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0:02
ALAN: When you go out looking at rocks that are millions of years old, you never know what you're going to find. As we came through a little clearing, I spotted a rough looking bone. Yep, this is the spot right here. Where it all began. KATJA: One bone after the next revealed itself. This was the Holy Grail. ALAN: Finding a dinosaur bone tells us only part of the story. There's so much more to these amazing creatures than just their skeletons,
0:36
which leaves the movies with a lot of artistic license.
0:41
KENNETH: The colors are made up, a lot of the behavior is made up.
0:48
KATJA: But now, remarkable new fossil finds are opening a window on the prehistoric world as never before. AJA: Technology is allowing us to answer questions that were previously unanswerable. We get to make dinosaurs move again for the first time in millions of years. And we can figure out their color. And even how they lived. ALAN: Can recent discoveries force us to put aside the movie magic and finally see dinosaurs as they truly were when they ruled the Americas?
1:21
MATTHEW: I think that we're closer to uncovering the truth of the age of dinosaurs than we've ever been. AJA: Fact is stranger than fiction. (thud) (whip)
1:45
KENNETH: My first exposure to the dinosaurs was probably <i> The Flintstones.</i> (laughs). Which is not a very accurate portrayal of dinosaurs. You know, like all kids, I was sort of immersed in this dinosaur culture.
1:59
I've always been fascinated by the biggest, the smallest, the highest flying, the lowest diving. That's where you really start to learn the limits of evolution. I wanted to find creatures that were among the largest to ever walk the face of the earth. Usually the largest dinosaurs are also among the worst preserved because it's so hard for a creature that size, the size of a house, to become a fossil. There is a group of plant eating dinosaurs called
2:25
Titanosaurs that we know relatively little about. So I was very attracted to finding one of those. 'How do you find a dinosaur?' It's the number one question I get asked. The world is geologically mapped. And so to find dinosaurs you have to find rocks from the Triassic, the famous Jurassic or Cretaceous period.
2:50
I'm looking for the green colors that are cretaceous aged deposits, rocks that are at least 66 million years old. There are some rocks here but this is the Congo basin, too many plants here. Northern Patagonia, rocks are the right age but quite a bit of work has been done here. But here down in Southern Patagonia we have everything that I was looking for.
3:20
Patagonia is an amazing place. Vast sweeping landscapes. Sometimes it's called "Fin del Mundo", the end of the World. It's the last stop before Antarctica.
3:39
To get to this site from the US is a six airport trip and then once you're there, you have to get<i> Jeeps</i> and you have to navigate up very rough dirt roads.
3:54
No other paleontologists had been working within maybe 1,000 kilometers.
4:04
This is the field area and you get yourself on the ground and you walk and you just look for bones sticking out of the rocks.
4:21
That year in 2004 we were about a month into the expedition and we hadn't found anything that I would say was really great.
4:31
So at this point, the pressure's on. You start to worry. We had a week left. And then finally we found something. A piece of bone exposed. It had weathered out of a cliff-face, so it was super easy to excavate. It doesn't take us long before we uncovered a very, very large femur. 2.2 meter long, that's about seven feet one inch long. We know that we're looking at one of the largest dinosaur bones that had ever been seen. This was an incredible result. But where are the rest of the bones?
5:15
We dug and dug and dug around there but there wasn't another bone to be found. But still, that told us giant dinosaurs lived here and that was enough for us to know that we had to come back to this place.
5:34
A year later, I was ready for a return expedition but I needed a bigger team. And I called up my friend, Matt Lamanna. MATTHEW: This was somewhat of a professional gamble, I would say, for Ken. Ken, in a lot of ways was putting all of his eggs in one basket.
5:55
I think that there was some pressure upon arrival that second year in 2005. You know, we're not there for, you know, for a month long vacation in the desert. We're there to find dinosaurs.
6:08
KENNETH: On the first morning I was prospecting for bones, and saw a dinner plate sized piece of bone exposed in the desert. I GPSd the location, I give it a field number, and I move on and, I start to prospect for some other sites.
6:29
MATTHEW: This is 2005 so I put on my iPod... (laughs). And put on some heavy metal. And I walked basically up the side of a mountain, you know, thinking that I was going to find the next big thing. But, I turned around when I got to the top of the mountain, and I saw my three Argentine colleagues, Marcelo Luna, Lucio Ibiricu and Gabriel Casal, all kind of gathered around this spot, that didn't really look like it was much of anything. And so I go down there because they're lingering there.
6:57
Maybe they'd found something interesting.
7:00
KENNETH: I returned to the spot where I'd found the bone and I saw something astonishing.
7:10
They have about a half of a leg bone exposed, half a femur. MATTHEW: The bone is six foot three long. So we knew we had a giant Titanosaur. KENNETH: And soon other bones start appearing.
7:29
When we began to excavate the tail it was really a thing of beauty. It was articulated, meaning the bones were still touching each other like they were in life. We started to see that this was giving us our best window yet into the anatomy of the largest creatures to walk the planet.
7:53
To protect the bone in transport we wrap it with bandages of burlap and plaster. This is what we call jacketing the bones.
8:03
We had excavated about 200 square meters of rock, as hard as concrete. After four more really grueling field seasons, so that's five years, we end up with 70% of the skeleton from the neck down which was almost three times more complete than the next best preserved super giant.
8:33
We had this huge creature, maybe the most massive dinosaur ever discovered. MATTHEW: Where does this thing rank compared to other giant Titanosaurs?
8:47
There's an equation you can use based off of modern animals that allows you one way to calculate an estimate of the weight of an extinct animal, using the circumference of the upper arm bone, the humerus and the femur, the thigh bone. KENNETH: But for most of these dinosaurs, they don't have the fossil remains so the weight is more of a guess. But, we have the two bones that we need. Now we have the key to understanding the mass of this great creature. We start to do the math.
9:18
We know this individual is one of the largest ever discovered. Is it the largest?
9:25
MATTHEW: When we finally did crunch the numbers, the number that came out was something like 59 metric tons, 65 short tons that we use here in the U.S. Which was mind boggling to me. KENNETH: An animal that's 65 tons is the mass of 13 African elephants, the most massive land animal for which we can calculate a weight. This was a very exciting and very tantalizing result. Our next question was, is this a new species of Titanosaur? The only way to find out was to study it in minute detail.
10:09
♪ ♪ AJA: I loved dinosaurs so much, by the time I was 13, I was volunteering at our local dinosaur museum. That's when I started hearing whispers of this giant dinosaur that was coming from the edge of the world. You know, it was, "It's the biggest dinosaur". Really? Okay, I'll believe it when I see it. And we went into the basement, when we opened the door and saw 300 containers, all with bones. It was way more than I ever could have expected.
10:49
I was a fossil preparator and my job was to extract the bones out of the rock, so we could examine them in close detail. KENNETH: We didn't know whether it's a new species, So we had to look for novel features in its skeleton. AJA: You're making maybe a dime size of progress a day. But little by little, day after day it all starts coming together, it's really slow but I love it. (laughs).
11:16
KENNETH: To establish a new species of dinosaur, you have to see at least one feature in its bones that hasn't been seen in any other dinosaur.
11:26
Eventually, after three years, we have the full skeleton just laid out on every table top. The 30 foot tail was laid out along one wall and down part of a next. The humerus standing by the door. Now we could see the 77 million year old skeleton it all its glory and finally work out what it was.
11:50
We began to get a full set of measurements.
11:56
This animal would have been 85 feet long that's almost the size of a basketball court. At the shoulder it would stand 2 stories high.
12:07
This was an immense animal.
12:12
KENNETH: Now based on all our lab work, we could see that it had unique features that hadn't been seen in any other dinosaur. So, this was a new species of Titanosaur.
12:24
Now we need a name. What would this animal have to fear in its landscape? Essentially nothing. And I come up with the name Dreadnoughtus, which means fears nothing. AJA: The first chance we got, we ran outside, screamed it as loud as we could Dreadnoughtus! It was like the best feeling, it's such a cool name.
12:48
KENNETH: Now we had identified this dinosaur as a new species, but we still had so many questions about how an animal so large could live. AJA: The largest animals today are the whales. They don't have to contend with walking on land. And it really sparked in me this question of how is this animal moving? All the parts that would tell us everything that we need to know, like muscle, cartilage, tendons, don't preserve. KENNETH: You can't just open up a book and look up
13:18
the muscles for a new dinosaur. We have to discern those from the bones themselves. AJA: The big limb bones are six feet two, about 800 pounds. We can't move that and try and figure out how it moved. So our solution was to go digital.
13:37
KENNETH: We used a 3D scanner to capture all the bones. This was one of the first dinosaurs to be captured in a 3D scan, and this opened up avenues of investigation that would have been impossible by using the real bones. AJA: So this area right here, that is a palm-sized muscle scar. Which means the muscle was pulling on this part of the bone so much that it left an imprint. KENNETH: Now with these scans we could begin to reconstruct Dreadnoughtus.
14:06
It enabled us to have these 3D bones that we can easily manipulate in a virtual environment and do our biomechanical experiments with. One of my colleagues, Kristyn Voegele, has mapped out those muscle scars, attached virtual muscles to test how these dinosaurs move. Let's contract this muscle, let's contract this muscle and we'll see what the limb does. So we're actually letting the anatomy inform us about its life. Our analysis of its largely complete skeleton helped us put
14:41
flesh on the bones of this amazing creature.
14:47
First, we could see that the bones themselves were big and strong it could easily walk on land. There's really nothing like these creatures on the planet today. But, there was one strange anomaly in the tail that puzzled us.
15:05
Underneath each of the tail vertebrae was a pair of bones that were hanging down and instead of tapering to a point like they do in other dinosaurs they flare out into this big paddle for muscle attachment. It was housing these hugely powerful muscles that would go from its leg to its tail. AJA: When we looked at it carefully we realized that these muscles would have provided powerful leverage in the tail. We thought, oh, if they pull on this fast enough, that's going to hurt.
15:36
It's not only that it was so big that nothing wanted to eat it. It was that it was weaponized in the case that something did try. KENNETH: This was something we hadn't seen before in Titanosaurs. This was a tail that could kill or maim the largest predators.
15:52
I think in comparison to other Titanosaurs Dreadnoughtus looks like about the toughest that I've ever seen. MATTHEW: I think that plant eating dinosaurs probably are often made out to be these, you know, like sort of gentle giants. But we're starting to understand that just eating plants does not, by nature, make you docile. KENNETH: I think it's time to recast these giant animals as the surly beast that they were. Look out meat eating dinosaurs because you do not want
16:22
to mess with a Dreadnoughtus! AJA: We put virtual flesh on Dreadnoughtus to visualize dinosaurs more clearly. Up in Canada another discovery has got even closer to seeing dinosaurs as they really were.
16:42
♪ ♪ DONALD: For me, fossils tell us that there's more to the world than what we see today. There's this huge buried past.
16:55
Normally when we go looking for them, we're only looking at the surface.
17:00
But, sometimes we get a helping hand from miners, who are used to digging down far deeper than we would ever dream of doing.
17:11
So, it's no surprise that every once in a while they're going to bump into something.
17:27
One day out of the blue I received a set of photos from <i> Suncor,</i> a mining company working in northern Alberta.
17:37
They'd found something they suspected might be a fossil and they wanted to know if we could identify it for them.
17:45
And that was our start to dealing with this mystery animal from the far north.
17:52
Two days later myself and a technician were on a plane. Fort McMurray exists in the middle of nowhere in northern Alberta where they're digging out bitumen soaked sand. We were driven out to a site.
18:09
Initially all we saw was a few broken fragments. We were told where it happened and when it happened. SHAWN: I was digging right in this area right here with my shovel. I could see some really big slabs with that big around of, with that really distinctive pattern. I've never seen anything come down the bank that had this distinctive uniform pattern to it before. DONALD: When Shawn Funk made the initial discovery it was hit by the excavator bucket and it shattered into pieces.
18:37
And the technician, Darren Tanke said, what if it's a dinosaur? And then all the pieces started to make sense, and we knew this was going to be a big deal.
18:49
So, if it was a dinosaur, what kind was it? Most of it was still stuck up in the cliff face, completely encased in hard rock. But when we looked carefully at the clues, we could begin to imagine what sort of animal it could be.
19:07
All we could see was this cross section in the cliff.
19:12
Then I began to see a shape of where the body was. Then we knew this was not your typical dinosaur fossil. We could see bony plates exposed, so we knew we were dealing with an armored dinosaur.
19:28
We noticed the arc of the armor was curving upwards. So that meant this dinosaur was lying on its back.
19:37
This is curved. It was all rather puzzling. The rocks that we were finding this fossil material in are early cretaceous, are about 110, 112 million years old. And at this time, this place was a shallow inland sea. It would be underwater. This thing's on its back on the seabed.
19:59
But, this, it's a land animal. It's not evolved to be in water. And then you start to wonder, well, how did it get washed out to sea? The only way to find out more would be to get it out of the rock. But to try and dig it out would risk the collapse of the whole cliff. We were under major time pressure. We were told we had three weeks to get this thing out. We couldn't start from the cliff face. We had to come down from the top.
20:33
So, they got one of their best shovel operators.
20:39
Some of them could do brain surgery, they're so good with the bucket.
20:48
MAN: It's peeling off very, very well.
20:54
Ooh stop. MAN 2: Stop! DONALD: We had most of it exposed and it looked like a giant grey lumpy potato. This large, seemingly bombproof mass had resisted being struck by a giant excavator and having a kilometer of rock piled on it for tens of millions of years, so the thinking was that this thing could withstand being lifted in one go.
21:17
(overlapping chatter) You look at that big grey lump and you'd have no idea that there's an absolute treasure sitting there. All we had to do is lift it up and plop it on the back of the truck. No one had ever done this before. So, no one knew really what to expect.
21:44
MAN: I'm like the expectant father here.
21:49
DONALD: They got their best hoisting and rigging people, started to lift it. MAN: There we go, come on baby.
22:04
(loud crack and thuds) DONALD: They said we're sorry we broke your dinosaur.
22:12
MAN: We only just started to move the dirt and she let go. MAN: Yeah, she didn't take much pressure. DONALD: The question now was, how were we going to salvage this?
22:27
DONALD: Getting a fossil out of the ground is just the end of the beginning. We quickly saw that we'd lost nothing.
22:38
It came out in convenient chunks instead of one epic five ton block. We now had to remove the rock from around the fossil and reveal what this animal was.
22:50
So, we needed someone with experience and who had the delicate touch but also had the muscles to shift these blocks.
23:01
MARK: Dinosaurs are basically like real life monsters. And I've been interested in dinosaurs since I was five years old. Because I'm good working with my hands, I wanted to become a preparator of fossils.
23:17
So, what I'm doing right now is slowly removing away paper-thin layers of rock away from the bone's surface using a pin vice. This will go on for many many hours, if not days. (laughs).
23:31
Usually when we work with specimens, we just work with the actual bones themselves. But as I removed the rock I started to find sections of black, I was amazed. This wasn't just bone, it was actual fossilized dinosaur skin, something that hardly ever survives, and if it does, it's usually just small patches. The biggest challenge was basically finding where all the skin was and kind of knowing where to stop. Sometimes it's really distinctive, kind of a very black in color,
24:04
and other times it kind of fades out. You don't want to start digging too deep of a hole trying to find something that's not quite there. DONALD: Mark was just the person to do that. It takes special skill to go from this unbelievably hard rock to something that's instantly soft and delicate.
24:25
MARK: We have the skin over most of the surface. So, it's kind of like mummified, even though it's not a true mummy. Once I had finished preparing all the blocks, my next task was to reassemble them. When you start putting those pieces together and the shape of this dinosaur begins to emerge, that's when it really became exciting. It became like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
24:54
DONALD: Now we could finally identify what kind of dinosaur we had.
25:02
It's built like a tank. It's covered head to toe in body armor.
25:08
It has a narrow muzzle and it has big shoulder spikes and that could only mean it's a nodosaur. It was a plant eater and it lived about 110-112 million years ago.
25:24
This was a new type of nodosaur, one that had never been seen before, and this meant we could give it a new name. MARK: The name of the dinosaur is Borealopelta markmitchelli. Named after little old me. (laughs). It's just fantastic.
25:41
This specimen has taken about five and a half years of my life. Now it looks like a sleeping dinosaur.
25:51
DONALD: It's absolutely magical how it turned out. CALEB: One of the things that makes this dinosaur unique is that it's preserved in three dimensions with all that skin. Beautifully preserved, but are there details that it reveals that we didn't know before? I was brought onto this project to help figure this out. Given that the skin is so well preserved it held a tantalizing possibility,
26:16
to find out the color of this animal.
26:20
The colors either in children's books or in documentaries, were largely just estimates. Estimates based on modern animals.
26:30
MARK: A lot of dinosaurs are portrayed as sort of basically greens or greys. DONALD: We don't know the colors of extinct animals because the pigment molecules don't preserve. It takes exceptional conditions to preserve skin and even better conditions to preserve any traces of the chemistry of that skin.
26:50
CALEB: This is a fragment from Borealopelta and this dark grey is the fossilized skin.
26:59
We sent a small sample of this for geochemical analysis. Using mass spectrometry, we could find out if any organic compounds were preserved in it. Those organic compounds can tell us about some of the pigments that were there originally.
27:17
More than five years after we found Borealopelta, we were on the cusp of knowing whether or not its skin was preserved well enough to tell us its color, and finally, we got the news. The results of the geochemistry revealed that one of the common organic compounds was a compound called Benzothiazole, which is a breakdown product of the reddish brown pigment, pheomelanin.
27:45
MARK: The color was definitely a big surprise. I think there's only been a couple other cases when that's ever been done. CALEB: It was very exciting to see how these animals actually looked. You almost don't need to use your imagination to reconstruct it.
28:01
DONALD: It's the best-preserved armored dinosaur in the world because it was preserved in the better conditions found at sea. But, that presented us with our final puzzle. CALEB: We have this odd situation where we have this animal that lived on land, but it's preserved in what was an inland sea quite a ways from where the coast would have been. So, what was this animal doing in the middle of the sea in the first place? DONALD: We could see right from the first day we were
28:27
in the field it went to the seabed upside down, and it hit the seabed with such force in the cliff we could see the impact crater.
28:37
CALEB: And the question is, how does this happen and why does it happen?
28:42
DONALD: Large animals when they die, bacteria start right away to digest their bodies and these animals fill up with gas and they become bloated. For many years I've been studying how animals float. So, I have this program I wrote to test these ideas. It takes basic physics, and it lets you take a body, put it in water, you can see what happens. Let's try a body that's full of gas and you can see it becomes unstable and then it starts to roll and then very quickly it rolls over.
29:13
And this happened every time without fail. And since they're full of gas, they're extremely light. And that allows them to be transported great distances just by floating. It's called bloat and float. Fortuitously, our floating carcass got swept out to sea. Eventually the gases burst, the body loses all buoyancy and goes bonk onto the seabed. And there was so much energy of it going down great clouds of sediment would have quickly covered it over. And so it was quickly sealed away from
29:55
the air and scavengers. That's why it's so well preserved.
30:04
CALEB: We were finally able to fill in missing pieces about how dinosaurs actually looked. Learning how they behaved from bones alone can be even harder. But, sometimes a site reveals discoveries so remarkable it changes the way we view an entire species.
30:25
♪ ♪
30:34
ALAN: Most tourists travel half way around the world to see the red rocks here. But the grey rocks can be beautiful in my opinion. And I'm probably biased because I know that the grey means there's fossils in them. I jokingly refer to the area as "50 Shades of Grey" because that's basically what you've got. I've been making this commute for 22 years and it never gets old.
31:02
When I first started we had no idea what we would find at the end of this drive. I know there are dinosaurs out there, but where are they, and what will they tell us? Essentially we have 2 million acres, and the middle million we knew virtually nothing about. It was just one giant question mark. As district paleontologist, it was my job to find some answers.
31:32
(thunder and lightning)
31:37
We had actually planned to meet a crew of volunteers coming up to dig on a hadrosaur site. But, flash floods the previous night had basically taken out the road and made it so they couldn't come in.
31:52
So, I had Mike Knell with me, who was a turtle expert, and I had Katja Knoll, my intern with me. Now what? What are we going to do today? I remembered that there was this place nearby that had lots of fossil turtle fragments and off we went to this turtle site. KATJA: Previously a really beautiful river turtle has been excavated there. So, we took him out there and walked that whole area.
32:24
ALAN: We expected to find more turtle fossils. So, what we saw instead came as a complete surprise.
32:33
The deluge had actually caused some erosion and created a little gully. As we came through a little clearing, I spotted something that had just been exposed by the recent rains. It was fairly large, about the size of my fist. It was a rough looking bone. You immediately run through a catalogue of shapes in your mind, you're thinking, what is this? This is so familiar. Have I seen this before? It had this unusually rugged, rough texture on it and the texture to me suggested that
33:06
I really have something here. KATJA: I don't quite recall what he actually screamed. It was maybe just grunts. I can't remember. Or something really crude. ALAN: Hey! Guys! KATJA: You want to go and check because when Alan screams, it's, it may be something. (laughs). And it turned out to be something pretty amazing. ALAN: I think we've got a Tyrannosaur, guys. (laughs). And then there was lots of high fiving and whooping and hollering and dancing around,
33:33
because that just doesn't happen every day. KATJA: It's pretty mind blowing to know that you're the first person to ever lay eyes on it. Tyrannosaurs are relatively rare. ALAN: We kept digging and by the end of the day we'd uncovered 50 bones KATJA: We were wondering, how much more can there possibly be? How extensive is the site?
33:58
ALAN: After the first day's excavation, we came back with a larger crew. KATJA: We had groups of people out there pretty much four or five days a week. Everybody was sitting in the singeing sun for 8 to 10 hours.
34:17
ALAN: As we worked, we were astounded to see that there didn't seem to be an end to the bones coming from the site.
34:27
We expanded the quarry out to about 100 square meters. The largest bone bed that we'd ever documented.
34:37
It became clear that the bones were a complete chaotic mass, that they were just a jumble that looked like they'd been randomly rolled and tossed out like dice.
34:50
But, there was something even more remarkable here. KATJA: We kept finding bones that were very clearly belonging to tyrannosaurs of different sizes. ALAN: We're now certain we had not just one tyrannosaur but at least two individuals at the site.
35:08
And then we started seeing more parts of skulls and more toes that indicated we had more than two individuals. By that time all of our minds were totally blown. (laughs). We did not expect this.
35:27
KATJA: It's not uncommon to find a mass death sites for prey animals that perhaps lived in large herds but for a predator, like a tyrannosaur, it's just so incredibly rare. Everybody always imagined Tyrannosaurs as being those lone mavericks. I mean, it is almost unthinkable to find a tyrannosaur mass death site. How many tyrannosaurs were at that site and why were they all together?
36:03
Of course, everybody knows about Tyrannosaurus Rex and everybody thinks they're cool but Tyrannosaurs are in a fairly large group and T Rex is only one representative. The fossils had been encased in burlap and plaster jackets. And the first thing we needed to know was what kind of tyrannosaur was inside.
36:27
It's kind of like opening a really cool package for Christmas, yeah, mmm-hmm.
36:35
In order to be able to identify an animal with confidence you really have to be able to look at the elements of the skull because there are slight variations between all the species. This is a jaw of a not fully grown tyrannosaur from our site. I would venture to say it is probably the most iconic part of a tyrannosaur. In this instance it's a little bit smaller than the jaw you would expect from Tyrannosaurus Rex. Tyrannosaurus Rex's jaw was significantly larger and
37:06
the teeth were also significantly more massive. The tyrannosaurs that we found at our site is perhaps a completely new kind.
37:19
ALAN: The tyrannosaurs that we found are 76 million years old. They're older cousins to the famous T-Rex. Very similar in appearance, but about three quarters to two thirds scale. We're talking about some of the largest terrestrial carnivores that ever lived on our planet.
37:40
KATJA: Now we knew what kind of dinosaur we were dealing with, there was a big question we needed to answer next. ALAN: Just how many individuals do we have at this site?
37:54
We knew we had all these toe bones of varying sizes. We had a really big one and we had a really tiny one that was obviously another individual. And then we had sort of inbetweeners. We compare, just exactly how many left feet are present in the collection. The pattern slowly emerges. Oh, ok I've got one left foot. Okay, I've got two left feet. Oh, my gosh, here's a third left foot, then finally a fourth, now five. There you have it, you've got a baby,
38:26
you've got teens and you've got a fully grown adult. Oh, my gosh. We've got an entire pack. We were forced to face the question, was this a social group? Was this even a family group?
38:43
KATJA: Tyrannosaurs were always perceived as being solitary predators. But, after spending months separating the skeletons out, we finally knew for sure that we had five individuals.
38:58
The big question is, how did they all end up together? There are just two possibilities, either they all died separately in different areas and they were flushed in by some big river system, or they all just died together. ALAN: When we inspected rock samples from the site, it became clear this whole area used to be a lake. So, we think a flood drowned them and washed them into the lake. But, how could we be sure our tyrannosaurs had actually died
39:30
together rather than just being washed in from different places by coincidence or accumulating there over time? What do we have in our toolkit that can answer this question? The geochemist on the project, Celina Suarez, had a eureka moment. She's like, we can study the rare earth elements.
39:54
As animals decompose in the sediment rare earth elements get incorporated into their skeletons as they're initially turning into fossils. They're a fingerprint. They will show us whether or not these bones were buried together from the get go. So, we, of course, sampled the bones and voila. They all had the exact same rare earth fingerprint.
40:26
So, they definitely died in the same lake at the same time. The chances of individual tyrannosaurs all ending up together are almost nil. And the age spread almost screams or mandates, interpreting it as a family. These had died together and been buried together. Which brought us back to the bigger idea, that this was a social animal.
40:55
Scientists and popular culture alike have viewed Tyrannosaurs essentially as these lone killers functioning at the level of a crocodile or an alligator.
41:08
But what if that's not right? What if everything we thought we knew about tyrannosaur behavior is in fact wrong? The only reason large predators start forming groups is to guarantee success of taking down large dangerous prey. And then the question begs itself, could these have been pack hunters?
41:32
Had anyone else come across something like this before? There is this other site in North America, in Canada.
41:41
"Lethal Albertosaurus was a family man!" "Fossils found at Dry Island Buffalo Jump suggest this predator hunted in packs."
41:52
And then I heard that there had been another mass mortality site in Montana. These events represent a capture of tyrannosaur behavior. So, now we've got three sites in North America with three different species of tyrannosaurs, all of which are relatively closely related to T Rex.
42:12
Perhaps T-Rex would have engaged in similar behavior.
42:21
Paleontologists often use bones to learn about anatomy, but these sites tell us something about how the dinosaurs actually lived. KATJA: It is really amazing to see how we're starting to put more of sort of a face on this creature that everybody just kind of knows about but really doesn't know a lot about.
42:46
If they all, in fact, belong to the same family unit, it could be very important to understand the dynamics of Tyrannosaurs.
42:58
ALAN: So, they were social, not just as families, but also as hunters. I think finds like these are challenging the idea that tyrannosaurs were not that intelligent.
43:13
They may in fact have actually been able to co-operate during hunts.
43:19
The idea now that we've got the largest killing machine that ever walked on dry land now with the smarts of a wolf and the complexity to pack hunt, um, it's terrifying.
43:38
We're certainly in a renaissance. Technology is allowing us to tease ever greater detail out of the fossils that we find. KENNETH: Discoveries that paleontologists are making now are going to change the way that dinosaurs are portrayed in popular culture. AJA: We are approaching truth. Let's give these dinosaurs the gravitas that they have well-earned. Captioned by Cotter Media Group.
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