Dinosaurs Were Weirder Than We Thought

Science is Future

Dinosaurs were not like I thought...   I’m finally learning the truth about dinosaurs.  I’ve loved dinosaurs since I was a kid, but it turns out a lot of what I thought I knew is wrong… or at the least outdated. So, in this video, I’m gonna show you the cutting edge of dinosaur discovery. I’ll give you rare access into a warehouse full of dinosaur bones, try to find my own fossil, and show you something new these scientists just discovered…  Chapters:  00:00 What were dinosaurs really like? 01:08 Why is today a big deal for dinosaur discovery? 03:31 How big were dinosaurs, really? 05:49 When did dinosaurs actually live? 08:20 How many dinosaurs have we found? 09:26 What was the T-Rex like? 10:39 Did I find a bone?? 11:55 What IS a dinosaur? 14:31 What did dinosaur skin feel like? 15:06 What color were dinosaurs? 15:51 Can you guess this modern animal? 16:54 How were dinosaur fossils formed? 17:34 Why did dinosaurs go extinct?* 19:14 Why do we study dinosaurs?  Thank you to the team at the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum and the Pipestone Creek Bonebed for making my dreams of hunting for dinosaur fossils come true!  Correction:  17:40 Some of the dinosaurs animated here went extinct before this mass extinction event. Thank you to the thoughtful commenter who pointed this out! We sincerely appreciate it.    Bio: Cleo Abram is an Emmy-nominated independent video journalist. On her show, Huge If True, Cleo explores complex technology topics with rigor and optimism, helping her audience understand the world around them and see positive futures they can help build. Before going independent, Cleo was a video producer for Vox. She wrote and directed the Coding and Diamonds episodes of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. She produced videos for Vox’s popular YouTube channel, was the host and senior producer of Vox’s first ever daily show, Answered, and was co-host and producer of Vox’s YouTube Originals show, Glad You Asked.  Gear I use:  Camera: Sony A7SIII Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM and 35mm prime Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX  Music: Musicbed and Tom Fox Musicbed SyncID: MB01ELGXSOMSWW0  Welcome to the joke down low:  Why did the Archaeopteryx catch the worm? Because it was an early bird!  Use the word “bird” in a comment to let me know you’re a real one who read to the end!

Transcript

00:01That right there is the toe bone from a baby dinosaur.

00:05And I'm holding it because I'm finally learning the truth about dinosaurs.

00:12I've loved dinosaurs since I was a kid.

00:14But it turns out that a lot of what I thought I knew is actually wrong.

00:19Or at least outdated.

00:20So, in this video, I'm going to show you the cutting edge of dinosaur discovery.

00:24I'm going to give you rare access into a warehouse full of dinosaur bones.

00:29Go out into the field and try to discover my own fossil.

00:32And show you something new these scientists just discovered.

00:36I think we got ourselves a dinosaur.

00:38A new look at dinosaurs.

00:39The golden age of dinosaur discovery.

00:44Uncovering almost one new dinosaur species a week.

00:47There's so much more to these amazing creatures that we really have just begun.

00:51I think I found a dinosaur bone.

00:59We're in Alberta, Canada, and we are on our way to an active dinosaur dig site.

01:06This is a huge moment in dinosaur discovery.

01:09Scientists are discovering more dinosaurs now than at any other time in history.

01:12They're finding a new species each week on average.

01:16And those discoveries are shaking up what we thought we knew about these ancient animals.

01:20The dig site that we're headed to now is special.

01:23The rumor is that they've uncovered something really cool.

01:25So, I don't know what we're going to find.

01:27But my big goal is to actually help discover a dinosaur bone today.

01:31If I could do that...

01:33Oh my god.

01:34The site that we're going to is full of a herd of dinosaurs called Pachyrhinosaurus.

01:38We have the big adults.

01:39We have the little babies.

01:40We have the teenagers.

01:42That's Dr. Emily Bamforth, the paleontologist in charge of this site.

01:45They're not sure what exactly killed this herd.

01:47It could have been a natural disaster like a flood.

01:50But they know that it killed them all at the same time.

01:52And then later, they were buried in mud that turned to stone over 73 million years.

01:58But that's a problem for us today.

02:00Because they're not preserved as individual animals where they fell.

02:03They're all sort of mixed together.

02:05That's right.

02:06So, we lovingly refer to it as our Pachyrhinosaurus omelet.

02:10It's basically hundreds, potentially thousands of animals kind of jumbled up together in this one deposit.

02:18Putting together a dinosaur is kind of like doing a puzzle.

02:20Except...

02:21You don't know what the picture on the front of the box is.

02:23You're missing half the pieces.

02:25There's pieces from other puzzles thrown in.

02:27And then the pieces sometimes are ripped and torn so they don't fit properly.

02:31The hardest jigsaw puzzle in the world.

02:33Basically, yep.

02:34So, how do you know that you're doing the puzzle right?

02:36How do we know that any of these dinosaurs are right?

02:39Well, we're about to see how they do it.

02:41Oh, wow.

02:42Oh, my God.

02:44Here we are.

02:46This is it.

02:47This bone bed is particularly exciting because it's one of the densest dinosaur bone beds in North America.

02:52So, the estimated number of animals is somewhere from 6,000 to 10,000.

02:57Oh, my God.

02:58Among all the bones in this huge dinosaur omelet, there's one type that's rare and special to find intact.

03:04A skull.

03:05And they just found one.

03:06So, this thing here is a big skull and everything that's around it is all bone as well.

03:12Can I touch it?

03:13Yeah, go ahead.

03:14It feels like a rock.

03:15It basically is a rock.

03:16Whoa.

03:17Are you freaking out right now?

03:19Yeah.

03:20I'm totally freaking out right now.

03:21This is so awesome.

03:23What is this?

03:24They're hoping to pull this skull out of the ground in the next few weeks.

03:29But if that's a pachyrhinosaurus skull, how big was the rest of it?

03:34It turns out, a lot has changed about what we think dinosaurs actually looked like, including their size.

03:40So let me show you.

03:41Okay, so I want you to imagine this skull coming out of the ground.

03:44It would look like this.

03:49This dinosaur had a big bony bump on the front of its nose called the boss, and a bony frill and horns on the back of its head.

03:55Using bones collected in the area and around the world, and referencing similar dinosaurs and animals that are alive today, scientists put together the rest of the skeleton like this.

04:06Now imagine the dinosaur comes back to life.

04:08It's about that big, which is huge.

04:12Compared to other dinosaurs, this guy was medium in size, which is wild, and makes me wonder how big were the rest of them?

04:20If you lined up a bunch of dinosaurs, from smallest to largest, you'd see the teeny little Ancyornis, just a little bit bigger than a basketball.

04:27You'd see the Comsignathus, the size of a small chicken.

04:30The famous Velociraptor would actually be here.

04:32Except in real life, they were about this big.

04:35Which is, uh, not the size they looked in Jurassic Park.

04:41And newer research shows that they didn't look like that.

04:43Velociraptors had feathers.

04:45To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, they didn't know that.

04:47The reason the Velociraptors don't have feathers is because we didn't know that those kind of dinosaurs had feathers at the time.

04:53In 1998, this discovery in China changed our understanding of what some dinosaurs looked like.

04:58And other discoveries since have confirmed that more dinosaurs had feathers than we thought.

05:02And there's still a lot of debate about what the color and the outside appearance of dinosaurs actually looked like.

05:07We'll get to that in a minute.

05:08One step bigger than the Velociraptor would be the Niassosaurus, about the size of a German Shepherd.

05:13Then our Pachyrhinosaurus would be here.

05:15One of my favorites, the Triceratops, was about the height of an Asian elephant.

05:20But much longer.

05:21Here's the Stegosaurus.

05:24And the T-Rex.

05:27And from here on, the sizes get nutty.

05:29These dinosaurs were bigger than school buses.

05:32They were taller than buildings.

05:34One of the largest known dinosaurs, the Argentinosaurus, was about as long and heavier than a commercial airplane.

05:42Can you imagine what it was like when these animals walked the earth?

05:48But here's the thing.

05:49They didn't all walk it at the same time.

05:51Really common misconception is that all dinosaurs lived all at the same time.

05:55Dinosaurs lived for way longer than most people think.

05:58If this is all of recorded human history, and this is the time since humans diverged from apes, this is the time when dinosaurs were alive.

06:11Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 180 million years.

06:16We are nothing in comparison.

06:19And the dinosaurs that we know today were spread out through this enormous history.

06:23Which means that some of the dinosaurs I think of as being alive at the same time were actually separated by millions of years.

06:31There was more time that separates Stegosaurus from T-Rex than separates T-Rex from us.

06:36What?

06:37Yeah.

06:38That's an amazing fact.

06:39I had no idea.

06:40The Stegosaurus was an ancient relic to the T-Rex.

06:44My whole childhood was a lie.

06:49They're about to let me look for some dinosaur bones.

06:52I've been waiting for this moment my whole entire life.

06:55So no pressure.

06:56But if I don't find something, I'm going to be devastated.

07:00I'm probably not going to find anything.

07:02I'm probably going to find like a chicken bone.

07:04But just searching.

07:05I'm so psyched.

07:06But first let me show you something.

07:07I'm trying to correct what I got wrong about dinosaurs.

07:09But understanding the news, especially science news, can be a challenge.

07:13That's why for this story I wanted to partner with Ground News.

07:16Their website and app gathers related articles on the same topic in one place.

07:19So you can compare coverage and get a more well-rounded understanding of an issue.

07:23I use Ground News to understand the information that I'm reading, where it's coming from, and how factual it is.

07:27Which is something that I care a lot about.

07:29And it's crucial for making Hugh GIF true.

07:31Like here, a few months ago the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to AI researchers.

07:34On Ground News I can see that over 300 news outlets reported on this.

07:37They also show you the political leaning of those news outlets and how reliable their reporting practices are.

07:41Plus I can compare all the headlines.

07:43One outlet likens AI to the invention of penicillin, which changed the world.

07:47While another raises concerns about potential negative consequences of AI.

07:50I want to see the differences because I care about how news is framed.

07:53Particularly when it comes to science and tech.

07:55If you do too, I think you'll appreciate Ground News.

07:57And right now they're offering Hugh GIF true viewers 50% off their Vantage plan.

08:00To check it out, just scan this QR code or go to ground.news.clio.

08:04Make sure to scan the QR code or use this link if you do sign up because that helps out this channel.

08:08Big thanks to Ground News for sponsoring this video and for supporting optimistic, independent journalism.

08:12Now, back to the story.

08:13Alright, here's how to hunt for dinosaurs.

08:16There are two rules.

08:17So the first one is that you always want to be working horizontal to the bone layer.

08:21The reason being like as soon as you do this, you run the risk of like accidentally stabbing a boa.

08:26The second rule is to always keep your sight clean.

08:28So we say a clean sight is a happy sight.

08:31Alright, the moment I've been waiting for my whole life.

08:33Here I go.

08:34Just, just, I'm just gonna be here for a while.

08:36Just so you guys, you guys can go.

08:38But as I worked, I wondered, how many of each dinosaur have we found?

08:46Some huge proportion of species are known from a single specimen.

08:50Which is crazy.

08:51Yeah.

08:52Turns out, almost half of all dinosaur species are known from a single specimen.

08:57And many of those fossils are incomplete.

09:00Meaning, we take the pieces that we do find and we extrapolate what the rest of it could have looked like.

09:05That makes the job of identifying what's a new species and what's just a piece of an already existing dinosaur really tricky.

09:11We are nowhere near having all the dinosaurs that ever lived.

09:14And the dinosaurs that we have found aren't final.

09:16They're an ongoing group project among scientists all around the world.

09:20Take, for example, maybe the world's most famous dinosaur.

09:23The T-Rex didn't look like you think.

09:26Scientists and artists have been imagining dinosaurs for hundreds of years.

09:29Based on early discoveries, they thought that the T-Rex was a lean predator that stood upright like a kangaroo.

09:34You may have seen their traditional T-Rex in the kangaroo pose, like standing up with his tail dragging on the ground.

09:40But the more they compared the T-Rex's hip and thigh bones to modern upright animals, they realized that they didn't quite make sense.

09:47New computer models showed that standing upright would put too much weight on its hips.

09:52But leaning forward would be much more stable.

09:55We now understand these animals are more like teeter-totters.

09:58And they weren't very lean, either. Rib-like bones were found with this old famous T-Rex skeleton, Sue.

10:03But it wasn't until 2018 when they realized that these ribs would have had to float in the T-Rex's abdomen, like crocodiles have today.

10:10And they realized that the T-Rex would have been way chunkier than they thought.

10:14Which means that it was probably an ambush predator jumping out at you, not a pursuit predator chasing you down in a jeep.

10:20In fact, most dinosaurs were chunkier than people thought.

10:23But before I show you that...

10:25Do you think that's a bone?

10:26I'm pretty sure both of these are bones.

10:29I'm pretty sure I found a dinosaur bone.

10:30I think I'm touching a dinosaur bone right now.

10:33Oh my god.

10:35Might also be a bone of like a large chicken or something.

10:38Am I right?

10:40I think there's two bones.

10:41I think this is a bone.

10:42And I think this is a bone under here, too.

10:44Yep.

10:45Oh my god, they're everywhere!

10:46I also didn't realize that I narrowly avoided disaster.

10:49This is bone, too, actually.

10:50Stop, really?

10:51Yep.

10:52Alright, I didn't spot that one.

10:53How do you know?

10:55I can see like those little white specks in there.

10:58Uh-huh.

10:59That's kind of like the arrow chocolate bar.

11:00Look at the texture of this.

11:02I had no idea what I was looking at.

11:03I thought I was looking for something like that, which is the outside of the bone.

11:07Yeah.

11:08That is the cross-section.

11:10That's the arrow bar part.

11:12The inside texture.

11:14Good thing I didn't chip away at that one.

11:18This is one of the coolest experiences in my life.

11:21I realize that this is just like another Tuesday for you, but this is really cool.

11:25It is pretty cool.

11:26Like I said, the thrill never wears off.

11:28But finding a bone isn't even the coolest part.

11:31We gotta get it back to the lab.

11:33Is there any hope of actually pulling that bone out of the ground?

11:37I think so.

11:38To get it out of the ground intact, we had to make this paste and then paint it over the bone

11:42and wait until it dried.

11:43And while we were waiting, I realized that I still had a very basic question about all of this.

11:48And after I learned the answer, I'm never gonna look at a chicken the same way.

11:51What qualifies as a dinosaur?

11:53Good question.

11:54It is a phylogenetic question.

11:57Alright, so your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather,

12:03over 10 to 15 million generations back, was a little lizard-like creature called an amniote.

12:09Scientists think that this was your most recent common ancestor with dinosaurs.

12:13Over millions of years, the amniote's kids adapted.

12:15And scientists grouped up the new species depending on their different characteristics.

12:19Scientifically speaking, a dinosaur is everything from here onward.

12:24Which means some of the animals that people often call dinosaurs actually aren't.

12:28So things like pterosaurs actually belong to a different group of reptiles.

12:32Things like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, athiosaurs are also not dinosaurs.

12:35They live at the same time, but they belong to different groups of reptiles.

12:39Crocodiles were alive back then too, which is crazy.

12:42But they're not dinosaurs because they actually branched off earlier.

12:45But if everything that descended from this branch onward is a dinosaur,

12:51then that means birds were dinosaurs and therefore they are also dinosaurs.

12:56Birds are not the descendants of dinosaurs.

12:59They are actually dinosaurs by the most scientific definition.

13:03Dinosaurs are still alive.

13:05And they're all around you.

13:11But hang on.

13:12I thought that a meteor hit the earth and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.

13:16But if birds are still alive and birds are dinosaurs, what actually happened after the meteor hit?

13:22To answer that question, we gotta go to the lab.

13:26Oh my god, this is like Santa's workshop.

13:32This is the coolest place I've ever been.

13:35Let me show you some of the coolest things here.

13:36This is a tyrannosaur tooth.

13:38Look at the serrated edges right there.

13:41You see it?

13:42Cutting flesh.

13:43Look at that.

13:44That is a...

13:45This is a break.

13:46That healed.

13:47That healed.

13:48Yep.

13:49Whoa.

13:50So this is actually really important.

13:51It's basically like kind of fossilized physiology or fossilized behavior, which is not something that's easy to find in the fossil record.

13:58Incredible.

13:59It also just reinforces that these were living animals.

14:03They had whole lives where they did all kinds of things and healed and, you know, had injuries and...

14:10Yep.

14:11And got sick too.

14:12So this has a really abnormal growth, bone growth, right at the end of it.

14:17Mm-hmm.

14:18So we think that's either osteoarthritis or potentially a bone cancer.

14:22Oh.

14:23So if you were to...

14:24Dinosaurs got cancer?

14:25Yep.

14:26We saw so many amazing things.

14:31And finally, I got to touch dinosaur skin.

14:34That is not skin impression.

14:36That's the actual skin.

14:37So you can touch it if you want.

14:38Like you're petting a dinosaur.

14:39It feels like what I imagine an enormous chicken foot would feel like.

14:44And on this one, this is another layer of skin.

14:47So if you look closely, you can see there are different kinds of scales.

14:51Yeah.

14:52Touching dinosaur skin was incredible.

14:54I closed my eyes and I imagined meeting a dinosaur.

15:04And then, looking at the skin, my question was...

15:07Do we know anything about color?

15:08Good question.

15:09So in general, we know what colors some dinosaurs were.

15:13The feathered dinosaurs in particular, because the feathers will sometimes preserve pigment.

15:18Based on pigments in fossilized feathers, they know that some feathered dinosaurs were black and white with shiny feathers.

15:23And some had rust or deep red colors.

15:26Skin doesn't preserve color, but they have found shading.

15:29Meaning that some dinosaurs likely had stripes.

15:32We don't know if those stripes were black and white, you know, if they were tan and black.

15:37We're not really sure of the color.

15:38The dinosaurs that you see reconstructed, it's based on our understanding of modern animals, how modern animals are colored.

15:44But a little creative liberty in color isn't the main problem with dinosaur depictions today.

15:49Look at this.

15:50You might not recognize it, but this is a modern animal, alive today, if you took its skeleton and treated it in the same way that many early science illustrators treated dinosaurs.

15:59The problem here is they just wrapped the skin around the skeleton without taking into account any of the muscle and the fat, turning this animal into a monster.

16:06Can you guess what it is?

16:07That's a zebra.

16:09How about this one?

16:11That's a baboon.

16:13This one's my favorite.

16:15That's a hippo.

16:16If we treated it like science illustrators treated dinosaurs.

16:19This is called shrink wrapping.

16:20And today, we know that that's probably not an accurate reflection of dinosaurs.

16:24They would have had a lot of muscle mass.

16:26Yeah, like just to move those things around.

16:28Today, artists and scientists are working to correct that, adding more loose skin and muscles and fatty tissues, redefining what dinosaurs realistically looked like.

16:37Every bone that comes to the lab from the field needs to get cleaned.

16:40So, time to clean ours.

16:42So this is still covered in mud, but when it's cleaned, it'll look more like this surface right here.

16:48Sort of, you can see the shine.

16:50This is a rib that is pretty close to being fully prepared.

16:54So you can see there's that shiny chocolate brown color.

16:57These bones are brown because they're not like your bones right now.

17:00In fact, what we've been calling bones are really rocks.

17:04All dinosaur bones are fossilized, which means they're now made of rock.

17:08You can think of fossil bones as basically an exact copy of the bone just made out of rock.

17:15The original bone material is there, but over millions of years, the minerals replaced the bone kind of like cell by cell basically.

17:21And so it's an exact copy of what the bone looked like.

17:24It's just now made out of rock.

17:25Every dinosaur in every museum is a stone replica of what was once a living, breathing animal.

17:32Which brings me to my last question.

17:34How did the big dinosaurs actually die?

17:37It started 66.04 million years ago on a normal day in the dinosaur kingdom, except that a speck appeared in the sky.

17:45And over a few weeks, it got bigger and bigger and bigger until a huge rock wider than Mount Everest is tall, traveling at 20 to 30 kilometers per second, hit the earth right here.

17:56So hard it vaporized the entire space rock immediately, but catapulted chunks of earth beyond the atmosphere, perhaps far enough to hit the moon.

18:06And on the surface, it created an apocalypse.

18:09There would have been, this is what kind of terrifies me about this extinction, something called a thermal pulse, which is basically a wave of heat.

18:15There would have been mega tsunamis that rippled across the planet.

18:19The immediate impact would have been awful to live through.

18:22But for the dinosaurs that did, the worst was still coming because the whole planet was going dark.

18:28The ejecta from the impact itself would have blocked out the sun.

18:32With less light, the plants died and the animals that ate the plants and the animals that ate them and up and up and up.

18:37And the things that survive are the things that are small, the size of a German Shepherd and smaller.

18:44Things that had some kind of refugia so they could go into water or they could live underground.

18:48It must have been so scary.

18:50The fact that anything survived is pretty incredible.

18:53After 180 million years, the reign of the dinosaurs was over.

19:00What would the world have looked like if that rock had missed?

19:04We'll never know.

19:05But ultimately, like a bad damn planet Earth for the dinosaurs, but a really great day for mammals.

19:11I mean, we are here today because of that extinction.

19:14We are here today because of this whole crazy history.

19:17Because dinosaurs lived and because they died.

19:20I think I liked dinosaurs as a kid because… monsters.

19:24But the more I learn, I see they weren't monsters at all.

19:27They were animals.

19:28Animals that ruled the Earth for millions of years before us.

19:32And now, I love them.

19:35And I love humans for how much care we take to study them.

19:39And the reason that we do that isn't just to understand how we got here, but also to understand where we're going.

19:44The world we live in is just one very small slice of geologic time.

19:48This different age can tell us something different about life on planet Earth.

19:51Where we've been, where we are, and where we're going in the future.

19:55This is the golden age of paleontology, and there is still so much that we don't know.

20:00And with more time and with more technology and more science, who knows what other mysteries are left to be unlocked.

20:07This is the golden age of paleontology.

Category

Transcript

Recommended