within and above
where the body of the mummy was sat and
this is information we’d use later when
we’re interpreting the actual sediment
samples which were recovered and made
thin sections from an imaged using
various microscopy techniques back in
Manchester and of course Joe meek Waker
who is the main sedimentology Stan the
project spent many months a working on
the samples we’d collected but he’d also
excavated out two non weathered surfaces
because once these surfaces of weathered
it alters the chemistry of the rocks so
much so it’s going to be useless for us
to interpret what was actually happening
when these were lay down so you’ve got a
mine back with his lovely ice axe rather
disturbing but it’s a great tool to get
using the Hell Creek Formation and we
got unweathered rocks and then we could
make polished thin sections where you
actually stick the rock onto a glass
slide polish it down to a few microns so
you can look through look at look at it
through transmitted light you can also
use a scanning electron microscope to
look at in backscatter lines it’s a very
very useful way of imaging and finding
out this sort of processes which have
undergone or preserve the rock that
we’re looking at and here we can see one
of these typical slides and this is
stuffed full of organics because that’s
actually a slide of the skin
we’ll get to the organic so we got
locked in the skin in a minute but from
that information and also the accessory
plant fossils and the specific
sedimentology and the type of cements
which were precipitated within the sands
gave us clues it was a very very wet
environment very wet and there’s lots of
organic acids probably freeing up a lot
of the chemicals which were sort of
locked initially in specific minerals
which were being dissolved by weak acids
within the ground waters which suggests
we had a lot of plant material giving
these acids and so this environment is
probably not very far from what we were
looking at for where our dinosaur mummy
came to its final end obviously during
preparation we wanted to record as much
of this information and these towers
which you see all over on all of the
blocks field preparing are actually the
upper surface or should I say the
absolute underside to have flipped it
over of course all of the block that we
recovered from the field and we’re
keeping a record right up to the skin
interface of the sediment so it’s like
having a core all over the body so we
can see what’s happening to the
chemistry where the animal starts
affecting the environment and when the
environment starts affecting the animal
and we can see that transition and trace
it in the sediments so again we’ve
collected enough as well so that in
maybe 20 30 years time that was still a
huge amount of sediment literally right
up to the skin which we can give to
scientists in the future to say you’ve
discovered this new technique can you
help us with this
I know it’s 30 years old this fossil but
we still have this information we
haven’t had a chance to use in this
particular fossil so we’re hoping to
future-proof much of the excavation by
recording large amounts of data which is
usually lost in the preparation lab when
we’re preparing as well we came across a
rather interesting find and this is a
little croc here which is peering up her
hadrosaur and at first I was got the
phone call we’ve found a theropod
dinosaur predatory dinosaur it turned
out that it wasn’t a predatory dinosaur
but it was a predator or scavenger maybe
in this case but this is the hand you
got the digits here and as the radius
and ulna the arm it’s articulated of a
crocodile it’s probably of a species
called boreal asuka’s
and this is around in the late
cretaceous and would have been living in
the swampy like areas and it possibly
started scavenging on the body of Dakota
I should say we’ve nicknamed a dinosaur
Dakota now since one apps give him where
it was found
now what was it doing there how was it
laying relative to the body we didn’t
know and that’s where we decided it
would be really useful if we can CT scan
this fossil CT scan something at weighs
seven or eight thousand pounds still
after a lot of preparation no one had
ever CT scan to block this large that
was going to cause his problems for a
start so but again being foolish we
thought would have a go because it would
provide us ideally with a
three-dimensional map as to where to
prepare in the future and for that I
introduce you to Jeff Anders
he can CT scan through a solid steel
block quite remarkable how did we get
through a dinosaur though we started off
using as an x-ray source a four million
electron volt linear accelerator which
will be blasting particles up to a
tungsten tart target which will be
generating x-rays we then moved to a six
MeV linear accelerator and ended up with
a 9mm linear accelerator which is akin
to something of Star Wars a big gun to
put it into perspective if you have a
chest x-ray if you go to a hospital you
get approximately three to four rad
dosage of x-rays when you have a chest
x-ray in a split second we were giving a
dose of between two and a half to three
thousand rad for forty minutes at a time
for each slice you would get a serious
suntan if you’re in the same room as
this thing it was big big x-rays we were
dealing with and we did manage to get
through some x-ray film is using
standard technology that you get don’t
get any resolution this is about three
or four rad it’s hopeless we couldn’t
see anything and this is just a upper
humerus of a theropod dinosaur just to
show it doesn’t work we don’t have the
resolution I even tried using medical CT
scanners because they’re easy to access
and this is the same approximate there
that upper half of a humerus of a again
predator theropod dinosaur and again
the resolution is appalling you can see
very little information I did have
access to another CT scanner in
Manchester which was industrial CT
scanner slightly more powerful you
wouldn’t put patients in will certainly
one they’re not alive anyway
because it would spoil their day we
don’t we’re not cruel to our students
honestly this is one of postdocs and he
fell up his bike honest governor anyway
this is the CT unit behind him and we
can see an image of a claw of a dinosaur
which we’d been doing a test CT scan on
we can only do objects the size of a
head though maximum what we had to do
though and this is an example of where
we’ve got the the toe sorry a finger or
the hadras Santos Ora sits on a disk in
dinosaur which has got this rather
interesting pathology that little spur
of bone shouldn’t be there but look at
the resolution we can get using CT it’s
akin to actually slicing through the
fossil which you don’t want to do its
destructive that is the whole reason of
CT scanning you want to look inside
without damaging and one is remarkable
about this particular CT scan you’re the
first people ever in the world to see a
stress fracture inside the dinosaur’s
finger which is caused there it is by
tendon emulsion that’s where the bone
has regrown is called exostosis bone
regrowth as a function of tendon being
ripped out from the sides probably one
of these sort of tendons which we even
have on our fingers quite useful not if
you do hyper flexor hyperextension they
can rip out they can rip the cortical
bone the outer bone out is very painful
but when it does so it often caused a
pin fracture which runs at a right angle
to the avulsion site and that’s exactly
what we’re getting in this that’s been
hidden for 125 million years and we
didn’t have to destroy the fossil to
show you that it’s a very powerful
technique so what could we learn by
scanning a whole dinosaur and I might
say this almost kills my computer just
try and do a finger when we actually CT
scan the core of Deinonychus when he’s
big dromaeosaurs from the Clovelly
formation it would have been chewing on
the animal which I had the finger often
on to Saurus but we managed to CT
scanner I’d love to be able to show you
the CT scan of this but the single file
from one claw was 320 gigabytes when I
start reconstruct
a finite element model which we can then
start playing with in a virtual
environment to see how it actually
behaves you instantly by creating that
model you double the size of the file to
640 gigabytes the computer science
department at Manchester now come to me
when they want a problem that they can’t
solve because we are generating files
which is so vast even Intel have got
involved with us now because they’re
interested who we’re pushing the
absolute limit of what you can do with
handling large datasets using dinosaurs
I should say as well there well we’ll
see with the what we did with the big
scanner in NASA in a second we also scan
modern animals I my nickname in the
department for a while was Harry Potter
because I was getting owls in the post
they were dead no don’t worry kids I’m
not killing owls these are owls I wasn’t
meant to be clever but these owls were
roosting on powerlines not clever so
it’s sort of roast owl that I was
getting in the post and we could
actually CT scan their claws and the
bone is a remarkable material it models
itself according to the mechanical
environment in which it grows so it’s
like a flight recorder giving
information on how it actually behaved
during life and so by studying modern
analogs we then compare it to those in
the fossil record and start
reintroducing them the behavior on the
actual structural behavior of materials
of say in this case the claw of
Velociraptor and this is a finite
element mesh which we can squish and
strange and strain in in specific
environments in the computer but it’s
based upon a CT scan so we’re taking the
CT scan data is not just an outer
surface it’s not an invention it’s based
upon actual physical evidence which is
one of my big things about finite
element modeling it looks great pretty
pictures but if it’s not based upon
actual physical evidence what’s the
point it’s a sharp point not gonna go
there well you can see there’s there’s a
owl or over there on the right hand side
as well so we can learn an awful lot
using this technique but what about a
whole dinosaur we needed a big scanner
this is the said beast now I do recall
actually saying to today
even Jenny who is out there that it was
akin to having a rhinoceros pirouette
emul team iliyan dollar carwash I was
absolutely terrified because we had
about one millimeter clearance for this
thing to do a translate rotate in front
of the linear accelerator which is
housed in this unit the detector array
here and remember these are precision
instruments it looks like a bit of
industrial machinery but it’s absolutely
precision because we’re dealing with
microns of resolution the slightest
movements in any of the towers if they
were touched it would put them out of
kilter you would not be able to have
registered them with the images you’re
creating but we complete garbage be
getting out at the other end so we had
to be very very careful
but we started scanning and we were very
lucky with the tile block in fact the
slices we got from the tile block were
quite useful extremely useful one thing
we should I should have explained in
more detail in the program the thing
that I’m really excited about is the
three-dimensional geometry of the
intervertebral discs we can pluck out
where the intervertebral discs it’s spin
it around and look at the form what the
disk might have looked like the spacing
is interesting don’t get me wrong but
the actual form of these structures is
fascinating and that scenario we’re
looking at now I can’t show you the
whole full resolution CT scan because it
kills my Mac and this is a new Mac so
it’s trying very hard it’s sweating as I
about to press the key but this is a low
resolution to show you what the CT scan
can do this is actually bits of the skin
envelope which is showing up when it’s
at a high enough angle we can look at
the relative position of the skin
envelope of the dinosaur to the actual
bones which is critical because we start
working out things like muscle volume
it’s very very useful because one of the
big parameters when we work in
locomotion in the past is working out
how fast dinosaurs could run and one of
the missing things is knowing how much
muscle that was it’s like having a
Ferrari and not knowing what’s
underneath the hood you need to know the
cubic capacity of that engine if you’re
going to work out how fast you’re gonna
race it the cubic capacity of this
animal is a big muscle in its backside
the quarter firmer Eilis longus and the
brevis as well these are quite critical
muscles in the locum
of these hit based retractors these are
ones that pull back the femur with a big
muscle group in their backside dinosaurs
had big asses sorry it’s on camera go
they edited that out from the second
time they showed it
whoops sorry I was about I got my
Britney Spears mic I was going to join
in right now one thing that was
suggested where this remarkable fossil
we’re going to find DNA at no point have
I been looking for DNA DNA is the
ultimate delicate molecule of life it is
a water-soluble molecule then left it’s
deep frozen and even then you’ll be
lucky to get it to a million years
anything beyond that you could be
looking at a blue bottle or a blue whale
it’s very very hard it’s so delicate a
molecule however DNA certain sections of
the DNA that wonderful code of life
encodes for chains of its four specific
proteins we call them genes they can
manufacture a specific protein these
proteins are either the structural
proteins the building blocks of our
bodies or ones actually produce
chemicals are useful to keep our bodies
running but it’s the structural proteins
that I’m interested in the really tough
proteins which hold us together the
collagen Zee elastin the beta keratin
and so on we’re very lucky to find
specific compounds which suggest we’ve
got certain types of or certainly
breakdown products or proteins present
this is very much work ongoing we’re
working on areas of skin which are
beautifully preserved and this is a
section from the arm it’s just quite
remarkable preservation when you
actually section through the skin and
produce a thin section of it it is not a
skin impression it has depth and
structure to it in the upper layers you
can actually see layering within the
skin it’s quite beautiful actually and
when you look at it in backscatter this
is the layer you can see here is
actually this area here that’s the upper
surface of the skin
and this is the lower surface the skin
here and here you can see the sediment
which is surrounding it and when we
actually looked at it in detail we’re
now playing with the idea that we’re
looking at something maybe the actual
epidermis of the animal
their structure in here the stratum
spinosum stratum corneum we’ve been
hunting for biomolecules in this now and
that’s where we’re going next but how
can something like this preserve well
let’s go back to our lidar data we
finished mapping out our sedimentary
units and when we started sort of
mapping out a rather large channel
complex it was right next door there’s
our mummys site here this is the edge of
a river bank which was pretty
contemporary with our dinosaur in the
same sort of unit this is a vast river
system that cut yards away from our
fossil it would have meant that the
ground in and around our dinosaur would
have been absolutely saturated properly
for decades it’s it was a close-run
thing that it didn’t actually meander
and cut right through the fossil itself
if it had would have lost it completely
but this told us instantly that we have
a supersaturated sort of sediment which
is freeing up all these wonderful soups
of minerals which are being freed up by
the acidic ground waters due to the high
concentrations of organic material in
the in and around the the banks of this
river and this was reacting with our
animal but how do you start
reconstructing these dinosaurs though
alright we’ve started looking at the
biomolecules themselves but how do you
actually bring a dinosaur back to life
well obviously the Victorians had a good
go they had a few disjointed sentences
and they had a good set it was pretty
good Megalosaurus ended up looking like
a giant crocodile and pride Iguanodon
ended up in some spike on his nose but
at the time that was quite brilliant as
it was based on the information and they
had science evolves there’s no such
thing as a truth in science Karl Popper
was quite right about many things and
that was one and it’s how our ideas in
science evolved through time based upon
the evidence which is put before us that
is critical to understand and that is
something which is often misrepresented
when people talk of science they talk of
fact any good scientist will tell you
there’s no such thing as a fact in
science there are things which we
slightly evolved and Bend through time
this is an animal that helps us alter
our perception the paradigm of what this
particular dinosaur looks like
we are going to shift this paradigm
because our dinosaur shows us that we
had an enormous backside this is the
skin envelope stretched over its 3d
hasn’t collapsed here this is skin which
is preserved all the way through the
tail of the animal when you actually
look at it in cross-section it’s like
looking at a dinosaur steak you can
actually see the skin envelope when you
get close to the skin you can see the
structure of the skin it’s quite
beautiful I think we should do a lining
Gucci dinosaur handbags don’t you that’d
be quite unique and you can see these
Cratylus type scales running down the
ridge of the back of the animal as well
the preservation is absolutely exquisite
it has depth it has structure this is
not skin impressions then you have the
arm the arm is 3-dimensional from its
beautiful little paddy on the end of its
fingers and it’s mitten like glove of
skin right the way up to going up
towards the elbow the folds of skin and
you can see the relative position of the
skin for the radius and older there in
cross section so we can workout muscle
volumes around the bones themselves from
having this skin envelope it is a
remarkable fossil muscle volume is
muscle volume is critical when you want
to flesh up an animal like this
especially if you want to make it move
because it’s one of these clear
parameters when you’re trying to make a
dinosaur walk that’s very very hard to
work out sometimes we use modern species
such as humans to actually get the
computer to learn how to get from A to B
in the most efficient way we put in
specific parameters the geometry of the
skeleton and so on and we also do muscle
activation patterns muscle lengths and
so on and we then get the computer to
work out the best way to get from A to B
after the first few runs it looks like
John Cleese on Monty Python but soon we
can get it walking in a very primitive
fashion and you can see all the muscle
activation patterns going off changing
color as it moves and then we can even
get it tripping the light fantastic
after a few million runs which is quite
entertaining
this may look daft but we can validate
our model because then we can get me
skipping the light fantastic across the
room and seeing and analyzing how I
actually get from A to B and seeing the
muscle activation patterns and working
out how we can then compare our model
with a living animal and seeing if the
results we’re getting in terms of the
gates actual movement of the limbs as
you move are similar to what we’re
seeing in our model that’s rather useful
so we decided to apply a model to
bipedal animals our early models were
very primitive and we used what we
called pointy soros it’s quite
interesting when you use elastic storage
in the back using the same input of
energy into the same model the ones with
elastic storage built in move faster and
that’s something which were working on
currently and you’ll hear more about
that in the future because skeletons are
not rigid structures they’re amazingly
elastic structures and the elastic
recoil just isn’t in gun and a recoil of
a gun is critical in locomotion and it’s
much overlooked we did some work looking
at here we go monty python again didn’t
linden anyway and these are that’s t-rex
we got Allosaurus Dilophosaurus I think
it’s Velociraptor and well the ostrich
EMU Compsognathus have just disappeared
and we that’s the human would have been
eaten by everything it’s interesting
that t-rex even an animal as big as
t-rex even without elastic storage can
run faster than a pro footballer so
Beckham would have got it basically it’s
quite useful but to test this model the
next step was to create a
musculoskeletal model so we actually
have a skeleton running where the muscle
groups attached the various parts of the
body and this is why we’re working
currently we’ve now scanned in the whole
skeleton of sub-adult hadrosaur Kent
Stephens has taken the scan data and
he’s uncompressed the fossil bones into
the shapes they would have been then
we’ve done a fully articulated skeleton
and we’ve been adding the major adductor
muscles and so on to the limbs and even
working out initial volumes of flesh
would have been around it – Annette’s
centre of mass and so on then we’ve been
applying the data from the mummy with
that when we can add our own muscle
groups and work out how they would have
sort of which
Ones would have been responsible for
moving a limbs and then we feed it into
our dynamic engine simulator a physics
simulator we’re using a genetic
algorithm so the computer is not
learning but it’s finding the best
possible way from get away to be and we
start letting the computer learn this is
a kangaroo dinosaur this is the early
first few steps it’s like watching a
toddler learning how to walk and this
case it looks like it’s been on the
market us all night if this is an early
few runs but before long we can actually
get it running along we’re still
fine-tuning this because obviously when
you look at the distal end of the tibia
and fibula the lower half of the leg and
the upper half of the foot the
metatarsus the joint there is complete
nonsense at the moment but with
fine-tuning the musculoskeletal model as
we go along and we’ve still got a lot to
learn the key thing is though that we
can start inputting this data when we’re
looking at locomotory models which you
see on the screen when you see dinosaurs
tripping the light fantastic in front of
you no longer is it based upon the
artistic eye of an animator it is based
upon information that we are giving from
actual studies of musculoskeletal
systems of dinosaurs based upon actual
fossils this is an animation this is
science that’s a big difference there’s
a lot of research still to go on this
specimen we now have a rough idea what
Dakota would have looked like it’s going
to be fine-tuned as the research project
goes on and it’s going to take several
years to do that but what we have here
is probably one of the most accurate
reconstruction of any hadrosaur ever
done before it hasn’t got a skinny back
tail it’s got a good healthy rump this
thing had to run it could run at 28
miles per hour we take our model to be
accurate which we hope it is for the
time being until we get new data to
improve it but at 28 miles per hour you
need a decent engine this backside
provided that engine it had good reason
to run fast
t-rex shared the environment with this
particular animal and we know there’s
fossils which bear the bite marks of
t-rex this is an animal that was running
for its life t-rex was just running for
dinner this animal
natural selection made sure it could run
faster than t-rex this remarkable fossil
really does need a home though it will
go back to mammoth where it was found
the mammoth research foundation is in
the process of constructing a fabulous
collection of dinosaurs and it will be
wonderful to have a collection of such
dinosaurs on display near where they
were found Tyler’s ambition and I’ve
supported wholeheartedly is to construct
a museum in Mammoth and as I it’s not a
big place when I first got there Tyler
said well I has asked Tyler how many
people live here
he said all 110 11 12 13 it’s a small
town but it’s one which has a heart
based upon paleontology and one that I
know is the right place for Dakota to
end up the bunkhouse which is a device
of torture where most of the
paleontologists stager in the summer is
probably when the largest buildings in
the town but it’s there’s plenty of
space to build a museum and I would love
to see the Kota back home if anyone has
any ideas of how you would want to build
a museum there to house such a
remarkable fossil please contact the
mammoth Research Foundation I’m sure
they’d be grateful and nothing more to
do but to thank a huge number of
scientists and the National Geographic
Society and many other people who’ve
helped study a truly remarkable fossil
called Dakota thank you very much
hard to bring in new techniques into
paleontology so it’s not so much a bunch
of folks at the bottom of the hull of
digging for bones anymore that’s just
part of the story we want to take it to
the next stage the next level in terms
of understanding of these wonderful
fossils that we pull from the ground the
key thing is that these fossils can tell
us so much about these extinct organisms
and by studying the bones and studying
the associated sediments The Associated
evidence treating I suppose the dig site
like scene of a crime we were able to
piece together these shreds of evidence
to a much more coherent story of what
life was like in the prehistoric past
the planet so it’s a very exciting time
to be a very intelligent for the simple
reason we’re looking into areas of
science now which we felt the doors were
previously closed firmly shut to our own
particular field of science it’s
becoming very apparent but this is not
the case I’m going to take you on a
journey this evening one which has been
extremely painful for me at some point
AIII apologised people are actually
filming this this evening I’ve already
warned them I’m a nightmare to film
because I’m I sort of run around the
place a bit they were tempted to chain
me to the lectern they have not
succeeded now it is a story and it’s a
wonderful story
unlike most stories it does have a
beginning a middle we haven’t quite
reached the end though what I’m going to
present to you this evening is some of
the science which was actually the
methodology should I say of science
which was shown in the documentary it
was quite clear during the documentary
that we were deeply frustrated that much
of the science that we were working
towards was tantalizing at our
fingertips and we hadn’t quite lit the
victory cigar however the science has
continued over the last few months
and I think it will continue probably
until I’m a very old man because this is
a fossil that’s worthy of such study
because it is a remarkable mine of
information and that is what I’m going
to take you on this journey this evening
however painful it might be it’s like
trauma counseling for me and you’re
going to share this pain with me because
it really is a remarkable story from not
just my own perspective but from a huge
group of scientists and dedicated
volunteers who have lent so much of
their time to make this story well come
to sort of some middly bits we haven’t
got the ending just yet we started 1908
with Charles Sternberg absolute royalty
when it comes to dinosaur hunting in the
world he was based in North America and
he and his family his sons were
absolutely avid collectors of dinosaurs
they brought material to many of the
major museums in North America and
latterly into Canada as well
in 1908 whilst the father was out
collecting new supplies that run down to
a few sacks of potatoes and that’s all
I’ve been eating which is not healthy so
he left his sons back at the ranchers
that were digging away and they
discovered this remarkable find the
first ever and they use the term
dinosaur mummy and this is where the
actual skin has been preserved up
against now I say the skin has been
preserved it is a skin impression the
actual tissues which made up the skin
are gone it is left the impression on
the mud sand sands which was sort of
pushed up against what was probably a
desiccated carcass it’s almost
eviscerated it’s completely dried out
and a lot of the flesh is gone from rest
of the body but we’re looking at skin
impressions but this was the time the
first time the term dinosaur mummy was
applied quite interesting as a hundred
years this year so it’s timely in many
respects for looking at these things
again they did find some other ones
which are beautiful and I sold one for
the British Museum now the nitrogen
museum in London and it was a really bad
time to be transporting things in North
Atlantic because it was during the
period between
1914 to 1918 bad times be taking cargo
ships in North Atlantic a German I ship
spotted it and sunk it sunk our poor
dinosaur mummy carrying cargo ship and
it ended up a few miles away from the
Titanic in very deep water unaccessible
so we can’t even go and recover it even
though it’s British we want it back
anyway III forget looking for the
Titanic if there’s anyone out there will
know submersibles please go and find
this dinosaur it’s worth digging out it
really is we don’t even have decent
photographs of it so who knows what
treasures are hiding in that hold so I’m
still on the hunt for a dinosaur mummy
really this is where a young gentleman
called Tyler licen comes into the scene
Tyler is absolute rockstar he deals in
rocks sorry it’s a bad one but I’ve got
to get that one in now Tyler has been
hunting on his uncle’s land for many
many years looking for the tell-tale
signs that dinosaurs are weathering out
from the Hell Creek Formation Badlands
which are the last sort of gasps of the
dinosaurs and the Late Cretaceous they
are beautiful
barren but beautiful and you can see in
the foreground here even that’s a little
triceratops vertebra poking out of the
ground it is littered with bone across
these surfaces and it was when he was
still at high school he’s now at Yale
doing his PhD and he’s scarily clever
I’ve always been told by my colleagues
be careful of scary students actually
like them as if they scare me I might
learn something as well and that’s
important has to be two-way but Tyler
when he was at high school he spotted
just a few bones weathering out of a
butte he picked them up he realized that
they were though bones of a hadrosaur
dinosaur and thought nothing more of it
he noted it in his field diary took a
GPS reading a few years passed by and he
started working with the mammoth
Research Foundation a group of
volunteers a not-for-profit organisation
excavates fossils in the Badlands of
North Dakota but they Triceratops had
been digging out that summer in 2004
petered out the bones disappeared and
Tyler looked through his field notebook
and decided to go back to the site we
should discover
few years earlier because there might be
a few more bones left in that they
started digging what is remarkable with
any excavation is the amount of time
that goes into the excavation and here’s
two key people it’s a Stephen Cohen
who’s quite active with the American
Museum of Natural History but also works
very closely with a mammoth Research
Foundation each summer and this is Steve
bigan who I described in the book as
wearing inappropriately tied shorts I
rest my case
anyway and Steve is quirky weird strange
he’s one of the oddest people I’ve ever
met on the planet but he’s a genius if I
could clone him I would he’s one of the
most skilled preparator I have ever had
the pleasure of meeting these are people
who actually remove grain by grain and
don’t go mad as they’re doing it and the
the encasing matrix that surrounds
fossils the man is an artist because he
can release these fossils from their
stony tombs in a way that we can
actually see what they look like and
you’ll see some of his work in a minute
he was working on the dig team with us
Tyler came across though as they started
digging into the block but first
telltale signs of our fossil but he also
found skin impressions but these weren’t
any ordinary skin impressions they had
depth skin impressions aren’t meant to
have depth what was going on and Tyler
did something that was the most
important thing and extremely how can I
say the foresight was incredible he
stopped stopped and thought this is
something special it’s probably best not
to let the crew blast into it one of the
crew was Emma who was one of my MSC
students back in Manchester and she came
back to me in the ottoman setup this guy
I’ve been working with in North Dakota
he’s discovered this remarkable fossil
looks like Scott skin impressions and
then she showed me this picture this is
the tail coming towards us here that’s
the leg there’s an e foot down here
that’s the arm coming out there’s the
body block in here the tail hasn’t
collapsed it’s got volume to it
the skin envelope hasn’t collapsed it is
contiguous it is a complete envelope
I I didn’t believe it I’ll be honest
with you I had to see this for myself
and at the first opportunity I jumped on
a plane three actually to get to the
Rapid City and eventually drove the sort
of 4,000 miles it felt like up the
straightest road in Christendom towards
Bowman and then across to Mammoth and I
took this is sad how sad is it when a
road is so straight you get excited when
you can see a bend coming up in the
distance it was perhaps sort of Road I’m
sure you’ve been on them we don’t get
those in the UK it sort of all over the
place anyway when I saw this fossil my
flapper was gassed at I just could not
believe how something like this could
have been preserved and suddenly my mind
missing whoa hang on how are we going to
do this justice we have to treat this as
a crime scene recover every shred of
information for the science we can apply
now but also try and future-proof the
excavation so that when new techniques
develop in the future
we haven’t trashed information that
could potentially buy used by new
methodologies and so on in the future
that was going to be an interesting task
we started planning the excavation
straightaway but before we could go any
further the tail block which had an
actual fracture at the top was filled
jacketed and moved so too was the arm
and leg which had natural fractures
running through them already so he could
actually start the preparation on some
elements of the body the main body block
which you can see Tyler stood by here we
started using aluminium foil sorry
aluminium and we cover it in tea
aluminium and foil and then we do a
field jacket to protect it over the
winter because we had to plan this
excavation and that’s where National
Geographic got involved in 2005 and we
started planning towards the 2006 field
season when we’re going to excavate this
animal and we could not have done this
without support of National Geographic
foundation that’s fantastic
but soon enough we got together a crew
of people who were going to help us
record this amazing find and we started
when I started knocking on the doors of
the petroleum geologists cuz they’ve got
loads of money in the science department
at Manchester and I said you might
hopefully help me dig up this dinosaur
they looked at me as if I was quite mad
but then I said look comin you’ve got
this fantastic piece of kit looks like a
James Bond piece of equipment the sort
of thing which James Bond is usually
rushing towards to defuse a few seconds
for its explodes that’s important to
bear in mind because I’ve got to take
this thing on aeroplanes as hand luggage
and it has things like danger laser
written on it it’s a lot easier actually
than the handheld scanner that we use
that looks like a gun at Chicago Airport
I had a security guard draw his weapon
and say please sir can you remove the
gun from your hand luggage yes don’t
argue with that but it’s the laser
technology we’re using now is actually
very helpful recording in this scale big
scale features this is but digital
mapping not just monochrome but
full-color
let me drag you to Egypt this is one of
our studies we’re working on the rift
project in Egypt and this is what struck
me straightaway that I can record a
three-dimensional digital outcrop map of
the depositional position of our
dinosaur within a succession of rock
because I can I want to know the
relative position of our dinosaur to
what’s gone on and before the dinosaur
died during and after and you’ve got to
know the relative position of the
dinosaur to these big packages of rock
because the rock represents specific
environments and changes in that
environment which might to give us clues
to how it becomes preserved you get
dizzy looking at this after a while I
just I just first heart tried it out
when I was working with a group in the
Spanish Pyrenees and behind us this
motley crew here you can see this wall
is about half miles for three quarters a
mile long and it forms a wall which runs
right way down a mountain it’s more less
vertical because Dooney uplift over the
Pyrenees what was once tidal mud flat is
now right up on its end but on this wall
there’s over 3,000 dinosaur footprints
it was laid down on Late Cretaceous it’s
been impossible to map they’ve tried for
years then we dragged in lidar to see if
we could use it to help in this
particular problem and welcome to
through manya this is just north of
Barcelona and we’ve just cut in because
there are the big files a pad
of dinosaur footprints there to see the
animals walking across the walls it’s
great because imagine three four hundred
years ago if you going up on your donkey
to the top of the hill you can see
animals giants which have been walking
up vertical faces it would have been
pretty scary because they look like
footprints but using this technology
we’ve been out to sort of a preserve in
full 3d and in real color the actual
track sights but it means we can revisit
them at the touch of a button and with
using 3d glasses as well you can
actually really make it totally
immersive and that’s critical when you
can consider this could be a world
heritage site that will weather away
through time we’ll have a permanent
record of it it will not be lost so we
thought this would be a valuable tool to
use on the dinosaur mummy dig so we did
so let’s fly into the dinosaur mummy dig
site for the first time and you can see
these various weathering buttes and
classic Hell Creek Formation Badlands
bring a zip round this beaut in a second
and we’ve dropped in a few
high-resolution scans on top of the
actual mummy itself I had I could stand
on top this hill and get cell phone
reception if the wind was in the right
direction but it’s them down here we can
see there’s the Mummy’s body coming up
that’s the body block and these are
trenches which we dug out so we could
actually take samples of sediment and
make polish thin sections for
understanding something about the poor
water chemistry within this rock to help
reveal some of the secrets of the
environment in which our animal died
with this we can also input later
three-dimensional datasets say if some
mad fool was going to try CT scanning
such a giant block who’s going to do a
stupid thing like that me so once we’d
actually wrap this thing up in a plaster
jacket which took quite a few weeks and
Tyler’s team the mammoth resuts
foundation were absolutely fantastic at
doing this and Tyler’s brother even
welded on a frame underneath it because
it’s just like with a broken bone you
don’t want the bones inside the field
jackets and move so he wants to make it
absolutely as tough as possible then we
realized we had a block that rate rut
weighed roughly between 10 and 12,000
pounds and we’re in the middle of
nowhere doesn’t matter how much man
now you’ve got we didn’t have sort of
2,000 Egyptians to help pull this rock
and build a big pyramid no it come to
mind though what we did do we persuaded
Tyler’s father who works in the oil
industry to get a rather large digger
it made life a lot easier and it’s
making actually the cameraman who was on
that day who sat in the audience at the
moment I’ve got some fantastic pictures
I shouldn’t say this for health and
safety reasons but of Dave the cameraman
hanging off the edge of this with his
camera
if this thing’s bouncing across the
Badlands and all I could think of that’s
an expensive camera he’s going to drop
that but it’s we’ve managed to get it
away from the site and drop it onto this
I don’t know how we persuaded this this
truck driver to drive his truck in the
middle of nowhere but he did and it was
brilliant because just as the body block
hit the flatbed of the truck storm
clouds in the distance started building
now rain in the Badlands equals bad it
means you’re not gonna go anywhere in a
month of Sundays because everything gets
mudded out and you just can’t move it’s
a nightmare
it was a rush to get this thing off the
Badlands and just as we hit the tarmac
of the road it started raining the first
rain in nearly six months we had done it
by the skin of our teeth it was really
well we were lucky very lucky the next
step was preparation but before I take
you to the preparation who could
understand something about death what
happens to a body when it starts
breaking down it’s quite incredible
really but most of the papers I could
find on this were written by the FBI and
it’s usually about bodies and how they
decay in the processes because for the
FBI
like any scene of a crime they wish to
know as much information about these
circumstances by which that body came to
rest and how it came to rest and whether
it was interred where it died and so on
for that reason we learn an awful lot
for a start if the animal dies the
stuffs decomposing and doesn’t move very
far you get something called a CDI it
sounds like something you get on this
crime CSI look we’ve got a CDI no a
cadaver decay island and this you can
see around this
here on the badlands where the body
fluids of our animal have seeped into
the soil but it is not the body fluids
which is going to alter the chemistry of
the soil it is actually the microbes
which are chewing on this gunk which is
raining down on them and the respiratory
byproducts of these various microbes
that live in different types of
environment which giving rise to the
staining that we see in much the rock
and that can be permanent and that is
something that we were looking for in
our fossil which meant when we excavated
it we had as much rock around it as
possible which was a bit of a nightmare
as it made it much bigger than really
would have wanted as soon as we got it
back to the lab though we flipped our
body block upside down so we could start
excavating it from underneath so we had
a much depth of sediment as possible but
before we get to the excavation as soon
as the body block was removed underneath
the body you can see how the sediment
changes color literally this is where
the body block was sat and we took
samples from in and around underneath
and we to produce these what we call
graphic logs which give us sort of as
much information about the succession of
sediments from below within and above
where the body of the mummy was sat and
this is information we’d use later when
we’re interpreting the actual sediment
samples which were recovered and made
thin sections from an imaged using
various microscopy techniques back in
Manchester and of course Joe meek Waker
who is the main sedimentology Stan the
project spent many months a working on
the samples we’d collected but he’d also
excavated out two non weathered surfaces
because once these surfaces of weathered
it alters the chemistry of the rocks so
much so it’s going to be useless for us
to interpret what was actually happening
when these were lay down so you’ve got a
mine back with his lovely ice axe rather
disturbing but it’s a great tool to get
using the Hell Creek Formation and we
got unweathered rocks and then we could
make polished thin sections where you
actually stick the rock onto a glass
slide polish it down to a few microns so
you can look through look at look at it
through transmitted light you can also
use a scanning electron microscope to
look at in backscatter lines it’s a very
very useful way of imaging and finding
out this sort of processes which have
undergone or preserve the rock that
we’re looking at and here we can see one
of these typical slides and this is
stuffed full of organics because that’s
actually a slide of the skin
we’ll get to the organic so we got
locked in the skin in a minute but from
that information and also the accessory
plant fossils and the specific
sedimentology and the type of cements
which were precipitated within the sands
gave us clues it was a very very wet
environment very wet and there’s lots of
organic acids probably freeing up a lot
of the chemicals which were sort of
locked initially in specific minerals
which were being dissolved by weak acids
within the ground waters which suggests
we had a lot of plant material giving
these acids and so this environment is
probably not very far from what we were
looking at for where our dinosaur mummy
came to its final end obviously during
preparation we wanted to record as much
of this information and these towers
which you see all over on all of the
blocks field preparing are actually the
upper surface or should I say the
absolute underside to have flipped it
over of course all of the block that we
recovered from the field and we’re
keeping a record right up to the skin
interface of the sediment so it’s like
having a core all over the body so we
can see what’s happening to the
chemistry where the animal starts
affecting the environment and when the
environment starts affecting the animal
and we can see that transition and trace
it in the sediments so again we’ve
collected enough as well so that in
maybe 20 30 years time that was still a
huge amount of sediment literally right
up to the skin which we can give to
scientists in the future to say you’ve
discovered this new technique can you
help us with this
I know it’s 30 years old this fossil but
we still have this information we
haven’t had a chance to use in this
particular fossil so we’re hoping to
future-proof much of the excavation by
recording large amounts of data which is
usually lost in the preparation lab when
we’re preparing as well we came across a
rather interesting find and this is a
little croc here which is peering up her
hadrosaur and at first I was got the
phone call we’ve found a theropod
dinosaur predatory dinosaur it turned
out that it wasn’t a predatory dinosaur
but it was a predator or scavenger maybe
in this case but this is the hand you
got the digits here and as the radius
and ulna the arm it’s articulated of a
crocodile it’s probably of a species
called boreal asuka’s
and this is around in the late
cretaceous and would have been living in
the swampy like areas and it possibly
started scavenging on the body of Dakota
I should say we’ve nicknamed a dinosaur
Dakota now since one apps give him where
it was found
now what was it doing there how was it
laying relative to the body we didn’t
know and that’s where we decided it
would be really useful if we can CT scan
this fossil CT scan something at weighs
seven or eight thousand pounds still
after a lot of preparation no one had
ever CT scan to block this large that
was going to cause his problems for a
start so but again being foolish we
thought would have a go because it would
provide us ideally with a
three-dimensional map as to where to
prepare in the future and for that I
introduce you to Jeff Anders
he can CT scan through a solid steel
block quite remarkable how did we get
through a dinosaur though we started off
using as an x-ray source a four million
electron volt linear accelerator which
will be blasting particles up to a
tungsten tart target which will be
generating x-rays we then moved to a six
MeV linear accelerator and ended up with
a 9mm linear accelerator which is akin
to something of Star Wars a big gun to
put it into perspective if you have a
chest x-ray if you go to a hospital you
get approximately three to four rad
dosage of x-rays when you have a chest
x-ray in a split second we were giving a
dose of between two and a half to three
thousand rad for forty minutes at a time
for each slice you would get a serious
suntan if you’re in the same room as
this thing it was big big x-rays we were
dealing with and we did manage to get
through some x-ray film is using
standard technology that you get don’t
get any resolution this is about three
or four rad it’s hopeless we couldn’t
see anything and this is just a upper
humerus of a theropod dinosaur just to
show it doesn’t work we don’t have the
resolution I even tried using medical CT
scanners because they’re easy to access
and this is the same approximate there
that upper half of a humerus of a again
predator theropod dinosaur and again
the resolution is appalling you can see
very little information I did have
access to another CT scanner in
Manchester which was industrial CT
scanner slightly more powerful you
wouldn’t put patients in will certainly
one they’re not alive anyway
because it would spoil their day we
don’t we’re not cruel to our students
honestly this is one of postdocs and he
fell up his bike honest governor anyway
this is the CT unit behind him and we
can see an image of a claw of a dinosaur
which we’d been doing a test CT scan on
we can only do objects the size of a
head though maximum what we had to do
though and this is an example of where
we’ve got the the toe sorry a finger or
the hadras Santos Ora sits on a disk in
dinosaur which has got this rather
interesting pathology that little spur
of bone shouldn’t be there but look at
the resolution we can get using CT it’s
akin to actually slicing through the
fossil which you don’t want to do its
destructive that is the whole reason of
CT scanning you want to look inside
without damaging and one is remarkable
about this particular CT scan you’re the
first people ever in the world to see a
stress fracture inside the dinosaur’s
finger which is caused there it is by
tendon emulsion that’s where the bone
has regrown is called exostosis bone
regrowth as a function of tendon being
ripped out from the sides probably one
of these sort of tendons which we even
have on our fingers quite useful not if
you do hyper flexor hyperextension they
can rip out they can rip the cortical
bone the outer bone out is very painful
but when it does so it often caused a
pin fracture which runs at a right angle
to the avulsion site and that’s exactly
what we’re getting in this that’s been
hidden for 125 million years and we
didn’t have to destroy the fossil to
show you that it’s a very powerful
technique so what could we learn by
scanning a whole dinosaur and I might
say this almost kills my computer just
try and do a finger when we actually CT
scan the core of Deinonychus when he’s
big dromaeosaurs from the Clovelly
formation it would have been chewing on
the animal which I had the finger often
on to Saurus but we managed to CT
scanner I’d love to be able to show you
the CT scan of this but the single file
from one claw was 320 gigabytes when I
start reconstruct
a finite element model which we can then
start playing with in a virtual
environment to see how it actually
behaves you instantly by creating that
model you double the size of the file to
640 gigabytes the computer science
department at Manchester now come to me
when they want a problem that they can’t
solve because we are generating files
which is so vast even Intel have got
involved with us now because they’re
interested who we’re pushing the
absolute limit of what you can do with
handling large datasets using dinosaurs
I should say as well there well we’ll
see with the what we did with the big
scanner in NASA in a second we also scan
modern animals I my nickname in the
department for a while was Harry Potter
because I was getting owls in the post
they were dead no don’t worry kids I’m
not killing owls these are owls I wasn’t
meant to be clever but these owls were
roosting on powerlines not clever so
it’s sort of roast owl that I was
getting in the post and we could
actually CT scan their claws and the
bone is a remarkable material it models
itself according to the mechanical
environment in which it grows so it’s
like a flight recorder giving
information on how it actually behaved
during life and so by studying modern
analogs we then compare it to those in
the fossil record and start
reintroducing them the behavior on the
actual structural behavior of materials
of say in this case the claw of
Velociraptor and this is a finite
element mesh which we can squish and
strange and strain in in specific
environments in the computer but it’s
based upon a CT scan so we’re taking the
CT scan data is not just an outer
surface it’s not an invention it’s based
upon actual physical evidence which is
one of my big things about finite
element modeling it looks great pretty
pictures but if it’s not based upon
actual physical evidence what’s the
point it’s a sharp point not gonna go
there well you can see there’s there’s a
owl or over there on the right hand side
as well so we can learn an awful lot
using this technique but what about a
whole dinosaur we needed a big scanner
this is the said beast now I do recall
actually saying to today
even Jenny who is out there that it was
akin to having a rhinoceros pirouette
emul team iliyan dollar carwash I was
absolutely terrified because we had
about one millimeter clearance for this
thing to do a translate rotate in front
of the linear accelerator which is
housed in this unit the detector array
here and remember these are precision
instruments it looks like a bit of
industrial machinery but it’s absolutely
precision because we’re dealing with
microns of resolution the slightest
movements in any of the towers if they
were touched it would put them out of
kilter you would not be able to have
registered them with the images you’re
creating but we complete garbage be
getting out at the other end so we had
to be very very careful
but we started scanning and we were very
lucky with the tile block in fact the
slices we got from the tile block were
quite useful extremely useful one thing
we should I should have explained in
more detail in the program the thing
that I’m really excited about is the
three-dimensional geometry of the
intervertebral discs we can pluck out
where the intervertebral discs it’s spin
it around and look at the form what the
disk might have looked like the spacing
is interesting don’t get me wrong but
the actual form of these structures is
fascinating and that scenario we’re
looking at now I can’t show you the
whole full resolution CT scan because it
kills my Mac and this is a new Mac so
it’s trying very hard it’s sweating as I
about to press the key but this is a low
resolution to show you what the CT scan
can do this is actually bits of the skin
envelope which is showing up when it’s
at a high enough angle we can look at
the relative position of the skin
envelope of the dinosaur to the actual
bones which is critical because we start
working out things like muscle volume
it’s very very useful because one of the
big parameters when we work in
locomotion in the past is working out
how fast dinosaurs could run and one of
the missing things is knowing how much
muscle that was it’s like having a
Ferrari and not knowing what’s
underneath the hood you need to know the
cubic capacity of that engine if you’re
going to work out how fast you’re gonna
race it the cubic capacity of this
animal is a big muscle in its backside
the quarter firmer Eilis longus and the
brevis as well these are quite critical
muscles in the locum
of these hit based retractors these are
ones that pull back the femur with a big
muscle group in their backside dinosaurs
had big asses sorry it’s on camera go
they edited that out from the second
time they showed it
whoops sorry I was about I got my
Britney Spears mic I was going to join
in right now one thing that was
suggested where this remarkable fossil
we’re going to find DNA at no point have
I been looking for DNA DNA is the
ultimate delicate molecule of life it is
a water-soluble molecule then left it’s
deep frozen and even then you’ll be
lucky to get it to a million years
anything beyond that you could be
looking at a blue bottle or a blue whale
it’s very very hard it’s so delicate a
molecule however DNA certain sections of
the DNA that wonderful code of life
encodes for chains of its four specific
proteins we call them genes they can
manufacture a specific protein these
proteins are either the structural
proteins the building blocks of our
bodies or ones actually produce
chemicals are useful to keep our bodies
running but it’s the structural proteins
that I’m interested in the really tough
proteins which hold us together the
collagen Zee elastin the beta keratin
and so on we’re very lucky to find
specific compounds which suggest we’ve
got certain types of or certainly
breakdown products or proteins present
this is very much work ongoing we’re
working on areas of skin which are
beautifully preserved and this is a
section from the arm it’s just quite
remarkable preservation when you
actually section through the skin and
produce a thin section of it it is not a
skin impression it has depth and
structure to it in the upper layers you
can actually see layering within the
skin it’s quite beautiful actually and
when you look at it in backscatter this
is the layer you can see here is
actually this area here that’s the upper
surface of the skin
and this is the lower surface the skin
here and here you can see the sediment
which is surrounding it and when we
actually looked at it in detail we’re
now playing with the idea that we’re
looking at something maybe the actual
epidermis of the animal
their structure in here the stratum
spinosum stratum corneum we’ve been
hunting for biomolecules in this now and
that’s where we’re going next but how
can something like this preserve well
let’s go back to our lidar data we
finished mapping out our sedimentary
units and when we started sort of
mapping out a rather large channel
complex it was right next door there’s
our mummys site here this is the edge of
a river bank which was pretty
contemporary with our dinosaur in the
same sort of unit this is a vast river
system that cut yards away from our
fossil it would have meant that the
ground in and around our dinosaur would
have been absolutely saturated properly
for decades it’s it was a close-run
thing that it didn’t actually meander
and cut right through the fossil itself
if it had would have lost it completely
but this told us instantly that we have
a supersaturated sort of sediment which
is freeing up all these wonderful soups
of minerals which are being freed up by
the acidic ground waters due to the high
concentrations of organic material in
the in and around the the banks of this
river and this was reacting with our
animal but how do you start
reconstructing these dinosaurs though
alright we’ve started looking at the
biomolecules themselves but how do you
actually bring a dinosaur back to life
well obviously the Victorians had a good
go they had a few disjointed sentences
and they had a good set it was pretty
good Megalosaurus ended up looking like
a giant crocodile and pride Iguanodon
ended up in some spike on his nose but
at the time that was quite brilliant as
it was based on the information and they
had science evolves there’s no such
thing as a truth in science Karl Popper
was quite right about many things and
that was one and it’s how our ideas in
science evolved through time based upon
the evidence which is put before us that
is critical to understand and that is
something which is often misrepresented
when people talk of science they talk of
fact any good scientist will tell you
there’s no such thing as a fact in
science there are things which we
slightly evolved and Bend through time
this is an animal that helps us alter
our perception the paradigm of what this
particular dinosaur looks like
we are going to shift this paradigm
because our dinosaur shows us that we
had an enormous backside this is the
skin envelope stretched over its 3d
hasn’t collapsed here this is skin which
is preserved all the way through the
tail of the animal when you actually
look at it in cross-section it’s like
looking at a dinosaur steak you can
actually see the skin envelope when you
get close to the skin you can see the
structure of the skin it’s quite
beautiful I think we should do a lining
Gucci dinosaur handbags don’t you that’d
be quite unique and you can see these
Cratylus type scales running down the
ridge of the back of the animal as well
the preservation is absolutely exquisite
it has depth it has structure this is
not skin impressions then you have the
arm the arm is 3-dimensional from its
beautiful little paddy on the end of its
fingers and it’s mitten like glove of
skin right the way up to going up
towards the elbow the folds of skin and
you can see the relative position of the
skin for the radius and older there in
cross section so we can workout muscle
volumes around the bones themselves from
having this skin envelope it is a
remarkable fossil muscle volume is
muscle volume is critical when you want
to flesh up an animal like this
especially if you want to make it move
because it’s one of these clear
parameters when you’re trying to make a
dinosaur walk that’s very very hard to
work out sometimes we use modern species
such as humans to actually get the
computer to learn how to get from A to B
in the most efficient way we put in
specific parameters the geometry of the
skeleton and so on and we also do muscle
activation patterns muscle lengths and
so on and we then get the computer to
work out the best way to get from A to B
after the first few runs it looks like
John Cleese on Monty Python but soon we
can get it walking in a very primitive
fashion and you can see all the muscle
activation patterns going off changing
color as it moves and then we can even
get it tripping the light fantastic
after a few million runs which is quite
entertaining
this may look daft but we can validate
our model because then we can get me
skipping the light fantastic across the
room and seeing and analyzing how I
actually get from A to B and seeing the
muscle activation patterns and working
out how we can then compare our model
with a living animal and seeing if the
results we’re getting in terms of the
gates actual movement of the limbs as
you move are similar to what we’re
seeing in our model that’s rather useful
so we decided to apply a model to
bipedal animals our early models were
very primitive and we used what we
called pointy soros it’s quite
interesting when you use elastic storage
in the back using the same input of
energy into the same model the ones with
elastic storage built in move faster and
that’s something which were working on
currently and you’ll hear more about
that in the future because skeletons are
not rigid structures they’re amazingly
elastic structures and the elastic
recoil just isn’t in gun and a recoil of
a gun is critical in locomotion and it’s
much overlooked we did some work looking
at here we go monty python again didn’t
linden anyway and these are that’s t-rex
we got Allosaurus Dilophosaurus I think
it’s Velociraptor and well the ostrich
EMU Compsognathus have just disappeared
and we that’s the human would have been
eaten by everything it’s interesting
that t-rex even an animal as big as
t-rex even without elastic storage can
run faster than a pro footballer so
Beckham would have got it basically it’s
quite useful but to test this model the
next step was to create a
musculoskeletal model so we actually
have a skeleton running where the muscle
groups attached the various parts of the
body and this is why we’re working
currently we’ve now scanned in the whole
skeleton of sub-adult hadrosaur Kent
Stephens has taken the scan data and
he’s uncompressed the fossil bones into
the shapes they would have been then
we’ve done a fully articulated skeleton
and we’ve been adding the major adductor
muscles and so on to the limbs and even
working out initial volumes of flesh
would have been around it – Annette’s
centre of mass and so on then we’ve been
applying the data from the mummy with
that when we can add our own muscle
groups and work out how they would have
sort of which
Ones would have been responsible for
moving a limbs and then we feed it into
our dynamic engine simulator a physics
simulator we’re using a genetic
algorithm so the computer is not
learning but it’s finding the best
possible way from get away to be and we
start letting the computer learn this is
a kangaroo dinosaur this is the early
first few steps it’s like watching a
toddler learning how to walk and this
case it looks like it’s been on the
market us all night if this is an early
few runs but before long we can actually
get it running along we’re still
fine-tuning this because obviously when
you look at the distal end of the tibia
and fibula the lower half of the leg and
the upper half of the foot the
metatarsus the joint there is complete
nonsense at the moment but with
fine-tuning the musculoskeletal model as
we go along and we’ve still got a lot to
learn the key thing is though that we
can start inputting this data when we’re
looking at locomotory models which you
see on the screen when you see dinosaurs
tripping the light fantastic in front of
you no longer is it based upon the
artistic eye of an animator it is based
upon information that we are giving from
actual studies of musculoskeletal
systems of dinosaurs based upon actual
fossils this is an animation this is
science that’s a big difference there’s
a lot of research still to go on this
specimen we now have a rough idea what
Dakota would have looked like it’s going
to be fine-tuned as the research project
goes on and it’s going to take several
years to do that but what we have here
is probably one of the most accurate
reconstruction of any hadrosaur ever
done before it hasn’t got a skinny back
tail it’s got a good healthy rump this
thing had to run it could run at 28
miles per hour we take our model to be
accurate which we hope it is for the
time being until we get new data to
improve it but at 28 miles per hour you
need a decent engine this backside
provided that engine it had good reason
to run fast
t-rex shared the environment with this
particular animal and we know there’s
fossils which bear the bite marks of
t-rex this is an animal that was running
for its life t-rex was just running for
dinner this animal
natural selection made sure it could run
faster than t-rex this remarkable fossil
really does need a home though it will
go back to mammoth where it was found
the mammoth research foundation is in
the process of constructing a fabulous
collection of dinosaurs and it will be
wonderful to have a collection of such
dinosaurs on display near where they
were found Tyler’s ambition and I’ve
supported wholeheartedly is to construct
a museum in Mammoth and as I it’s not a
big place when I first got there Tyler
said well I has asked Tyler how many
people live here
he said all 110 11 12 13 it’s a small
town but it’s one which has a heart
based upon paleontology and one that I
know is the right place for Dakota to
end up the bunkhouse which is a device
of torture where most of the
paleontologists stager in the summer is
probably when the largest buildings in
the town but it’s there’s plenty of
space to build a museum and I would love
to see the Kota back home if anyone has
any ideas of how you would want to build
a museum there to house such a
remarkable fossil please contact the
mammoth Research Foundation I’m sure
they’d be grateful and nothing more to
do but to thank a huge number of
scientists and the National Geographic
Society and many other people who’ve
helped study a truly remarkable fossil
called Dakota thank you very much
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