Pratique du Shadowing: Why dinosaurs are being found every week - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

There's a new dinosaur being found once every week on average.

⏸ En pause

Vitesse :

314 phrases

Si les phrases sont trop courtes ou trop longues, cliquez sur Edit pour les ajuster.

There's a new dinosaur being found once every week on average.

We live alongside thousands of species that are the direct descendants of dinosaurs,

or one type of dinosaurs, birds.

Hey What in the World listeners, it's Hannah Gelbart here.

Today I'm going to take you into the world of dinosaurs.

Now when I was growing up,

my little brother was obsessed with them.

I think it's something that every kid goes through and loads of adults seem to be too.

And I found out the other day that scientists are still discovering new dinosaurs.

They're a whole species that we just didn't know existed.

So today you're going to hear some of the things we have learned from dinosaurs.

And also, how come there's still so much that we just don't know?

Well, let's find out about this now from Vic Gill, our science correspondent.

Hi, Vic.

Hello, how are you doing, hon?

Yeah, great.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

So were you obsessed with dinosaurs when you were growing up?

Yeah, somewhat.

I think as a kid,

you know, had the models and the toys and the sort of general enthusiasm.

I don't think I was quite as much of a dinosaur nerd as maybe some of my colleagues

that work on the science desk now, but certainly very enthusiastic.

And, you know, I'm old enough to have been a kid that was able to go to the,

when the Jurassic Park franchise started,

was taken to the cinema then and was just absolutely enthralled.

So it's a real, you know,

they really kind of dominate our culture, I think.

It's a real fascination.

Why do you think that is?

Where do you think the fascination comes from?

I mean, I think they're just fascinating, aren't they?

You know, they are the biggest ones with the size of passenger jets,

just these enormous monsters.

They ruled the earth for about 160 million years.

And, you know, and to put that into context,

humans have been around for about 300,000 years.

So they really were these just like these dominating kings of the environment of prehistory for all of

that time in these different eras.

We've been hearing from someone who started collecting fossils

when she was 12 now she's 17 and she teaches people about paleontology which is the study of fossils.

This is Aswata Biju who's from India.

Namaste.

I'm a young paleontologist of India and founder of the Fossil Forever Club.

Paleontology, to be more specific,

is a vast and interdisciplinary science that connects your both geological and biological science.

But that one point that fascinates me too much towards the field of paleontology is

that the way it can connect the three tenses of your English grammar that is your past,

present and future.

Paleontology is the only field that can help you understand the past of earth and the prehistoric organisms,

the present condition in which you find them fossilized and the present phenomena that happen in earth and the future.

What possibly could happen if certain results keep happening.

Since this is something very unique to the field, it fascinates me more.

So, Vik, what do you think about what Ashwatha said about how learning about the past,

particularly from dinosaurs, can help us learn about the future?

That's such a lovely way of looking at it.

And of course, you know,

we live alongside thousands of species that are the direct descendants of dinosaurs or one type of dinosaurs, birds.

You know, birds directly descended from theropods and just look at the diversity in the bird world.

So, you know, we get kind of a glimpse of that insight into that ecology,

into those creatures, you know, every day.

So it's just such an interesting,

and because they ruled the earth for so very long and

because there were several different transitions and all of this evolution to kind of understand,

And they give us such an insight into just how life moves

and changes and how the world changed over such a vast period of time.

And, of course, you know,

the great extinction, the demise of the dinosaurs was such a fascinating story within itself, so dramatic.

You know, the idea of this 12-kilometre-wide asteroid crashing into the Earth and just changing everything.

So, you know, I think it gives us this sense of this evolution of prehistory of just life, I suppose.

I didn't actually know that birds were descended from dinosaurs until I started researching this.

It's so interesting.

Yeah, and you know, you'll never look at chickens' feet in the same way ever again.

So I keep chickens and I can never,

I'm just always, I guess maybe just because I'm a bit of a weirdo and a bit of a nerd,

but I'm always fascinated sort of watching them move around and especially watching their feet.

When you see those claws and those kind of almost scaly legs,

they look like little feathery dinosaurs.

Totally.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And, you know, and there are some,

we can talk about this,

but there are some of the best preserved fossils from parts of China,

from the kind of later era of the dinosaurs,

around about 60, 60 million years,

65 million years ago, where we can see that actually some of those dinosaurs,

some of those dinosaurs that were the ancestors of birds had feathers.

We can even see some of the pigments in those feathers that were preserved.

It's fascinating.

So you can really see this transition and the evolution of feathers and the evolution of animals that we live alongside today.

What are some of the oldest fossils that have been discovered?

It was 200 years last year since the first dinosaur was officially discovered.

So I was speaking to Professor Steve Brissati, who's from Edinburgh University.

He's a paleontologist, about what that race to find these fossils

and some of the most significant fossils were in the age of looking for dinosaurs.

I'm Steve Brussati.

I'm a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and I'm a paleontologist.

I'm one of those people that gets to dig up dinosaur bones for my job.

100

It's a great job, but it's actually quite a new job in terms of human history.

101

It's only been the last couple of centuries where there have been paleontologists.

102

And that's because although people have been encountering and discovering dinosaur bones and other fossils for millennia,

103

It was in the 1800s in England where the very first dinosaurs were discovered

104

and studied by scientists at museums and universities and given formal names.

105

And it was only then that it was understood that these bones belonged to a totally extinct group of giant reptiles.

106

Now the very first one ever given a name was Megalosaurus that was found near Oxford.

107

It was named in 1824 and that opened the floodgates.

108

Soon after, many other dinosaurs were found in England and then across Europe.

109

And by the 1840s, so many of these bones were being found

110

and they were being given lots of different names that a new name was needed to characterize the entire group.

111

And that's when Richard Owen from the Natural History Museum in London came up with the name Dinosauria.

112

Now, soon after that name was given,

113

dinosaurs started to be found elsewhere around the world.

114

When the frontier opened in North America,

115

when settlers from Europe began pushing farther and farther west into the Great Plains

116

and the Rocky Mountains in the U.S and in Canada,

117

so many new dinosaurs were found.

118

So many, in fact, that different rival paleontologists were starting to fight each other for the best fossils.

119

There's this famous period of time called the Bone Wars where there were two scientists,

120

a guy named Marsh at Yale University in the U.S.,

121

a guy named Cope from Philadelphia in the U.S.

122

They literally sent out teams out to the western part of North America to fight each other for the best dinosaurs.

123

They wanted to find the biggest dinosaurs and the boldest dinosaurs and the newest dinosaurs.

124

And these teams, they would sabotage each other.

125

They would steal from each other.

126

They would fight each other.

127

It was a vicious time,

128

the time of the open frontier of the American West,

129

the time of cowboys and gunfights,

130

fossils, dinosaurs were part of that.

131

But thankfully, that period started to end.

132

Things calmed down later in the 1800s.

133

And by the turn of the century,

134

there were still many people all around the world looking for dinosaurs.

135

But it was a more gentle time.

136

People didn't fight as much.

137

People started to collaborate more.

138

and today the greatest dinosaur discoveries are being made not just in the US

139

or in England or in other parts of Europe but all over the world.

140

There's a new dinosaur being found once every week on average and most of them are coming from China,

141

from Argentina, from Brazil, from Mongolia,

142

from South Africa, from some of the enormous countries that are developing and growing so quickly.

143

But we are still finding many dinosaurs right here in the UK including right here in Scotland.

144

It's a big part of my job going to the Isle of Skye and finding new Jurassic Age dinosaurs.

145

And we have new ones that we are working on right now.

146

So there is still a huge amount to discover.

147

And Steve was actually consulted on the Jurassic Park films, wasn't he?

148

Yeah, he has.

149

He's consulted on several of those movies.

150

You know, so he's sort of,

151

he's walked the red carpet and been on set as a paleontologist with filmmakers who want to,

152

you know, try to, in that whole kind of,

153

you know, it's fiction, it's drama.

154

We've never found dinosaur DNA.

155

That's one thing.

156

I think that would be something that would be the real kind of holy grail of searches for evidence about dinosaurs.

157

It's still very much the fossil evidence are the jigsaw pieces of what we know.

158

I want to come on to the recent discovery.

159

I'm going to see if I can get this right.

160

The Enigma cursor molyborthwickae.

161

It's the new species of dinosaur that was recently discovered.

162

And that dinosaur is now on display at the Natural History Museum here in London.

163

And this dinosaur is tiny.

164

It's only about the size of a Labrador,

165

so like kind of knee height friendly dog.

166

But it's a really significant discovery isn't it?

167

Yeah it is.

168

I think it's the latest addition to that dinosaur display.

169

At the time when those huge dinosaurs,

170

the kind of diplodocus, those big boss sized beasts with the huge feet

171

and the long necks and long tails were stomping around

172

and this little critter was scampering around and chasing its prey down in the sort of undergrowth.

173

So it really builds up that picture of what the world looked like.

174

And I think it's really interesting that,

175

you know, maybe when fossil hunting,

176

you know, when paleontology began and when we started to build a picture of this realm of the dinosaurs,

177

the biggest and the most impressive,

178

the most dramatic of these creatures,

179

you know, the Diplodocus, the Tyrannosaurus Rex,

180

the real kind of iconic beasts,

181

people were really racing to find those,

182

to be the people that discovered those.

183

And actually, some of these smaller little scampering creatures,

184

you know, something like the smallest dinosaurs were the size of little songbirds.

185

They were really tiny.

186

And every single one had its place in the niche

187

and kind of built a picture of what that whole ecosystem was like for so many millions of years on Earth.

188

This Enigma cursor Molly Borthwickay,

189

it's named after someone, isn't it, right?

190

Molly Borthwickay.

191

Who was she and how do you get a dinosaur named after you?

192

You can get a dinosaur named after you multiple different ways,

193

you know, because people who find these species can make a decision about what they want to call them.

194

So people can name dinosaurs after themselves.

195

They can name them in honour of somebody else.

196

There's a certain kind of pattern of nomenclature as well with the kind of the Latin names.

197

So the enigma is basically about this particular dinosaur filling in a sort of mysterious part of

198

that ecosystem and that puzzle that they were trying to solve.

199

Often with these fossils, money talks as well.

200

There was a very generous donation by someone called Molly Borthwick to the Natural History Museum

201

that allowed them to buy this beautiful, incredibly complete fossil.

202

I'd recommend looking it up online

203

because it is just one of those examples of where you can just see the whole animal in skeletal form.

204

It's really beautiful.

205

This discovery was made in the western US,

206

United States, and there have been quite a few different dinosaur fossils found there.

207

But they tend to come from certain parts of the world, don't they?

208

A lot has happened to the rock formations

209

that make up the land on which we live and the rock formations that the dinosaurs dwelled on.

210

That means that there are only certain parts of the world where those fossils are encapsulated and held and preserved.

211

So essentially it's where sediments trap the bones of animals and then something happens to keep that sediment locked away,

212

perhaps a volcanic eruption that means that gets covered with volcanic rock.

213

And then many, many, many years later,

214

those fossilised bones, they'll turn to fossils,

215

they'll essentially turn into rock,

216

into very, very hard rock and they'll erode out of the earth and people will start finding fossils.

217

So there's a couple of really famous formations.

218

The one that Enigma...

219

I'm going to say its name wrong now.

220

Enigma Cursa Molly Balthwick.

221

There we go.

222

I have learned it by heart for this episode.

223

Well done.

224

So the one that Enigma Cursa came from was actually from the Morrison Formation,

225

which is a late Jurassic formation in the Western US.

226

And there's all sorts of iconic species that have come from that.

227

Stegosaurus, that beast with the big plates down its back.

228

Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus.

229

There's another formation in North America in parts of Montana,

230

North Dakota and South Dakota so these rocks are sort of spread around different states,

231

that's called the Hell Creek Formation and there's a couple of really famous really rich

232

fossil beds in the Mongolian Gobi Desert and also in China.

233

So Vic, how is it that when we know so much we're still discovering so much more about dinosaurs?

234

It's a combination of things,

235

it's Every tiny piece of bone is a little addition to a puzzle.

236

The bones are emerging faster than we can do the really in-depth scientific study to figure out exactly what those bones are.

237

Every single little fragment of bone could potentially be something new.

238

And as those are collected and brought into museum collections and kept and preserved,

239

they might just sit in a drawer for many years.

240

There's a lot of papers being published where a researcher will revisit a collection

241

and re-study some fossils that have maybe left people a bit puzzled

242

and they sort of didn't know whether they were new they looked like something a bit strange

243

and they put them away again the bones are being collected faster than we can do

244

that detailed science and every fossil needs to be carefully prepared

245

and scanned and so i think you know that

246

that discovery just keeps coming

247

so back in those jurassic park films the t-rex is this

248

evil monster it's the species well it's got those those little t-rex arms

249

but um it comes on these massive legs and it's you know eats people up when they're on the toilet.

250

That's how I remember the T-Rex.

251

It's a classic scene.

252

Exactly right.

253

Is that a realistic depiction of the T-Rex?

254

Was it just a brutal thug or you know did it have a different side and what do we know about it?

255

What do we know about how it evolved?

256

So that's a really good question because the answer to

257

that in terms of its behaviour is we can take clues from its bones

258

and about how it must have eaten and preyed on things and what it must have eaten.

259

There are teeth marks on other dinosaurs,

260

on big herbivores that lived at the time,

261

on big plant-eating dinosaurs that lived at the same time of T-Rex,

262

that matched T-Rex teeth.

263

So we do know that T-Rex would have pounced on really large animals and just dug its huge teeth into them.

264

We know that it had an incredibly powerful bite force.

265

We can do some what they call biomechanics work,

266

looking at its jaw and the forces that that jaw would have been capable of withstanding,

267

the strength of its teeth.

268

So we do know that that all points to it being a very brutal hunter.

269

In terms of its behaviour and what it would have hunted,

270

it's not that clear because we don't,

271

you know, social information, information about behaviour, doesn't really fossilise.

272

So it's all just kind of clues that we can take from bones.

273

We don't even know if it roared.

274

You know that kind of really classic sort of screeching roar that was created for the T-Rex in the Jurassic Park movies?

275

We don't know if that's the noise it would have made at all,

276

because we haven't been able to,

277

you know, there's no recordings of it,

278

and we haven't been able to see some of the soft tissue inside its body that would have produced those sounds.

279

What is it that humans can gain?

280

What's the real value from studying dinosaurs?

281

Fundamentally, it's a study of how life evolves on our planet,

282

how that depends on the environment that surrounds it.

283

You know, the story of the dinosaurs,

284

The story of the different extinctions on our planet tell us a lot about the life support mechanisms on Earth

285

that make our lives possible and how,

286

through history, the life that this planet has supported has changed.

287

We can't talk about the dinosaurs without talking about extinction,

288

the big asteroid, and it feels some of the conversations about climate change today have that same fear,

289

talk about the end of humanity and extinction.

290

The event that wiped out the dinosaurs was such a hugely dramatic and hopefully one-off event,

291

this asteroid impact, this absolutely massive asteroid impact.

292

And I should say that it's something that's an active area of science at the moment,

293

is looking out for anything that could be on a collision course with Earth from space.

294

Anything much smaller than 12 kilometres across,

295

12 kilometres is a huge size of an asteroid.

296

And there's nothing on a collision course at the moment

297

that we should be aware of that hopefully will put some listeners' minds at ease.

298

But, yeah, I think this is such an incredible story of how these absolutely dominant animals

299

that ruled the Earth for 160 million years,

300

you know, we are a blip.

301

Humans are an absolute blip in a timescale compared to the reign of the dinosaurs.

302

So, you know, how just something can be,

303

how something can happen that can wipe out such a dominating species.

304

Maybe that could give us a little bit more of a sense of humility

305

and our dependence on the kind of life support system of this planet.

306

Vic, thank you so much for joining us.

307

It's been a pleasure as always.

308

Thank you.

309

Yeah, it's my pleasure.

310

Anytime.

311

And that's it for today.

312

I hope you enjoyed this episode of What in the World.

313

I'm Hannah Gelbot.

314

I'll see you next time.

TRENDING

Populaires

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.

☕ Offrez-nous un café

ShadowingEnglish reste 100% gratuit grâce à votre soutien. Les coûts des serveurs et de l'IA sont élevés — votre café nous aide à continuer ! 🙏

Faire un don via PayPal

ShadowingEnglish.com – Pratique du Shadowing en Anglais

Parlez anglais couramment grâce au Shadowing. Écoutez des vidéos YouTube de locuteurs natifs, répétez phrase par phrase et développez une vraie prononciation et fluidité — utilisé par les candidats IELTS du monde entier.

Pratique du Shadowing: Why dinosaurs are being found every week - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

Populaires

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Pratique du Shadowing: Why dinosaurs are being found every week - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

Télécharger l'application

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?