Shadowing Practice: Why dinosaurs are being found every week - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It was named in 1824 and that opened the floodgates.

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

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

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

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

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Now, soon after that name was given,

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dinosaurs started to be found elsewhere around the world.

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When the frontier opened in North America,

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

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

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so many new dinosaurs were found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And these teams, they would sabotage each other.

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They would steal from each other.

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They would fight each other.

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It was a vicious time,

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the time of the open frontier of the American West,

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the time of cowboys and gunfights,

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fossils, dinosaurs were part of that.

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But thankfully, that period started to end.

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Things calmed down later in the 1800s.

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And by the turn of the century,

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

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But it was a more gentle time.

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People didn't fight as much.

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People started to collaborate more.

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

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

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

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from Argentina, from Brazil, from Mongolia,

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

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

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

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

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So there is still a huge amount to discover.

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

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Yeah, he has.

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He's consulted on several of those movies.

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You know, so he's sort of,

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

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

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

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We've never found dinosaur DNA.

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That's one thing.

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

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

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I want to come on to the recent discovery.

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

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The Enigma cursor molyborthwickae.

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

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

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And this dinosaur is tiny.

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It's only about the size of a Labrador,

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so like kind of knee height friendly dog.

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

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Yeah it is.

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

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At the time when those huge dinosaurs,

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

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and the long necks and long tails were stomping around

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

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

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And I think it's really interesting that,

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you know, maybe when fossil hunting,

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

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the biggest and the most impressive,

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the most dramatic of these creatures,

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you know, the Diplodocus, the Tyrannosaurus Rex,

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the real kind of iconic beasts,

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people were really racing to find those,

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to be the people that discovered those.

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And actually, some of these smaller little scampering creatures,

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

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They were really tiny.

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And every single one had its place in the niche

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

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This Enigma cursor Molly Borthwickay,

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

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Molly Borthwickay.

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

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

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

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So people can name dinosaurs after themselves.

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They can name them in honour of somebody else.

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

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

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

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Often with these fossils, money talks as well.

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

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

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I'd recommend looking it up online

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

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It's really beautiful.

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This discovery was made in the western US,

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

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

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A lot has happened to the rock formations

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

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

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

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

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And then many, many, many years later,

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those fossilised bones, they'll turn to fossils,

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they'll essentially turn into rock,

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

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So there's a couple of really famous formations.

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The one that Enigma...

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I'm going to say its name wrong now.

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Enigma Cursa Molly Balthwick.

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There we go.

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I have learned it by heart for this episode.

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Well done.

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

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which is a late Jurassic formation in the Western US.

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

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

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Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus.

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

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

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

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

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

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It's a combination of things,

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

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

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

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

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they might just sit in a drawer for many years.

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

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

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

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

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that detailed science and every fossil needs to be carefully prepared

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and scanned and so i think you know that

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that discovery just keeps coming

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

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

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

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That's how I remember the T-Rex.

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It's a classic scene.

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Exactly right.

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Is that a realistic depiction of the T-Rex?

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

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What do we know about how it evolved?

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

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

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

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There are teeth marks on other dinosaurs,

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on big herbivores that lived at the time,

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

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that matched T-Rex teeth.

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

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We know that it had an incredibly powerful bite force.

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We can do some what they call biomechanics work,

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

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the strength of its teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

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We don't even know if it roared.

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

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

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because we haven't been able to,

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you know, there's no recordings of it,

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

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What is it that humans can gain?

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What's the real value from studying dinosaurs?

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

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how that depends on the environment that surrounds it.

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You know, the story of the dinosaurs,

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

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that make our lives possible and how,

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

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

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

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talk about the end of humanity and extinction.

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

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this asteroid impact, this absolutely massive asteroid impact.

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

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

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Anything much smaller than 12 kilometres across,

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12 kilometres is a huge size of an asteroid.

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

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

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

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that ruled the Earth for 160 million years,

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you know, we are a blip.

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

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So, you know, how just something can be,

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

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

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

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Vic, thank you so much for joining us.

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It's been a pleasure as always.

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Thank you.

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Yeah, it's my pleasure.

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Anytime.

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And that's it for today.

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

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I'm Hannah Gelbot.

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I'll see you next time.

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