Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park | Lex Fridman Podcast #480

T-Rex is definitely weird, even compared to all the other giant

Tyrannosaurs that are very closely related to it.

Because it is by

far, ludicrously by far,

the largest carnivore in its ecosystem.

>> So, it doesn't really have competition,

>> I mean, so so this is a Velociraptor skull.

There are some carnivores

that are a bit bigger than this,

but not enormously so,

um which were knocking around as T-Rex.

The the skull's the same time tooth crown. Right?

But but like you think about that.

And that's like going

going That's like going to Africa

and going, "Okay, there are lions.

What's the next biggest predator?"

And it's like, "Well, there's a weasel about this >> Yeah.

Like it it's that kind of size difference.

And you don't get that normally in ecosystems.

It would eat those the juvenile

of the herbivores, >> It's going to be eating Triceratops

and Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus.

There's even a couple of giant sauropods

knocking around in some places.

It's It's going to be hoovering them up.

But like how often is it going to eat

Again, Velociraptor isn't there, but how often is it going to eat something the

size of an adult Velociraptor?

I mean, they're a fraction of our size and we're probably too small.

That That This is like lions hunting mice.

Like you're just not going to

unless one like virtually runs into your mouth,

you're not going to go and try and eat it.

The following is a conversation

with Dave Hone, a paleontologist,

expert on dinosaurs, co-host

of the Terrible Lizards podcast,

and author of many scientific papers and books

on the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs.

This was truly a fun

and fascinating This is the Lex Fridman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description and consider subscribing to this channel.

And now, dear friends, here's Dave Hone.

Let's start with the T-Rex

dinosaur, possibly the most iconic predator in the history of Earth.

You have deeply studied and written about their evolution, biology, ecology, and behavior.

So, let's uh first maybe put ourselves

in the time of the dinosaurs

and imagine we're standing in front of a T-Rex.

What does it look like?

What are the key

features of the dinosaur

in front of us? >> It's gigantic.

It's almost trite now because

everyone knows T-Rex is massive.

But yes, if you actually stand in front of one,

you would be seriously

impressed just how absolutely vast they are.

Um so, I've got a copy of a T-Rex skull

I carried downstairs from my office.

And yeah, I I could fit comfortably through its mouth.

So, it would be just about capable of swallowing me whole and I'm a pretty big guy.

Your body you can fit in its mouth.

>> I can fit through it.

>> it's not even a particularly big one.

It's a copy of the one that's in the Smithsonian.

And they get bigger than >> a two-scale copy. Yeah, yeah. Of what?

Yeah, it's a it's a cast.

It's just a giant

mold made and then

pulled out like the dentist do your teeth, but very very big.

So, yeah, they 12-ish

m long, so what's that? 14 yd.

4 and 1/2 maybe 5 to the top of the head standing up, so

another 6 yd high and

seven-ish metric tons, so what's that about 8 and 1/2 short tons.

So, a colleague of mine, Tom Holtz, described them as an orca on land. But that's it.

It is a killer whale-sized

animal, but on legs on land.

And those are massive predators.

So, you're looking at something absolutely colossal.

And I think that is what will stun you.

I think people don't realize how big a lot of animals

are, which sounds weird.

Um but I used to work in a few zoos

and something I think you notice is when you go and see things like

elephants or giraffes or rhinos,

everything's built to the scale of the animal.

The elephant house is huge.

The doors are huge.

The bars are huge.

The food is huge.

And so, you don't see them

in the context of something that you have a good frame of reference for.

And I learned this, yeah, when I was at London Zoo and

was it going into the basement

of the old elephant and rhino pavilion

and a rhino stuck its head out from like this gap in the wall.

And the head was

twice the size I thought it was

once you stood next to it.

And the same with an elephant.

I once stood next to an elephant

closer than you are to me now

and you go, "Oh

Oh, they are so much bigger than I thought."

And I think it's similar in museums.

Like even when you get up relatively

close to a T-Rex

there's a bit of space between you and it and then some bars and

then it's usually raised up a little bit and then mount it on a

little mount to hold the platform

and then you stand back from that.

And you don't actually get to stand like under them.

And when you do that,

yeah, you realize that yeah, the the foot finishes at my knee.

So, is a T-Rex bigger than an elephant?

That'd be fair to say? Yeah.

I mean, a a very

large Savannah African elephant

is 5 to 6 tons.

And we're looking at 7 plus. Man. And a biped. And a carnivore.

So, yeah, you know, a a big lion A big lion is 200 kilos, so 430 lb. Yeah.

Well, that's why That's why it means widely considered to be probably

the most epic uh predator

in the history of Earth.

>> Yeah, I mean and I think more than that, it's I think it's one

of the most iconic animals, period.

I mean, if you're if you're listing

things that the average

person has heard of,

lion, elephant, giraffe, tiger, hippo, rhino.

There's a few more, but T-Rex is coming

somewhere up in that list.

That That's how prominent

it is as an animal.

So, yeah, it's it it's almost inescapable

as a paleontologist and then doubly so for me who works on dinosaurs

and doubly so again cuz I do work on Tyrannosaurs.

But yeah, it just dominates conversations.

>> Well, some of the other features maybe we can go through.

Big skull, big head, small hands.

>> Massive head, very kind of boxy. It's very robust.

Um big forward-facing eyes,

massive eyes, massive I mean, tennis ball-sized eyes.

These things had amazing eyesight.

Um Yeah, giant teeth.

There's a cast of a what? Tyrannosaurus Rex >> tooth? Yeah, I know.

So, It It It looks a bit bigger than it is.

So, this is all root.

So, this would be stuck in the jaw.

This would be something in the jaw.

>> part is that's the tooth.

>> The The tip, as you call it.

And yeah, you know, so that would comfortably

go through pretty much any part of the

>> And then you realize just how thick it is.

So, this is a cast of a thing called Carcharodontosaurus from um Africa.

You get it down in

Niger and a few other places like that.

And they're very very big, not as big as T-Rex, but

not a million miles away.

And then if you look at the teeth in profile,

they're a surprisingly similar shape

and not far off in size as well.

And then you look at them that way on

and you realize it's

a third of the

So, this isn't just massive, it's thick.

And of course, being thick, it makes it strong.

And with that giant head,

with all that extra bone and then all the extra musculature

attached to that giant head,

they've got this uber-powerful

bite and the ability

to just chomp thing it wants to.

Um so, yeah, they they are truly unusual in that regard, even actually compared

to a lot of the other very big Tyrannosaurs.

They're a often a kind of step above in their proportions.

>> So, incredible crushing power in the jaw. Yeah.

And then as you say, like this really

short bull neck cuz you've got this massive weight of this head up front.

You need to hold it up and not tip forwards.

Um really quite a massive body.

Again, there's two or three other

big carnivorous dinosaurs which people argue are maybe they're a little bigger than T-Rex,

maybe they're a little smaller, but it's always in terms of

Which is one way of looking at things, you know, pythons are very long,

but they're nothing like as massive

as, yeah, lion or a tiger. Same thing. T-Rex is massive.

It is built so

really big kind of barrel-shaped

chest making the body very very big as well.

And so, that's why,

yeah, there's things like Giganotosaurus

and Mapusaurus in South America.

Maybe they get a bit longer, another meter or so in length,

but in mass we're talking about

maybe only 2/3 3/4.

So, T-Rex is just massively

bigger than basically any other big carnivore we know of.

And then yeah, little arms, as you say.

So, this is a

not great, but it's a cast of a T-Rex arm.

It's not the biggest animal.

They do get a bit bigger than this.

Um but as I love showing,

it it's not a million

miles off the size of my

I could do with a diet, but I don't weigh 7 tons.

Yeah, it really is really pretty small.

Two claws, two fingers?

>> Yeah, so two fingers.

Some you'll see sometimes that they say there's a third.

This is a slight misnomer.

So, you do see this extra little bone here.

This doesn't turn up in all of them and it's an extra hand bone.

So, it's these the metacarpals,

but it's not supporting an extra digit.

So, mostly functionality-wise it wasn't very

>> They're not doing very much at all.

Um you know, you've This is what's called the deltopectoral crest.

It's really important for

basically big arm movements

cuz it's deltoids and pectorals.

Um the radius and ulna are really quite thin, thinner than ours.

The fingers are pretty stocky.

The claws look big and curved.

And they are, but

other Tyrannosaurs and indeed other carnivores generally

much more curved claws.

And then they have

um these little things.

Oh oh, how can I say it?

There There you can see there's a little mark.

That's a ligamentous pit.

And so, what you can imagine is

if you're trying to hold on to something and something's wriggling, you want grip. Mhm.

And there's a risk that you just like dislocate your fingers.

So, we have ligaments

that hold bone to bone.

And if you just put it flat to flat surface area, there's only so

much you can attach.

Whereas, if you turn that into a little hemispherical

dip, you get a lot more surface area for your area. Mhm. >> If that makes sense.

So, if you have a really big ligamentous

pit, it means there's a really big ligament,

which means your fingers are really strong and they're really resistant

to being wiggled around and pulled as if, you know, you've grabbed something that

doesn't want you to kill it.

Well, T-Rex has probably the smallest ligamentous

pits of any So, that kind of suggests it's not doing very much.

And again, when you look at the claws proportionally,

they're not that big

and they're not that curved.

So, even though it looks like quite a wicked thing

to us, remember, put this on a 7-ton

animal whose individual teeth

are the size of entire fingers.

Suddenly, that arm doesn't look like it's doing very much.

What about the feet? So, massive.

Again, not surprisingly, you're

supporting a colossal amount of weight.

Um but they have this

beautiful adaptation in the foot.

So, the equivalent bones in the foot, the metatarsals,

so for us make up the flat of the feet,

but these animals walk like birds.

They've got three toes on the ground and then the metatarsals stick nearly vertically.

Now, that overall extends the length of the leg, so you can walk a little bit faster.

You get a slightly bigger stride length.

Um don't worry, I've got the right bone here. Nice.

But, they also have Yeah, there's a good one.

That one's a great one.

Um but they also have this really

neat adaptation in the middle bone.

So, you can see it on this one quite well.

And that this is actually not a Tyrannosaur.

This is an Ornithomimosaur.

Um so, one of the really ostrich-like

ones, Gallimimus from the first Jurassic Park.

Um it has the same thing.

You can see the normal bones would be really quite long and square and

then flat at the top.

And instead, this thing shrinks

in the middle and turns into this kind of flattened diamond shape.

And what that means

is the bones either side

kind of lock it.

In fact, at the top end, it actually tends to wiggle a bit.

So, it actually goes left and then right.

And of course, what that really does is then help these things lock together.

And so, this is an adaptation

to basically lock the foot and make it

And we see it in a whole bunch of things independently evolved.

Early Tyrannosaurs don't have this.

Early Ornithomimosaurs don't have this.

The Overraptors, the early ones don't have this.

And the later ones

acquire it in a couple of other groups as well.

And it's about making the foot stable.

And what that really does is make the foot energy efficient.

So, you can as an animal, you know, we we have some cartilage

and we've got some ligaments and tendons joining all the bones together and holding joints stable.

When you push down, that's going to compress

them to a little degree.

And when you lift that weight off, they're actually going to spring back.

You're going to get a tiny little energy return.

It's the idea of those air soles they put in

all the trainers and

stuff in the in the '90s.

It's that same And you will, you'll get a little bit of energy return.

But of course, big force, particularly for a big heavy animal,

it's going to take the kind of path of least resistance.

And so, if your bones are all kind of loose in the foot,

what they're going to do is they're going to tend to splay out and

you're actually going to lose that energy.

But if you lock the feet together,

the bones can't move

and instead, that's going to further compress

those soft tissue bits

and give you a bit more spring.

And this is all about

I mean, this is about the mobility,

about the dynamics of the movement.

>> It makes you more efficient.

It means you're putting less energy in to walk

because you're just getting a little bit of spring off every single step.

Uh I should say that

I deeply admire people like Russ Tedrake, like the Boston Dynamics teams,

like the Tesla Optimus

robot robot teams that

look at bipedal and quadrupeds robot movement. >> Yeah.

And they try to make

human-like movement to, you know, basically efficient movement.

And so, the question here is how the hell is a T-Rex

its size bipedal able to move as a predator?

It's a weird body shape, is it not?

I mean, the big head makes it look more odd,

but you look at dinosaurs

as a whole and

over third pretty 40 45%

is the group called theropods,

which were all bipedal.

So, T-Rex, Allosaurus, Velociraptor,

Spinosaurus, many, many others that people may have heard of.

They're all bipedal built in this way.

There's a whole bunch of ancestral

groups which were doing something very similar, including various crocodiles

or relatives of crocodiles.

And then the birds are bipedal.

Um birds are actually doing it in a much weirder

way than theropods are.

The the theropods are

a lizard on its back legs.

I'm oversimplifying a lot.

I can hear paleontologists

screaming as I've just said it's a lizard standing up.

It's not a lizard standing up.

But they're doing a lot of the same stuff in the same way.

And that is really functionally

about where you put muscles.

Because what you really want to do to walk forwards

is you want to basically pull the leg

back so that you're pushing the body off. Mhm.

And the way they do that is the musculature on the tail.

So, we don't have a tail.

And indeed, mammals that even do have a tail, you know,

elephants and even lions, you know, it's a piddly little thing.

There's not a lot of muscle there.

But if you look at a lizard, particularly

if you look at something like a crocodile,

you see this massive,

massive block of muscle sitting on the first

third to half of the tail.

And that's what dinosaurs are doing.

It's the same thing as lizards and crocs.

They have this giant

set of muscles on the first half of the tail

that's anchoring on the femur, so the thigh bone on the back of that. And muscles contract.

That's the one thing they do.

But now you've got a giant muscle.

Yeah, and T-Rex, this this muscle's like

2 and 1/2 3 m long. >> Mhm.

It's going to be like this wide in the middle.

So, when that contracts,

the leg goes back.

The foot stays stationary on the ground, so the animal goes forwards.

So, the the tail is integral to movement.

>> It is It's a huge part of the biomechanics of the movement.

>> it with the butt.

So, we're kind of weirdly

how we organize our muscles.

But there's a This is generally probably a better way of doing it because

you can get a really long muscle.

Of course, the longer the muscle,

the more contraction you can have.

The hyper version of this is kangaroos.

So, kangaroos supposedly get more efficient the faster they move.

They get so much energy return

that when they're moving faster,

they get more compression

from the meaning they get more spring.

So, we should be imagining this

gigantic, thick tail, big body, >> Oh, yeah. >> big head, >> Yep.

and uh biped, and how fast does it move?

So, this is one of those things that's gone backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards.

There was a paper arguing

that we've probably been overestimating

various speeds, primarily based on footprints.

Um there's been I don't know how many papers trying to do T-Rex speed.

The most recent one that was pretty detailed,

I think had it clocked

So, I think it was I think it was 25

mph, so 40 kph

was the very upper end of the estimate.

So, probably a bit less than that.

What that means it can move. Yeah.

So, That's the but that's the thing.

Like big things move quick.

I've seen rhino and hippo

going at full tilt and

yeah, they're a lot quicker than you'd

Um and at least part of it is simply stride length.

When your legs are

three-ish meters long, it's hard not to cover

a lot of ground

with a single Um

and yeah, big big theropods,

T-Rex is is going to be a power walker.

It's not going to run

in the conventional biomechanical

sense where both feet are off the ground at one time.

>> running, it's power walking. >> Yeah.

But when you've got a

4- or 5-m-long stride,

it doesn't really matter whether you're airborne or not. Power walking.

So, you're never So, or running,

there's moments in time when both feet are off the ground.

And you're saying likely

here one foot is always on the ground.

>> Yeah, pretty much has to be for loading.

Oh, if it just because because of the mass of the thing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right.

The you know, you know that's the origin of cinema? What's that?

It was the is what

This is Edward Muybridge.

So, the the origin of cinema

was a bet as to whether or not

whilst running, a horse had all four feet off the ground.

And no one really knew this for sure.

And a guy called Edward Muybridge, he was British, but he was living in the States.

He was a keen photographer.

And he basically did what people seem the Wachowskis

do for the Matrix.

He set up a whole row of cameras

and set up a whole bunch of triggers

and had a horse run through them,

so it took loads of

And lo and behold, in one of them, the feet were off the ground.

The guy won his bet.

But he also realized that we already had things like zoopraxiscope,

you know, the little thing you spin with a with a slit. Mhm.

Um so, you see the right.

So, he did that with horses.

And now you have a moving photograph.

And that's pretty much the origin of cinema

was a bet about biomechanics.

Yeah, it's always a good question and a bet, and there you go.

You're off to the races. Yeah. All right. All right.

So, we're standing in front of this thing. >> Yes.

Uh how screwed are we, you and I?

We're back in the time of the dinosaurs.

What's the probability of our survival?

There's two big things to weigh up, which are going to be interesting,

which is would they even consider

us a potential meal? Mhm.

Because we know that animals that have never

Animals have to learn stuff.

And so, animals that have never encountered things before

are often they don't have a response

because they don't know what their response should be.

We should say during that time there was not something that looked like primates. No. Absolutely nothing.

>> So we would look very weird.

>> we would look weird. Yeah.

Um so you know that there's lots of really cool records

of particularly you've got down in

um Indonesia and stuff we've got these

insane volcanic spires and at least of these tiny little valleys.

And people go in there and they go, "Yeah, the animals walk up to us.

They've never seen a human.

They don't know what it is."

So it might look at us and

animals are fundamentally cautious.

It doesn't know if we're a threat.

So maybe it might just find us weird

or in some way shape or form off-putting.

And so we may not even be considered on the menu.

the other thing is we might

be too Um my suspicion is we're not.

So animals carnivores typically

take stuff that is much much smaller than them

despite basically every day I just saw a documentary movie ever shows T-Rex hunting

an adult triceratops which is like the same size as it.

Uh and every documentary you got to have lions taking down a wildebeest or

even a Like these are weird and rare outcomes.

These don't usually happen.

The vast majority of active predation is on stuff much

much much smaller than you.

I totted some of this up for

a paper I did on microraptor

this really small gliding dinosaur from China where we actually have a bunch of

specimens with various stomach contents in them.

And we were coming up with numbers of about like 5 to 20%

of the mass being typical.

So prey versus predator.

And that's actually very

similar to what we see with modern carnivores.

And it's not far off what we've seen

even with things like Tyrannosaurus

where you occasionally find

consumed bones from So

if we put the lower end of that is 5%

of the mass of a T-Rex,

we might actually be okay

um if it doesn't consider us worth the

assuming you're encountering a big adult and not a half-size

one that's maybe only weighs

a ton, then we might be all

>> What would be the survival strategy?

So the there's a thing that you criticized

not being true that I guess in Jurassic uh not moving. >> Yeah, it's nonsense.

They they can see really well.

Like I said, like

T-Rex has giant eyeballs.

People don't realize that cuz like whales and like elephants,

it looks small compared

to the size of the animal.

But what you're in really important for vision is absolute

size not proportional size.

And absolutely their eyes are gigantic.

>> Probably the biggest on Earth at that time.

Yeah, uh guy called Kent Stevens did a paper.

He's got a really nice graphic of it.

If if you if you just put

s t e v e n s T-Rex.

There's the one with the There we go.

That's the one with the with the googly eyes.

That's a baseball or a tennis ball size eyeball.

And when you think about the incredible

visual acuity of something like an eagle

which has eyes not much bigger than

think about what that's going to do.

And we we absolutely know there's been loads of studies on this in

mammals and birds and other things as well

that basically eyeball size correlates with visual acuity.

And that can fold in two different ways.

It can be like general sharpness,

like how well can you see a long way away?

So eagles and vultures it's really important.

Or it can be good in low light.

And I now discovered

that there's a nature

was metal Oh yeah. Reddit. Yeah, yeah.

For which is gnarly gnarly paleo things. Yeah.

Yeah, I come across it occasionally.

For dinosaurs, let's see what's the top post of all time.

Oh, that's a glyptodont.

An Argentinian farmer recently found it.

20,000 years old fossilized

So these are these are giant armadillo-like

animals with club Interesting. Wow.

Oh, that's Black Beauty.

That's at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

So giant eyeballs, they can either see very well

they can see a very long way in daylight or they can see very well at night.

My suspicion is it's the latter.

I think they're probably

primarily nocturnal when when they get that size.

And that moving might be a good strategy

because it's cautious cuz it doesn't understand what these primates are.

Yeah, um but I think if it if it starts coming towards

you, if you're truly in the open,

then you're in real trouble and I'm not sure what you do.

I mean the one thing the one advantage humans have over almost

anything else on Earth there's a handful of exceptions

is we have range.

I can pick up a rock and hurl it with reasonable accuracy.

Most things can't do that.

And animals probably don't like being hit in the face or hit in the

eyes with a rock

at a range cuz again they're not going to know how it's happened or

how to respond to this.

All they know is they're taking damage and that's bad.

And that might genuinely

be enough to do it.

I wouldn't want to try,

but again if I was

dumped on a plane or a prairie

with nothing else but a T-Rex that was interested in me,

it's worth a shot.

Um if you're in a forest, I would try and get behind a tree.

They they're quite good at turning.

There's been a couple of nice papers looking at like the the mechanics

of the foot and the ankle and how quickly they could like pivot.

Um but we're much better cuz we're just so much smaller.

So it it would be very kind of Looney Tunes, but I think you

could go round and round a big tree

right Yeah, but much faster than it could. Yeah.

And so it's going to get bored or lack interest sooner or later.

So let's zoom out.

What did it eat?

I mean the you could go for the classic joke of whatever it wanted,

but the reality is

um the relatively big herbivores that are around at the time,

it's probably largely leaving them alone

because again just the classic dynamics

predators even like quote super predators like Tyrannosaurus,

they're still real animals.

If you get injured

and you can't hunt,

that's probably the end of you.

So you don't want to tackle an adult triceratops

that weighs the same as you and has

meter meter and a half long horns on its head

is potentially pretty aggressive

um and then even the big

uh so the hadrosaurs

are kind of classic duck-billed dinosaurs.

They're not they're not

present with any like obvious defenses.

They don't have armor.

They don't have horns or spikes or anything like this.

But they're simply massive.

Again, you know, yes T-Rex has got the teeth and the bite and

even if they're a bit rubbish the claws on the hands.

But like just grappling

another animal which is the same

size as it, there's a risk you're going to get a foot trodden on

that it's going to get off some kind of body slam or whatever.

And then even if you do bring it down,

you're never going to eat it.

Like if you you you bring down an animal that weighs 5 tons,

it's nearly your own mass.

You're not you're not going to eat it before it goes rotten.

That's a huge amount of kind of not like wasted energy, but you probably

put a lot of effort into this and you're not getting that much reward out.

And again, the there are again there are exceptions.

You've got things like links are the classic one.

Links are not very big cats

and yet they'll hunt adult deer.

They're way bigger than them.

Lions hunt things like buffalo,

but they're operating in a group so it's a bit of a cheat.

So there are some things that do this, but fundamentally

the vast majority of carnivores tackle stuff that's way way smaller than them.

And that's what we see.

Um every record we have of basically any large carnivorous

dinosaur where you have

stomach contents where it's like consumed

something or healed bite marks.

We get quite We get a not quite a few.

There's a handful of them

where there's an obvious damage to a bone

in more than a couple of cases with a tooth broken off in the

bone and then the bone has healed over it

so you know it got away. They're they're juveniles.

They're relatively young animals.

And that's what they're targeting.

it makes ecological sense.

It's what modern animals do for very good reason.

Juveniles are relatively small and weak.

They don't have the horns or frills or armor or shields and other stuff. They're naive.

They don't They have You don't have to learn

what predators are or you have to learn

how to avoid them or to

check the wind or

even physically see them before you know

see them kill something else before you know that they're a threat.

And juveniles forage badly.

Um they're relatively inefficient.

So actually they need to eat more

for their size than an adult does.

And then on top of that they're not very experienced at foraging in the right areas.

And even if they can find a good patch, the adults will often

beat them up and chase them off.

>> You're talking about juveniles across various species? Everything.

This is just a universal pattern of being a smaller

animal versus a larger or a younger animal versus a larger animal.

>> So so hunting young young things.

>> young things is easier cuz they're dumb.

Right, they're dumb, but they're inexperienced.

But they're but they're often

they're often feeding in sub-optimal areas.

So this is the place with all the best food.

The adults will kick you off so now you have to feed somewhere else.

Maybe the food isn't as good in which case you need to eat more

of it so it takes longer.

Or maybe it's the one next to the edge of the forest where the T-Rexes hide.

But either way you're stuck there.

And then you don't really know what you're looking for and you haven't got the armor.

So guess who's getting eaten.

Like this again there's lots of exceptions.

You can't have nature without things like that, but this is the absolute

rule of thumb for how

foraging and growth and predation operate across

everything from fish to stuff

as fish as predators starfish

praying mantis all the way up to

things like big cats by stuff like crocodiles.

It It's how it works.

So, it'd be very weird if it didn't also operate for dinosaurs.

And then, as I say, we've actually got the direct evidence for this from

bite marks and stomach content.

They've taken small stuff.

Bite marks give a lot of information. Yeah.

That's a powerful signal in paleontology. Yeah, absolutely.

I've done really quite a lot of work on it, and they can

tell you an awful lot

if you've got the right understanding

of the burial conditions,

because you weird thing that I think a lot of people don't appreciate is

you basically can't take fossils at face value,

particularly when you're trying to get into stuff like behavior and ecology,

because so between the animal dying

and the paleontologist digging it up,

potentially quite a lot has happened.

And that's where it's really easy to start

misinterpreting things, because if you just go

I I had one like this not too long ago, where I was an

editor on a paper.

And the the authors had done a pretty good job,

to be fair, but it was this discussion

of whether or not

several animals were together

at the time of their death. Mhm.

They had um theropods

together in this quarry.

And it's like, right, but there was loads of debris,

and you had loads of things like

fish scales and other small bones.

And it's like, okay, but this looks like

these animals died potentially

died somewhere else, and then

a flood or a river washed

them into this bay

or a channel, or it then the water level dropped, and they ended up together.

But that doesn't necessarily

mean they were together when they died.

And so, just cuz you've got

three animals together, what is the potentially

the story of how they got there?

So, you have to consider multiple explanations,

and then try to figure out what is the most likely.

>> Yeah, or what can you test with various bits of evidence.

So, there was some

uh Tyrannosaur inflicted bite marks on

a duckbill from Mongolia

that I worked on years ago.

The specimen was from Mongolia, but it was held in Japan in a Japanese museum.

I was working with the Japanese on it.

And I'm I'm not a taphonomist,

or the study of like decay in the history of specimens, and I am

in no way, shape, or form a geologist.

I did zoology for my degree.

Um but the guys I was working with, like, they were really hot on erosion and damage.

And they were looking

at some of the way

the bones had been damaged, and they're like, okay, we're pretty confident

that the bite marks

are sitting on top of erosion.

What does that mean?

So, it means that the animal had died,

uh and it was found in a It was found in

sand-covered, but in what would have been a river channel.

So, this animal has died,

washed downstream, ended up on a sandbank.

The sand is whipping past, cuz I've been in a sandstorm

in China, and it is not fun.

And that's starting to etch

some of the bones and damage them.

And after that, there's a bite mark?

>> After that, you're getting bite marks coming in.

So, that can only be scavenging.

That thing has been dead and sitting out for days, possibly weeks,

before something came along and chewed on it.

It pretty much can't have happened any other way.

>> have to take these really

subtle signals to to reconstruct the story.

>> But then, you can start piecing some other stuff together.

So, in this case,

the skeleton is pristine.

It's one of the best hadrosaur skeletons out there.

It's certainly the best from Mongolia I've ever seen.

Um and all the bite marks are on one bone, the humerus, the upper arm bone. Every Every mark.

We We went over the rest of the skeleton, nothing.

And then, the humerus is chewed to bits.

There's bites all over it.

But when you look,

there's two really distinctive patterns.

There's deep circular punctures.

And remember what the shape of this thing looks like. Yeah.

At the ends, and then along the deltopectoral

crest, okay, it's much, much bigger in a hadrosaur, but this bit, but remember,

that's where all the big muscles attach,

there's all of these types of This is from a different bone, but

different animal, but all these types of close, parallel scratches.

And so, that looks like selective feeding,

because it's using its giant

crunchy teeth at the ends to

get the bone off.

And this is off a buried skeleton.

And then, it's got these

Actually, T-Rex has really small teeth at the front of its

mouth, right right in the front where our incisors are.

They're called incisiform teeth.

They look like incisors.

They're a fraction of the size of the big ones.

Um and they've got a really weird flat back. Mhm.

And that's what these are.

It's hitting this with

the front of the mouth and pulling.

And that's mostly for eating. Yeah.

And that's why it's just on the deltopectoral

crest, cuz that's where all the muscles are. Mhm.

So, it's I always liken it to getting something like an Oreo,

and you take the top off,

and then you scrape the cream out with the teeth.

I think most people have done that. Yeah. Right?

But But that's what it's doing.

So, it's got this little row of teeth, Yeah.

and everywhere you get lots of muscle,

you get little rows of teeth together.

So, there's different bite marks for sort of fighting, killing,

and then there's different bite marks for >> Yeah.

So, it kills and dismembers with the big teeth up the side,

and then it feeds with the little front teeth.

>> And all that has evidence Yeah. in the bones. Yep.

What hunting strategy does it use?

Can we figure that out?

>> So, that comes down to the

um to that foot stuff.

Um they're relatively efficient

compared to a lot of other things, and particularly compared to the herbivores.

So, that means they're probably looking at long distance rather than speed.

And that makes sense, cuz even though the kind of stuff we're talking about,

like I said, maybe they're getting to 20, 25 mph,

that's pretty quick, but some of the smaller stuff is going to be a

lot faster than that.

And remember, that's a real upper estimate.

They're They're probably not that quick.

But yeah, So, they're just jogging after you. Right.

But But they've got

They've got the distance. So, yeah.

So, it It's much more uh Yeah.

I'm hyena- or wolf-like

strategy than like a

cheetah going for hyper-speed,

or a lion going for a relatively

quick burst, and it either gets you or it doesn't.

And then, you the people kind of I just go, well, like, but that's ridiculous.

Like, you They're not even that quick.

And it's like, yep, but if you're hunting

something big, that's not that quick, either.

And so, that That's a misconception.

Like, when I'm talking about juvenile

dinosaurs, I don't mean just out of the egg

and weigh a kilo.

Like, a juvenile Triceratops

could still weigh a ton,

and be the size of a rhino.

They're not that fast.

And again, if you get a head start on them, because as I said,

I suspect they're nocturnal.

So, cuz that's the other thing.

It's really hard to hide a T-Rex.

Even lions and tigers struggle

to kind of hide in long grass.

When you're 3 and 1/2, 4 m tall,

like, you you can't hide.

Maybe in a forest,

but even then, you're probably going to stick out, and it's going to be

hard to maneuver between the trees.

And we've got big Tyrannosaurs

living in what we know to have been relatively open environments.

Maybe there's some stands of trees, but it's not like

a woodland or a forest or anything like that.

So, they're living in the open and surviving in the open.

So, they've got to have a way of doing this.

And I think it's either

or some combination of being nocturnal,

so it's you relatively

easy to Sneak isn't quite the wrong word, but approach

things to cut the the distance

down for your initial strike,

and then just running them down.

Because, yeah, maybe a 1-ton Triceratops

or 1-ton Hadrosaur is rather faster than you,

but if you've covered the first couple of hundred meters to get up to

your top speed before they start running,

then you're probably much closer to

And then, will they exhaust

faster than you'll keep going?

Well, probably not 100% of the time.

No predator's that effective.

But I suspect that's what they're doing.

And it fits with what we know of their size, their vision.

They've got a very good sense of smell.

Again, that makes sense at night.

It makes less sense if you're diurnal

and operating primarily in the day.

And you got to hide this thing.

And then, we know they're pretty efficient

versus relatively fast, but not that efficient prey.

Well, there's a bit of a debate

of scavenger versus hunter.

They're They're obviously both.

A, because we've got things like the bite marks I just described, which is

pretty much definitive scavenging.

And then, we've got the healed bite marks with T-Rex teeth buried in bones,

which is pretty much definitive active predation.

So, we've got evidence of it doing both.

But can we possibly

figure out what was the primary strategy?

That gets much harder.

My guess is they're probably still primarily uh actively carnivorous.

Because if you look at stuff that's reliant

on being uh scavenger,

um I mean, the true scavengers,

like the vultures and condors

and stuff like this,

you have to be ultra-long-distance, very energy-efficient travelers.

You know, they're they're soaring soaring in thermals.

They're barely using any energy to fly.

It It's It's really

hard to to get very far.

How far were they spread?

Where did they Where did they

>> So, the ones we found,

you've got them from

Alberta down to probably New Mexico.

There's some I want to say there's some Tyrannosaurine,

so very close to T-Rex teeth,

that may or may not be T-Rex in New Mexico.

There's similar teeth in Mexico

proper, down in Coahuila.

Um so, about halfway down Mexico.

Mongolia, also, aren't they?

So, Mongolia, you have a thing called Tarbosaurus,

which is very, very close relative of T-Rex.

It's the species or nearest genus that we have.

Um but T-Rex is probably

occupying almost all of western North America.

So, at times, the east was kind of split off and and separate.

>> But the entire surface of Earth

had dinosaurs on it. >> Oh, yeah. >> Most of it.

>> Yeah, we We've got them in Antarctica.

We've got them in Antarctica

even close to the mass extinction event.

>> Just an insane number of dinosaur species

all over the earth.

Just the same kind of variety

we have in the animal kingdom today.

You just have in the dinosaur.

I mean this is this is

like how many dinosaur species were there? I don't know.

I mean I basically wrote an entire book chapter about this

because there's so many.

But this would make the number high, but this would make the number low,

but this would make the number high, but this would make the number lower.

Counter versus counter arguments

that you can guesstimate

almost any number and probably be

very accurate or very far out.

>> Yeah, but we should say that a large number of dinosaur species

are constantly being discovered.

>> Yeah, so we've named

give or take in the realm of 1500, 1600 valid species.

That that is not everyone agrees on every species, but most people would be

satisfied with that number.

But we also name in the realm of 40 to 50 a year and

we've been doing that for at least

the last 10, 12 years.

That number is rocketing up.

Shows no signs of slowing down.

There's loads of like we still never really explored India very much.

We're starting to find entirely new beds in places like

Argentina we know has a ton of stuff, but we've never excavated there very much.

Australia we know there's a ton of stuff we haven't excavated there very

Um so there's lots of places

even now to still go through.

This a good moment to take a brief tangent and look at paleontology.

So how how do we how do we find these fossils?

What's the What's the magic? What's the science? The art?

>> The same way more or less that people did in the

1750s or whenever you first start getting them.

That there's for dinosaurs in particular,

but this is true of

the vast majority of stuff.

There's essentially two ways of doing it.

The simple one is

where you have quarries

of particularly things like lithographic

limestone, so the printing

limestones or stuff that's very similar to that.

Uh sometimes it's often volcanic.

Um you get these super

super super fine layers of sedimentation

and that's where you get these places of exceptional preservation.

Whenever you see like the feathers

or almost always when you see feather dinosaurs

it's like oh we got the skin, we got the claws

and like the whole skeletons laid out.

So Archaeopteryx being like the the first bird being absolute classic example,

it's from these beds.

And there you find them by basically splitting limestone.

We don't usually dig for them.

It's because there are quarry workers and people

who are already doing this

because the stone is useful

because there might be one decent fossil for every, you know, few hundred tons

of rock you shift.

In which case you could get every paleontologist

in the world there for a couple of years and you wouldn't find very much.

You rely on the fact that there's hundreds of guys doing this constantly.

And then sooner or later they'll find something

and then you've got it.

That's the super easy way.

The only slightly more complicated

way is you go to somewhere

where geologically we know it's the right age

and it's the right kind of rock

and ideally fossils have been reported from there before.

And again, you know, geologists

map all the world's geology

years ago in quite a lot of detail. There's There's gaps.

There's places where we don't have the details, but in general we know.

And then you go there

and then you walk around and you look.

And that's basically it.

And you're looking for something that's sticking out of the rock.

Yeah, so you always get the

So there's this constant

and I think, you know, borderline

myth of the idea

that dinosaurs and mammoths and lots of other fossil things

like entered lots of indigenous

cultures because it's impossible

that the guys were wandering around

say Dakota and the Native Americans

didn't come across some dinosaur fossils.

That I'd agree with.

It's pretty much impossible they didn't come across some dinosaur fossils.

Did they come across

a whole skeleton laid out on the ground?

No, because those don't usually exist.

Because even if they're tougher

or It doesn't matter if they're tougher or weaker than the surrounding rock.

Dinosaur bones are, you know, in some way, shape or form they're lithified.

They They turn to rock

and they will absorb some of the

minerals from whatever they've been buried in.

And so even in places like Mongolia

and northern China where I've been to where actually

the the fossil bone is quite a lot tougher than the sandstone that it's embedded in.

Like you can find a bit of bone and pull it out like almost

like rub it with your hands and the the sand comes off and there's your bone.

They will decay pretty quickly.

You know, sandstorms, you know, sand just etches stuff.

Um the tiniest bit of moisture particularly in winter

gets into the cracks.

Bones are incredibly porous.

That freezes, that expands, that cracks. Bones just shatter.

And yeah, you find

shattered bone on the surface everywhere.

What you rarely find is

a decent bone on the surface let alone a skeleton.

>> So there has to be something that's sticking out just a tiny bit so

that you can see it

but it's still buried. Right.

And it And it happened.

The The The greatest

one that I saw

or that that I didn't see it happened but it was with a friend

of mine when we were in um

northern China and he went yeah, I can see a bit of a claw

sticking out of a hill. And it was.

It was like this this this much.

You could see, you know, less than a centimeter

coming out of a

And it's like so You know, that's the dream, right?

>> Dig a little bit and there's a little bit more.

Dig a little bit there's a little bit more.

Dig a little bit there's a little bit more. Okay.

And then the system we were running there is

some guys were searchers and some guys were diggers.

So he and I were searchers and we told okay, you guys have

You guys he found it.

You found something go and look for something else, we'll dig it out.

And so we come back a couple of days later and check in on the digging team.

So what is it again?

Oh it's a complete skeleton. And it was.

It was a thing

very, very close relative of um Velociraptor.

Ended up naming it Linheraptor

so the raptor from Linhe which was the nearest town.

And it was yeah, the legs were a little messed up because water had

got to them and the end of the tail was missing

and that was about it.

So like 90 plus percent

complete skeleton and it had been found

with you know, 5 mil, a couple of 16ths

of an inch of bone sticking out of a hill.

And that's what you want

because every so often behind that is a whole skeleton.

If you're looking for skeletons

on the surface they're going to be gone before you get to them.

And when it's a near complete skeleton,

you you did a show of

uh terrible lizards on Stan. Oh yeah.

>> fossil that sold for 31.8

million >> some of that.

So that that's a nice

sort big adult T-Rex.

So looking at a fossil like this Yeah.

sold for 31.8 million dollars,

what's the excavation process

for when you have a claw sticking out like you were mentioning

and getting that whole thing out without damaging the bones?

What can you say about that process?

So it depends where you are.

It depends how many people you've got.

It depends on your budget

and it really depends on the rock.

So again, like going into China and Mongolia

where this little guy is from

the bone tends to be relatively

strong compared to the sandstone that it's in.

That also That means that A it's fairly tough and

Um but it also means

that uh it's really easy to dig.

Like again, I've I've dug stuff by almost like pulling it with my hands

or like getting my fingers in.

Getting something like a chisel or a hammer you can just

cruise through this rock.

But like you have to be really careful not to touch the bone, I guess.

So it depends how how strong it is.

So again, so some bone is incredibly

strong, some isn't because they've all fossilized differently.

Um what we're usually doing is applying glue to it though.

There's this um wonderful stuff called Paraloid

and it's a special glue for fossils.

And as I said, bones super porous.

So it's really good at sucking up liquids.

>> you're basically filling it with glue

so it like makes it stronger.

Yeah, and Paraloid's really great because you can

it with acetone and it basically doesn't react with anything.

So you can fill your fossil with glue, but then if you want to

take all that glue

back out >> Very cool.

Um so yeah, what you would normally do is

for for something say in

um where the rock is relatively

soft uh and the bone's relatively

tough and um where we don't have any

like manpower and shipping

problems, which is a real issue in other places

you basically map out where you think the skeleton's going.

So um in the same way that you were doing it like, you know,

if you can imagine

like a cake or something and someone said oh I put a toy dinosaur

in there and you you've you've got to find it without damaging it.

So like well you'd stick your finger in the cake and just kind of

dig until you hit the edge of it and then you'd go in somewhere

else and go in and that's what we're doing.

We're just going in

from kind of all sides

and once you've hit three or four bones you kind of know which way

it's it's going into the hillside.

Usually sometimes they're very weird and mixed up.

And then you can just like almost trace the outline of it.

And then you'll just dig all the way around that

which might involve taking

the top off a mountain

depending on where you are.

In the desert it tends to be a bit easier.

But yeah, we we've had stuff where

like the first three days is just

10 people with pickaxes

just digging a hole to get down to the right level.

But sometimes the excavation

requires like large equipment, right?

>> Yeah, we've used jackhammers and stuff.

We've We've used a backhoe.

We've just literally driven it into the desert

and just dug a big hole next to the the to the fossil.

Um and then the classic thing of covering it in a plaster of Paris

jacket, strip strips of burlap sacking

plaster of Paris and some water,

wooden beams if you want to make something

really big and really solid,

and just basically wrap it all up,

and then take it out.

And that's again, that's what they were doing 150-200 years ago.

That that that hasn't changed.

Where it gets more

complicated is if you've got really hard

very hard to get through, particularly if the bone is fragile,

then it becomes difficult because if you want to like get a jackhammer

in, the vibrations means you're going to shatter your bones before you've even cut through the rock.

So then you might be down to doing it manually.

And there you was like Yep.

Hand hand chip chipping it out.

Yeah, the the other the other way you end up with that

like the classic Jurassic Park thing, like the the

Was it the second scene?

And they're digging in the desert and there's the whole

skeleton laid out and five or six guys all all digging

digging round it and exposing it.

And that's actually quite common in the

And the reason is

a huge amount of those excavations

are being done on government land.

They're national parks or whatever or or or protected land,

and very often the rules are you're not allowed wheeled vehicles.

Full stop at all to protect the environment.

You can walk in and walk out, but you can't drive.

And it's like, well all right, when we're in the desert in Mongolia

or in China or China or Mongolia and we're allowed to do this,

literally, yeah, my my boss drove into town,

hired a guy with with a JCB,

he drove out, picked it up with the bucket,

drove it back into town, and put it on the back of a flatbed,

and we drove it to Beijing.

If you're out in a protected area

and you can't, you've got two choices.

You can take it out by hand,

but that means it's got to be light enough

that half a dozen people can lift it,

which if it's a block of stone the size of this desk, you know,

a couple of meters by a couple of meters by meter high,

is basically So that means you either got to carve chunks

off, so take the head off, take the arm off and whatever,

and you can get it out that way, but it's not ideal.

There's always the risk of breaking,

you're losing some information,

and if you want to make a really spectacular

display, you don't want to

join through every big bit of bone.

You you want to show the public one one piece.

So the alternative is to get rid of every bit of rock you possibly

can to make it light enough to helicopter

it And so normally,

so in China, if we hit Yeah, if we hit that bit of bone

going in, we're just like going in round the sides

until we've hit it,

take the top off, take the bottom off, and just take it.

So the skeleton is completely

encased in rock, and it's as safe and secure as it can be,

and then we'll do the preparation

work back at the lab. >> That's heavy though. That's real heavy.

>> If you're going to have to lift it with a helicopter

and they've got a weight limit of only a couple of tons,

or if it's not, then you need to pay twice as much for a

much more expensive helicopter,

then you take off every gram of rock that you think you can

to get the weight down

so you can ship it.

So so it varies massively.

Yeah, and something the size of Stan,

that's that's months of work.

You're you're probably doing that across three or four years

with a team of half a dozen people.

>> So can we just talk through cuz just using Stan as a case study,

Stan was first discovered in the spring of 1987

by amateur paleontologist well, Stan

Second Son in Hell Creek Formation

near Buffalo, South >> But it was the Larson brothers from the Black Hills Institute

who dug it up.

And so they're they're a commercial outfit.

So they dig stuff up to sell it.

Um but they also make casts and sell them.

Um this Oh, I brought my other I do have a cast a cast

of one of Stan's teeth.

Um so like you can buy casts of Stan's teeth, you could buy casts

of the head, um you could buy the whole skeleton.

>> It's a famous skeleton.

You you see Stan in a whole bunch of different places.

There's a there's a Stan just up the road from here at Oxford.

Oxford's got a cast of Stan. Oh.

Um I was just at Lyme Regis,

uh the famous fossil locality in the south of the UK a couple of weeks ago.

One of the fossil stores has a skull of Stan in the window.

So Stan Stan turns up again and again and again.

>> So the process is written here involved removing the overlying

rock using heavy equipment like a Bobcat.

>> Yes, we'd call that the overburden, the extra stuff.

That's all the rock that's sitting above the layer with our fossil in.

And when you're lucky, that's

a foot of sandstone

and you shovel it out in an hour.

And I've seen guys in South America

There was a team in Argentina.

I think it was my old boss Ollie Rauhut showed me this.

And they took like

20-30 feet off the top of a hill

to get down to this fossil.

You know, so so something,

you know, it's a pretty half an acre in size, 20-30 feet of rock.

I want This is incredible.

I wonder if you can speak to some of these other components.

Carefully extracting each fossil bone by hand with picks and brushes,

plotting and diagramming the bones using a grid system at the dig site,

wrapping the bones in burlap

and plaster for safe transport

to the BHI lab.

Some of the stuff you've spoken to.

What's the What's with the diagramming?

What's with the plotting of the >> So yeah, so

you may well have seen something like this for

archaeology shows or something like that.

Um nowadays, again, tech's getting better.

People are using drones and stuff for this

or taking hundreds of photos and then building photogrammetry models.

You've just got a 3D model in the

>> Or just kind of modeling what we're looking at here.

>> Yeah, but but where you found everything.

So it goes back to that stuff we were saying about the process of

fossilization or the or the process of what's happened to that animal

from death to discovery

is, okay, it All right, a classic thing is bones being in a line.

So you can imagine

if, you know, bones are lots of weird shapes,

but mostly, or at least certainly lots of bones,

ribs, arms and legs,

things like this, they're quite long bones.

So if they're in a current,

they will tend to spin in the axis

so that they are facing the current.

So if you're finding all the bones are in a line,

that probably tells you that this thing has had quite a lot of water washing over it. Mhm, got it.

>> You're then probably going to be missing most of the small bones

cuz the big heavy bones won't be shifted by that current, but maybe the small ones will.

How does he actually model

where the bone where where you're likely to find the bones, the big bones,

the small >> might it might tell you

where to go and dig further down the hill, quite literally,

but it can also just tell you,

okay, this thing there's no way this thing died here.

It absolutely got moved.

So we need to factor that in when we're trying to interpret it. Okay.

Or we've got this one weird bone and we can't work out what on earth it is.

Well, maybe it's from something else

cuz if we know a whole bunch of stuff washed together,

maybe that's a random bone from a different animal.

Yeah, maybe that was eaten or there might be a different story if it

was washed like you like you were describing.

>> Any of that kind of thing.

So that's where you want to have

as much information as possible.

It says here, once it's a lab, the bones underwent

more than 30,000 hours of cleaning,

preservation, restoration, and documentation.

And uh Stan's skeleton is notable for its high degree of completeness,

about 70% by bulk, 63%

by bone count, and the exceptional

preservation of its skull,

which has become a scientific standard for the species. Yeah.

So there's this unbelievably beautiful skeleton, Borealopelta.

This is this is a helicopter lift.

phenomenal preservation from from northern Alberta.

>> It's full name is Borealopelta

markmitchelli, and it's called markmitchelli

named after Mark Mitchell, the preparator,

who basically spent I think Mark spent the thick end of two years on this.

Like this was his job.

And he did other stuff as well.

He's doing some other prep, he's doing some field work,

but Mark basically went in

every day, 9:00 to 5:00,

cleaning the rock because the rock was hard

and the bone was soft,

and it's extraordinarily well preserved.

Borealopelta is a genus

of plant-eating armored dinosaur.

Sure as hell looks armored.

This is an incredible

preserved from the early

Cretaceous period, about 112

million years ago, found in what is now Alberta, Canada. Amazing.

Look at this thing.

So Borealopelta is one of the ones where we've even got some of the

evidence of patterning, and it suggests that it's darker on top and lighter underneath.

So this illustration, I think that's Yeah, that's Julius Csotonyi did that.

He's a Canadian paleo artist,

and so that color pattern is roughly accurate.

Oh wow, so this is true to color. Yeah.

So we can figure out the colors.

Give Give or take some very large

um uncertainties, it's going to be something like this.

That's so >> these guys are

That's hard to eat that.

Near enough armored pine cones.

Yeah, though it's very much the adult condition.

Uh the juveniles seem to be far less, if not unarmed.

>> We're back to the juveniles. >> Right. So right.

So So but that's why we That armor is absolutely

going to be effective as

anti-predator, but it's probably evolved primarily

for combat and display

between members of the species.

Cuz otherwise, if this stopped you being eaten, the babies would have it.

This fossil is considered

one of the best preserved

dinosaur specimens ever found

with armor, skin, keratin sheaths,

and even stomach contents all intact. Incredible.

And so for that, he really did the work.

>> And also found miles

and miles and miles out to sea,

or the the paleo sea.

So this is from a site which normally gives us big marine reptiles.

Predatory plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs

and then um mosasaurs

and stuff like that,

and then it turned up an ankylosaur,

well, nodosaur in this case. Yeah, wow. This is incredible. >> Yeah.

So okay, let's complete the journey

of Stan to the museum

to like you get you get to the process of cleaning everything,

stitching it all >> Yeah.

Like Mark and like that suggested, you know, this can be

even on an animal that size.

Borealopelta is, you know,

4-5 meters long, we've only got to go up the front 2/3 of it.

Yeah, this this can be like needle level stuff.

That's how you get to the 30,000 hours.

>> Yeah, exactly that if it's that quality

and you want to get everything open.

And then something like Stan

actually really complicated skull.

The skull's full of lots of little bones.

The bones are really fragile,

so that just adds to the time.

I mean, at least the Ankylosaurus

the skull is just this giant solid block of bone, which makes life a

little bit So, yeah, they're going to put those hours in and that's really

going to help sell the animal, which is ultimately what happened.

I mean, Stan sat

in the Black Hills Institute for decades.

I mean, '87 and they sold it in like 2020.

So, they had it for

30 years uh sitting in their kind of little museum.

And then my understanding

was basically the brothers broke the company up and that's why they sold it.

Yeah, but it was still incredibly surprising

that it was sold for 31 million.

>> Yeah, I mean, far more than I think anyone thought it was going to.

I mean, I I liken

what you know, if you're not buying like teeth or an ammonite in some

small fossil shop, you know, when you're buying talking about things like

whole dinosaurs and whole Tyrannosaurus,

I think it's a bit like the art market

in it's worth what people will pay for it. Yeah.

And so, you know, Yeah.

plenty of T-Rexes had sold for a few million dollars and therefore everyone thought

it would might be five.

You know, 10 would be an absurd sum of money and then

It it went for 30 and it's like, okay,

I was going to say someone wanted it that bad, but clearly not two

people wanted it that bad cuz if only one guy is prepared to bid

30, then it goes for

you know, a million more than

the next highest bidder.

But presumably two people,

if not three, bid it to get that

Yeah, it was anonymous at the time, but now it's Abu Dhabi's Department of

Culture and Tourism came out and they were the ones >> got it.

And and then that record has been since beaten apparently by a by Apex,

the the Stegosaurus, which

I still haven't seen, though a friend of mine has sent me some photos of this thing.

Is it impressive to you this thing? >> No, not especially.

That's why I can't imagine that it sold for that much.

It's a really nice Stegosaurus.

It's pretty big Stegosaurus. Well preserved.

>> I've seen other very good Stegosaurus

and I don't understand why that's worth

that much more than something like Stan.

But it shows you the market.

So, so we're here in London,

there's a Stegosaurus called Sophie

at the Natural History Museum in London.

Sophie is a young animal, so she's not very big.

I mean, it's a sizeable specimen.

I'd say five-ish, 6 m off the top of my head total length.

But Sophie's like truly exceptional.

Like there's a couple of plates missing,

a handful of ribs, a couple of bones in the tail,

I think a couple of toe bones.

Like this is by far the most complete Stegosaurus out there.

That sold for I think

250,000 pounds, so maybe 400,000

dollars about a decade

So, this is now gone up like a

for an animal which is quite a bit

but is way less complete.

I for me those two things kind of balance out

because size is always impressive and that's what the public likes, but also a

complete one is better than a half a one or 2/3 of one.

So, yeah, so how has the price gone up a hundred

to or from yeah, 400,000

to 40 million in 10 years

for roughly the same thing?

A T-Rex is a little bit

more epic than a Stegosaurus.

>> a massive premium on it because it's yeah, a Stegosaurus

is one of those top tier,

you know, it's you can virtually do the list, you know,

T-Rex, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus.

It's in that first

six or seven, okay, these days Velociraptor

thanks to Jurassic Park, but it's

like it like but you know, that's that's the list of like seven or

eight things that any random human

who doesn't care about dinosaurs and doesn't know anything about dinosaurs, but they've probably heard of them.

You know, Stegosaurus is in that list and would have an idea of what it looked like.

Oh, yeah, it's got like the big stuff stuck along the back.

You know, you you'd get that answer from

almost any, you know, 99%

of people on the

But yeah, it's it's not a T-Rex.

So, how it's worth

yeah, 50% more and it's not even a particularly

complete skeleton, Apex to my

Like I I don't

I don't get it.

since we're on the topic of money,

if I gave you, let's say, 10 billion dollars,

how would you spend it?

You were forced I I forced you to spend it on dinosaur-related things.

How would you spend it?

>> Um I mean, I'd probably drop

half a billion or so on the best museum you'd ever seen

So, put together a museum.

You're like one of the great communicators,

one of the great scientists,

and so like you would want to push forward