跟读练习: What Dinosaurs ACTUALLY Looked Like? - 通过视频学习英语口语

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The past is a vast and mysterious land that begins at the Big Bang and ends in the present, expanding with each passing moment.
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It's the home of everything that came before, the key to understanding our present.
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Here, we find the most amazing creatures to ever roam our planet.
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Hundreds of millions of species so diverse that our imagination cannot do them justice.
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Unfortunately, the past carefully guards its secrets.
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While there are a lot of things about the past we know, there are way more things we know we don't know.
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And worse, there are probably even more things we don't even know that we don't know about.
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Think of the wonder of life.
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We now recognize about 1.5 million eukaryotic species, but there may be as many as 10 million alive today.
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And although we are adding some 15,000 new species to our collective knowledge each year, the vast majority of life on Earth is still undiscovered.
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This is just what is around today.
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An estimated 4 billion species emerged on our planet in past eons.
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but at least 99% of them died out way before humans spoke the first words.
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The vast majority of all the different species that ever existed are
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so utterly deleted that they have become part of the unknown unknown part of the past, lost to us forever.
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Or are they?
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Could we use science and imagination to glimpse a shadow of the unreachable past?
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Let's start with what we do know.
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To learn about creatures of the past we need fossils.
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Any sort of remains preserved from past geological ages.
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Bones or shells, impressions or imprints, things preserved in amber.
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The totality of all fossils on Earth is called the fossil record, and it's the most important window on the past we'll ever have.
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For a dead animal to fossilize, a number of things must go just right.
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the right environment, timing and conditions.
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And then the fossil needs to survive for millions
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or hundreds of millions of years and then get back to the surface and then be discovered before natural processes dissolve it.
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So it is kind of a miracle that we have what we have and know what we know.
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Take the dinosaurs, since they were one of the largest
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and most successful groups of animals for some 165 million years and are also a lot of fun to animate.
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What were they really like and what are we missing?
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In the last 200 years, we've found tens of thousands of fossils from over 1,000 dinosaur species.
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Lately, we've entered a golden era of discovery, and about 50 new dinosaur species are discovered each year,
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expanding what we know and what we know that we don't know about them, which is amazing.
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But it also makes us aware of all the things lost to the past forever.
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Imagine if we took all the animals
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that lived in the last 50 million years and randomly chose 10,000 individuals from 1,000 species to fossilize.
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Think about all the things that would be missed or that seemed too weird to be true.
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Like the giraffe, a yellow animal with brown patterns
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that looks like a horse and an antelope had a baby with a long neck and two tiny hairy horns.
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How many dinosaur giraffes were there?
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Animals so weird and selected for ecological niches so specific that evolution molded their bodies very absurdly.
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Today they might seem made up to us.
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We know a lot of species are lost forever just because of the environment they lived in.
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For example, lush jungles basically prevent fossilization as the chances that an animal will be buried here are low.
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Countless scavengers of all sizes break down freshly deceased animals extremely quickly, and the soil is often so acidic that bones are dissolved.
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And so fossils of dinosaurs from jungles are practically non-existent.
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Today, half of all known species live in the few remaining rainforests that only cover 2% of Earth's land mass.
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Millions of years ago, when dinosaurs roamed Earth, jungles covered much more of the planet.
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So, besides some insects and other small animals trapped in amber, there should be millions of species that emerged and vanished without leaving any trace.
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Trapped deep inside the unknown unknown.
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But just in general, biology trips us up.
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Look at your body.
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It's mainly squishy, gooey, soft stuff, which does not preserve well.
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What remains the longest are the crystallized parts of your bones, and so most dinosaur fossils are bones or teeth,
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usually fragments, not entire skeletons.
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This means that almost all boneless or shell-less animals are practically wiped from the fossil record.
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If we take a look at the stunning diversity of weird animals like worms, jellyfish, and slugs alive today, we can only speculate what we are missing.
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Although thankfully, many mostly soft and gooey species also left us an incredible diversity of shells
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that tell us an amazing amount about our past, so at least we have that.
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Still, when we think about all the boneless species that may have existed in the last half billion years, even our best attempt at imagining them falls short.
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But it's not like reimagining something based on its bones is straightforward, and so the way we envisage what dinosaurs actually looked like has changed a lot in the last few years.
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In the past, many illustrations had a bony, minimalistic look, with a toothy grin to signify fierceness and danger.
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But if we draw today's animals in a similar way based on their skeletons, just for the fun of it, we get the most bizarre creatures.
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Elephants, swans, and baboons that look like monsters right out of nightmares.
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So, similar to animals today, we should imagine dinosaurs with much more soft tissue, fat bellies or chests, weird soft parts like skin flaps,
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lips and gums, and just more pronounced features that would make them seem like much more pleasant fellows.
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Some soft features actually leave distinctive traces on bones that we can look for in the skeletons of extinct animals,
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which is where today's animals with similar features are really helpful.
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It's a similar story with colors.
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Because we know what the feathers of living birds look like, modern technology combined with the exceedingly rare fossils with preserved remains of fuzzy feathers
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give us a glimpse of the real colors of extinct dinosaurs.
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We know that tiny Sinosauroptoryx had a striped tail, and its tiny dino buddy Ancyonis huxley was white and black, with gorgeous red feathers around its head.
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Still, for the vast majority of really any ancient extinct species, we have no real clue what color they were.
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But we know what modern dinosaurs, birds, look like, and here we find the most amazing variety.
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So some dinosaurs will have tried to blend into the background, while others might have fielded aggressive color schemes to attract mates or to appear dangerous.
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Some might have had impressive decorations or colorful beaks.
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Some may have been striped or patterned.
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Similarly, we don't know that much about dinosaur behavior, although once again we can draw conclusions from existing animals.
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For example, even apex predators like lions spend a lot of their time lying around
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and cuddling and licking each other and playing and playing.
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Why would dinosaurs be so different?
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When we first found the skull of T-Rex with its mighty teeth and probably the strongest bite of any land animal ever, we imagined a fierce and stupid beast.
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But modern scanning technology has revealed that T-Rex had a larger brain-to-body ratio than some earlier giant meat-eaters.
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And it probably had very sharp hearing, vision, and a sense of smell, and was in all likelihood not a stupid animal.
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So maybe T-Rex was a cuddly fellow
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that spent a lot of time playing around or impressing potential mates when it was not hungry.
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Likewise, while their horns and shields might have made Ceratopsids appear to be natural born fighters, they were probably much more than that.
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Based on the behavior of modern animals and the complex dances some have to go through to mate, maybe their shields were amazingly colorful.
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Maybe it danced for its mates like many birds do today.
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How How intensely amazing these creatures must have been.
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And what a loss it is to us that we don't get to experience them first hand.
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What an even greater loss that there is so much we will never know about them and, even more tragic, all the absurd and beautiful beings that disappeared without a trace.
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But such is life.
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Time marches on without any concern for our feelings, and the past expands with every moment that passes.
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wild animals alive today will in all likelihood not leave fossils behind and also just disappear forever.
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We can do something about that though.
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Instead of accelerating the extinction we are witnessing, we could become the guardians of life and preserve it where we find it.
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If possible in the wild, if not then in museums, movies and in our minds.
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Because as amazing as our imagination is and as fascinating to think about the animals that are part of the unknown unknown,
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it is even better to witness them in the present.
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The land that we actually inhabit, where we get to experience life as it happens.
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看YouTube學英語：從恐龍視頻學影子跟讀

你是否曾邊看YouTube邊想「這麼有趣的內容，怎麼用來練英語？」這支關於恐龍真實樣貌的視頻就是絕佳素材！它的語速適中，內容生動，既有科學知識又有想象力，非常適合練習雅思口語或影子跟讀。想象一下，當你能用流利的英語講述「化石形成的奇蹟」或「恐龍的未知物種」，是不是很有成就感？

必學實用短語&搭配

  • fossil record（化石記錄）：「The fossil record is our window to the past.」（化石記錄是我們窺視過去的窗口。）
  • golden era of discovery（發現的黃金時代）：「We're in a golden era of dinosaur discovery.」（我們正處於恐龍發現的黃金時代。）
  • ecological niches（生態位）：「Animals adapt to specific ecological niches.」（動物會適應特定的生態位。）
  • soft stuff（柔軟組織）：「Most of our body is soft stuff that doesn't fossilize.」（我們身體的大部分是不會形成化石的柔軟組織。）

你的影子跟讀挑戰（shadowspeak）

現在就打開視頻，找到「For a dead animal to fossilize...」這段（大約從化石形成條件開始），跟著做3步練習：1. 先聽2遍，注意語調和停頓；2. 打開字幕，跟讀1遍，模仿語速；3. 關閉字幕，進行影子跟讀（英語影子跟读），盡量同步。完成後，錄下自己的聲音對比，你會發現「fossilize」「scavengers」這些詞的發音變得更自然！這不僅能提升口語流利度，還能積累雅思口語素材。快試試吧，shadowspeak就是這麼簡單！

视频中的语法

说话人最常用的结构，并附上视频中的原话：

结构视频中的用法
被动语态 be + 过去分词 — 强调发生了什么，而不是谁做的is still undiscovered · is called · be discovered
现在完成时 have/has + 过去分词 — 过去发生但与现在仍有关联的事have become · we've found · we've entered

什么是跟读法？

跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。

影子跟读法: 阅读完整分步指南 →