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That right there is the TOE bone from a BABY
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dinosaur! And I'm holding it because
I'm finally learning the truth about
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dinosaurs. I've loved dinosaurs since I was
a kid but it turns out that a lot of what I
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thought I knew is actually wrong or at least
outdated. So in this video I'm going to show
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you the cutting edge of dinosaur discovery. I'm
going to give you rare access into a warehouse
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full of dinosaur bones, go out into the field
and try to discover my own fossil and
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show you something new these scientists
just discovered... "I think we got ourselves
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a dinosaur!" "A new look at dinosaurs"
"The Golden Age of dinosaur discovery..."
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"Uncovering almost one new dinosaur species
a week" "There's so much more to these amazing
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creatures" "We really have just begun..."
I think I found the dinosaur bone...
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We are in Alberta Canada and we are on our way to
an active dinosaur dig site. This is a huge moment
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in dinosaur discovery. Scientists are discovering
more dinosaurs now than at any other time in
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history. They're finding a new species each week on
average! And those discoveries are shaking up what
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we thought we knew about these ancient animals.
The dig site that we're headed to now is special.
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The rumor is that they've uncovered something
really cool. I don't know what we're going to
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find but my big goal is to actually help discover
a dinosaur bone today. If I could do that... oh my
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god. The site that we're going to is full of a
herd of dinosaurs called Pachyrhinosaurus. "We
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have the big adults, we have the little babies, we
have the teenagers..." That's Dr Emily Bamforth, the
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paleontologist in charge of this site. They're not
sure what exactly killed this herd. It could have
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been a natural disaster like a flood but they know
that it killed them all at the same time and then
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later they were buried in mud that turned to stone
over 73 million years. But that's a problem for us
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today because they're not preserved as individual
animals where they fell. They're all sort of mixed
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together. "That's right. So we lovingly refer to
it as our Pachyrhinosaurus omelet." OOOF! "It's basically
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hundreds, potentially thousands of animals
kind of jumbled up together in this one deposit."
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Putting together a dinosaur is kind of like doing
a puzzle, except... "you don't know what the picture on
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the front of the box is, you're missing half the
pieces, there's pieces from other puzzles thrown in,
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and then the pieces sometimes are ripped and torn so
they don't fit properly." "Hardest jigsaw puzzle in the
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world!" "Basically yep." So how do you know that you're
doing the puzzle right? How do we know that any of
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these dinosaurs are right? Well we're about to see
how they do it. Oh wow, oh my god, here we are! This
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is it! This bone bed is particularly exciting
because it's one of the "densest dinosaur bone
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beds in North America so the estimated number of
animals is somewhere from 6,000 to 10,000." Oh
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my god. Among all the bones in this huge dinosaur
omelet there's one type that's rare and special
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to find intact: a skull. And they just found one.
"So this thing here is a big skull and everything
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that's around it is all bone as well." Can I touch
it? "Yeah go ahead, it feels like a rock. It basically
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is a rock." Woahhhh. "Are you freaking out right now?" Yeah
I'm totally freaking out right now. This is so
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awesome. They're hoping to pull this skull out
of the ground in the next few weeks but if that
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that's a Pachyrhinosaurus skull how big was the
rest of it? Turns out a lot has changed about what
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we think dinosaurs actually looked like including
their size. So let me show you: Okay so I want you
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to imagine this skull coming out of the ground
it would look like this. This dinosaur had
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a big bony bump on the front of its nose called
the boss and a bony frill and horns on the back
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of its head. Using bones collected in the area and
around the world and referencing similar dinosaurs
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and animals that are alive today scientists put
together the rest of the skeleton like this. Now
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imagine the dinosaur comes back to life. It's about
that big which is huge. Compared to other dinosaurs,
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this guy was medium in size which is wild and
makes me wonder: How big were the rest of them?
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if you lined up a bunch of dinosaurs from smallest
to largest you'd see the teeny little Anchiornis just
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a little bit bigger than a basketball. You'd see
the Compsognathus, the size of a small chicken. The
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famous Velociraptor would actually be here except
in real life they were about this big which is um
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not the size they looked in Jurassic Park! And
newer research shows that they didn't look like
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that. Velociraptors had feathers. To be fair to
Jurassic Park though, they didn't know that. "The
00:04:47
reason the Velociraptors don't have feathers is
'cause we didn't know that those kind of dinosaurs
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had feathers at the time." In 1998, this discovery
in China changed our understanding of what some
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dinosaurs looked like and other discoveries since
have confirmed that more dinosaurs had feathers
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than we thought. And there's still a lot of debate
about what the color and the outside appearance of
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dinosaurs actually looked like, we'll get to that
in a minute. One step bigger than the Velociraptor
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would be the Nyasasaurus, about the size of a
German Shepherd. then our Pachyrhinosaurus would be
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here. One of my favorites, the Triceratops, was about the
height of an Asian elephant but much longer here's
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the Stegosaurus... and the T-Rex... and from here
on the sizes get nutty. These dinosaurs were
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bigger than school buses, they were taller than
buildings. One of the largest known dinosaurs, the
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Argentinosaurus, was about as long and heavier than
a commercial airplane! Can you imagine what it was
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like when these animals walked the Earth? But here's
the thing: They didn't all walk it at the same time.
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"A really common misconception is that all dinosaurs
lived all at the same time." Dinosaurs lived for way
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longer than most people think. If this is all of
recorded human history and this is the time since
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humans diverged from apes, this is the time when
dinosaurs were alive. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth
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for 180 million years. We are nothing in comparison!
And the dinosaurs that we know today were spread
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out through this enormous history. Which means
that some of the dinosaurs I think of as being
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alive at the same time were actually separated
by millions of years. "There is more time that
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separates Stegosaurus from T-Rex than separates
T-Rex from us." WHAT. That's an amazing fact.
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I had no idea. The stegosaurus was an ancient
relic to the T-Rex! My whole childhood was a
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lie. They're about to let me look for some
dinosaur bones. I've been waiting for this
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moment my whole entire life so no pressure but if
I don't find something I'm going to be devastated.
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I'm probably not going to find anything I'm
probably going to find like a chicken bone but
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just searching I'm so psyched. But first let me
show you something: I'm trying to correct what I
00:07:08
got wrong about dinosaurs but understanding the
news especially science news can be a challenge.
00:07:13
That's why for this story I wanted to partner with
Ground News. Their website and app gathers related
00:07:17
articles on the same topic in one place so you
can compare coverage and get a more well-rounded
00:07:22
understanding of an issue. I use Ground News to
understand the information that I'm reading, where
00:07:25
it's coming from, and how factual it is which is
something that I care a lot about and it's crucial
00:07:29
crucial for making Huge If True. Like here: A few
months ago the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded
00:07:33
to AI researchers. On Ground News, I can see that
nearly 300 news outlets reported on this. They
00:07:38
also show you the political leaning of those news
outlets and how reliable their reporting practices
00:07:41
are. Plus I can compare all the headlines: One
outlet likens AI to the invention of penicillin
00:07:46
which changed the world while another raises
concerns about potential negative consequences
00:07:50
of AI. I want to see the differences because I
care about how news is framed particularly when
00:07:53
it comes to science and tech. If you do too, I think
you'll appreciate Ground News. And right now they're
00:07:57
offering Huge If True viewers 50 % off their
Vantage plan. To check it out just scan this QR
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code or go to Ground Dot News Slash Cleo. Make sure to
scan the QR code or use this link if you do sign up 'cause
00:08:07
that helps out this channel. Big thanks to Ground
News for sponsoring this video and for supporting
00:08:10
optimistic independent journalism! Now back to the
story... All right, here's how to hunt for dinosaurs:
00:08:16
there are two rules. "So the first one is that
you always want to be working horizontal to the
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bone layer. The reason being like as soon as you
do this you run the risk of like accidentally
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stabbing a bone. The second rule is to always keep
your site clean. So we say a clean site is a happy site."
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All right the moment I've been waiting for my
whole life, here I go! I'm just going
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to be here for a while just you guys you guys
can go! But as I worked I wondered: How
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many of each dinosaur have we found? "Some huge
proportion of species are known from a single
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specimen which is crazy." Yeah turns out almost
half of all dinosaur species are known from a
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single specimen. And many of those fossils are
incomplete, meaning we take the pieces that we do
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find and we extrapolate what the rest of it could
have looked like. That makes the job of identifying
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what's a new species and what's just a piece of
an already existing dinosaur really tricky. "We are
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nowhere near having all the dinosaurs that ever
lived." And the dinosaurs that we have found aren't
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final. They're an ongoing group project among
scientists all around the world. Take for example
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maybe the world's most famous dinosaur. The T-Rex
didn't look like you think. Scientists and artists
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have been imagining dinosaurs for hundreds of
years. Based on early discoveries they thought that
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the T-Rex was a lean predator that stood upright
like a kangaroo. "You may have seen the traditional
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T-Rex in the kangaroo pose like standing up
with his tail dragging on the ground." But the
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more they compared the T-Rex's hip and thigh bones
to modern upright animals, they realized that they
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didn't quite make sense. New computer models showed
that standing upright would put too much weight on
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its hips but leaning forward would be much more
stable. "We now understand these animals are more
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like teeter totters." And they weren't very lean
either. Rib-like bones were found with this old
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famous T-rex skeleton Sue, but it wasn't until
2018 when they realized that these ribs would
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have had to float in the T-Rex's abdomen like
crocodiles have today and they realized that the
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T-Rex would have been way chunkier than they
thought which means that it was probably an
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ambush predator jumping out at you, not a pursuit
predator, chasing you down in a Jeep. In fact most
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dinosaurs were chunkier than people thought. But
before I show you that.... Do you think that's a bone?
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I'm pretty sure both of these are bone. I'm pretty
sure I found a dinosaur bone! I think I'm touching
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a dinosaur bone right now. Oh my god. Might also
be a bone of like a large chicken or something.
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Am I right? There okay I think there's two bones.
I think this is a bone and I think this is a bone
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under here too. Yep oh my god they're everywhere.
I also didn't realize that I narrowly avoided
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disaster. "This is bone too actually." Stop really?
All right I didn't spot that one. How do you know?
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I can see like those little white specks in there
that's kind of like the Aero chocolate bar. Look
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at the texture of this. I had no idea what I was
looking at. I thought I was looking for something
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like that which is the outside of the bone right.
That is the cross section. that's the Aero bar part,
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the inside texture. Good thing I didn't chip away
at that one. Thank you. This is one of the coolest
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experiences in my life. I realized that this is
just like another Tuesday for you but this is
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really cool. "It is pretty cool, like I said the
thrill never wears off." But finding a bone isn't even
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the coolest part. We got to get it back to the lab.
Is there any hope of actually pulling that bone
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out of the ground? "I think so." To get it out of the
ground intact we had to make this paste and then
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paint it over the bone and wait until it dried. And
while we were waiting, I realized that I still had
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a very basic question about all of this. And after
I learned the answer, I'm never going to look at a
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chicken the same way. What qualifies as a dinosaur?
"Good question. It is a phylogenetic question." All right
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so your great great great great great great great
great great great great great great great great
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grandfather over 10 to 15 million generations
back was a little lizard-like creature called
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an amniote. Scientists think that this was your
most recent common ancestor with dinosaurs. Over
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millions of years, the amniote's kids adapted and
scientists grouped up the new species depending
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on their different characteristics. Scientifically
speaking, a dinosaur is everything from here onward
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which means some of the animals that people often
call dinosaurs actually aren't. "So things like Pterosaurs
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actually belong to a different group of reptiles.
Things like Mosasaurs, Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs also
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not dinosaurs. Like they lived at the same time
but they belong to different groups of reptiles.
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Crocodiles were alive back then too which is crazy
but they're not dinosaurs because they actually
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branched off earlier. But if everything that
descended from this branch onward is a dinosaur
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then that means... "birds were dinosaurs. And therefore
they are also dinosaurs." Birds are not "the
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descendants of dinosaurs." They are actual
dinosaurs by the most scientific definition.
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Dinosaurs are still alive and they're all around
you. But hang on I thought that a meteor
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hit the Earth and caused the dinosaurs to go
extinct. But if birds are still alive and birds are
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dinosaurs... what actually happened after the meteor
hit? To answer that question we got to go to the
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lab. Oh my god. This is like Santa's workshop.
This is the coolest place I've ever been. Let me
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show you some of the coolest things here. This is a
Tyrannosaur tooth! Look at the serrated edges right
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there you see it? For cutting flesh. Look at that!
That is a "this is a break" That healed! "That healed,
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yeah." WOAH. "So this is actually really important. It's
basically like kind of fossilized physiology or
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fossilized behavior, which is not something that's
easy to find in the fossil record." Incredible.
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It also just reinforces these were living
animals. They had whole lives where they did
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all kinds of things and healed and you know
had injuries... "Yep and got sick too! So this
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has a really abnormal growth bone growth right
at the end of it. So we think that's either
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osteoarthritis or potentially a bone cancer."
Wow. Dinosaurs got cancer? "Yep!"
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We saw so many amazing things and finally I got
to touch dinosaur skin. "That is not skin impression,
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that's the actual skin. You can touch it if
you want. It's like you're petting a dinosaur." It
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feels like what I imagine an enormous chicken
foot would feel like. "And this one, this
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is another layer of skin. So if you look
closely you can see they different kinds of
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scales." Touching dinosaur skin was incredible.
I closed my eyes and I imagined meeting a dinosaur...
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And then looking at the skin, my question was, do we
know anything about color? "Good question. So in
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general we know what colors some dinosaurs were.
The feathered dinosaurs in particular because the
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feathers will sometimes preserve pigment." Based
on pigments in fossilized feathers they know
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that some feather dinosaurs were black and white
with shiny feathers and some had rust or deep red
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colors. Skin doesn't preserve color but they have
found shading, meaning that some dinosaurs likely
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had stripes. "We don't know if those stripes were
black and white you know, if they were tan and
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black, we're not really sure of the color. The
dinosaurs that you see reconstructed it's based
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on our understanding of modern animals, how modern
animals are colored." But a little creative liberty
00:15:45
and color isn't the main problem with dinosaur
depictions today. Look at this. You might not
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recognize it but this is a modern animal, alive
today, if you took its skeleton and treated it in
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the same way that many early science illustrators
treated dinosaurs. The problem here is they just
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wrapped the skin around the skeleton without
taking into account any of the muscle and the
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fat, turning this animal into a monster. Can you
guess what it is? That's a zebra! How about this
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one? That's a baboon! This one's my favorite. That's
a hippo! If we treated it like science illustrators
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treated dinosaurs. This is called shrink wrapping.
And today "we now though that's probably not an
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accurate reflection of dinosaurs. They would have
had a lot of muscle mass, yeah just to move
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those things around." Today artists and scientists
are working to correct that, adding more loose skin
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and muscles and fatty tissues, redefining what
dinosaurs realistically looked like. Every bone
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that comes to the lab from the field needs to get
cleaned. So time to clean ours! So this is still
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covered in mud but when it's cleaned it'll look
more like this surface right here sort of you can
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see the shine. "This is a rib that is pretty close
to being fully prepared so you can see there's
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that shiny chocolate brown color." These bones are
brown because they're not like your bones right
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now. In fact what we've been calling bones are
really... rocks. All dinosaur bones are fossilized
00:17:05
which means they're now made of rock. "You can think
of of fossil bones as basically an exact copy of
00:17:13
the bone just made out of rock. The original bone
material is there but over millions of years the
00:17:18
minerals replace the bone kind of like cell by
cell basically and so it's an exact copy of what
00:17:23
the bone looked like, it's just now made out of rock."
Every dinosaur in every museum is a stone replica
00:17:29
of what was once a living breathing animal which
brings me to my last question: How did the big
00:17:35
dinosaurs actually die? It started 66.04 million
years ago on a normal day in the dinosaur kingdom
00:17:42
except that a speck appeared in the sky and over
a few weeks it got bigger and bigger and bigger
00:17:48
until a huge rock wider than Mount Everest is tall
traveling at 20 to 30 km per second hit the Earth
00:17:56
right here so hard it vaporized the the entire
space rock immediately but catapulted chunks of
00:18:02
Earth beyond the atmosphere perhaps far enough
to hit the moon. And on the surface it created an
00:18:08
apocalypse. "There would have been, this is what kind
of terrifies me about this extinction, something
00:18:13
called a thermal pulse which is basically a wave
of heat." There would have been mega tsunamis that
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rippled across the planet. The immediate impact
would have been awful to live through. But for the
00:18:22
dinosaurs that did, the worst was still coming
because the whole planet was going dark. "The ejecta
00:18:29
from the impact itself would have blocked out
the sun." With less light, the plants died and the
00:18:34
animals that ate the plants and the animals
that ate them and up and up and up. "And the
00:18:37
things that survive are the things that are small
the size of a German shepherd and smaller, things
00:18:44
that had some kind of refusia so they could go
into water or they could live underground." It
00:18:48
must have been so scary. The fact that anything
survived is pretty incredible. After 180 million
00:18:54
years the reign of the dinosaurs was over. What
would the world have looked like if that rock
00:19:02
had missed? We'll never know. But... "ultimately
a bad day on planet Earth for the dinosaurs but
00:19:09
a really great day for mammals. I mean we are
here today because of that extinction." We are
00:19:14
here today because of this whole crazy history,
because dinosaurs lived and because they died. I
00:19:20
think I liked dinosaurs as a kid because monsters!
But the more I learn I see they weren't monsters
00:19:27
at all, they were animals animals that ruled the
Earth for millions of years before us and now I
00:19:34
love them. And I love humans for how much care we
take to study them. And the reason that we do that
00:19:40
isn't just to understand how we got here but also
to understand where we're going. "The world we live
00:19:44
in is just one very small slice of geologic time.
Each different can tell us something different
00:19:50
about life on planet Earth, where we've been where
we are and where we're going in the future." This
00:19:55
is the Golden Age of paleontology and there is
still so much that we don't know. And with more
00:20:00
time and with more technology and more science, who
knows what other mysteries are left to be unlocked?
