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dragonflies the size of hawks centipedes larger than humans a strange managerie of giant insects amphibians reigned over the Earth 300 million years ago over time these huge creatures shrunk in size or disappeared the reasons for their Progressive Extinction remain controversial [Music]
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358 million years ago the continents came together to form the supercontinent Pangia this was the beginning of the Carboniferous period oxygen levels in the air were much higher back then 35% compared to today's 21% for the first time on Earth giant trees stored carbon dioxide and released oxygen in abundance human beings would not have survived in this High oxygen atmosphere but for some swamp dwellers it was ideal like Arthur plura measuring up to 10 ft this long lost cousin of the
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centipedes was a herbivore oranor with a wingspan up to 25 Ines this member of the dragonfly family is the largest known flying insect ever discovered a tireless Predator it had no Airborne competitors of the time since birds and flying reptiles didn't exist
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[Music] yet the high oxygen levels in the atmosphere give the characteristic sepia color to the sky during the the Carboniferous period oxygen also makes the air extremely
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[Music] flammable such a hostile world is hard for us to imagine lightning storm could set a flame the immense forests and their
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inhabitants during this period not a day went by without huge forest fires and yet giant insects thrived later when fires became less frequent these astonishing creatures simply disappeared scientists are trying to determine what caused that Extinction
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there are several possible culprits in fact it's a bit like an Agatha Christi novel when there's not one but several murders it's our job to take the clues we have and reconstruct the investigations in order to come up with the most likely scenario while we've known about giant insects since the 19th century paleontologists did not understand why they had disappeared for a long time a change in the composition of the atmosphere was the only EXP explanation but at the beginning of the
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21st century the discovery of fantastic fossil insects and their predators opened up new possibilities while that's a wonderful hypothesis and assuredly something was preying upon these giant insects we don't have great evidence for it around the world American European and Chinese scientists confront the old theories using new fossil discoveries Unearthed by groundbreaking technology to try and explain why these science became [Music]
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extinct the earliest giant insect fossils were found in the French region of aler in 1880 under the surface at this Pond were the remains of animals that had died 350 million years ago during the Carboniferous period mean neuras now extinct these tireless predators are the largest flying in sex that ever existed this abandoned industrial site was an important coal field in the 19th century and as the coal was dug out fossils were discovered close to the town of
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kanty the owner of the coal mine Mr Money gave his name to the specimen that is preserved at the Natural History Museum in Paris meura mon Andre Nell a paleontologist whose speciality is early insects watches over this valuable piece miners would look for fossils to make a little extra money and one day when they were opening slabs they came across this animal unfortunately when they were digging it out they hit it four times with a pick and we lost its head they
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were the super predators of the time predators of other insects that were also very [Music] big these large siiz fossils are quite exceptional while thousands of insects were found on the site of common only five mean neuras were ever discovered meura like all other insects had four wings two on each side attached to the thorax in the center in front you had a head with big eyes because it was a predator so its eyes just like modern dragonflies were used to see its environment in
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360° so possibly even behind the animal to better understand how this extinct animal once lived we must step back 300 million years in [Music] time this is what the french region of Alia would have looked like then a giant swamp scattered with cypresses humidity at nearly 100% desent made the atmosphere dense and allowed meura to easily carry its heavy exoskeleton into the air it is part of a Genus that is extinct today but it looks much like modern dragonflies and is part of the same
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odonatoptera super order with wings that functioned independently of each other megaira was agile in flight but unlike its contemporary cousins it couldn't fold its wings faced with this efficient Airborne Predator vegetarian insects such as paleo dict optera had to keep themselves out of
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[Music] sight by comparing its Anatomy to Modern dragonflies we can guess that gura's main physical characteristics one it could fly over 40 [Music] mph two it was a sight Predator its head was independent from the rest of its exoskeleton so it could keep it still while flying and focus on its prey three it had a huge appetite it could eat its own weight in food every 30 minutes to catch all this food megura had an array of attributes identified in
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fossils but What might explain its giant [Music] sign away from the public is the Museum's library of species where they keep the specimen that scientists study here we find mean neuras and their prey both reaching impressive
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[Music] sizes so here you have an example of a meura on which we see the base of its wings the thorax but what is most spectacular are the four legs equipped with strong spines that were used to stab prey but the meanus prey were also large sized insects like the Paleo dict top TI you just have one Wing from here to here so you can imagine the whole thing these were mean's prey they were big guys too big insects to escape big predators so in this case we have an
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arms race between predators and prey but this battle to be the biggest between meura and its prey seems to have had its limit limits otherwise paleontologists would certainly have found even bigger and more terrifying flying insect
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fossils most of mean's day was spent looking for food since its metabolism required a lot of energy according to scientists the huge size of insects During the carbonis period was possible because of the high levels of oxygen in the air
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[Music] insects don't have lungs but instead use a unique system of tubes trachea and traul to bring air directly to their organs including their digestive
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system the downside to this system is it lacks efficiency air travels through the tissues in the form of gas the bigger an insect is the more oxygen it needs it is very strange that these animals reach these sizes because nowadays we do not have such big insects and at the time of the dinosaurs when we had large vertebrates insects were much smaller it turns out that in the Carboniferous period for reasons linked to geochemistry the oxygen rate in the atmosphere was higher than it is today
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which encouraged the development of animals such as the large insects Mega neuras could not survive in today's atmosphere because not enough oxygen would reach their organs including their brains and they would
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faint since the beginning of the 20th century scientists have proposed a link between the size of insects and the concentration of oxygen but it wasn't until 2007 that an experiment finally proved it [Music] in the Chicago suburbs the Argon National Laboratory houses the United States most powerful synchrotron a scanner that generates the brightest x-ray beams in the northern
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hemisphere the distance around the particle accelerator is more than half a mile so Jake sooker the scientist in charge of the study uses a trike to get [Music] around today live insects are being put under the scanner we use the idea that you can take living insects and make inferences about insects that existed in the past what we're trying to do in the study is to test an old hypothesis that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is what limits insect body size so the idea
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with this hypothesis is that when you have more oxygen your insects can get larger and when you have less oxygen insects will get smaller in response U but no one had really ever tested this hypothesis before so we use synchrotron x-rays to look inside the animal to study the dimensions of their tracheal system this particle accelerator generates extremely intense and focused x-rays that pass through the insect's body our purpose is to see the trach system in action and some of the
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tracheal tubes are really small and we want to see it in the living animal um so this is really the only technique where we can do all of those
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things immed for the first time scientists are able to actually observe an insect breathing would you turn the using this experiment they discovered that crickets not only breathe passively but also use their whole bodies to carry air to their organs and you can see that bubble in the gut moves forward to the head and it moves backward and every time it's doing that it's synchronized with the compression of the tracheal system the movements that you see here are are not
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a passive effect this is an active movement um by the animal and it's the ultimate cause of it are contraction of muscles just as this cricet contracts its digestive system to send air to its organs meura would have contracted its abdm to absorb the thick Carboniferous air the elastic exoskeleton would resume its shape once the muscles had completed their [Music]
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action but beyond the discovery of this internal movement what interests Joka is the space occupied by the respiratory system within the insects [Music] bodies he has compared beetles of different sizes to study the link between their size and that of their respiratory system and what we found is that the tracheal tubes take up a larger fraction of the body as you go from smaller to large than you might expect so what we think based on the study is that if you
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would make this even larger so if we would scale this up farther and farther eventually you reach a limit where you can't stuff more traal system inside the animal because you have to have other things like muscles and gut and nervous tissue um fat bodies things like that that are all important for the physiology of the animal you can't just have one big tracheal system the higher oxygen concentration of the Carboniferous period meant that insects required fewer respiratory tubes and
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could therefore grow to a larger size but with the modification of the atmosphere the giant insects had to reduce their size over millions of years of evolution and not all of them survived these changes 290 million years ago During the permium period oxygen level decreased from 35% to 23% close to today's level Andia had already formed a supercontinent extending from one pole to the other surrounded by a single ocean it was subject to extreme climatic conditions the heart of the continent
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suffered drastic temperature changes and deserts appeared but at the equator heavy rainall allowed the great forest from the Carboniferous era to survive
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during this period of major climate change punctuated by the monsoons and the warming of the atmosphere a living fungus appeared on the bark of trees this tiny mushroom uses an enzyme to break down wood gradually plant debris and dead trees decompose and no longer build up on the ground to form coal [Music]
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the fungus stopped the accumulation of carbon on the ground and instead it was recycled into the atmosphere the proportion of oxygen in the air decreased gradually with major consequences for the
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environment this transitional period brought about the demise of arthr plura a distant relative of the centipedes but why did the first giants of the Carboniferous period disappear could their lifestyle be
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responsible in 1977 arop plura fossils were found in OT in the heart of the French Countryside the slag heaps surrounding this former mining town are Hallmarks of its industrial past in the local Natural History Museum tribute is paid to the miners who discovered fossils while they were working among them this impressive set of footprints the most important ever found in France they're examined by Silva shabon a specialist in arthropods the family of invertebrates that includes insects and
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centipedes here you can see a set of tracks you have two trails that are parallel this was made by an organism of quite a respectable size an animal that must have measured around 3 F long it's just a fragment of the track that was probably much bigger unfortunately no adult size fossil has been discovered but the paleontologists have found many smaller specimens in these C deposits you can see here what this little creature looked like these are juvenile specimens which are
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tiny here's a complete specimen with its shell that is well preserved so obviously this organism as it grows will produce larger Trails when it moves arura was rather similar to Modern centipedes it could reach 10 ft in length and it crawled on the ground or up trees in search of
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food life in the rainforest during the early permium period was quite similar to that of the Carboniferous
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period and there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere for arthr plura to thrive and face unexpected Predators such as iops this amphibian locates arthr plura using cells in its skin that detect vibrations on the tree
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trunk but ARR plura had a considerable Advantage the claws of the ends of it its articulated legs allow it to grip the trun and its protective shell Shields it against
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[Music]
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attackers Arthur aura's disappearance may not have been caused by Predators but by decreasing Food Supplies
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this creature was a herbivore at the time it would have had plenty to eat at that time the vegetation was equatorial or tropical so it was an extremely Lush vegetation with a great variety of plants these plants are in fact the origin of coal ARR plura lived in this Forest environment you also have on the other side trees and leaves that were found in aropur stomach contents so it probably fed on these tree branches did they eat from trees lying on the ground or did they climb trees
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these are hypothesis we will probably never know for sure these fossilized plants have been so well preserved that they still appear alive but as they began to disappear arur plura had to adapt this Forest environment will tend to dry out at the end of the Carboniferous the climate will change the vegetation will disappear and arthr plura will lose its food source which is probably one reason that explains its Extinction over a period of 10 million years the atmosphere and the climate
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gradually changed bringing about the demise of arthr plura the most recent fossils we have date from about 280 million years ago Evolution could have retained smaller and more energy efficient insects however in 2009 scientists were surprised to find new meura fossils in the south of France these specimens discovered on sight dating from the end of the permium period prove that the declining oxygen rate cannot be the sole explanation for the extinction of giant [Music]
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insects what Clues did these unexpected fossils [Music] reveal these deposits are scarce scientists know of only about 15 of them in the world and like here they've not been all fully
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excavated this beautiful landscape with its typical Red Rock is located less than an hour from the French Riviera this is one of the sites excavated by Andre [Music]
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Nell here we are 250 million years into to the red Continental peran red peran because the rocks have become oxidized the iron is oxidized and has become red so we are dealing with an environment that is extremely rich in organisms that have left their impact but few visible fossils up to now in any case in this deposit but fortunately fossils have been found in other deposits it's in a similar geological layer that insect fossils from the permium period were discovered in 2009
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close to the French of for a long time we thought these giant dragon flies had existed during the Carboniferous period at the beginning of the peran but they no longer existed towards the middle and end of the peran but we were surprised to discover dragonflies that were as big as those from the Carboniferous paleontologist were perplexed since the level of oxygen had already decreased by that period in theory giant insects should have disappeared but the specimens of
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different sizes conserved in Andre Nell's laboratory in Paris Pro that they were still around there are tiny wings of the meanu day like this one here this is the size of a modern dragonfly Wing we have much bigger species here is the rear wing of another meanu day another species this one too was a giant we have bigger ones but only fragments this here is a piece of meanu day's Wing the size is comparable to that of the meanu day of the coniferous we estimate that its wingspan is around
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23 in we see that with these animals there is great diversity it's during this time they become the most Diversified we have small ones medium ones big ones and very big ones this means they had not really become extinct at this period this does not sit well with the scenario of Extinction due to the decrease in the level of oxygen these recently discovered species of mean neuras found in France have also turned up in the United States evidence of their existence is
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accumulating here is what the Earth looked like during the middle of the permium period a hot and humid World covered with tropical forests with an oxygen rate just slightly higher than today one animal species survived Against All Odds Mega neuras represented by this Mega neur opsis this specimen discovered in Texas is as large as it French cousins but how can an insect measuring nearly 2 ft survive breathing air that was much poorer in oxygen than in the
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past did it have an advantage that arthr plura did [Music]
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not the mega neurops fossil was discovered in 1937 next to canaza city in the USA [Music] Professor Michael Engles is a Paleo entomologist who has worked at the University of canvas for the past 20
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years author of The Definitive work on the evolution of the insects he is also the head of this collection containing 4.7 million specimens most of them contemporary insects these are some of the large insects that occur today large moths stick insects beetles dragonflies and damsel flies and while they're pretty impressive in their size none of them can compare to the giant insects of the past according to angles one asset which might have enabled mean neuras to
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survive during the permium period despite the lower oxygen levels is the movement of their wings you would have an easier chance getting a large flying insect than you would a large insect that doesn't fly wings are vital not only for the movement of the organism but as the muscles contract to move the wings up and down they actually press up against the air sacks and move air through the body flight actually confers an advantage to uh the giant insects in the
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fact that the actual movement of the flight muscles helps to support the metabolically active tissue within them by getting oxygen into an area where a wingless insect or other arthropod would not be able to this full body ventilation could be the secret to meganeuropsis survival the movement of its wings quickly brings air to the trachea which then supplies the organs with [Music]
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oxygen while the ground dwelling Giants of the Carboniferous period disappeared this Advantage would have allowed mean neuras to continue ruling the skies During the permium period remaining at the top of the food chain in the swamps this dupla corus now extinct amphibian has no chance of going unnoticed betrayed by its need for air meganeuropsis sees it as soon as it leaves the water surface thanks to eyes that are extremely sensitive to movement shapes and colors
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[Music] w [Music]
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[Music]
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mean neuras were the super predators of the time and their wings enabled them to survive despite falling levels of oxygen so what caused their Extinction no megur fossils have been discovered from after the permium period today scientists still don't know exactly when they disappeared but other large-sized dragonflies survived the next 130 million years to explain the extinction of these Giants scientist are now contemplating the emergence of new Predators while insects were the only
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flying creatures during the first part of their history other animals took to the skies during the later peran period between 300 and 250 million years ago of what was to become eventually Europe
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[Music]
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Jean Sebastian sta alienist at the Natural History Museum in Paris is the leading French specialist in early vertebrates he has come to the legendary paleontology gallery to collect a very important specimen for the study of insect Predators though smaller in size than many other fossils this was the first of its species to possess a major advantage
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[Music]
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this is the fossil of a gliding reptile that is about 250 million years old and has the strange name of celos ravus this reptile actually developed gliding flight the ability to Glide allows an animal to catch prey in the air like the giant insects
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the planet continued to heat up at the end of the perum period swamps an infinite source of fossils now had aquatic plants characteristic of stagnant Waters like the insects during the Carboniferous period reptiles were just starting to try out life in the trees and flying amongst them s zavas would become an outstanding insect Hunter thanks to its retractable
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Wings it had a very unusual and interesting Anatomy its fairly small head was a triangular shape on its skull we can see small conico pointed teeth they were probably used to crack the hard exoskeletons of insects and of course the main characteristic of this gliding reptile are its stick shaped bones that start around the armpits and Ena this animal to throw itself in the air and base jump we can well imagine it climbing up this microscope for instance and then [Music]
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jumping we can even imagine it climbing with its small Claws and then unfolding its swings to Glide so we can picture the race between celus aravis and the flying insects living at that time only 16 in long this small reptile couldn't catch Mega neuras but it could compete for the same prey the Paleo dioptra to catch its victim it has to take the
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plunge CIA surus can't flap its wings to catch flying insects it relies on an element of
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[Music] surprise and its ability to
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Glide there is no room for
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[Music]
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error cidio surus is merely a first step on the road to
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flight this gliding reptile has no doubt played apart maybe not in the full extension of giant insects but in any case we have a super Predator regularly attacking them and we can therefore assume that this was one element in the decline of giant insects at the time if cier SAS was not the only culprit it was certainly the first to put pressure on giant insects before any others took to the skies this animal guarding the entrance to the kro museum in Germany is part of
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the terasol family these flying reptiles appeared 230 million years ago today they are completely extinct but scientists have discovered around 100 different species could they too have been a threat to giant insects Professor eard Frey or Dino as he is usually known is a world specialist in terrasaurs theasaurus are flying reptiles and they are characterized by a flly membrane that extended from the tip of the little finger down to the ankle the interesting point with these
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pterosaurus is that they have a size range which is simply unbelievable from about 20 cm swings span up to 14 M swings span which is unique yet according to scientists very few of these terrasaurs were insect eaters the only insectivores were part of the anurag natis family among the smallest terrasaurs we cannot imagine really that they hunted the big insects but probably they chase the small ones which are not seen in the fossil record the big insects however also chased small insect so they
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probably conquered about the same prey all the other pterosaurs from that time we know likely fed on something else and thus did not make any concerence to the big insects and probably this is one of the reasons why they persisted such a long
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time 230 million years ago during the Triassic period terrasaurs spread around Europe Europe but also to what is now South America and Asia for the first time in the history of life on earth a family of vertebrates learned to master not just gliding but flapping flight like annatas discovered in Germany its Asian cousin batak gnatus is a flying reptile nocturnal insect eating and fast with its flat scull and big eyes batrack arnus occupies the same ecological niche as modern day
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owls but the comparison with birds of prey stops there its enormous Jaws are equipped with a dozen conical teeth no flying insect can hide from Bacha Agatha's volums literally flying frog jaw can the caligrama an insect with a 10-in wingspan take it
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on an experiment carried out in Germany puts the theory to the
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[Applause] [Music] test Dino fry Works in collaboration with the Institute of fluid mechanics in K Germany this wind tunnel is usually used to refine the shape of airplanes and improve their aerody dyamics but today the paleontologist is using it to test the terasa flying [Music] abilities a resin and carbon fiber model of annatas is placed in the Wind Tunnel we are the beginning of our studies but what we learned so far is that pterosaurs likely were extremely
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slow Flyers yeah so they could cope with wind speeds uh around 40 kilm per hour or less that probably these guys needed to flap their wings to stay in the air and that they were not very good gliders but flapping wings also means that they were as active Flyers much more maneuverable and this is again interesting when they started to chase insects on the wing when theasaurus appeared insects lost the Monopoly on flapping flight bat trogus was indeed capable of leaving
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the tree line Shore to chase insects out in the open which his predecessor Celia aravis the flying lizard was unable to do the terrasaurs seem to have had more of an impact on the giant insect's prey than on the giant insects themselves contributing to their final decline but not fully explaining their Extinction
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[Music]
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on the other side of the Atlantic one American researcher suggested other culprits in a study published in August
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2012 this paleontologist specialized es in the extinction that occurred at the end of the perum period 250 million years
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ago more at home in front of a computer than wielding a TR in the field Matthew clam is a database de it took him a year and a half to collect the information needed to publish his survey on the decline of giant insects he has undertaken a mammoth task Gathering the sizes of all fossil wings since the first scientific Publications we compiled this very large database with nearly 10,000 insect species um by simply getting um published papers where paleontologists
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had found insect fossils and described them and given them a name Clapham discovered that during the first part of their history insect size changed with the level of oxygen in the atmosphere as oxygen declined they diminished in size and as it Rose their size increased so this pattern holds for the first 200 million years or so of of insect history um but then beginning in the late part of the the Jurassic period around 150 million years ago you can see insects
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are become become smaller um even though atmospheric auction is is going up at this time and this coincides quite closely with the evolution of of archaeopteris the first bird the ancient ancestors of the birds first appeared during the Jurassic period 160 m million years ago the oldest fossils come from
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China at that time forests of giant conifers offered a fantastic Launchpad to conquer the sky an ecological niche that was quickly seized by a new generation of creatures Learning to Fly small dinosaurs like this anones had feathers on their arms and legs and used them as wings [Music] the claws on their wings enabled them to gain altitude and get good Vantage points insects like this jurus in brof lebia had to hide in the trees to survive as soon as it takes off it
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becomes visible and is hunted down by anones while only a few terrasaurs like anagas ate insects all bird ancestors did increasingly skilled at flying they would become Fierce insect
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predators in the Cretaceous Period when these these first birds are are evolving there would have been increased predation pressure on these large insects in particular as they were less maneuverable than than the smaller insects uh in addition to this increased predation there was likely competition between birds and insects uh especially these large predatory insects for the same food sources and so both of those factors likely led to a a decrease in in insect
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size this competition between birds and insects still happens [Music] today just like flying lizards and parasaurs birds would have had an influence on the size of insects but why have giant insects completely disappeared leaving only today's small insect population a last clue could provide an answer it came from a fossil Rich site close to where anones was found in the Chinese region of loning northeast of Beijing the numerous eruptions that shook the region 125 million years ago
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have helped preserve certain plants from the period in volcanic ash including the ancestors of flowering plants discover in 2002 by the paleobotanist sun they would have had an unexpected impact on the extinction of the last large-sized dragon flies but here uh in China in the west Le we found at all this know an we call the
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arus this is archo fructus the first flower to appear on our
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planet on this fossil seen through a microscope we can distinguish the male organs the stam that contain the pollen and the pistol the female organ these characteristics allow sunate to confirm that this fossil belongs to the angiosperms a family of plants whose seeds are enclosed ins of fruit unlike conifers according to the paleobotanist these plants were Aquatic and grew on Lake Shores but what does the appearance of the first flowering plants have to do
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with the extinction of large carnivorous
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insects Andre Nell believes these two events are linked many families of insects disappeared at that time and others managed to adapt to angiosperms which proliferated and began to diversify to produce more or less our modern forests the impact was also very significant for dragonflies during that same period could the decline of giant insects have something to do with the dragonfly's original shape because before they were able to fly they were aquatic creatures their life began
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underwater for the first few years they they existed as L and just like their cousins the mayflies they fed on other aquatic insect
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[Music]
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Lara when flowering plants such as archo fructus appeared on the lak shores 125 million years ago the Lara's life conditions [Music] changed the plants took root in shallow water but then opened their flowers in the air when they withered their petals and leaves floated on the surface before sinking to the bottom this material is digested by the microorganisms present in the water but to do this the organisms use the oxygen contained in the water leaving little oxygen available for the dragonfly
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lava these dragonflies may have disappeared at that time because their L could not adapt to this change in the aquatic ecosystem and they were replaced by other dragon flies the emergence of flowering plants completely modified the lak's ecosystem and would have led to the extinction of the last large-sized insects which had gradually declined since the [Music] Carboniferous the extinction of arthropods and giant insects over millions of years of evolution teaches
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us that it took many protagonists to cause the extinction of these species the change in the composition of oxygen in the atmosphere the emergence of new Predators like flying lizards some teras SWS and the bird ancestors and finally the birth of
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flowers in the early 21st century which are the largest insects that inhabit our [Music]
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planet today insects can reach the size of a hand but very few are bigger than this Chinese Cricket for we are at the dawn of a new phase of Extinction C by humans since the onset of the Industrial Revolution the large insects live mostly in tropical or intertropical climates they're in danger since the habitat is at risk if the forest in which the giant stick insect lives is in danger the giant butterfly will of course disappear I certainly hope that we will continue to see them but
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certainly with the rate of habitat destruction that's going on throughout the world particularly in the tropical environments where many of these species occur um it is very likely that a lot of them will be lost just like the giant insects
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where do birds come from and who were their ancestors for a long time these questions have remained unanswered their family tree stopped abruptly at the oldest known species a fossil found in 19th century Germany archaeopteris whose name comes from the Greek for ancient wing
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but since 1996 thousands of animals Unearthed in China have shed new light on the origin of
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[Music]
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birds this abundance of the discoveries proves that most dinosaurs were not covered in Scales but clad in feathers some of these feathered Dr dragons could even [Music]
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fly the extent of the Asian jigsaw puzzle is so vast that it ties modern-day Birds to remarkable distant cousins and suggests a multitude of
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relatives during the Jurassic period between 200 and 145 million years ago the supercontinent Pangia opened up creating separate land masses at the edges of this world China and Siberia formed a huge Peninsula with a temperate climate similar to that of modern Europe
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the breakup of the continents was accompanied by volcanic eruptions particularly in China a paradise in Waiting inhabited by strange creatures like [Music] anonas meaning near bird this little dinosaur is completely covered in [Music] feathers the size of a modern-day pigeon anones is a long lost relation the descendants of this lightweight dinosaur survived better than other large theropods a group that includes all carnivorous dinosaurs
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[Music] including Guan Longs they are efficient Hunters 3 m long and weighing 50 [Music] kg to escape anones was capable of short gliding flights while its pursuer was firmly stuck on the [Music]
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[Music]
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ground and yet guanlong also had feathers what were they used for
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erupting volcanoes spewing fine Ash and noxus gases frows a moment of Jurassic Life For Eternity helping us answer some of these
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questions this dinosaur Paradise has become the feathered dinosaurs Pompei a huge range of new species has recently been discovered in one of China's many construction
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sites over the last two decades in the Leaning region paleontologists have collected thousands of specimens hidden for millions of [Music]
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years these magnificent fossils are in a state of almost perfect preservation thanks to the mixture of extremely fine clay and volcanic ash
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sediment and those volcanic eruptions kill the animal directly and they buried their body so that's why we have so beautiful skeleton and I include soft tissue preserved um so that's why we come here paleontologists shuing and his colleagues from around the world world can trace the chaotic History of Flight and feathers in these rocks the feather preservation is really amazing like detectives they examine the clues to understand what feathers were used [Music]
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for and discover how some dinosaurs from the therapod family turned over the course of millions of years into Birds
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[Music] the first piece of evidence in their inquiry was discovered at the end of the 19th century in Germany towards the end of the Jurassic period Europe was partly submerged under a shallow body of water called the tethis sea [Music] about 150 million years ago Germany was dotted with Tropical [Music]
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Islands terrasaurs the first flying vertebrates have dominated the skies for 80 million years this is germano dactus one of 150 species of theasaurus
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discovered these flying reptiles are not dinosaurs a fine skin stretches over their elongated fingers to create leathery Wings this membrane along with powerful muscles and hollow bones makes them masters of the Skies
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[Music]
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[Music] but the terasa aerial Supremacy is about to be challenged by the very first Birds such as
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archaeopteris a primitive bird whose claws are the ends of of its wings rais suspicions amongst 19th century [Music] paleontologists its fossils were found around the modern German Town of sofen a tropical archipelago during the late Jurassic Period some islands harbored salty lagoons where dying animals avoided scavengers
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and were buried by Soft mud that preserved them in minute
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detail eard fry commonly known as Dino fry is the resident expert this is the famous solenhofen laminated Limestone and you can actually see the sediment stapled up like the leaves of a book and inside the leaves of this Rocky book this is where archa opter was found together with many other fossils and uh it's a speciality of this rock that it is very very very fine grained and inside this mud fossils are preserved like in a tin and this is why this entire area is so valuable as a window
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in in Jurassic times the locals use these stones to tile their houses in the process uncovering highly prized Treasures in the history of
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[Music] paleontology in 1868 faced with the archaeopteris British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley asserted that this was a transitional fossil between reptiles and birds [Music] a friend of Darwin and an Ardent defender of the theory of evolution Huxley was an expert anatomist capable of skilled fossil analysis until the year 1861 before Arch Optics was discovered the only creatures that were known to have feathers were the birds so it was apparent that this is a fossil
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bird and Thomas haxley looked at it very closely and he discovered signs that this bird could also be a dinosaur actually a carnivorous dinosaur and actually shares characters of the two making it a missing link between dinosaurs and birds that was a sensation at the
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time the darwinian idea of natural selection is therefore very recent
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Huxley had the insight to see that Arch op's teeth clawed wings and bony tail meant that it has similarities with kognus Dinosaurs predatory relations of the velociraptors [Music]
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archaeopteris was certainly no acrobat but it had feathers and it could
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fly its color bones had already fused together a vital step enabling the wings to Flap efficiently and gain altitude allowing it to hunt and nest in trees [Music] throughout the 20th and 21st centuries more Arch opter fossils were Unearthed in Germany
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[Music] this is specimen number 11 it's the latest specimen and it came to light in the year 2011 and despite its fragmentary it's not completely preserved because the skull is missing it still shows us some features which were previously unknown one of them is that the tail end shows a v-shaped feather configuration and the second is that you can see in this specimen the extent of the feather Trav along the [Music]
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legs the feathers on its feet are intriguing since modern Birds no longer show this characteristic is this an exception what is sure is that this feature has not been selected by Evolution just like this giant Marine reptile a leop
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done washed up on the shores of the Lagoon it is a godsend for archaeopteris the flies attracted by the carcass provide a hearty meal for this insect
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eater but being out in the open is dangerous for Arch opter an opportunistic German oact sees the prospect of a protein Rich
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M and doesn't appreciate the competition [Music]
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[Music] once the mightiest creatures in the skies terrasaurs became extinct by the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago while archaeopteris his descendants grew in number bogged down at the bottom of the sofen Lagoon this remarkable fossil launched the debate on the relationship between birds and dinosaurs but with insufficient proof this theory was shelled for more than a 100 [Music] years until New Evidence came to light at the end of the 20th century in [Music] China in 1993
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leaning a huge fossil deposit was found dating from the Cretaceous Period 125 million years
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ago this region formerly known as Manchuria comprises fertile Farmland with fields of corn and
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pasture farmers were the first to uncover fossils inadvertently in seun at the foot of a cliff fashioned by volcanic eruptions layers of gray mud alternate with red [Music]
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[Music] Ash transported to Beijing these fossils allow 21st century researchers new insights into the feathered dragons like cusur opter the first discovered in
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1996 this specimen remains a source of Fascination for one of China's most famous paleontologists shuing I remember clearly as that time when this discovery was announced everyone got so excited you know we know we are kind of shocked the by the beauty of the fossil if you look at this spacement closely you see the feathers cover the whole body along the over the head over the back cover whole the tail a little bit hair also I mean limb basically feathers are quite
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simple they are more like your hair before this discovery some penologist believe some bird like danc should have feathers but but now we have real evidence so that's totally different the discovery of this feather covered fossil was astounding for the first time they had found a dinosaur with Aven characteristics proof that they were part of the same [Music]
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lineage in Conifer forests growing in the shadow of volcano lived sinur opter it belonged to a group of carnivorous dinosaurs called
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theropods these Predators use sight and smell to
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[Music] hunt one of its favorite victims is Zango terium one of the first
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mammals sinur opic's feathers look like the down covering modern day chicks they are so different from bird feathers but for a long time Skeptics dismissed them as mere hairs
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[Music] [Applause] [Music] in 2010 chuing focused on
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[Music]
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sinosauropteryx
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pigments these are are mosomes cells that give feathers their color shushing discovered circular shapes that produce a brown pigment and stick-like shapes that create a gray color he deduced that sinos orop was the color of a squirrel with lighter stripes on its tail but that's not all we can use a Mal to infer the color but more importantly for us we want to use that information to part the hypothesis that those dark impression in this particular spacement are Proto feathers not
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something else because if mamone are present we can see quite confidently those are primitive feathers sinus arupix was undoubtedly covered in feathers but this land animal was incapable of
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flight so what use was this Dino fuz did it protect this warm-blooded animal from the cold possibly but this theory is not easy to [Music]
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prove to learn more about the climate in leoning during this period shuing teamed up with a laboratory in France this therapod tooth brought back from China by geologist Roma AMU holds the key to this meteorological mystery a lot of researchers thought that fossils from that time couldn't preserve the weather conditions recorded during the animals lifetime it was a big challenge we were going to test something unknown could we find out climate information or not in a sense we can test the water
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that the dinosaurs drank a chemical reaction with the oxygen preserved in tooth enamel reveals the temperature of the atmosphere 100 million years ago Roma made a major discovery that radically altered our
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preconceptions at that time there was a global climate that was similar or a little colder than current temperatures which is very different from what we thought about the period of the dinosaurs that we had imagined as hot tropical and the same throughout the world well Ying is the climate was similar to what we have in the north of France with very harsh Winters so dinosaurs would have seen snow in winter so feathers were an insulating material it meant they could keep warm
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and keep active throughout the year like any other warm-blooded
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animal coincidentally just as Roma published his research the discovery of large siiz dinosaurs confirmed his work [Music] uterus the aptly named feathered tyrants were the super predators of the [Music] time due to their large size the remains of T-Rex's cousins are kept in a warehouse in a suburb of Beijing [Music] yeah urnal is really amazing animal you know it's a really big animal about 1 and/ half tons in body mass his body covered by feathers really long feathers so this is
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unexpected you know traditionally we we thought you know when animal get bigger is for dinosaur same the low feathers reduced feathers so all at least feathers are kind of sparse but uh here we have a large bodyi dinosaur with a dense and like long feathers so this is bizarre the fact that such a large warm-blooded animal was covered in feathers suggests that its body size eyes was not sufficient to regulate its temperature so the climate must have been very cold the discovery of the largest
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feathered animal ever found confirms the hypothesis of a temperate climate with harsh [Music]
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Winters it proves that the theropod dinosaurs of leoning wandered into the winter snow 125 million years ago and that the feathers of the little sinur opter and the huge utilus protected them from cold temperatures in this region of the northern hemisphere [Music]
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[Music]
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the insulating property of feathers remains a feature in modern Birds but it is not sufficient to explain how surface dwelling dinosaurs evolved over millions of years to become Birds among the therapods living in leoning was there only one type of feather and at what stage did dinosaurs begin to fly over time Chinese paleontologists have Unearthed many feathered creatures on some fossils like the cipic discovered in 1998 shuing found feathers that were not just simple
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filaments with its large feet it looks much like an ostrich in this fossil there are some really beautiful feather impression here you see two hands of this animal and here is a middle finger and you see feathers attached to the finger this surface and this they go this way so it's quite a big
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feathers cipic literally meaning tail feather comes from the same Chinese site as 125 million years [Music] [Applause] [Music] ago scientists imagin that these chicks were imprinted on their mothers just like M birds and followed them everywhere more or less
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[Music]
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weighing almost 20 kg the female cepter can't fly neither can her
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[Music] youngsters so why do these animals have long feathers could they serve a purpose other than warmth [Music] feathers begin as a simple filament which divides to form a pom pom before barbs appear around the Hol shaft but at this stage in their development feathers are symmetrical and air passes through
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them so it is not flying anymore it's fast running animal living on the ground so what's a function apparently those feathers are not used for flying uh so the other possibility uh most people believe is a [Music] display just like many birds the males and females were physically very different paleontologists believe that the male cepter displayed his shimmering feathers in order to attract females
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[Music]
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these courtship rituals along with natural selection stimulated an anatomical transformation cordi were among the first theraps to possess a shorter tale that supported their display [Music]
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Fells in order to fly they were still missing a fundamental element flight [Music] feathers seen under a microscope this feather comes from another dinosaur discovered in 2000 by shushing himself it is a vital clue to solving the mystery of the origin of flight here the feathers are highly asymmetrical so asymmetrical feathers are normally considered to be a associated with flight capability these feathers are identical to those of modern Birds it may be proof that some
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dinosaurs could fly microraptor is definitely the most amazing species that discovered so far and it is dinosaur but you see it has uh asymmetric flat feathers not only the feathers on the arms but also on the feet so we call the fwi the condition this is really really bizarre and now we have quite a good evidence suggesting this forign condition is related to the origin of flight for a long time paleontologists believed that two-legged dinosaurs ran along the ground in order to take off
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but Micro reactor's climbing claws opened up a new possibility 125 million years ago in the part of China that microraptor called home the ground was fertilized by volcanic ash that encouraged the growth of lush vegetation tall trees add a vertical Dimension to the landscape and the microraptor meaning small Thief takes advantage of
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them microraptor sported feathers on its arms and legs
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with its four wings was probably the world's first base
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jumper four wings offer an advantage for gliding but not for walking
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a microraptor on the ground is a microraptor in danger
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[Music]
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[Applause] [Music]
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according to shushing tree dwelling feathered dinosaurs like these would evolve to become
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Birds to better understand this transition paleontologist teamed up with an ornithologist zongi in front of him is an incredible collection of primitive Birds found at cun like the feathered dinosaurs from the same site they all date from the Cretaceous Period 125 million years ago I think uh there are over 500 uh spens of confusion sonis are collected in this Museum alone I think as this is the largest collection of confus Sonic in the whole
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[Music] world this bird like confusious Onis they are only shortly uh later than the earliest bird arop and uh they are transitioned in many uh flight apparatus many features despite the claws on their wings they are very similar to Modern
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Birds they no longer have teeth or a long bony tail they also have a furcula the famous chicken wishbone for attaching muscles to Wings and the males have two ceremonial ribbons ornamenting their behinds
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[Music]
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[Music] this sexual variation is similar to that of the feathered dinosaur cipic like him the male has long feathers that he uses to lure the [Music] ladies competition is tough and courting displays are often interrupted
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[Music]
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also you can see the bird uh start climbing the trunk with uh very big claws in the wing now we see the bird can uh are perch on the branches of the trees because the the helex of the foot is already reversed much like a modern [Music]
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bird confucious oris's narrow feathers were not well adapted to gliding but would have allowed it to fly by flapping its wings albeit clumsily but natural selection is at work retaining only the most Adept genes [Music]
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yet the presence of many birds found at the same location as feather dinosaurs does not necessarily prove that they were related if Birds had already Diversified 125 million years ago U tyranus and other theropods may have been merely an evolutionary dead end so when did the first bird appear did they share a common ancestor with feathered dinosaurs and how did their ancestors begin [Music] flying to answer these questions Chinese paleontologists have one last card of their
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sleeves west of leonin a new fossil bed was revealed during the construction of a Motorway
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in 2009 a finally preserved anones dating from the Jurassic period was found near here it was to become a crucial piece in shing's puzzle this site is very important for at least for for one reason we know that artics the earliest nor bird is from about 145 million years ago but most other FAS dinosaurs are you know from early cres or even later so this dinosaur was living in like 160 million years ago earlier than arrix so that means there are some feas dinosaur
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predates arap Tri the earliest bird so that's uh correct the time sequence this new fossil puts an end to the debate feathered dinosaurs are undoubtedly older than the first birds today shushing discovers a fish confirmation that anones lived in a rich ecosystem this little four-winged theropod must have been a victim to Giant [Music] predators in the Jurassic period terasol like these Darwin opterus ruled of the Skies with talon-like claws and a wingspan over a meter wide they were the
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equivalent of modern-day Birds of Prey their ability to fly and perform aerial acrobatics was beyond that of the feathered [Music] dinosaurs faced with this constant danger anones sought shelter in the forest but this little dinosaur was also threatened from the ground its only shelter lies in the restricted area between the ground and the sky the trees it Glides down to feed in the
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undergrowth its surface area is smaller than microraptor so it falls more [Music] quickly with its long back legs anones is built like a sprinter but its lengthy feathers are a hindrance on the ground its long legs are an advantage for foraging or rushing to the nearest shelter if such a thing exists [Music]
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though clumsy anones showed that dinosaurs attempted to fly from trees using four [Music] wings on this rare fossil the rear leg feathers are visible to the naked eye
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to refine his theory shushing continues his research using a medical scanner X-rays of anon's skeleton will be digitized in 3D in order to study its [Music]
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biomechanics but honestly there are some debates how exactly those animals use their leg wiins some people believe the leg wiins are not really related to flight maybe is a display structure if you look at other dinosaurs their leg normally is underneath the body they has all like fully erect posture one possibility may be Anis can project its leg slightly laterally to compensate for the lack of a wishbone anones used its rear leg feathers to improve its gliding
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ability the discovery of anuis proves the dinosaur flight was a result of trial and an error in the evolution of anatomy and [Music] Feathers surprisingly new information about the origin of feathers was soon to appear from Over the Border in Siberia in the summer of 2013 the first Russian feathered fossils made their appearance [Music] 1500 km north of Beijing in the trans Bal step a team of Russians and belgians worked together at the excavation
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site when local geologists found the first bones they invited paleontologist Pascal gooda from the Royal Institute of Belgium to take part in this revolutionary discovery
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we're at the kulinda deposit in southeast Siberia the hills you can see behind me date from the Jurassic period between 145 and 160 million years ago and Russian geologists who were prospecting in the area in 2010 found the first dinosaur bones which have been extremely important for reconstructing the evolution of plummage and feathers in dinosaurs his curiosity aroused Pascal assembled a team to search the site for themselves it's a lengthy process requiring a deep layer of soil to be
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removed to get to the fossils but after several days the team's work starts to show
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[Applause] results yeah look at that that's quite a big deal just there at the edge oh wow that's
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[Music] one so here at the edge of the plate you can see very fine little filaments and these are feathers dinosaur feathers you can see that the filaments converge towards the base so these are composite feathers It's A Primitive kind of down that we find on some primitive dinosaurs
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compared to the impressive Chinese discoverers these fossils may seem a little underwhelming but the paleontologists are thrilled to discover a completely new animal
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species during the Jurassic period the Chinese Peninsula was covered in a vast Forest of conifers while Siberia was much more hostile style the arid climate had huge seasonal variations in temperature and intense volcanic activity one of the keys to conserving precious
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fossils only fragments of skeletons are found at Cinda to begin with the Russians thought that the feathers came from fossil ized Birds the scales from
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crocodiles and the Bones from a small predatory [Music] dinosaur but Pascal was not convinced by this hypothesis in 2014 he reanalyzed all the fossils and suggested an entirely different explanation it's a bit like going into a cemetery and Gathering up loose bones you'll have small tibas large tibas little femurs and big femur but they all have the same morphology so we can tell they all come from the same type of dinosaur that we called Cinda
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dramus because of the large number of disconnected bones that we found at kulinda we now know that kulinda dramus was a small heror dinosaur that was fast slender and agile this is the first ever feathered heror dinosaur to be discovered a separate branch of the dinosaur family tree from the carnivorous
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theropods colinda dromia lived in herds just like vilder Beast migrations in Africa large Predators such as sinraptor must have closely followed the movements of these dinosaurs
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[Music]
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this is a real Revolution what it means is that all dinosaurs could potentially have had feathers feathers would have appeared on an ancestor that was common to both groups it could be as old as dinosaurs themselves first seen in the Triassic period 220 million years ago
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[Music]
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[Music] the misfortunes of this group of herbivores have led paleontologists to the origins of
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feathers thanks to Cinda dromus we now know that the first feathered dinosaur the common ancestor of the carnival and the herbivores remains to be found in Fossil Beds going back to before the Jurassic [Music]
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[Music]
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period but who knows what other Secrets could be found in Siberia and what Clues could be hidden in other parts of the world to document the early history of the bird Dynasty [Music]
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[Music]
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to study the mammals that lived during the age of the dinosaurs paleontologists were dependent for a long time on Tiny fragments of fossils they believed that mammals at that time were no larger than a mouse and that they had only flourished after the extinction of dinosaurs but the discovery in China of a amazingly well-preserved fossils at the beginning of the 21st century revealed that mammals were bigger and more varied than previously thought detailed analysis of their
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physical features allows us to understand how they were able to coexist with their carnivorous neighbors and even outlive them
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the fossils of these amazing mammals were found in the volcanic region of leoning northeast of Beijing repenomamus was the size of a wolf and was able to devour young feathered dinosaurs
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they must have been victim to large Predators like these uteruses they are much bigger than all previously known
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mammals these rep anomalus lived 130 million years ago in a highly active volcanic area
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preserved in fine volcanic ash their skeletons have survived the
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ages radically changing paleontologists understand Landing of the first
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[Music]
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mammals this fossil mammals are certainly related to our own evolutionary history in the a sense that we ourselves are mammals mammals whose name comes from mamory gland are the only animals to suckle their young their characteristics include fur covered bodies ears that are separate from their jaws and a great variety of teeth all of which according to the latest fossil discoveries were already present at the time of the dinosaurs and what we see is that they go from having teeth with a few
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cusps on them to having teeth that have many different cusps or tools such that they were able to survive the mass extinction that killed off Dinosaurs the fossils discovered at the beginning of the 21st century show that the first modern mammals appeared 125 million years ago the genetic analysis indicates that they may go back even further until the discovery of new evidence controversy rages between geneticists and
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paleontologists it All Began 250 million years ago at the beginning of the Triassic period during a time when the world was extremely
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hot the ancestors of the mammals were mamalian reptiles like these three neodon a relative of the reptile family thr Aidan is considered to be a transitional species in the evolution toward WS mammals like reptiles its legs are not under its body but on the sides and it has no external ears but like mammals it has several different kinds of teeth and its body is covered with [Music] fur to escape the heat it dug B along the banks of rivers which is where it was
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fossilized new x-ray technology at the synchrotron radiation facility in France enables scientists to analyze this South African burrow discovered in the 19th [Music]
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century using this Innovation VOR Fernandez is able to study the contents of the rock without destroying [Music] it we discovered this borrow on a site where a road was under construction and amidst all the Burrows we discovered in this small Quarry this one had small bones in it which gave us the idea of extracting it completely and studying it here at the sron in grob this tunnel was buried 250 million years ago at a pivotal moment in the Triassic period when 70 % of the
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planet's terrestrial species disappeared this block of stone may be able to tell us more about what happened to the survivors of this dramatic Extinction the best way to find out which animal used which burrow is to find the animal directly inside the borrow and to find this animal rather than clearing the Rock by hand we will use x-rays to study the animal inside the fossilized borrow 100 billion times more powerful than Hospital X-Rays the synchrotron is able to distinguish the difference in
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density between fossilized bones and The Rock
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itself this highresolution technology revealed the presence of a thrinaxodon a long-lost mammal ancestor plus an unexpected bonus an amphibian named brista line by its
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[Music]
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side this is a very big surprise because first of all we did not expect that but mostly it's very rare because animals don't usually share the same burrow especially with animals that are the same size and have the same diet just as some mammals hibernate to protect the El from the cold this thr axan Burrows underground and estivates to avoid the
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heat in this dormant state it may not have been aware of the brasta taking refuge in its shelter the amphibian could also have been hiding from the Hostile climate and its fossil shows that it was
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injured we discovered that the brooma was wounded it had a series of seven broken ribs that were healing we know that because it has small bone growes around the fractures so we see the healing process we know it was probably injured for several weeks this discovery revealed that mammal's ancestors had developed the ability to enter into a state of torper one wounded the asleep both animals would have been taken by surprise by the rising
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Waters the lineage to which thoon belonged was capable of surviving because it could dig underground tunnels and withstand droughts thanks to its specific metabolism the fact that this lineage survived allowed for the emergence of mammals several million years later [Music] vassel and his South African colleagues are now searching for new Burrows to scan hoping to solve other [Music] Mysteries we are also looking for an egg or a pregnant female that will finally
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tell us which mode of reproduction our ancestors had it's a difficult task because mammal fossils from the Triassic period are very
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rare until the late 20th century the only remains we had were the first mammals where their teeth like these tiny specimens that are preserved at the national Museum of Natural History in Paris M specialist Emanuel Gabon remembers his early years as a [Music]
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paleontologist when I started my career in the 80s and '90s most of the remains we found were isolated teeth we dreamt of finding not only Jaws but complete skulls
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these tiny fragments are obtained through painstaking work paleontologists must Sie several tons of sediment to uncover just a few of these melean
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teeth the teeth are well preserved because tooth ANL is particularly resistant to time it is the hardest part of the skeleton the part that fossilizes
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[Music] best the interesting thing about these collections of isolated mammal teeth is their small size you can have a collection of several hundred teeth which will fit into a shoe box so you can have the representation of a very Diversified FAA even the history of a whole geographical province which boils down to a collection in the drawer of a cabinet with several hundred teeth that's exactly what the collection studied by Emanuel gabon's team looks like started in 1976 in a fossil deposit
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near Nori in northeastern France it now contains close to a th000 teeth from the upper tric period 210 million years ago this is the oldest collection of mammals in the world with a dozen different species identified solely through the shape of their teeth on these molers the three cusps are exclusive to mammals the molers are used to grind food while canines keep food in place and incises cut this complex dentition indicates that these animals are mammals
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since other animal species have only one type of [Music] tooth the shape of teeth is like an identity card to show what group they belong to it's an identity card to identify the animal and it also reveals functional information in other words the animals died because sharp teeth for instance indicate an insectivorous diet but if they have rather flattened teeth that indicates a herbivorous diet though they tell us more about how these dinosaur age mammals ate the fossils
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give no indication as to what they looked
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[Music] like however a tiny clue discovered in France in 2008 reveals more about the skin of these extinct
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animals this abandoned Quarry is located near the town of aring on the west coast of France on this sand excavation site two paleontologists from the University of Ren take advantage of the exposed walls to come and collect fossils this geological layer dates from the Cretaceous Period 100 million years ago at the time it was covered by a forest of conifers and Ginko trees whose remains have been uncovered by Roman vulo and
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diu look at this this Leaf has been in clay for the past 100 million years comes off and if I blow on it I can bend it which shows that it's still flexible apart from its change in color the passage of millions of years doesn't seem to have altered this Leaf significantly the paleontologists are searching for another treasure in this Petrified Forest occasionally bits of animals become trapped in the resin from Conifer trees when the resin fossilizes it becomes [Music]
1:55:09
Amber so here we are at the bottom of the Quarry water has poured down and created an interesting little out crop because you can see the different layers the layer is stre because you have different alternating sediments you will have two main types of deposits you find sand deposits white ochre and red and then another deposit from an accumulation of coal which forms these small black veins so here you can see sand alternating with Clay beds that contain plant debris and small pieces of Amber
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which is what we're looking for in particular
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the sediment is then sivd in a nearby Pond we've got quite a few small fragments here that's a good sized piece it's slightly translucent part Brown part red paleontology relies on meticulous work and a fair amount of luck
1:56:24
one major clue to the appearance of mammals was discovered thanks to an incredible stroke of Good
1:56:33
Fortune while looking for bacterial filaments one of Rao's colleagues made an exceptional Discovery two hairs trapped in Amber so we see the whole piece of Amber and in the middle the longer of the two hairs which is slightly bent as you can see it is very very fine we compared this 100 million year old fossil hair with the hair of current mammals and we found that this one presents many similarities with what can be found in existing species including scale morphology and scale
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layout and their Contours also show strong similarities to the hair of living animals from a paleontological point of view this is an outstanding Discovery since there are only one or two fossil mammal hairs in the world 100 million years ago warm-blooded mammals already had the same hair as today to protect them from the climate and allow them to survive the extinction that decimated large dinosaurs [Music]
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in China at the beginning of the 21st century new Clues to the physical appearance of mammals were Unearthed in a deposit dating from the Cretaceous Period 125 million years ago fossils were discovered in an area that was once a peninsula with a subtropical climate this world dominated by huge dinosaurs like these 30t high titanosaurs was also home to mammals like this aoma scoria literally ancient mother that can climb prayed upon by feathered dinosaurs like the Zen one long aoma was the
1:58:48
oldest known mammal ancestor when it was discovered in
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2002 located in the leing region Northeast of Beijing this deposit was once a volcanic area that has preserved our distant past for millions of
1:59:19
years shes American paleontologist of Chinese origin is at the seun cliff where many longl fossils have
1:59:33
emerged this Yan formation is Lake deposits and trapped all variety of fossil vertebrates most famous of all are feather dinosaurs but very important for understanding our own human beings early evolutionary history are are those Cretaceous mammals 125 million years ago multiple volcanic eruptions created a series of sedimentary layers pockets of Red Ash flattened the mammals into the gray mud like a printing [Music]
2:00:17
press measuring 6 in from nose to tail and weighing around a oun aaya would have been fair game for the feathered
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dinosaurs the fossil mammals are preserved very well because they Liv nearby shallow water lake the sediments accumulated fairly slow and also the are occasional volcanic eruptions so the hot volcanic ash help to trap the fossil mammals in the sediments and that is why they are preserved so well therefore gave us this beautiful fossil to study at the Natural History Museum of Beijing shuo studies fossils of the aoma scansor group placental mammals whose fetuses are sustained in the uterus by
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placenta just like [Music] humans the whole body of the animal is beautifully preserved a dream come true for any mammal specialist it is absolutely amazing that we have the entire fossils here with the complete skeleton we can start to flash out a more interesting picture about this early mammals this guys lived in Cretaceous it has very grass out jaws and we can recognize even with naked eye the limbs are quite slender and we can tell by its very long fingers and the
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different nail structures that they are tree climber it shows that the placental ancesters are capable of exploring the aboral or tree living nich is than all these other contemporaries and this gave us a big evolutionary
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Advantage aoma left its young high up out of reach of dinosaurs that sometimes slept on the
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ground these very first mammals would have to leave their shelter in order to drink
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their extraordinary Mobility is revealed by this skeleton particularly by the elongated trapezoid bones which resemble those of tree dwelling primates
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it is really by uh studying the ankle joint we are able to recognize great many features to place this particular fossil on the line that eventually gave rise to Modern placentals its feeding habits were revealed thanks to its extremely well preserved teeth you can tell that this uh mammals have a very sharp cusp in the front and in the lower teeth generally there were a series of very sharp triangles and those are very effective for cutting the skeletons of insects and also slice off
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the Flesh of worms
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[Music] sh [Music]
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[Music]
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[Music] after the discovery of aoma more fossils were Unearthed in China changing the vision that paleontologists had of ancient mammals
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countless wonders are kept at The Institute of vertebrate paleontology in Beijing among them is a repenomamus with a complete and unusually large
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[Music] skeleton Yong King Wang is the paleontologist in charge of studying this strange 30in creature Unearthed in 2004 a lot of of mic mmal that about the size of mouse a rat so this is quite a big another feature of this large mammal is its sharp pointed teeth embedded in a strong [Music] jaw before we found this animal we know mesic mammals usually we sought there are insector and small living in the shadow of dinosaurs you can see the te is like sharp and pointed so it's a
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Carnivor animal especially in his stomach area there are some fragmentary bones of baby dinosaurs called tacosaurus so we said okay this guy ate Dinosaurs the animal stomach contents are revolutionary they contain proof that some mammal ancestors actually fed on young dinosaurs rather than living in their
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[Music] Shadow paleontologist do not know exactly how they
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hunted but they believe Romus work together in packs like wolves
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[Music]
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the Beijing collection has many surprises in store for [Music] scientists discovered in 200 6 volti aetherium has an unusual feature a large fold of skin connecting its upper and lower
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[Music] limbs observed under a microscope this dark stain reveals the presence of numerous hairs
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called a patagium it's a fine membrane of skin covered in fur like a flying squirrel the Tor skin stretched between its limbs meant that vola etherium was able to Glide from the
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trees before this discovery scientists believed that bats were the first flying mammals to appear 50 million years ago voltio theum who was a around at the same time as the dinosaurs showed that flying mammals were around long before that this nocturnal Hunter waited for Dusk to start searching for its
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[Music] prey it's really interesting it's told us the ecological diversity of the meso m is much wider than we thought before usually we thought animals is living in the tree or working on the ground but these animals can GL in the air
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[Music] this flying animal confirms that mammals had adapted to different environments long before the extinction of dinosaurs despite the discovery of these fossils in China one question still troubled the scientific Community during the early 21st century when did placental mammals first appear geneticists and paleontologists thrashed out their opposing views in scientific journals in the German Town of oldenberg a team of researchers hunts down the genes of modern mammals in
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order to construct their family
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tree we can estimate by seeing how similar a gene is in two different species of mammal how closely related they are Olaf binda Emmons is the author of a 2007 study which analyzed the genes of 99% of animals living
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[Music]
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today this Mammoth task required eight months of DNA sequencing to track the genetic mutations of 60 markers throughout the evolution of mammals the molecular data will give us a much more complete picture we have DNA here for many more species then we have fossil data for the fossils will give us Point estimates throughout the tree the DNA will fill in the gaps and give us all the divin times for all the species of mammals and all the common ancestors that were
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[Music]
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this method called the molecular clock shows that placental mammals separated from marsupiales 160 million years ago during the Jurassic period Then Diversified during the Cretaceous Period to form the current main groups rodents carnivores and primates an unexpected result since no fossil of these early mammals has ever been discovered this was interesting because there's a very big disconnect between molecular studies and fossil
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studies in Pittsburgh on the other side of the Atlantic another study offered very different
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results it is the work of John Wibble a paleontologist at the caragi Museum of Natural History
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its starting point was the discovery of a skull found in a 75 milliony old deposit in Mongolia named mesus gobiensis it has been studied from every angle since it does not belong to any known species 400 of its morphological features have been compared to those of 82 fossil or living mammals what we did as we looked at the individual morphological features of this animal across a broad array of other fossil forms and living mammals to try to figure out what it was what it
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was related to and our study supported the traditional view that there were no fossils living during the cortus that were members of the placental group itself there were only the ancestors of placentals living which of these two studies should we believe fossil or genetic the molecular studies all tend to say that the crown group orders rodents primates carnivores bats they all have their origins in the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs were still alive the problem is there's absolutely no fossil
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evidence supporting this many of these modern groups according to the molecular clock analyses actually are they should be present in the Cretaceous record we can't find them there's no doubt that there were placental m in the Cretaceous what's debated is what kind of placental mammals they are and it's a question of who's right at the moment to achieve the most complete mammal family tree both types of data will need to be refined defining the pace of genetic
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mutations on one hand and seeking Fossil Beds on the other since new fossils would confirm the geneticist hypothesis
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in the meantime paleontologists are also trying to understand how these early mammals protected themselves from
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[Music] Dinosaurs the ability to nurse their young could have been a benefit
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[Music] if we want to understand how modern theor come from we need to look at modern theon's distant relatives Zango theum is a mammal that is even more ancient than placental mammals this extremely well-preserved fossil was discovered in China in [Music] 1997 we can be relatively sure it is a mammal because it had fur and associated with fur would be a whole series of reproductive features and so we know that the must have nurse its fetuses but we don't know if the fetuses was born
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either in a egg or a live fetus lactation offers an advantage when food is scarce since the young continue to be fed thanks to their mother's body reserves lactation first appeared in the form of hundreds of milk producing glands on the abdomen just like modern platypuses the young would lick the thick milk from their mother's
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hair zangi etherum has another characteristic in common with monotes like the platypus a spur on its hind leg this spe definitely has another fossil that has preserved with a boning spur and it's also consistent with the first observation directly from this particular specimen in modern monitoring this spur is definitely used for selfdefense but we do not know if it is truly poisonous or it's just a bon spur
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snakes have fangs insects can sting but this defense technique is rare among modern mammals
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[Music]
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[Applause] [Music] located on the male's hind legs this spur may have released a Venom capable of paralyzing their [Music]
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foes according to scientists this weapon is not terribly efficient since it takes time for Venom to have an effect as they a vault they tried other strategies like running away and to improve this tactic what better than a superior sense of hearing the evolution of ear bones was a key Advantage for primitive mammals in 2011 the discovery of this leoniden fossil shows at last how the jawbones of these reptiles migrated to form the middle ear of modern mammals 120 million years
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ago this specimen is in most complete Amo we have ever found in Western down all the bones are preserved here so it's a very beautiful specimen especially this specimen preserves some tiny bones of your region this year O course usually is very difficult to be preserved in the fossils because it's were tiny more important it is a transitional stage of the meman midyear evolution in ancient mammals the lower jaw was linked to the skull by an elongated bone in leonan this evolved to begin
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forming the ear bones the hammer Anvil and tanic ring became completely detached in modern mammals to form the inner ear
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amazingly every mammal embryo including humans reproduces this evolutionary phase in the womb resulting in the formation of the inner ear this Precision Tool allows us to analyze everything that happens around us constantly yes you can hear the dangerous earlier than the other kind of animals so helps them to escape from the pred Dead The Mystery of the inner ear bones a link with our reptilian past is cleared up thanks to this new [Music] fossil another mammal weapon
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teeth reveal their secrets at the University of Washington in Seattle this is where Gregory Wilson uses state-of-the-art technology to analyze the teeth of multituberculates mammal species that became extinct 34 million years ago we found some really exciting results actually what we found is that these multituberculates that were living alongside dinosaurs actually undergo an adaptive radiation 20 million years before dinosaurs go extinct and what we see is that they go from having teeth
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with a few cusps on them such that they can eat insects and so on to having teeth that have many different cusps or tools such that they can exploit a new resource in flowering [Music] plants is that ability to exploit that new resource that allows them to expand in terms of numbers of different species of multituberculates as well as the range of body sizes that they have such that they were able to survive the mass extinction that killed off
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dinosaurs his study shows that multituberculates evolved well before the extinction of dinosaurs they moved from an insect-based diet to a diet based on fruit or even angiosperms flowering plants that appeared during the Cretaceous Period
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to reach this astonishing result Gregory Wilson used fossils collected over a hundred years in Montana's Hell Creek formation by studying this collection of tiny teeth under a microscope he was able to familiarize himself with the many species of multituberculates
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[Music] this is the largest of um multituberculates that lived uh the size of maybe a beaver or a Marmet uh and it has many many bumps all along the tooth row and those bumps act as tools to crush and grind food um another example sits inside this tiny vial it's a another multituberculate but it also had teeth with many little bumps so this was a smaller version of this animal that lived during the time of dinosaurs this lineage we've known about for a very long time but it's been
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difficult to really quantify or understand what the shape of those teeth mean we've tried many different approaches but none have really uh been able to give us the Precision that we can now attain today this technological Revolution came in the form of of the CT scan a medical imaging tool nowadays used by
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paleontologists specimens like this 67 milliony Old tooth are first scanned with x-rays on a microscopic scale it is identifiable by its long inzer but what intrigues researchers is the complexity of its molers once the data is collected cartography software reconstructs an accurate map showing the shape of the teeth Gregory Wilson has found that carnivores have a fairly simple tooth structure with approximately 110 cusps per row of teeth while multituberculate teeth are
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far more complex with up to 348 cusps this particular specimen that I just pulled up has uh about 250 different complex little tools on the surface of its tooth row and those little tools tools help break down plant material that needs to be processed very finely in order to be digested properly so these guys have evolved towards eating plants [Music]
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[Music]
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it is this key function of grinding which promoted the explosion of herbivore and omnivore species an ecological niche untapped by primitive
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mammals despite these multiple discoveries at the end of the 20th century The crucial question about the origins of the first real mammals
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remained once again the leoning region provided the answer in 2011 Chinese Farmers found the fossil of a mammal called Jeremiah sinensis meaning Jurassic mother from China
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the paleontologist Shilo Has Come For the First time to visit this area which stretches over several miles it is not an easy task to identify fossil bearing Rocks Under the fields of lush
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corn but he is Guided by a local specialist in feather dinosaurs whose older specimen anones was excavated on a site close to this [Music]
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one it's exciting fossil discovery because it gave us a new Milestone as to when the placental lineage first start to appear on Earth and all the modern placental mammals have a deep root into the Jurassic and is coming from right here the Rocks also are embedded with volcanic ashes and this size had been dated by geochronology to be 160 million plus or minus a little bit so we know for sure this rocks actually belong to the late Jurassic the Jeremiah sinensis fossil is
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the oldest specimen of a placental mammal and is a critical piece of the puzzle in the evolution of mammals it was identified by its teeth which included molers canines and
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incises as the genetic studies of living mammals showed their origin is much older than existing fossils had suggested since the discovery of Jeremiah means that placental mammals must have appeared at least 35 million years before aom Mya skoria and even though paleontologists are still seeking fossils from the Cretaceous Period belonging to current groups like rodents or carnivores this discovery brings the conflicting opinion of geneticists and paleontologists closer together independent
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corroboration by fossils on one hand and by molecules on the other gave us the confidence that we are getting closer to the correct answer with Jeremiah we know that 160 million years ago mammals already had the characteristics that made them successful fur complex teeth and acute hearing to escape predators and locate their
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[Music] prey the General Adaptation such as insect St and such as a capability to move on the tree gave this particular mammo some evolutionary Advantage it is really equipped it well enough already in the late Jurassic for its descendant to thrive After The Dinosaurs Extinction [Music]
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[Music] certainly the mammals ancestors were very small in the time of dinosaurs but much more varied and better equipped than was previously thought with advantages that we find later in primates our closest relatives
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a [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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[Music]
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[Music] he
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[Music] oh
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