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Documentary, National Geographic Explorer - T. Rex Walks Again 2008
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00:00The Tyrant King of the Dinosaurs.
00:08One of the most ferocious predators ever to walk the Earth.
00:13But there's a missing piece to the tale of T-Rex.
00:17It's beginning.
00:22Now, Explorer and a team of scientists and artists go on an epic journey.
00:29Digging deep into the fossil record for the tiniest of clues.
00:35To bring a baby T-Rex back to life.
00:41If they're successful, the world will finally see the tiny creature that would one day grow into this colossal killer.
00:59This is T-Rex.
01:13Full grown.
01:15Twelve thousand pounds.
01:17Forty feet long.
01:19Brutish and hungry.
01:21For almost a hundred years it has haunted our museums.
01:29Science has learned a lot about this beast.
01:33Dozens of adult skeletons have been unearthed.
01:37But one of the most vexing questions of ancient life remains.
01:43How did this ferocious predator begin?
01:49Scientists believe at birth it was no bigger than a house cat.
01:55But how did it survive the brutality of life more than 65 million years ago?
02:05How did it walk?
02:06Run?
02:07Feed?
02:08Was it the hunter or the hunted?
02:13In Toronto, Canada, Hall Train, world famous model maker, wants to help answer those questions by building a walking one-year-old T-Rex.
02:24There are few clues.
02:26It's something no one has ever done successfully.
02:30Hall is starting from a blank page.
02:33Only scattered fragments of young T-Rex bones have ever been dug up.
02:40But if anyone can bring the animal to life, it's Train.
02:46His models of ancient creatures have been featured in museums around the world.
02:54I'm an artist who works in the service of scientists.
02:58I use mechanics and physics and art and I'm trying to jam it all into something to help people explore, you know, the possibilities of what dinosaurs look like.
03:12His goal now is to incorporate the latest scientific findings in the design of the creature's skeleton, muscles and skin.
03:22But first, he needs the science.
03:26Some basic facts about the animal.
03:31Summer 2006.
03:34The Badlands of Montana.
03:37Thomas Carr and a team of dinosaur hunters were scouring a stretch of eroded hills and ledges rich in fossils from the Cretaceous period.
03:50They spotted a bone sticking out of the dirt that demanded attention.
03:55I took my brush and I swept the dirt away and uncovered more bone.
04:00And intriguingly, there was more of it and it was hollow.
04:04You can see this very big empty space in this bone and that's typical of meat-eating dinosaurs.
04:11Because the bone was long and narrow, he knew it was part of the lower leg or shin bone.
04:19Anticipation grew as the team continued to dig.
04:24Extracting an ancient bone from the dirt is not an easy job.
04:29If they dug too quickly, they risked shattering it.
04:33Roots had to be removed.
04:36Small rocks.
04:38Chunks of clay.
04:40Nearly touching the shin, they found a toe.
04:45Then came a small and seemingly nondescript fragment.
04:50And that caught my eye.
04:52It looked a little bit unusual, but I thought it was part of this long bone that we were uncovering.
04:57And as soon as he brushed the dirt off, I knew that we were holding, or that Chris was holding, part of the forehead of a little T-Rex.
05:07Carr noticed a set of distinctive contours that confirmed its identity.
05:12Underneath that ridge is separating the surface for the eye, so the top inside of the eyeball would have been in this vicinity.
05:20And on the other side of this ridge would have been the front of the brain, and up here, the back of the airway, of the nasal airway.
05:27Carr named this young T-Rex after a colleague, calling him Little Clint.
05:39From the discovery of just four bone fragments, Carr knew he was onto something big.
05:49Using Carr's findings, Hall Train can begin building his model.
05:54Jason Braun, an artist and naturalist from the American Museum of Natural History, has come to help design the model.
06:06But nothing is straightforward.
06:08With a CT scan, even if you'll see the distinction of mussels, you think?
06:11To fill in crucial details, they'll use photographs of a related species, a young Tarbosaurus.
06:19Yeah, that probably is what that is.
06:22This brown wax form is a miniature version of an adult T-Rex skull.
06:29They'll now reshape it into a baby T-Rex.
06:34So there are a series of proportional changes that we want to do.
06:36We want to have a somewhat shorter rostrum, which is the part in front of the eye.
06:42Mm-hmm.
06:43We want to have some of the sculpture has to come down and be smoother.
06:46Mm-hmm.
06:47Now they begin to cut, shave, and sculpt it down to size.
06:54A juvenile T-Rex is going to have a much shorter snout proportionately, much larger eye opening.
07:00The overall look of the head is going to be similar, but it'll just be shorter and cuter, bigger eyes.
07:12To make sure they get it right, they'll turn to a specialist.
07:15So anyway, this is like a prototype proof of principle.
07:18Mark Norell is a curator at the American Museum of Natural History.
07:23He's been studying dinosaurs for over 20 years.
07:31That's so sharp, that's amazing.
07:32They have pulled rare specimens from the museum's collections for comparison.
07:37I would make it much narrower, like slit-like.
07:43The wax model is close, but he notices a few irregularities.
07:47On this one, like, this is actually the top of the skull right here.
07:50A horn-like feature at the top of the skull of related dinosaurs is missing.
07:55So it's almost like a horn.
07:57The team will adjust and recalculate the dimensions of the skull to match the real fossils in front of them.
08:03I mean, the denarii in general, I would make it shorter.
08:06Jason can now finally draw the bones to their exact scale.
08:12With accurate dimensions, the team can start to visualize what this young killer would have looked like.
08:20When it's finished, the model will be almost six feet long and three feet high.
08:27A swift runner with strength and agility.
08:34It's a creature the public has never seen.
08:37A young tyrannosaur on the cusp of survival.
08:40A young tyrannosaur on the cusp of survival.
08:44Haltrain is known for his ability to breathe life into creatures made of metal and plastic.
09:03He'll mount his model T-Rex on a machine that uses gears and rods to simulate how it would actually have moved.
09:15You end up having a flexible connector through the vertebrae, a disc, and then what do you, for something like this, do you, or is it up, or is it up?
09:27To decipher the animal's actual motion, he and Steven Gatesy, a biomechanics expert, begin by laying out a set of plastic bones.
09:36How did a real T-Rex balance, walk, and run?
09:45A pitching motion is hard.
09:47Pitching motion is hard, yeah.
09:51To find answers, they decide to observe a distant relative of T-Rex, one that's living today.
09:57You first.
10:01You can get the next one.
10:04It may not be ferocious, or even have teeth, but the emu has a lot in common with a young T-Rex.
10:15A native of Australia, it's part of a family of large, flightless birds, called ratites.
10:24They don't like people.
10:25T-Rex and emus are both part of a line of creatures that stretches back some 200 million years, called theropods.
10:37But you'd never mistake an emu for a T-Rex, unless you look at how it walks and runs.
10:44Through time, these limbs are evolving, the body's evolving, evolving large size, shrinking back down again, evolving flight, losing flight.
10:56All these things are happening, and yet those legs are essentially walking continuously.
11:00That's just an ancient behavior.
11:04That one's moving.
11:06Look at the speed.
11:08By studying an emu, they can begin to understand the mechanics of a young T-Rex in motion.
11:13Is there something about the way an emu moves that can shed light on a baby T-Rex?
11:20My feeling is that they're, like, right up on their toes.
11:23I'm not seeing that heel pad hit the ground at all when these things are running.
11:28Oh, there we go.
11:30An emu, like a young T-Rex, is built for quick acceleration.
11:34Just so nimble.
11:36Its legs are like coiled springs, feet, shin, and thigh able to extend quickly to give it a burst of speed.
11:48But designing a machine that replicates the movement of a live animal is no easy feat.
11:55So each of these joints, we can say, has a range of motion, but trying to decide how they work with respect to one another in a coordinated way is really, really difficult.
12:06He's brought along a fake emu leg.
12:10This is a left foot.
12:12A spare part from another model in his shop, to help him understand how the foot hits the ground.
12:19Are we seeing anything here, Steve, by this?
12:23Like, if a foot is coming in for a landing, are you going to see this back spray like that?
12:30Or is it that happening?
12:33He sees that when an emu steps, its toes dive in first, followed by its heel.
12:40It gives him an idea.
12:42Perhaps the movement of the foot is all that matters.
12:46If you can control the motion of the heel, the legs will follow in a natural cycle.
12:52This is Gambit. Come here, Gambit. Come here, sweetie.
12:57It helps to have a dog like Gambit, who can step in as a test subject.
13:02The trick with making this animal walk, the machine walk, is to control this part of the foot.
13:07Once you control that, you've got everything under control.
13:11You have to trust me, okay? Just trust me.
13:14As Gambit's foot moves up and around, it traces an elliptical path.
13:20The toes naturally respond to this movement, flattening as they hit the ground, extending out when the foot rises in back.
13:27There's a good boy.
13:31Train thinks a rod connected to a gear will cause the model's foot to move in this exact pattern.
13:39So now we've got this shape happening.
13:42So Hall's approach to take the foot, I think, is fascinating because rather than starting at the hips and working his way down, he's starting at the feet and working his way up.
13:53Using a wheel to control a complex shape.
13:56So what happens if your wires are asking the end of this to go somewhere that it can't reach, for example, does it?
14:04I'll figure it out.
14:07This is the foot of the dinosaur.
14:09And if we can control this, we can control anything.
14:14Train spends weeks designing a machine.
14:18Building a prototype.
14:20Tweaking the complex interplay of custom gears and mechanics.
14:27Nearly two months later, he's finally got the machine he's imagined.
14:34An engineering marvel of sleekly machined metal.
14:39It is like a giant watch, but instead of keeping time, it will control legs, head, tail, and body of the juvenile T-Rex model mounted on top through a complex network of gears and rods.
14:53Each element must be precisely calibrated.
14:56The slightest imperfection and its motion will look unnatural.
15:02If they can get this unique contraption to work, and the model to look real, then Train's team will be nearing the finish line.
15:13But they still have a long way to go.
15:15You're happy with that?
15:17And before they go any further, they have to look to science once again, at a topic that confounded scientists for decades.
15:28Ever since T-Rex was discovered over a century ago, scientists have been searching for the most natural way to position its bones.
15:42For decades, paleontologists assumed it had walked upright, like Godzilla.
15:55But at over six tons, a towering T-Rex in that pose would have had considerable balance problems while charging and hunting.
16:03But the truth was hiding in the anatomy all along.
16:10They have this massive forebody.
16:12They also had these massive tails that were sort of a counterbalance to the front part of the body.
16:17When the animal would walk, the tail would rise as the front part of the body would go down.
16:22The front part of the body would go up, and the back of the tail would go down.
16:25It's sort of falling forward and catching oneself as you move along.
16:28And really that the bipedal posture only sort of works with the horizontal backbone.
16:33It wouldn't work with a vertical sort of Godzilla-like pose.
16:38With its back parallel to the ground and its head held low, T-Rex is now thought to have been a swift and deadly predator.
16:58For Hall Train's team, the proportions of the skeleton, walking motion, posture, are all falling into place.
17:08Did you cement the tail end?
17:09No. No, it's just sheer strength.
17:12Brute force.
17:14They can now begin to give the model a living form.
17:19There, that's it.
17:21Perfect.
17:23A slender profile of a one-year-old T-Rex emerges.
17:27There.
17:29Okay, now it definitely looks like a dinosaur.
17:33Dinosaur on a stick.
17:35With its insides complete, Jason must now go to the drawing boards for the next step.
17:41Long legs and feet.
17:44A narrow skull.
17:45But there's something else about this creature that seems to go against everything we think we know about dinosaurs.
17:56Many scientists believe it looked nothing like its parents.
18:01A young T-Rex's hide would most likely have been covered with feathers.
18:06Not the plumage of flying birds today, but a more primitive form that actually resembles hair.
18:19I would expect that a hatchling or a young juvenile T-Rex would be most reminiscent of a running bird, like the sorts that evolved in grasslands around the world.
18:28The types of birds that would run around on two legs, sometimes through dense forests, sometimes through dense grass, looking for every opportunity to find prey items to grab.
18:38On a diet of bugs, lizards, and small mammals, the agile young T-Rex would grow longer and heavier.
18:50What pressures did a growing T-Rex face?
18:56Why would it need so much speed and agility?
18:59Out in Montana, that distant time still lives beneath these eroded ridges and arid grasslands.
19:1865 million years ago, this region was nothing like what it is today.
19:22It was a coastal plain, cut with rivers meandering to the sea.
19:33Dinosaurs lived and died along their banks.
19:38Floods pushed dinosaur carcasses together, sometimes covering them in mud.
19:44There they stayed, encased in tombs of dirt, until the elements exposed them to the view of paleontology.
19:52There were many paleontologists like Thomas Carr.
19:56As Carr and his team followed the trail of little Clint's bones into the hillside,
20:02they found themselves entering its world.
20:06They encountered a whole zoo of other creatures.
20:11Among them, the legendary giant, the Triceratops.
20:16Twice the size of a modern rhino and a major T-Rex adversary.
20:19What Aaron and I are going to do is map its location and its depth, and so it can be included in the map of the quarry.
20:37Exactly 300 degrees east of north, 170.5.
20:46One week the team is hot on the trail of little Clint.
20:51The next, they are bogged down by all these other creatures.
20:59They need to document everything.
21:02From leaves and turtle shells, to large thigh bones like this.
21:09They clean and preserve them, extract them from the ground.
21:19The team comes across something unexpected.
21:22A bone that's crumbling and covered with roots.
21:28Carr clears away the debris and finds that it's hollow.
21:31That means it's probably another theropod.
21:36So, it's looking like this bone is hollow.
21:40The matrix is continuing pretty deeply within the shaft.
21:46So, for today, this one is a priority to collect.
21:51It might be part of one of our big, big Rexes.
21:55Carr determines that it's a larger T-Rex.
21:58Did little Clint run afoul of his larger cousin?
22:05Or meet some other fate?
22:09Those questions are part of a larger set of unknowns.
22:15Whether T-Rex adults lived in a community and protected their young.
22:21By digging into the bones themselves, scientists are beginning to see
22:26just what a struggle it was to grow up T-Rex.
22:32What we're doing is we're just sort of rolling out some muscles, so...
22:36Yeah.
22:37Get involved in that.
22:38Do some basic shapes.
22:40Snakes and what-nots.
22:43Hall Train and Jason Brom now go to work putting flesh on the bones of their young T-Rex.
22:49We should probably go, we should probably go in this order.
22:54Okay.
22:56They'll attach out here.
22:57Working initially in clay, they'll lay out all the muscles, shapes and positions.
23:03It's not clear whether it loops around here or whether it can just come over there.
23:06They begin with the legs, thighs and tail.
23:12Speed sculpting.
23:16So right here, it turns into like a little stringy bit.
23:20How thick would these muscles be in a real T-Rex?
23:24How would they connect with one another?
23:26Yeah, so it would fill up here, so it wraps around like that?
23:31Yeah.
23:33When we study muscular reconstructions on dinosaurs, we're a lot of times looking at two-dimensional drawings,
23:39but none of which give us a three-dimensional view of how those muscles work,
23:43how they weave in between each other and how the masses fill out.
23:48No one knows what a fully loaded T-Rex looked like under the skin.
23:52Good.
23:56So the team decides to check its work against its contemporary cousin.
24:05This emu came from a local farm.
24:08It had suffered a crippling leg injury and had to be put down.
24:13But it may be able to provide the answers they need.
24:17Aided by anatomy expert Catherine Chorney, the team zeroes in on its long and muscular legs.
24:27You see, here's the same thing.
24:29They begin to peel back the individual muscles.
24:33That's the way that muscle comes together, right?
24:36Then sever them from tendons that hold them to the bones.
24:40You know, a lot of the action of the running is coming from the knee.
24:43Quite a wedge of muscle. It's almost wider than it is long, as opposed to a T-Rex, which is sort of longer than it is wide.
24:50Right.
24:51That would be the muscle that does the job Hall was talking about.
24:54There is one unmistakable difference between this bird and a baby T-Rex.
24:59First of all, a T-Rex would have a very massive, very long tail.
25:02And the musculature between the leg and the tail would be much more developed than it is here.
25:12A T-Rex, like its other distant relatives from the crocodile family, controlled its massive tail with huge muscles that extended out from its legs.
25:23While a croc uses its tail to propel itself through the water, a T-Rex probably used it for balance.
25:33The model is now ready for its muscles.
25:51Top of spine.
25:53Lower legs.
25:55Thighs.
25:57Tail.
25:58Finally, an added feature inspires them to look into the world of a young T-Rex.
26:07I'll look right down. I'll look right down the snout.
26:09You think they'd be that close?
26:11Its eyes.
26:13That doesn't look bad.
26:15I usually, as soon as I can, like to get a pair of eyes looking at me.
26:20And then all of a sudden, you know, you get kind of drawn into the animal.
26:25Like that's, it usually gets you to that next stage of enthusiasm.
26:30You know, when the thing sort of comes to life, you know.
26:36I'm gonna go get a mirror.
26:38Very close.
26:39Excuse me.
26:40The team has chosen to give it the blood red color often seen in the emu's bird cousin, the cassowary.
26:49Looks pretty good.
26:52Looking into its eyes, you can see hints of the monster this animal would grow into.
26:57The eyes are widely separated and faced directly forward.
27:09Some scientists believe that may have given T-Rex acute depth perception.
27:16Allowing it to accurately track prey.
27:21The position of the eyes may be a consequence of another, more formidable adaptation.
27:27The back of its skull is unusually wide.
27:38One day, those jaws would support muscles and teeth able to crush 500 pounds of bone and flesh in a single bite.
27:47But before a T-Rex could attain such dominant power,
27:51it had to grow beyond the 25 pound speedster that Hall and Jason are assembling.
27:58Should we put this on here or do that?
28:02What milestones and perils would a one year old T-Rex have faced in its journey to adulthood?
28:08One man is looking for the answer.
28:24Greg Erickson is an expert in dinosaur bones.
28:27As near as we can tell, a young Tyrannosaur was in dire straits.
28:35It was a dangerous time.
28:36These were very small dinosaurs and they certainly were on the menu for lots of other animals.
28:41Say crocodiles or other small theropod dinosaurs.
28:46Or perhaps even other adult Tyrannosaurus rex.
28:48To find out how T-Rex fared, Erickson is digging deep into the bones.
28:57He starts with a cross-section of bone and cuts off an ultra-thin slice.
29:09He examines the slice under a high-powered microscope.
29:12Even after more than 65 million years, he finds the bones hold a clear record of the animal's life.
29:29A series of lines come into focus.
29:32Like rings in a tree, each one represents a year's worth of bone growth.
29:37The growth line right here. See the line came along?
29:40By counting the rings, Erickson can determine how old an animal was when it died.
29:47From there, he calculates T-Rex death rates at each age.
29:52What he finds is that the odds were stacked against a young Tyrannosaur.
29:59Oh, as near as we can tell, 80, 90% of hatchling Tyrannosaurus rex never made it up to...
30:07...and sex maturity.
30:12An adult T-Rex was a brutal predator with few, if any, real enemies.
30:19But its offspring were far down the food chain.
30:26Like many animals today, from fish to alligators, it lost many of its young.
30:32To ensure that enough will survive, these species produce large numbers of eggs.
30:38Then when they reached about two years of age, or several meters in length, all of a sudden, the mortality rates declined.
30:50So these animals reached a stasis in mortality.
30:53For some reason, they didn't die from the age of about two up to about 18.
30:56So what that suggests is that these animals reached a threshold size where they were no longer on the menu for other dinosaurs.
31:07If a young T-Rex managed to survive beyond this threshold, it would begin one of the most radical transformations known in the animal world.
31:17In Hull Train's studio, the model is ready for its skin.
31:28There it is.
31:29Da-da-da-da!
31:30Yeah.
31:31Jane Edmondson, a movie special effects artist, arrives to give it a fitting.
31:37Oh, he's great!
31:39Yeah, he's bizarre.
31:41Little tiny arms always last to get picked for the bowling team.
31:46Go right on.
31:48The first step is to fit the model with a stretchy fabric that will adjust to its body as it walks and moves on its mechanical platform.
31:57Edmondson places the material into all the nooks and crannies of the model's body.
32:04She will take these measurements back to her own studio.
32:08There, she'll sew it all together and outfit it with synthetic fur that resembles the feathering that might have graced a baby T-Rex.
32:18It'll be beautiful when it's finished, I swear.
32:21Okay, my pattern.
32:23We would predict that a Tyrannosaurus Rex, when it's hatched out of the egg and weighed perhaps one kilogram, maybe two kilograms, would have been completely covered with a feathery body covering.
32:36And that feathery body covering would have helped it maintain heat.
32:39Now, as an animal gets bigger, the problem doesn't become maintaining heat anymore, it becomes dumping heat.
32:43So, at about 300 pounds or so, it probably would have begun to lose its feathers if they would become much more sparse on its body because it could basically sit there all night and it wouldn't lose heat just by virtue of its mass.
32:57Little Clint might have been on the verge of losing its feathers and only remnants of its youthful plumage would have remained by the time it reached the size of another T-Rex discovered in the Montana Badlands.
33:21This specimen, known as Jane, is almost a teenager.
33:31She's on display in the Burpee Museum in Rockford, Illinois.
33:37In her bones, one can see what a juvenile T-Rex would have grown up to be.
33:42My question is, what would this have grown into?
33:48Jane still had the slender frame and long lower legs of a juvenile.
33:56From its time as a toddler, a T-Rex's legs gradually shortened compared to the rest of its body and grew thicker to support its weight.
34:06In fact, by adulthood, its leg muscles could account for as much as one-third of its overall mass.
34:20Remarkably, those arms, already short in a juvenile, would have shortened even further in relation to the body.
34:28If they ever served a purpose, it probably decreased over time.
34:40As large as Jane is, her skull and teeth are those of a juvenile T-Rex.
34:46These are meat cutters. They're meat slicers. You can look at these and see a bunch of kitchen knives.
34:52That's what we're dealing with here.
34:54The jaw is certainly more slender on Jane than an adult Tyrannosaurus Rex.
34:59This jaw is not built for putting a whole bunch of PSI, pounds per square inch, in a bite.
35:06Over its life, the small, light skull of a baby widened and thickened to support those fearsome teeth.
35:13So the neck is going to become more of an almost like a shock absorber.
35:19The jaws themselves are going to have incredibly powerful muscles that are going to be able to pull up and create that crushing bite that the adult T-Rex has.
35:29If Jane had survived to adulthood, she would have relied less on her juvenile speed and agility, and more on overwhelming force.
35:44The largest teeth were some six to eight inches tall.
35:47They were rather round in their cross-section, so they're very robust structures.
35:51They're almost like railroad spikes with a steak knife-like cutting edge on them as well.
35:58Greg Erickson estimates that the jaws of an adult T-Rex could exert almost 7,000 pounds of pressure.
36:06The transformation of the teeth and bones were part of an astonishing period of growth that overtook T-Rex.
36:23From its early teens, it went from under a ton to as much as six tons.
36:29At which point, their growth rate just exploded, and they put on about five pounds of mass per day from then on,
36:38and then bulked up into the adult morph of Tyrannosaurus rex by about 18 or 19 years of age.
36:45To see such a high growth rate among modern predators, you have to look to the ocean.
36:51An orca can reach full size, up to six tons, in about ten years.
37:03An adult great white shark can reach a weight of three tons within ten years.
37:08Large ocean creatures rely on the density of water to support their immense weight.
37:23Gravity weighs large land animals down.
37:28So what led T-Rex to grow from 25 pounds at age one to six tons by age 18?
37:38What evolutionary forces made T-Rex so big?
37:44We do know that giantism in theropod dinosaurs is sort of a recurring theme.
37:48It's happened independently in lots of different theropod dinosaur groups.
37:52As far as the processes involved with these animals getting big, the selective pressures,
37:56the evolutionary dynamics of them getting big, we really don't have any idea.
37:59And yet there are theories that say the rise of giant dinosaurs was part of an evolutionary arms race between predators and prey,
38:10like T-Rex and the great horned dinosaur, the Triceratops.
38:14The Triceratops must have been a tempting target for a hungry T-Rex.
38:30But was an adult T-Rex really suited to such search and destroy missions?
38:41Some believe it was more inclined to lay in wait, like a crocodile or an alligator.
38:51We're talking about animals that should, you know, be likened more with, say, alligators today or avian predators.
39:06In sit and wait, predation is much more common in some of these kinds of animals or occasional ambush, these kinds of things.
39:15No matter how a T-Rex hunted, for all its strength and weaponry, its life was brutal and, in the end, short.
39:36In the young ones, the eyes set a lot less deep, obviously, than in the adult.
39:44We might have to just sculpt something.
39:46Before their baby Rex takes its final shape,
39:50Paul Train and Jason Braun will give it hints of personality.
39:54I won't have any sinister eyebrow ridges.
39:57Its feathers would probably have extended down over the forehead to just above the eyes,
40:03with tufts down the nose.
40:05It seems like wrinkling is a thing you just either can get right or you don't.
40:08Some believe the face was like that of a vulture, featherless,
40:12to minimize the growth of bacteria from feeding on carcasses.
40:18The feet would likely have been lined with scaly features known as scoots.
40:23Do you want more of that?
40:24Yeah.
40:26In modern birds, they are made from the same compound as feathers.
40:30Those scales are present on the feet as well,
40:37and the team gives them an array of shapes like those on a chicken.
40:42Finally, as the skin pushes up toward the eyes,
40:49it wrinkles in to form the eyelids.
40:51Unlike our own, these eyelids don't drop over the eye.
40:58Instead, they reach in and surround it.
41:02It's cute, isn't it?
41:04I mean, I don't think there's an animal in the world that when it's young isn't cute.
41:08You look at them and you go, wow, that's so ugly, it's cute.
41:12Like newborn parrots are hideous, right?
41:14But they're cute.
41:15But they're cute nonetheless.
41:16Yeah.
41:20Is this post supposed to be in something?
41:23I just took it out.
41:24Oh, you did? Okay.
41:25Oh.
41:27Haltrain's model of a young Tyrannosaurus Rex is nearly complete.
41:35Appendages, skin, and feathers are all there.
41:40That's Laura's own comb.
41:43Now, if this was a real animal, she wouldn't be using her real comb, her own comb.
41:47The animal would eventually grow into these unusually large feet.
42:03But Hall is still struggling to get the mechanism to control the model's walking motion.
42:12I think all we need Tony is another set of springs going this way.
42:17Pulling this forward, this could just be a little higher.
42:23Train expects to be tweaking it for weeks before it goes out into the museum world.
42:28Hold on, one more.
42:30There we go, let's go.
42:34But right now, a group of critics is on its way to his studio to render an important judgment.
42:42Okay, let's try running that.
42:43Some last-minute touches to the fur.
42:49The team has chosen a pattern you might see on a young emu,
42:54and the color of a wildcat camouflaged for life in a forest.
42:58Can we run her?
43:08Hall train finally gets the motors and gears working.
43:14Lovely.
43:16Just in time.
43:18Lovely.
43:19Yay!
43:20Yay!
43:22It's all finished.
43:23Let's get.
43:29It's underneath here.
43:31Come around this way, guys.
43:32Come here.
43:33Come on over this way.
43:35So shall we unveil?
43:37Let's go this way.
43:41Okay.
43:42Shall we unveil?
43:44Okay.
43:46Yeah.
43:51So is it a bird or is it a dinosaur?
43:54Both.
43:55That's right.
43:56It's fuzzy, isn't it?
43:57It's brand new.
43:58We turned it on this morning for the very first time.
44:01And we worked on it all night.
44:04Hall's baby T-Rex takes its first tentative steps.
44:09The scientist that did all this work said he is one year and two days old.
44:14What is this mean?
44:16It actually...
44:18It captures the imagination and pulls us in.
44:21And a skeleton of the animal.
44:24It looks a lot like an ostrich.
44:25It looks a lot like an ostrich, doesn't it?
44:27Yeah.
44:28This little tiny...
44:29Through a model like this, we reach back into its world.
44:33And marvel at evolution's handiwork.
44:36Why does it have small arms?
44:38Why?
44:39That's a good question.
44:40I guess because they're not using them very much.
44:43Then why would they have them?
44:44Well, the thing is that we have things that we don't really use.
44:48Like you don't use your belly button anymore, but you used it at one time.
44:51Which I guess is sort of similar to that.
44:54Would it do any hunting or would it rely on its parents?
44:59I think the most significant thing that we can do
45:02when we attempt a reconstruction of an animal like this
45:06is we renew people's sense of wonder
45:10and inspire them to think or delve into how did this animal live.
45:15and what makes it different than other animals.
45:21If you could go back in time and see one of these little killers,
45:26would you recognize it for what it was?
45:29A young creature with those big eyes and long legs
45:35on its way to becoming one of the largest and most formidable predators
45:39that ever walked the Earth.
45:42The Earth
45:45The Earth
45:47You
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