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, actually. - I mean, this is a Velociraptor skull. There are some carnivores that are a bit bigger than this, but not enormously so which were knocking around as T. rex. The skull's the same type. ...toothed crap. But, like, you think about that. And 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 big. Like, 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, but not... - Oh yeah, it's gonna be eating Triceratops and Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus. There's even a couple of giant sauropods knocking around. - Got it. - In some places it's gonna be hoovering them up, but like, how often is it gonna eat... Again, Velociraptor isn't there, but how often is it gonna eat something the size of an adult Velociraptor? I mean, they're a fraction of our size and we're probably too small. This is like lions hunting mice. Like, you're just not gonna bother, unless one, like, virtually runs into your mouth, you're not gonna 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 conversation. 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 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. So I've got a copy of a T. rex skull in my downstairs from my office and yeah, 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 could fit- ... in it's, its mouth? - I can fit through, I can fit through it. - Wow. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And 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 that. - You have a to-scale copy. - Yeah, it's a cast, so it's just a giant mold made and then- - Nice. - ...pulled out like the dentist do your teeth, but very, very big. So yeah, they are 12-ish meters long, so what's that? 14 yards. Four and a half, maybe five to the top of the head, standing up. So another six yards high. And then seven-ish metric tons. What's that? About eight and a half 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, 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 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, 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 skeleton, there's a bit of space between you and it, and then some bars. And then it's usually raised up a little bit on a mount, 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, you realize that, yeah, 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 very large savanna African elephant is five to six tons, and we're looking at seven plus. And a biped and a carnivore. So yeah, you know, a big lion. A big lion is 200 kilos. So 430 pounds. Yeah. - Well, that's what, that's why I mean, it's why they consider it to be probably the most epic 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, 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, 'cause I do work on tyrannosaurs. But yeah, it just dominates conversations. - Well, some of the other features, maybe we can go through. - Yeah, sure. - So big skull, big head, small hands. - Massive head. Very kind of boxy. It's very robust. Big forward-facing eyes. Massive eyes. Massive. I mean, tennis ball-sized eyes. These things had amazing eyesight. Yeah. Giant teeth. There's a cast of a- - What? - ...Tyrannosaurus rex tooth. - Yeah, I know. So- - How... - 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 supporting it. - Right. But that tip part is- - But that- - ...that's the tooth? - The tip, as you call it. And, yeah, you know, so that would comfortably go through pretty much any part. - And then you realize just how thick it is. So this is a cast of a thing called Carcharodontosaurus from 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 width. 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 through basically anything it wants to. So yeah, they are truly unusual in that regard, even actually compared to a lot of the other very big tyrannosaurs, they're 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, 'cause you've got this massive weight of this head up front that you need to hold it up and not tip forwards. Really quite a massive body. Again, there's two or three other big carnivorous dinosaurs which people argue, oh, maybe they're a little bigger than T. rex, maybe they're a little smaller, but it's always in terms of length, which is one way of looking at things. You know, pythons are very long but they're nothing like as massive as, yeah, a 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 from South America. Maybe they get a bit longer, another meter or so in length. But in mass, we're talking about maybe only two-thirds, three-quarters. 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. But as I love showing, it's not a million miles off the size of my own. And I could do with a diet, but I don't weigh seven tons. So yeah, it really is really pretty small. - Two claws, two fingers. - Yeah, so two fingers. You will 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 functional. - They're not doing very much at all. This is what's called the deltopectoral crest. It's really important for big arm movements because it's deltoids and pectorals. 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, have much more curved claws. And then they have these little things, oh, where 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 onto something and something's wriggling, you want grip. And there's a risk that you'll just 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. If that makes sense. - Yeah. - 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've grabbed something that doesn't want you to kill it. Well, T. rex has probably the smallest ligamentous pits of any tyrannosaur. 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 seven-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. But they have this beautiful adaptation in the foot. So the equivalent bones in the foot, the metatarsals, for us make up the flat of the feet. But these animals walk like birds. They got three toes on the ground and then the metatarsals stick nearly vertically. That overall extends the length of the leg, so you can walk a little bit faster. You get a slightly bigger stride length. Don't worry, I've got the right bone here. - But they also have... Yeah, there's a good one. That one's a great one. 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. So one of the really ostrich-like ones, Gallimimus from the first Jurassic Park. 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 stable, 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 oviraptodiraurs, the early ones don't have this, and the later ones acquire it, and 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 imagine, as an animal, you know, 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 90s. It's that same principle. 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 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 of every single step. - I should say that I deeply admire people like Russ Tedrake, like the Boston Dynamics teams, like the Tesla Optimus robot teams that look at bipedal and quadruped robot movement. 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 a third, probably 40, 45% is the group called theropods, which were all bipeds, so T-Rex, Allosaurus, Velociraptor, Spinosaurus, many, many others that people may have heard of, they're all bipeds 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 bipeds. Birds are actually doing it in a much weirder way than theropods are. Theropods are basically 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. And the way they do that is the musculature on the tail. We don't have a tail, and indeed, mammals that even do have a, you know, elephants and even lions, 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. And T-Rex, this muscle is like two and a half, three meters long. It's going to be like this wide in the middle. So when that contracts, the leg goes back, the foot's stationary on the ground, so the animal goes forwards. - So the tail is... - integral to movement. - ...so it's a huge part of the biomechanics of the movement. - Yeah, we do it with the butt. So we're kind of weirdly how we organize our muscles. But this is generally probably a better way of doing it, because you can get a really long muscle. And 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 landing, meaning they get more spring. - So we should be imagining this gigantic thick tail, big body, - Oh, yeah. - ...big head. - Yep. - ...and 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'd probably been overestimating various speeds, primarily based on footprints. 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 at... So I think it was 25 miles an hour, so 40 kph was the very upper end of the estimate. So probably a bit less than that. - Well, that means it can move. - Yeah, so that's the thing. Big things move quick. I've seen rhino and hippo going at full tilt, and yeah, they're a lot quicker than you'd think. 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 step. And yeah, big theropods, T-rex 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 once. - So it's not running. It's power walking. - Yeah. But when you've got a four or five meter long stride, it doesn't really matter whether you're airborne or not. - Power walking, so you're never... So, or running, there are 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, just because of the mass of the thing? Okay. All right. - You know, that's the origin of cinema? - What's that? - It's where... This is Eadweard Muybridge. So the origin of cinema was a bet as to whether or not, while running, a horse had all four feet off the ground. And no one really knew this for sure. And a guy called Eadweard Muybridge, he was British, but he was living in the States. He was a keen photographer, and he basically did what people have seen 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 photos. 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 zoopraxiscopes, you know, the little thing you spin with a slit? 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. All right, all right, so we're standing in front of this thing. - Yes. - 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? Because we know that animals have never encountered things. 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. We, we- - So we would look very weird, right? - We would look weird, yeah. So, you know, there's lots of really cool records of, particularly you've got down in Indonesia and stuff, where you've got these insane volcanic spires, and it leads to 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 small. My suspicion is we're not. So animals, carnivores typically take stuff that is much, much smaller than them, despite basically every dinosaur documentary movie ever shows T-rex hunting an adult Triceratops, which is, like, the same size as it. And every documentary, you gotta have lions taking down a wildebeest or even a buffalo. 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 tyrannosaurs, where you occasionally find consumed bones from prey. So, if we put the lower end of that as 5% of the mass of a T-rex, we might actually be okay. If it doesn't consider us worth the hassle, then assuming you're encountering a big adult and not a half-size one that maybe only weighs a ton, then we might be all right. - What would be the survival strategy? So there's a thing that you criticized as not being true that I, I guess in Jurassic Park, not moving. - Yeah, it's nonsense. They can see really well. Like I said, like, T-rex has giant eyeballs. People don't realize that 'cause, like whales and like elephants, it looks small compared to the size of the animal, but what you're saying. And 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. A guy called Kent Stevens did a paper, and he's got a really nice graphic of it. If you just put Stevens T-Rex, there, it's the one with the... There we go. It's the one with the googly eyes. That's a baseball or a tennis ball-sized eyeball. And when you think about the incredible visual acuity of something like an eagle, which has eyes not much bigger than ours, think about what that's going to do. And 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 discover that there's a Nature Was Metal- ...subreddit- - On Reddit, yeah, for- - ...which is looking at- - ...gnarly, gnarly paleo things. Yeah, I come across it occasionally. - For dinosaurs, let's see what's the top post of all time. - Oh, that's a glyptodontid. - An Argentinian farmer recently found a 20,000-year-old fossilized glyptodont. - So these are giant armadillo-like animals with club tails. - Interesting. Wow. - Oh, that's Black Beauty, and 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. And my suspicion is it's the latter. I think they're probably primarily nocturnal, when they get that size. - Well, not moving might be a good strategy because it's cautious because it doesn't understand what these- ...primates are. - Yeah. But I think 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 because, 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 plain or a prairie with nothing else but a T-rex that was interested in me, it's worth a shot. If you're in the forest, I would try and get behind a tree. They're quite good at turning. There's been a couple of nice papers looking at the mechanics of the foot and the ankle and how quickly they could pivot. But we're much better because we're just so much smaller. So it would be very kind of Looney Tunes, but I think you could go round and round a big tree- ...yeah, but much faster than it could. 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, you could go for the classic joke of whatever it wanted, but the reality is the relatively big herbivores that are around at the time, it's probably largely leaving them alone because, again, just the classic dynamics of 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, a meter and a half long horns on its head and it's potentially pretty aggressive, and then even the big, so the Hadrosaurs, the kind of classic duck-billed dinosaurs, they're not, they're not present with any like obvious defensives. 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 with 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 bring down an animal that weighs five tons, it's nearly your own mass. 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've probably put a lot of effort into this and you're not getting that much reward out. And again, there are, again, there are exceptions. You've got things like lynx are the classic one. Lynx are not very big cats and yet they'll hunt adult deer 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. Every record we have of basically any large carnivorous dinosaur where you have stomach contents, whether it's like consumed something or healed bite marks, we get quite a, we get a 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 often 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. They're relatively inefficient, so actually they need to eat more for their size than an adult does. And 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, uh- - Young things. - ... young things is easier. - Yeah because- - Because they're dumb. - Right. They're dumb, but they're inexperienced. - Inexperienced. - But they're often feeding in suboptimal 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 is, 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 starfish, fish as predators, starfish, praying mantis, all the way up to things like big cats via stuff like crocodiles. It's how it works, so it'd be very weird if it didn't also operate for dinosaurs. And as I say, we've actually got the direct evidence for this from bite marks and stomach contents. They're taking small stuff. - Bite marks give a lot of information. 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. 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 had one like this not too long ago where I was an editor on a paper, and 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. So multiple 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 potentially died somewhere else, and then a flood or a river washed them into this bay or a channel or the water level dropped and they ended up together, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were together when they died. And so just 'cause you've got three animals together, what is 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 were some 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. I'm not a taphonomist or the study of decay and the history of specimens. I am in no way, shape, or form a geologist. I did zoology for my degree, but the guys I was working with, 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, 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 'cause I've been in a sandstorm in- in China. 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 - Oh, man. - 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. - And you 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. And all the bite marks are on one bone, the humerus, the upper arm bone. Every mark- 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 are two really distinctive patterns. There are deep circular punctures. Remember what the shape of this thing looks like, at the ends. And then along the deltopectoral crest, okay, it's much, much bigger in a hadrosaur, but this bit, remember, that's where all the big muscles attach. There are all of these types of- this is from a different bone, but a 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. then it's got these- actually, T. rex has really small teeth at the front of its mouth, 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, and they've got a really weird flat back. And that's what these are. It's hidden 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, 'cause that's where all the muscles are. So I always liken it to getting something like an Oreo, and you take the top off and then you scrape the cream out with your teeth. I think most people have done that. Right, but that's what it's doing. So it's got this little row of teeth- ...and everywhere you get lots of muscle, you get little rows of teeth together, pulling. - So there's different bite marks for sorting, fighting, killing, and then there's different bite marks for eating. - Yeah, so it kills and dismembers with the big teeth up the side- ...and then it feeds with the little front teeth. - And all of that has evidence? In the bones? What hunting strategy does it use? Can we figure that out? - So that comes down 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 'cause even though the kind of stuff we're talking about, like I said, maybe they get into 20, 25 miles an hour. 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, almost- - They're just jogging after you. - Right, but they've got the distance, so yeah, so it's much more, uh- ...hyena or wolf-like strategy than like a cheetah going for hyperspeed or a lion going for a relatively quick burst, and it either gets you or it doesn't. And then people kind of then just go, "Well, like, but that's ridiculous. Like, they're not even that quick," and it's like, yeah, but if you're hunting something big that's not that quick either, and so 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 can 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. 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 three and a half, four meters tall, 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. 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 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. I think it's either some combination of being nocturnal, so it's relatively easy to... "sneak" isn't quite the wrong word, but approach things to cut the distance down for your initial strike and then just running them down. Because, yeah, maybe a one-ton Triceratops or one-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 them. Then will they exhaust faster than you'll keep going? 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 have 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. You've 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 obviously both. A, because we've got things like the bite marks I just described, which is pretty much definitive scavenging. 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 actively carnivorous. Because if you look at stuff that's reliant on being a scavenger, 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. They're soaring in thermals. They're barely using any energy to fly. It's really hard to get very far. - How far were they spread? Where did they live? - So the ones we've 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 are similar teeth in Mexico proper, down in Coahuila, so about halfway down Mexico. - Mongolia also, or no? - So Mongolia, you have a thing called Tarbosaurus, which is a very, very close relative of T-rex. It's the nearest species, or nearest genus, that we have. genus, that we have. But T-rex is probably occupying almost all of western North America. So at times, the east was kind of split off and separate. - But the entire surface of Earth had dinosaurs on it. Well, most of it. - Yeah, we've got them in Antarctica. We've got them in Antarctica even close to the mass extinction event. 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, like, how many dinosaur species were there? I- 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 lower, this would make the number high, but this would make the number lower, counter versus counterarguments, that you can guesstimate almost any number and probably be very accurate or very far out. 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 1,500, 1,600 valid species. Though that is, not everyone agrees on every species, not everyone agrees on every species, but most people would be satisfied with that number. 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 are- Like, we still never really explored India very much. We're starting to find entirely new beds in places new beds in places like Ecuador. 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 and we haven't excavated there very much. So there's lots of places, even now, to still go through. - This is a good moment to take a brief tangent and look at paleontology. So how do we, how do we find these fossils? What's the magic? What's the science? The art? the science? The art? - The same way, more or less, that people did in the 1750s or whenever you first start getting them. There's... 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 The simple one is where you have quarries of particularly things like lithographic limestone, so the printing limestones, the printing limestones, or stuff that's very similar to that sometimes it's often volcanic you get these super, super, super fine layers of sedimentation. And that's where you get these places of exceptional get these places of exceptional preservation. Whenever you see, like, the feathers, or almost feathers, or almost always, whenever you see feathered dinosaurs, it's like, "Oh, we got the skin, we got the claws," and the whole skeleton's laid out. So Archaeopteryx being the first bird is an absolute classic example. it's from these beds. And there you find them by basically splitting limestone. We don't 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 hundreds of guys are 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 mapped all the world's geology years ago in quite a lot of detail. There are gaps, there are 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 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 fossil bone is quite a lot tougher than the sandstone that it's embedded in. You can find a bit of bone and pull it out, almost like rub it with your hands and the sand comes off and there's your bone. They will decay pretty quickly. You know, sandstorms, you know, sand just etches stuff. 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 happens. The greatest one that I saw, or that I didn't see, it happened with a friend of mine when we were in Northern China and he went, "Yeah, I can see a bit of a claw sticking out of a hill." And it was like this much. You could see you know, less than a centimeter coming out of a hillside. 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. 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. We're told, "Okay, you guys have..." 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 then?" "Oh, it's a complete skeleton." And it was a thing, a very, very close relative of Velociraptor. Ended up naming it Linheraptor, so the raptor from Linher, 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, five mil, a couple of sixteenths 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, Terrible lizards on Stan. - the T-Rex fossil that sold for $31.8 million. - Sight and some of them. - So that, that's a nice sort of big adult T-Rex. So looking at a fossil like this... ...so for $31.8 million, 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 or Mongolia, where this little guy's 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 resistant, but it also means that it's really easy to dig. Like again, 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 strong it is. So again, some bone is incredibly strong, some isn't because they've all fossilized differently. What we're usually doing is applying glue to it though. There's this wonderful stuff called Paraloid, and it's a special glue for fossils. And I said bone's super porous, so it's really good at sucking up liquids. - Oh, so you're basically filling it with glue so it like makes it stronger. - Yeah, and Paraloid's really great because you can dissolve 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 out, you can pretty much just dissolve the glue back out again. - Very cool. - So, yeah, what you would normally do is for something, say in China, where the rock is relatively soft and the bone's relatively tough, and 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 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, put a toy dinosaur in there." And you've got to find it without damaging it. Sort of 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 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 going into the hillside, usually. Sometimes they're very weird and mixed up. And then you can just 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've had stuff where, like the first three days is just ten 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 used a backhoe and we've just literally driven it into the desert and just dug a big hole next to the fossil. And then the classic thing of covering it in a plaster of Paris jacket. 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 hasn't changed. Where it gets more complicated is if you've got really hard rock that's very hard to get through, particularly if the bone is fragile. Then it becomes difficult because if you want to get a jackhammer in, the vibrations mean 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 manual is like- - Yep, hand-chipping it out. Yeah, the other way you end up with that is like the classic Jurassic Park thing, like, was it the second scene where they're digging in the desert and there's the whole skeleton laid out and five or six guys all digging around it and exposing it. And that's actually quite common in the States. And the reason is huge amounts of those excavations are being done on government land, their national parks or whatever, 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, when we're in the desert in Mongolia or in China or Mongolia, and we're allowed to do this, literally, yeah, my boss drove into town, hired a guy with a JCB. He drove out, picked it up with a bucket and 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 a meter high, is basically impossible. So that means you've either gotta 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 wanna make a really spectacular display, you don't wanna join through every big bit of bone. You want to show the public 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 out. - And so normally... So in China, if we hit that bit of bone going in, we're just like going in round the sides until we've hit 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. - But- - 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 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 it, so it varies massively. Yeah. 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? Because just using Stan as a case study, Stan was first discovered in the spring of 1987 by amateur paleontologist, Stan- Skekanson in Hell Creek Formation near Buffalo, South Dakota. - Yeah. 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. But they also make casts and sell them. This, oh, I brought my other... I do have a cast, a cast of one of Stan's teeth. - Oh. - So like you can buy casts of Stan's teeth. You could buy casts of the head. you could buy the whole skeleton. - So it's a famous skeleton. - You see Stan in a whole bunch of different places. There's a Stan just up the road from here at Oxford. Oxford's got a cast of Stan. - I was just at Lyme Regis the famous fossil locality in the south of the UK a couple weeks ago. One of the fossil stores has a skull of Stan in the window. Stan turns up again and again and again. - So the process as written here involved removing the overlying rock. ...using heavy equipment like a Bobcat. - Yeah, so we 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 Rowhurst, showed me this. And they took like 20, 30 feet off the top of a hill to get down to this fossil, you know. Something, you know, it was probably half an acre in size, 20, 30 feet of rock. - This is incredible. I wonder if you could 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 this stuff you've spoken to. What's with the diagramming? What's with the plotting and the diagramming? - So yeah, you may well have seen something like this for archeology shows or something like that. 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 just get a 3D model in the computer. - Or just kind of modeling what we're looking at here. - Yeah, but where you found everything. So it goes back to that stuff we were saying about the process of fossilization or the process of what's happened to that animal from death to discovery. 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. - Mm-hmm. Got it. - You're then probably going to be missing most of the small bones because the big heavy bones won't be shifted by that current, but maybe the small ones will. - Oh, so you actually model where the bones, where you're likely to find the bones, the big bones, the small bones... - So 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 because 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 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 at the lab, the bones underwent more than 30,000 hours of cleaning, preservation, restoration, and documentation." And, 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 a helicopter lift. Absolutely. - It's awesome. - Phenomenal preservation from - Northern Alberta. - What is this thing? - Its 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. This was his job. And he did other stuff as well. He's doing some other prep, he's doing some fieldwork. But Mark basically went in every day, nine to five, 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 incredibly preserved specimen. - 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 Chattoni did that. He's a Canadian paleo artist, and so that color pattern is roughly accurate. - Oh, wow. So this is true to color. - And so we can figure out the colors that— - Well, give or take some very large uncertainties— - it's going to be something like this. - That's so awesome. - Yeah. So these guys are— - That's hard to eat, that thing. - nearly armored pine cones. Yeah. Though it's very much the adult condition. The juveniles seem to be far less, if not unarmored. - We're back to the juveniles thing. - 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 because otherwise if they 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. So predatory plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs and and then mosasaurs and stuff like that. And then it turned up an Ankylosaur. Well, Nodosaur in this case. - Yeah. Wow. This is incredible. 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 together. - Yeah. Like Mark suggested, you know, this can be even with an animal that size. Borealopelta is, you know, four or five meters long. We've only gotten the front two-thirds of it. Yeah. 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 with the Ankylosaurids, the skull is just this giant solid block of bone, which makes life a little bit easier. So yeah, they're going to put those hours in, and that's really going to help them 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 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... Well, you know, if you're not buying, like, teeth or an ammonite in some small fossil shop, you know, when you're talking about things like whole dinosaurs and whole tyrannosaurs, I think it's a bit like the art market in it's worth what people will pay for it. And so, you know- ... plenty of T-rexes had sold for a few million dollars and therefore everyone thought it would, might be five. You know, ten would be an absurd sum of money. And then yeah, it, it went for 30 and it's like, "Okay, well... Two." I was going to say, someone wanted it that bad, but clearly not two people wanted it that bad, because 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 high. - Yeah, it was anonymous at the time, but now it's Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism came out that they were the ones. - I know they've got it. - And that record has since been beaten, apparently, by, uh... - by Apex, 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 a 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, we're here in London. There's a Stegosaurus called Sophie in the Natural History Museum in London. Sophie is a young animal, so she's not very big. I mean, it's a sizable specimen. I'd say five-ish, six meters, off the top of my head, total length. But Sophie's truly exceptional. 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. This is, by far, the most complete stegosaurus out there. - That sold for, I think, 250,000 pounds, so maybe $400,000, about a decade ago. So this has now gone up, like, 100-fold for an animal which is quite a bit bigger but is way less complete. So, 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 two-thirds of one. So yeah. So how has the price gone up 100 times, or from 400,000 to 40,000,000 in 10 years for roughly the same thing? - A T-rex is a little bit more epic than - Well, that's the thing. - a Stegosaurus. - T-rex has 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... Right, there's the list of 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'd get that answer from almost any, you know, 99% of people on the street. But yeah, it's not a T-rex. So how it's worth, yeah, 50% more So how is it worth 50% more, and it's not even a particularly complete skeleton, to my understanding? I don't get it. - Actually, since we're on the topic of money, if I gave you, let's say, $10 billion, how would you spend it? I'd force you to spend it on dinosaur-related things. How would you spend it? - 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 you would want to push forward the whole field. - And one of the ways to do that is a great museum, actually. - Yeah, but you want to... So it's twofold because, yeah, there's the communication and the education part of it, which is something I'm massive on, and I think research is pointless if you don't communicate it at some level. I'm not saying everyone needs to communicate everything. If you're working on the nuances of a calculation of the volume of a black hole or something, yeah, it probably doesn't need a press release or a new museum exhibition. But fundamentally, we should be talking about our work. But also, you've got to store this stuff. Many fossils are fragile. They need to be kept not necessarily in climate control, but at least you want a basement that is much more even than, you know, just sticking it in a box in a warehouse somewhere. So you've got to be able to store this stuff to be able to study it, or it's kind of pointless. But with the rest of that money, I'd buy a ton of land, like the quarries that gave us Archaeopteryx in Bavaria and have given us a ton of other stuff. I've worked on a load of pterosaurs, the flying reptiles from there. These stuff are mostly commercially run or just straight-up privately owned and not being commercially run. Someone's just inherited it, and is just sitting on this stuff. - So if somebody's building stuff on land, does that threaten the possibility of discovering something on it? - It's more that they're not necessarily exploiting it with fossils in mind. - Presume you have to balance the search efforts and then the land by- - Yeah, but you know, one billion on its own would go a very, very long way, almost infinitely, if you're just creaming off the interest and then funding excavations and supporting scientists who are already embedded in other museums or other universities or other research institutes. - So the rest is for buying up land so that those people can do their work. - Yeah, you look at somewhere like, you know, Brazil, and there's... I can never remember the name of it, but there's, again, one of these zones of exceptional preservation where superlative pterosaurs, fish... We've had a handful of dinosaurs and a whole bunch of other stuff has come out, and it's just a giant commercial mining operation. And yeah, when they hit a fossil when they think they're close to it, yeah, they stop and pull it out and they'll send it to a museum, and more often they'll sell it to a museum, and museums only have so much money. Whereas what if I owned that quarry and then I made sure everyone who worked there was trained and got a bonus every time they found anything and then I just handed everything they dug up straight into a museum? - So there would be some element of a crowdsourced paleontology or... - Yeah, but it's more that like no researcher ever needs to... spend money to access that. No museum needs to go and find a new donor to give them half a million to go and buy this one specimen, knowing that it might still go, yeah, to some Silicon Valley billionaire's foyer or whatever. It's like, "Well I own the land, so it's mine, so problem solved." Like, that's what's in my head. - It just would be wonderful to scale up the effort to where we can map out the whole, sort of, story of this time, because it's such a fascinating time in the history of Earth. - I've jokingly written a couple of times about how all science funding in the world should go to paleontology. And the idea being that, like, if you want to investigate black holes or neutrinos or chemical crystallography or panda genetics or whatever it is, you can do that any time you want. That's not gonna change a million years from now as it will from tomorrow. But fossils are in places that erode, and if we don't dig them up, they're gone. So we should dig all the fossils up now and then we've got forever to study them. But if we don't dig them up now, who knows, maybe there's something twice the size of T-Rex and it sat on a hillside for six months and then the wind got to it and it's gone and that was the only one that ever preserved. Well, we'll never know now. To be clear, this is a joke. I'm not suggesting we should stop doing cancer research and physics and other things, but it is, we're in a fundamentally different field where our science is literally disappearing. - Yeah. I mean, I know it's a joke, but there's some truth to it. And, on the flip side, one of the things, one of the hopes is that technology will somehow ease the search and discovery process, but as you said, so far most of it... - It hasn't. Yeah, I mean... - So far. - Yeah. You know, Jurassic Park '93, you've got that little scene where they've got the, like, thumper or something they call it, and it hits the ground and seismic, and then they go, "Look, look! Here's the whole skeleton." They tried it. It doesn't really work. We've tried looking for stuff with drones. That helps you getting into some inaccessible areas, but until the resolution is probably better, you've still got that problem of, like, looking, you know, with human eyes which are binocular, and being able to, you know, just tilt your head completely changes how you see something in a way that flying over just won't. I know they've tried looking... So because the bones are porous, they tend to suck things up, so actually dinosaur bones can be really radioactive if they're in areas where there are things like uranium. So yeah, there are drawers which have lead boxes around them and stuff like this for dinosaur bones, or just signs saying, "Do not handle." They're very low-level radioactive. Like, you'd have to stick it in your pocket for six months to run any real risk. But they're radioactive, much more so than the background. So can we do that? Hmm, turns out, not really. So again, maybe tech will advance. - But for now- - Right, and- - ... humans are quite incredible. - Yeah, we are. But also, paleo's kind of at the bottom of the pile, you know. There's not many of us. We don't have a lot of funding. It takes real money to adapt stuff. So, you know, like, we're scanning stuff with MRIs and things like that in hospitals, but it mostly doesn't work very well because the problem you've got is, like I said, the bones take on some of the properties of the minerals in which they're embedded, which means their density is really similar, and things like MRIs or seismic activity is basically looking for differences in density. What if it's the same density as the- you know, it's like I put some green plasticine in some blue plasticine, there's gonna be a bit of a join and they're gonna be very, very slightly different. But ultimately, you're not gonna be able to detect that through most means if you're looking for density or mass or anything like that. - Well, I personally think that there's few things as important to understand as the history of life on Earth. There's like books, right? There's like a- or maybe you could think of it as chapters, and then one of the chapters is the time of the dinosaurs- and then there's a great extinction, so it just goes up and up. - I mean, that's not a million miles off. I think Darwin had an analogy like that of we've got a few words on a few pages spread out, but between them you get an idea of what the story is and where it's going. - I think what humans don't quite realize is we may end up being just a chapter in a book. It might be our extinction event, self-created, perhaps a nuclear war, perhaps robots take over, perhaps we don't know. - Well, or dumb luck. I mean, the dinosaurs were doing absolutely fine until a dirty great rock hit them and you can't, you know, Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis movies aside, there's only so much you can do about that. - Hey, you take that back. There's nothing they can do wrong. All right. Quick pause. Bathroom break? We've taken a few tangents, but let's continue on the thread of T-Rex. Go to the skull. So the skull of T-Rex is iconic. You describe it as being incredibly robust and overbuilt. - Yeah. There's a lot of bone on there. So we mentioned a couple of other things, like Giganotosaurus, is this, you know, giant carnivore. If you put Giganotosaurus T-Rex in- That's the one. So that's, yeah, that's from my old blog. It's not my image. Um... - What are we looking at, on the left and the right? - So you've got T-Rex on the left, in orange, and Giganotosaurus on the right, in red. As I said, they're pretty similarly sized, but just look at the robusticity. Like, the front of the snout of T-Rex is all bone. And yet, the major openings, there's a thing called the antorbital fenestra, the opening in front of the orbit, is absolutely massive in Giganotosaurus. It's like half the skull. The opening at the back of the skull is much bigger. The opening in the lower jaw is much bigger. And actually, the jaw, what you can't see, side to side, is much thinner. So their heads are the same size, and as animals, they are about the same linear dimensions. But you can just see, there's just way more bone in the T-Rex. - It's incredible. - So it's not overbuilt; it's obviously evolved that this is the right amount of bone for the stresses and strains, for what it's doing and how it's acting. But you compare it to anything that's not a very large tyrannosaur, and suddenly you see just how much bone has gone into it. It is a very large... It's an absolutely large head, but it's a very heavy head with a lot of bone. And a lot of that bone is there to resist all the forces of all the muscles, because it has this giant, super-powerful bite. Which again, you can see in the teeth. - So the bone and the muscles kind of evolve together... - Yeah, yeah. - ...to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So you need this kind of structure for the power that, ...the crush has. - So one of the big things tyrannosaurs have... And this goes all the way down to the earliest tyrannosaurs were like our size. Like little diddy things, like two, three meters long, be a meter and a half tall. But they have fused nasals. So the pair of bones that, in us there's not a lot there, but obviously in something like a dog or something like a baboon with a long nose, it's like the whole top of the snout. And there's two, one each side. In tyrannosaurs, they fuse together, so it forms a solid bit of bone. So the whole top of the nose is solid. And then that makes the skull just fundamentally more rigid and able to take more power through it. The very early ones weren't super biters, I suspect, but they do also have the little flattened teeth at the front, so I strongly suspect the fused nasals, at least originally, is for resisting that. If you've got a long nose and you're pulling with quite a lot of force at the very tip, that's going to bend your snout. So, strengthen that. - Can you speak to the evolution from the smaller to the bigger of the T-Rex? What were some of the evolutionary pressures? What's the story of the evolution? - So tyrannosaurs go back to the Middle Jurassic. Tyrannosaurs were around for a hundred million years, so from about 160-ish, 165-ish million years till the extinction, 66.5 I think is the current dating on that. So yeah, you've got a hundred million years of them. And the Middle Jurassic, annoyingly, is probably the bit of the Mesozoic, so the whole dinosaur period, that we know the least of. Just by chance, we just don't have many rocks exposed of the right age that are fossil-bearing. But we've got two or three tyrannosaurs from that time. And yeah, they're really quite diddy. They'd be chest-high to us, two or three meters long, including the tail. Probably more like three, a lot of them. Little heads, long arms. They look every other carnivore going. There's not a lot special to them, at this point. They've only just separated from their nearest groups, which is actually something like the ancestors of Giganotosaurus, actually. They do have the fused nasals early on. They do have these special little teeth at the front of the jaw very early on. They're feathered early on, definitively. We have skeletons with feathers on them that are early tyrannosaurs, at least until the Early Cretaceous. But yeah, they're knocking around as relatively small animals in Europe and Asia. We have a couple from the UK. We have a whole bunch from China. There's stuff from like Kyrgyzstan and places like this. I think there's one, a relatively early one from Russia. And then when they get into the Early Cretaceous, they start getting quite a bit bigger. So someone like Yutyrannus, if you want to... There you go. So Yutyrannus is fuzzy. We have three specimens definitively feathered. It gets to six, seven meters long. - There's something funny-looking about the sexy, smaller, earlier version of the T-Rex. - But again, this is seven, eight meters, maybe weighs half a ton or a ton. Like, we are very much on the menu for an animal that size. And it's massive and dangerous. Quite what triggered them... There are general patterns in evolution of size change, and one famous one called Cope's Rule, I've worked on a fair bit, which is the idea that over time, things tend to get bigger, and they do for various different reasons, one of which is just pure, almost, like, diffusion. If you start small and you evolve, well, you can't get much smaller, but you can always get bigger. So you'll naturally kind of diffuse away. Whereas if you're a blue whale, you probably can't get much bigger, and its descendants will probably end up being smaller. But there are reasons that bigger things do better. You can hunt more stuff. You are more energy-efficient. You can move more efficiently. You're dominant in contests, particularly with conspecifics. If you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights, bigger things usually beat up smaller things. So there's going to be selection favoring them. But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events, so that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff, and then smaller stuff does better again. - So mostly, there's evolutionary advantages, but- - But a fairly big one. So yeah, it's the classic thing of there's a day-to-day advantage of being bigger, and that might last for a few million years, right up to the point that suddenly there's the biggest drought the Earth has encountered in five million years, and then all the big stuff just gets nailed. - Oh, so we should probably say, is this accurate to say that the bigger you get, the fewer of you there are? - There are, yeah. There's just less fundamental space, you know? There's more mice than there are elephants. There are more elephants than there are whales. Like, there is only so much biomass that an ecosystem can support. - And bigger things are just worse at repopulating in extinction events- - Right, so they're less likely to survive because they need more fuel. You know, what would feed a mouse for a year won't feed an elephant for a week. So if... And, of course, the mice are going to have an easier time finding a few little seeds than an elephant's going to find tons of food, and then they've got less genetic diversity. There might be 5,000 mice, there might be 200 elephants, so who's likely to have more genes or who's likely to have selection acting on those genes to produce a survivor? Well, the one with five or ten or a thousand times the population. And then, on top of that, you've then got the very slow reproductive cycle which then, again, gives evolution not a lot to work with if, as an elephant, you're breeding once every five years, and as a mouse you're doing it once every eight weeks. - What can we say about the evolution of just the massive bone-crushing power of- - So that starts kicking in seriously, kind of Eotyrannosaurus up. So that's when you start getting not just…

Transcript truncated. Watch the full video for the complete content.