some developments in the world of
dinosaurs and share with you some my
journeys back in time so dinosaurs are
one of the jewels in evolutions crown
animals so amazing that is almost kind
of beyond belief some of the longest
heaviest tallest animals that ever walk
the earth
giants that had razor-sharp smiles and
armored dinosaurs that wielded bone
crushing tail weapons dinosaur fossils
themselves are really a privilege to
study but to know that in their final
encore they took to the air well frankly
it’s unbelievable over the last 200
years paleontologists have traveled the
world in search of dinosaur skeletons
pretty much to most pockets of it from
the coldest depths to the hottest
infernos and this is continuing
generation after generation
so sometimes very occasionally
paleontologists they’re basically
confronted with the exceptional fossils
like this where you actually have the
preserved stomach contents fossils that
preserve soft tissues and even fossils
that preserve feathers birds are a type
of dinosaur a 200 year old theory that
theories well-supported it’s kind of
like gravity
that’s such the support that we have so
how about with having you know all the
dinosaurs around and knowing that the
stuff that’s absent and realizing that
what you had in front of you really was
there all along so having a beautiful
fossil like this and realizing that what
you had is that so what is this sorcery
how could you get something so different
well this has to do with laser
stimulated fluorescence or LSF for short
using high-powered lasers and shining
them at fossils to make the fossils glow
in the dark so what happens is that the
laser light you shine a violet laser in
a dark room and it causes the fossils to
glow specifically the soft tissues
around the bones and when that happens
you get amazing details and this
technique has been developed by my
collaborator Tom Kay of the foundation
for scientific advancement and we’ve
I’ve been traveling with Tom around the
world
scanning specimens with lasers to try
and reveal amazing things so in the last
20 years in actually our part of the
world in northeast China they’ve been
wonderful fossils that have been found
fossils such as this one
which preserve feather and us bone and
soft tissue data that has allowed us to
reconstruct the evolution of birds from
an ancestor shared with bird-like
dinosaurs like the Raptors and it’s even
allowed us to reconstruct how feathers
evolved from very primitive filament
like structures as well as these fossils
others from different dinosaurs have
been revealed to be early
representatives
different dinosaur groups are really
filling in gaps in the early history of
those groups and one of those includes
this example so this is an early
Triceratops relative called setec
asaurus and it lived a hundred and
twenty million years ago in northeast
china so this animal we will be using
with LSF to reveal the most detailed
reconstruction of color in any dinosaur
ever so the reason this worked is
because the laser causes the skin of the
fossil to fluoresce really brightly
revealing details that you can’t see
otherwise so what we were able to do is
use all this information from from the
laser and the actual muscles themselves
to create pretty much the most detailed
reconstruction of an animal a dinosaur
ever you know from its actual you know
physique to the actual skin patterns
themselves and what you’ll notice is
that the top of the animal is rather
dark and the underside is lighter so we
interpreted this as being an example 120
million year old example of
countershading so this is a very common
phenomenon in the world today whereby
animals have different colors across
their body and the way it works is in
this example here with this mammal the
sun shines down onto it and with a
darker top the sunlight lights it up
with the sun casting a shadow over the
body this lighter part then comes in
shadow so the idea is you have a kind of
canceling out effect that ends up
camouflaging the 3d shape of an animal
so if you imagine if there was a lion
somewhere in the courtyard over there it
would have a more difficult time of
spotting this animal if it did not have
if it’s a basically didn’t have this so
that’s what we think we have into tack
asaurus but the thing that was even more
interesting is
the position of this coloration so it’s
very low on the body and we scratched
our head and had that Eureka moment when
we found that this is exactly the same
thing we see in animals that live in
environments where you don’t have as
much direct sunlight diffuse light
animals that live in forests so in this
deer for example the boundary between
the dark and light is positioned low on
the body so what we were able to do is
take that you know beautiful 3d
reconstruction two experiments to
simulate we know where will that line
fall if you had a light source shining
on the model and it matched the fossil
so you know it was isn’t 120 million
years ago dinosaurs were doing these
things that we can see you know if we go
into the hills behind us to see the
local deer that we have in Hong Kong
with small species so yeah that was
pretty fantastic so the other thing
you’ll notice about this critter all
this stuff is soft tissue and it’s scaly
you know most dinosaurs are mostly
covered in scales you notice the tail
though there’s something come broom
thing going on there it’s got these
bristle like structures now from what I
was seeing before you know birds are a
type of dinosaur and the bird-like
dinosaur also had feathers so t-rex
believe it or not we have examples of
their early relatives with feathers as
well so t-rex was a feathered animals so
but these guys are all over here and
this evolutionary tree some of dinosaurs
is as such with Triceratops being a
relative of psittacosaurus so if those
peculiar structures you know what are
they are they a kind of primitive
filament like feather and that would
suggest that you know feathers evolved
right at the beginning of dinosaurs in
the first dinosaurs are these something
different is it actually something
independent of those feathers so that’s
kind of a really important question that
we wanted to use the laser to shed some
light on and so we’re able to create
images like this
which the laser is actually able to
distill out chemical information so you
notice that this is orange the original
color is has since been gone mostly gone
from the specimen so this is reflecting
a chemical signature and you’ll notice
that it’s similar to this orange here
now this is actually the boundary of the
skin and I said that most color
disappears and that’s because these
black dots are remnants of melanin the
same pigment that gives your eyes and
your hair their color so the fact that
these bristles match the unpigmented
skin suggest that they probably have a
similar origin they probably have are
related to keratin now we did lots of
comparisons with these structures we
were keen to find out what they were
like and in the bird like dinosaurs you
get these primitive filament like
structures and these structures we found
were very similar to them but they
weren’t absolutely the same what we did
is actually look at very peculiar
structures that you find in modern birds
this is a horn screaming and you can see
why it might have got that name from its
expression they have this really strange
spine on their head which is very very
very rare amongst birds and this is not
a feather everything else on its body is
apart from the scales on its feet but
this very strange structure here and we
found that those things on the attacker
sources tail were very similar to it so
we kind of were like wow okay well that
kind of a bit puzzling if this is not
relevant what is it so it kind of really
threw a spanner in the works and even
the laser revealing these new insights
what it showed is that really we need to
be finding more clues to finally resolve
this debate so you know the laser at the
moment is you know at the cutting edge
of resolving the actual physical
appearance of dinosaurs so one of the
bottlenecks that we have in paleontology
is comment to all
all sciences is actually finding
dinosaurs so I spend my summers in the
Gobi Desert in China when it’s rather
hot and spend weeks and weeks kind of
looking at the ground it’s difficult to
find dinosaur fossils it’s even more
difficult to find tiny little animals
such as little mammals so in the time of
dinosaurs the mammals were all pretty
small no bigger than a cat or a dog and
so that was one of the things so as a
dinosaur time mem ologist of Mesozoic
mammalogists you’re kind of resigned to
the fact that living through tons and
tons of material and siming it is kind
of part of the job
so that was just what you know what
people expected and you know after
you’ve sift it you spend a lot of time
under a microscope picking through and
trying to see if you might get a fossil
tooth or bone but you know
paleontologists are easily imagined t’v
and quite early on they came up with
this really neat trick and that’s that
in areas where you have ants in the
fossil at locality you can actually pick
up the debris formed around an anthill
and look there for fossils and the
reason is that ants they pick together
or some species and at least they pick
together particles of rock are about the
same size so they’re basically the snap
having a natural way of concentrating
these fossils so paleontologists prima
knowledge is for a long time would
basically basically be wrecking and
hills around the world but you know we
thought we could maybe do better and so
we kind of put our heads together and
this thought that well we can probably
use the laser fluorescent properties of
the fossils to make you know this kind
of process less cumbersome more
efficient so in this slide here you can
see that this part is fluorescing really
well under the laser and you know some
other bones don’t pharrell different
parts of the bones for us with different
properties you know the actual matrix
holding the bone it can have different
fluorescent properties so the idea is
the fact that things fluoresce
or glow with different colors we use
that to try and find fossils so we
developed this sorting machine oh and
when you show it to various colleagues
they kind of well they didn’t think but
it was kind of close to that they were
kind of we were managed to sort through
fossils that maybe take a hundred let me
perhaps even a thousand times faster
using this method so it was really kind
of a nice step forward so that’s
something that we’re we’re hoping will
help with the rate of discovery in the
field another bottleneck is actually
preparing fossils so I’ve had experience
preparing fossils myself but you really
need to be extremely patient and into a
skill to take them out and you know
preparing a fossil can actually take
years and years to do um that’s a big
problem if you’re trying to kind of find
something and want to work on it like
how ones are gonna be ready you know so
we also managed to finds ways of using
the laser to help with that and the
specific property is as follows so this
is a proportion that isn’t fluorescing
and with the laser you can see that what
the laser can do in certain types of
fossils is actually bring out the detail
much more clearly but more importantly
can actually look a few millimeters into
the rock so it’s kind of like a very
shallow x-ray so the implications for
that is that normally when you prepare
the preparator has to basically rely on
the tiny bits of bone they can see to
know when to continue and not so it’s
why it’s such a skilled job so with the
laser you have a way of kind of knowing
if you’re going to hit bone a bit kind
of earlier than you would so that should
improve the rate at which we get
prepared the fossils out for study so
really with the LSF not only is it a way
of kind of dealing with solving old
puzzles in the field you know the origin
of birds the the actual appearance and
evolution appearance and dinosaurs but
actually as a way of eliminating or
narrow widening the bottlenecks that
limit the rate of discovery in the field
so I’ve hope you enjoy my talking
and thanks very much [Applause]