Why Dinosaurs?

(film projector humming) (playful music) - [James] My name's James Pinto.

For as long as I can remember, I've been into dinosaurs.

- Do you like the Pteranodon that's on your shoulder?

- Yeah, is that my pet?

- Yeah.

I played with dinosaur toys, went to natural history museums, and made lots of dinosaur art, but I just never really grew out of it.

From an early age, I was fascinated with rocks and shells and various types of fossils.

I even won some awards at the county fair.

(enchanting music) When I was 13, my dad took me up to UC Santa Cruz to work on a science fair project with some geologists.

We used actual dinosaur teeth and a mass spectrometer to try and figure out how much time Spinosaurus spent in saltwater compared to freshwater.

The experiment took first place in the California state science fair later that year.

- James Pinto.

(audience cheering) - [James] And I even got to meet the mayor of my hometown.

(members applauding) After that, I couldn't wait to get out into the field, so I started spending a few weeks every summer hunting for fossils on private ranches in the Badlands of South Dakota and Wyoming.

At 16, I started volunteering at the La Brea Tar Pits as a docent and preparer.

I spent countless hours cleaning asphalt off the bones of mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant sloths, and other prehistoric creatures.

My dad's a filmmaker, so I asked him to help me make a documentary about dinosaurs.

We set off for some interviews with paleontologists, amateur fossil hunters, artists, toy collectors, and a state senator.

I wanted to learn how to become a paleontologist and what the job entails, but I also wanted to understand why people around the world are so fascinated with dinosaurs and have been for centuries.

How and where did it all begin?

(bright music) The very first interview took place down the street from my house, at a unique hobby store that also happened to sell fossil replicas.

The owner is a walking, talking dinosaur encyclopedia.

- Our discovery of dinosaurs, you know, back in the Middle Ages or even back into the times of early man, the fact that we find a dinosaur or a footprint in China and Mongolia and stuff, that whole area is just a wealth of fossil finds.

There's no doubt in my mind that dinosaurs, you know, were believed to be the dragons and the different things that we put into our mythologies and stuff that we have today.

- [James] People have been finding fossils throughout history, and making all kinds of assumptions about them.

For example, a mastodon skull has a large hole for the trunk, but you can easily see how someone might have thought it was a giant, one-eyed cyclops, especially if you found it along with some huge limb bones.

But when and where did modern paleontology actually originate?

(seagulls squawking) Paleontology as we know it started in the British Isles during the early 1800s.

Fossils of prehistoric sea creatures were found on coastal cliffs like these.

Mud and sand covered them and preserved them from natural decay.

But after millions of years, these plants and animals have been replaced by rock and are exposed after heavy wind and rain.

Paleontologists, such as Dr.

Dean Lomax, are highly skilled at finding and revealing them.

- Oh, wow.

Look at that!

It's a complete ammonite.

The first time anybody has seen that in 180 million years.

Right in the center, it's got these whorls, it goes 'round and 'round and 'round right to the end where the living chamber, here, where you've had the little animal living inside the shell, little arms and tentacles would've been right here.

Beautiful.

I used to come here when I was younger.

It was a very, very famous location and I used to collect lots of fossils here, and I essentially honed my skills as an avid fossil collector.

You know, going on adventures down here, and of course, talking about coastlines in the British Isles, it's difficult for me not to mention Mary Anning down on the Dorset coast, who as a little child went out and collected thousands of fossils.

I like to see myself as a mini Mary Anning when I was here collecting material as well.

And she found, you know, many of the most incredible fossils down in Lyme Regis in particular.

- She was an amateur paleontologist that lived in the UK in the early 1800s.

She was one of the first people to really appreciate the Jurassic Coast.

She was not allowed to be part of the scientific discussion at that time because she was a woman, but she made huge inroads in allowing women to be involved in science, and she is definitely one of the most iconic paleontologists that I can think of.

- Not only do we find the ammonites and other types of fossils here, we also do find dinosaur footprints here.

And it's a very different environment, and it's slightly younger than the material, the 180-million-year-old stuff for the ammonites and things.

This material's about 170, 160 million years old, and what you're looking at here is a massive block of sandstone that's fallen down from right at the top of the cliffs and this footprint.

This is by far the best one.

So you've got a three-toed impression here.

You can easily see one, two, and three.

Now, what you're looking at, it's not a true track.

So it's not where the animal's left its footprint and then that's preserved.

Instead, the footprint's been left behind that's been baked by the sun, it's hardened, and then that impression has been filled with another sediment and then that's hardened over time.

So you have what's called a natural cast of the original footprint.

By looking at the footprint's shape, comparing it with the feet of other dinosaurs, we know that this has been made by a Stegosaur-type of dinosaur, one of those armor-plated beasts from the Jurassic.

It's a pretty awesome, awesome fossil.

- [James] Paleontology and fossils presented the extraordinary idea that there were once animals and plants that are now extinct.

Soon people were finding fossils from more of these extinct creatures, including the first discoveries of dinosaurs.

The first dinosaur to be named and described was Megalosaurus by William Buckland in 1824.

The next year, Mary Ann Mantell discovered some unusual teeth, which her husband, Gideon, named Iguanodon, and later he discovered and named this armor-covered herbivore, Hylaeosaurus.

- But nobody could work out, couldn't put their finger on exactly what these things were.

They knew they were some really weird ancient reptiles, but what were they?

This is when we enter Sir Richard Owen, the founder of the Natural History Museum in London, because Owen examined those three dinosaurs as well as other remains, and he actually coined the name "dinosaur," meaning "fearfully great" or "terrible lizard" in 1842.

So effectively, you know, we could say that the dinosaurs are a British invention (laughs).

- Today is Thursday, August 19th, and we are going to the Natural History Museum to have a very fun time.

My earlier dinosaur influences were Disney's "Dinosaur," "Walking with Dinosaurs," and "Dinosaur Planet" featuring Scott Sampson, also known as Dr.

Scott the Paleontologist on "Dinosaur Train."

I sent Dr.

Scott an email and asked if we could interview him, and to my surprise, he said yes.

So we were soon on our way to Vancouver to meet one of my paleontology heroes.

- I think people love dinosaurs because they are big, they're bizarre, and they're extinct.

Of course, not all dinosaurs are big, some are very small, but many dinosaurs are big, and that makes them literally larger than life when you think about life today.

They're bizarre in the sense that they have hooks and horns and spikes and sails and all kinds of weird and wonderful bony features, and they're extinct so that especially for little kids, they're not worried about them coming up under the bed or showing up in an alley.

They're something that lived a long time ago.

Dinosaurs are often a child's first foray into science.

It's the first time a kid learns stuff that grownups don't know, so kids can spout off all these multi syllabic names of dinosaurs, Parasaurolophus, and the adults have no clue what it is.

And so the kids have this feeling of power because they understand things that the grownups don't really get.

(wondrous music) - [James] In 2015, my dad took me on a dinosaur-themed adventure for my birthday.

We went to Dinosaur National Monument, a gigantic dinosaur bone bed that spans the border between Utah and Colorado.

- [Dad] Is this like Disneyland for paleo nerds?

- Yeah, here, check this out.

This is the femur.

It's like shorter and wider, so it looks like it would be from a Camarasaurus.

- And you get to touch it?

- Yeah.

Back in the late 1800s, Andrew Carnegie funded the excavation of millions of bones so he could fill up the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The area around the quarry was eventually declared a national monument and a structure was built over some of the bone bed so the public could enjoy these natural treasures.

(enchanting music) The next day we went to the Natural History Museum of Utah.

- [Dad] All right, I think we found the mother lode.

What's this guy over here?

- [James] That's like an Allosaurus, probably.

- [Dad] And what are all those over there?

- [James] Those are all like various ceratopsians.

- [Dad] There's a huge mammoth way back there too.

- [James] Yeah, some sort of ornithomimidae, oviraptorosaur.

So, probably a chirostenotes.

- [Dad] What about behind you, the Freddy Krueger claws.

- That's a Nothrorychus.

That's a Nothrorinchus, rychus.

It's Nothronychus, but hey, I was only 13.

(gentle music) (uplifting music) Rob Sula is an amateur paleontologist, artist, and teacher with over 30 years of field experience.

He's made many significant contributions to science, including the discovery of the Tanis fossil site with Dr.

Steve Nicklas, which may be a record of the K-T Extinction event, an asteroid impact that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs around 66 million years ago.

He also knows quite a bit about the history of paleontology in the US.

- There have been many, many books written about the "Bone Wars," a competition between two of the United States' first paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.

It's a cautionary tale about how competition can be really destructive.

They used scientific publication to make it very personal and to say that each other was bad.

By the end, Marsh didn't actually do fieldwork.

He employed people to do it, and some of these guys were, you know, pretty shady characters.

And so there were actual shots fired, there was destruction of each other's sites, (explosion thundering) and ultimately it destroyed both of them.

But that being said, their very competition and their incredible urge to outdo each other just got a lot of science done and opened a lot of new quarries.

And I think in the balance of it, their competition was good for paleontology.

- [James] In 1902, American paleontologist Barnum Brown discovered what could arguably be called the world's most popular dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus rex.

A second more complete skeleton found in 1908 was put on display at the American Museum of Natural History, where it quickly became a media sensation.

A little more than a decade later, German paleontologist Ernst Stromer named another large, meat-eating dinosaur found in the Sahara Desert, which he dubbed Spinosaurus.

- We really just had a very short glimpse of this dinosaur, but we knew that it was really bizarre.

It had a giant, magnificent sail on its back.

We knew that it had strange, slender, lower jaws, a little bit like the jaws of a crocodile, and we knew that it was very, very big, maybe even bigger than T-rex.

- Oh!

- [James] As more dinosaur bones were discovered, paleoartists like Charles Knight were fleshing out these magnificent creatures.

- His original paintings are still on exhibit at the Field Museum.

Yes, the T-rex is upright, you know, dueling with the Triceratops, but it's just beautiful, and he really sort of saw that maybe these were active animals.

He's definitely the godfather.

He's the guy that started it all.

(wondrous music) - [James] In our travels, we saw many museum exhibits built to make dinosaurs come alive to the public.

We wanted to see how they're constructed and how today's paleoartists make them scientifically accurate.

- Most of the children are too afraid to come in the room because of its big teeth.

I take it as a compliment if my work's good enough to represent that real of a picture for them (laughs).

- When it comes to the more speculative features, such as the sort of muscle pouches beneath the cheeks and the scaling towards the neck, I mean, what's been your process through making those decisions?

- A lot of it is based off of my own concept of understanding anatomy and biology.

Some tyrannosaur skull features are very similar to crocodilians and share those features.

And so it came upon me to look and understand, okay, a lot of these features in a different way, but are also represented in these animals.

Artistic interpretation, that's always in paleontology and paleoart.

- [James] So what is the composition of the model?

- I actually take measurements of those fossils and skeletals and blow them up and weld them out of steel.

And I go from that steel tubing to foam.

I might use chicken wire, whatever it takes to get that large shape on there, and then I come over it with a two-part epoxy clay for the skin.

- [James] Okay.

- Now, as people come into this facility, they aren't just reading about a dinosaur.

There's a dinosaur looking them directly in the eye as they're doing it, and it has a greater impact and a greater understanding for people because of that.

(dramatic music) - [James] Another seminal moment for dinosaurs in popular culture was the 1933 film "King Kong," which inspired audiences and future filmmakers like Phil Tippett.

- I was about five years old, and they aired "King Kong" on television, and I was just totally mesmerized.

And that started off a long journey of interest into dinosaurs.

- [James] The Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by World War II, left paleontology in something of a slump.

Sadly, many historic buildings became casualties of war, including the Natural History Museum of Munich, Germany, which housed the only known Spinosaurus specimen.

- And in April 1944, the museum was destroyed.

It was one of the most magnificent, most beautiful natural history museums in the world, and it was just reduced to rubble in one night.

And those bones were destroyed and lost.

(text thundering) - [Announcer] When dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

- [James] Despite advances in dinosaur research throughout the '60s and '70s, dinosaurs on film and TV were still not very realistic and usually relegated to being movie monsters, but audiences were still fascinated.

- Well, I was a big fan of Ray Harryhausen movies.

Yeah, they were pretty cool at the time.

They wouldn't hold up to Steven Spielberg standards by any stretch of the imagination.

- The one that inspired me was "One Million Years B.C."

One of the reasons being that the Allosaur that comes into the camp isn't gargantuan.

It isn't like 20 feet tall.

It's sort of a size comparable to what you would expect from a juvenile Allosaur.

He also had Ceratosaurus fighting a Triceratops and all sorts of various dinosaurs.

It wasn't just one type of dinosaur.

- There was this show when I was a kid, "Land of the Lost," live-action with real people.

And they're on a raft and they go down a whirlpool, and they end up in some quasi-dinosaur world.

There's some little hominid ape people.

And then there's also, most ridiculous of all, these highly evolved, like, "What if dinosaurs evolved?"

called Sleestaks.

And then the occasional rampaging tyrannosaur.

I don't know if it was an Allosaurus or Tyrannosaur, 'cause it really was terribly inaccurate.

(whimsical music) - [James] Beyond movies and TV, dinosaurs are everywhere in pop culture.

We discovered a collector who goes by the name of "the Dino Geek" who claimed to have over 6,000 pieces of dinosaur memorabilia and invited us to check out his collection.

- [Tony] So, you ready to go check out the Dino Den?

- Yeah, I'm ready to check out the Dino Den.

- After you.

- Wow.

(laughs) Wow.

- [Tony] My name is Tony Campagna and I am a dino addict.

- [James] My goodness.

- And hopefully one day all of this will be in a dinosaur toy museum.

Then if you want to, you can step in there and see as it continues.

- It doesn't end.

- You know, people like dinosaurs enough that they put 'em in everything and every different kind of incarnation: books and comics, magazines.

And you've got companies that put dinosaurs on their beverages, cars that have horns on 'em, and not, you know, "beep beep" horns.

But you know, like Triceratops horns.

There's dinosaur robots in the other room.

You saw the Transformers.

It's just kind of a big collection of all things dinosaur.

One of the things that's really fun about a lot of pieces in here is that they have come from different people.

People have found things for me or traded with me, and so there's good memories attached to a lot of pieces.

These are all signed by various people, like Dr.

Robert Bakker and Phil Currie signed, Jim Kirkland.

That stuff's always cool.

It's getting autographs on things from, you know, real paleontologists or what I call primary paleontologists who go out and find everything first, because if they didn't do it, all this stuff wouldn't be here.

This is the Jurassic Wall.

There's so much "Jurassic Park" stuff and "Jurassic World" and "The Lost World" and all that.

I thought, "I'll never get all of that stuff."

And that was before the "Jurassic World" movies started coming out where they're just pumping out, pumping out, pumping out lots of wonderful, good toys.

Especially this last round with Mattel.

- Some of these dinosaurs I don't quite remember in the movies, like an Amargasaurus over here.

- Yeah, you got a good eye.

There was never a Pachyrhinosaurus or the Chasmosaurus.

Every dinosaur when I was a kid, whether it was a carnivore or herbivore, everybody is yelling with a mouth full of teeth.

"Aah!"

Everybody's yelling.

And I guess it just made for more drama in the sandbox.

You want your dinosaurs to fight.

- [James] And be able to eat each other.

By the '80s and '90s, dinosaurs were back in full swing in popular culture, especially in movies and TV shows, including "Transformers," "Dino-Riders," "The Land Before Time," "Denver, the Last Dinosaur," "Dinosaurs" the TV sitcom, and who can forget "Barney & Friends."

And then in 1993, Steven Spielberg totally reshaped the world's understanding of dinosaurs with "Jurassic Park."

- That scene where they see the Brachiosaurus for the first time, Alan Grant's shaking, taking off his sunglasses, and it's just this beautiful, magical moment.

I'm even like almost tearing up now thinking about just how powerful it was, not only as a kid, but every time you see that scene.

- It's, it's a dinosaur.

- Uh-uh.

- That without a doubt is my most favorite scene in any of the "Jurassic Park" movies.

It's just done so incredibly well.

And then the fact that they talk about behavior, and you've got the line of, "They do move in herds."

It's still, I can feel it now.

It gives me goosebumps.

You know, just such an iconic scene.

(inspiring music) - I think "Jurassic Park" is sort of the iconic pop culture version of dinosaurs.

It added a vitality, a life to it, a realness, an immediacy, as only Spielberg can do.

- The most important piece of dinosaur media, almost without question, is "Jurassic Park."

It was powerful and inspired a whole generation of paleontology enthusiasts.

- I remember going to see "Jurassic Park" when I was a freshman in high school in '93.

It definitely had me interested.

You know, it was a big deal.

It kind of just put dinosaurs on the map.

- I was watching it with all of these seasoned visual effects artists.

The T-rex shows up in the rain, and there's no matte lines and there's motion blur, and we were all just looking at each other like, "What are we looking at?"

(T-rex roaring) Things had fundamentally changed and I wanted to be a part of that.

- "Jurassic Park" is about dinosaurs who walked the Earth, and they died, and then they're resurrected, and they walk again, and they're heroes to us.

- That movie just had such a huge influence on the public.

So for example, at the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, the year that movie came out, our attendance shot up 40%.

- You can actually see a spike of the amount of paleontologists that come after those movies.

And I think that they do help persuade people that they can be paleontologists.

- Because that movie centers on paleontologists and how you could create your own dinosaur.

I think that aspect was really interesting.

It's not just bringing them to life, but showing you how you maybe could bring them to life.

- I think it's an awesome bit of filmmaking, but you have to be careful with the dinosaur reconstructions.

They're all grays and browns.

Dinosaurs had color vision.

They would've used color to highlight their frills and their spines.

- One of the biggest criticisms we paleontologists have when it comes to "Jurassic Park" is the position of the forelimbs in the predatory dinosaurs because it's just completely wrong.

Essentially, anatomically, the forelimbs of these dinosaurs would've looked like they're just about to clap.

And in some ways it's kind of like a precursor to the avian flight stroke, right?

That's kind of what they do.

So if you want to put them into this kind of configuration, you literally kind of have to break their wrists, right?

- The raptors, we didn't think they ever got that big, except just before the release of the movie, Jim Kirkland found Utahraptor, which is about the size of those guys.

- This is a conservative reconstruction, but when you compare these two claws, you know, my claw is bigger than Spielberg's claw.

- Dilophosaurus was probably not frilled and probably didn't spit.

- I would love to work at an excavation site where you're literally just brushing sand away from the bones.

That would be great.

There's never been an excavation site that easy before.

But showing the technology, showing people out in the field, even using the ground-penetrating radar that we know doesn't really work today because bones and rocks are basically the same densities, but just showing people that this is a real, active field and we're learning stuff every single day and you too can do it.

- It's not about scientific accuracy.

There are many things that are scientifically wrong about "Jurassic Park," but it was never meant to be scientifically accurate.

It was meant to be entertainment and it did entertain.

- Because it's not a documentary on paleontology, it's a really fun roller-coaster ride.

And if he had gotten things exactly accurate, like the fact that if you stay still in front of a T-rex, it won't see you, which is crazy because they had some of the best sense of smell of any animal, they had binocular vision.

You know, the movie would be about 30 seconds long, and that's not very interesting.

- Across North America on movie screens, dinosaurs are coming back to life today in the new movie "Jurassic Park."

- That was the first movie to ever gross a billion dollars.

That's how popular dinosaurs are.

- There was a move to try and get some of the success of the movie back into paleontology.

We took some grants from Spielberg and Universal and made it available to scientists around the world.

One of the reasons there are so many paleontologists in the world now working on dinosaurs is because of the spinoff from the movie "Jurassic Park."

- [James] And with two "Jurassic Park" sequels and the "Jurassic World" trilogy, Universal continues to generate enormous interest in dinosaur paleontology, spanning multiple generations.

(epic music) - Finding dinosaur fossils is an amazing thing and the thing that keeps you going out there, 'cause you're living in the field for weeks at a time and eating the same food every day and it's hot and there's bugs and you're hanging out with people you may not even like.

But the thing that keeps you going is you never know when you're gonna walk around a corner and find something that nobody has ever seen before and you get a chance to be involved in digging it up.

- Fossil hunting in the field is one of the coolest experiences you can have.

It essentially is hiking and looking, hiking and looking, hiking and looking, and then eventually you're gonna find some bone fragments.

Then maybe you'll take off your backpack and get a little bit closer, find out where the layer is.

You know, it might be an ancient riverbed or a bend in a river.

Find that layer in the strata where those fossils are coming out of.

Follow that layer around as far as you can go, and you might actually see things that have already eroded out.

- When I uncover something for the first time, I still sometimes get that same feeling that I had 25 years ago seeing a tooth for the first time.

'Cause I'm the first person on Earth that's ever seen that.

- When I find a dinosaur, it's a pretty incredible feeling.

It's a huge adrenaline rush.

It's fascinating, it's exhilarating, it's fun.

- And many people think that we make this discovery on a hill, say in Madagascar, and we call up CNN and we tell them we've got this thing and they make an announcement, and the reality couldn't be any further from that.

Discovering it is just the first thing.

Then you've gotta actually excavate it, wrap up the fossils in plaster and burlap, move them to a truck sometimes with the help of a helicopter.

Then it might take a year to two years to prepare the fossils at a laboratory.

Then you have to study them, and you can't just study those fossils.

You have to compare them with the fossils of relatives held in other museums around the world.

So often you have to travel to other places.

Then you sit down and you write a manuscript, you submit it to a scientific journal.

The journal reviews it, and then it's sometimes six months to a year later before the paper's finally published.

So it can be anywhere from two to five years, from the moment of discovery to the moment that we announce it to the world.

(lively music) - [James] Dinosaurs are found all over the world, from the freezing Antarctic to the blistering heat of the Sahara Desert.

- When we started our fieldwork in the Moroccan Sahara, we didn't really know what we would find.

A couple of people told me that we would probably not find anything interesting.

I said, "Well, this is a really difficult place to find fossils in.

Most of them are just isolated bits and pieces."

But we found many incredible fossils: massive, plant-eating dinosaurs that would've weighed as much as an entire herd of elephants.

We found remains of flying reptiles, crocs, lizards.

But of course, the holy grail for us was Spinosaurus, right?

That was the creature we really wanted to uncover.

In April 2008, we were just returning from fieldwork in the Sahara.

On our way back, we stopped in a small oasis town, and while we were there, a local showed us some fossils in a cardboard box.

One bone really caught my eye and I'd never seen anything quite like it before.

And I thought, you know, these are several bones that probably belong to one skeleton.

This could be something really important.

We made sure that these fossils were brought to the paleontology collection at the University of Casablanca.

I thought, you know, maybe one day I'll be able to figure out what exactly these fossils are.

I was also visiting museum collections at around that time, all around the world to look at African dinosaur fossils.

And one of the museums I visited was the Natural History Museum in Milan.

My Italian colleagues had told me that they have a partial skeleton of a dinosaur sitting in the basement of their museum.

There were big, tall spines, leg bones, foot bones, skull bones.

You know, after all these years, we might finally have the skeleton of Spinosaurus, but we had one big problem.

We didn't really know where the skeleton came from.

And in paleontology, that's a really, really big problem.

You need this contextual information to understand what environment the animal lived in.

But then I picked up a chunk of spine and I realized it looked just like the chunk I had seen in the cardboard box in Morocco.

I thought maybe they all belong to the same skeleton.

All I have to do is relocate the man with the cardboard box.

It was like looking for a needle in the desert.

There are about 50,000 fossil hunters operating in Morocco.

I didn't have a name or an address or a phone number.

Really, the only thing I could remember was that the man had a mustache.

And so we went to all these remote villages and talked to the locals, and they didn't know anything about a partial skeleton of a dinosaur.

They said, "You know, that's unheard of.

We just find isolated bits and pieces here."

But then on the very last day of our search, we're sitting in a cafe and I just saw all my dreams going down the drain.

And just in that moment, a man walked past our table, and I caught a glimpse of his face, and we were like, "Was that the guy?"

And so we got up and caught up with him.

It was the man we had been looking for.

And he then told me that he found many other bones.

He sold those bones to an Italian geologist.

That's when it all came together.

Yes, these bones all belong to the same skeleton.

I then had to convince him to take us to the dig site.

We found little pieces of bone and spine.

And so over the next few years we returned to the dig site several times.

We removed many, many tons of rock and we did find more bones.

And turns out that the most important parts of the skeleton were still hidden in the rocks.

One of the most exciting parts of the skeleton was the tail of Spinosaurus.

And this tail completely rewrites the dinosaur textbook because it revealed that this was a dinosaur like an extraterrestrial, a really, really strange creature.

(intriguing music) - In about 1990, I read "Jurassic Park," and I wanted to find out what kind of dinosaurs do we have around here, and so I started trying to figure out how to find fossils.

Eventually I learned how to read a geologic map.

I was out in an area.

It was very ridged.

The layers had been turned almost vertical.

And so I was walking at the base of ridges looking for bone chip trails.

I found one and it had a lot of bone chips in it, and there was a little sandstone bluff about the height of my head sticking up.

And finally I turned to the right, and I saw a big flat bone sticking out of the rock, and there were ribs sticking out next to it and other pieces, which are actually at the top of this little display.

And so then I was just overcome by adrenaline and thinking, "I might have a heart attack."

When I started realizing how much of it was there, I thought, "I should sit down maybe and try and collect myself."

- I'm an advocate for citizen science in whatever form it comes in, especially if they're willing to work with professionals that were trained in the field and learn proper ways to document and then later store the materials.

- One day, I just came home, and I looked up like, dinosaur news, and I saw that California had gotten a new state dinosaur.

And then I thought, "Why didn't Arizona have one?"

So I just wrote up a letter to the governor after doing a little bit of research and said that the Sonorasaurus was probably the best pick for the state dinosaur.

- It was discovered in southern Arizona.

There's no other dinosaur like it.

And I thought it was a great, great idea.

So I introduced the bill.

- He talked to the governor about it.

He testified in front of state legislative committees, and they made it the state dinosaur.

- Members, by your vote of seven ayes, one absent, zero nays, you have given Senate Bill 1517 a due pass recommendation.

(members applauding) - Ever since then, when I go and I speak to youth groups, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, I talk about this bill, and I talk about Jax and say, "You can be part of the process too."

(gentle music) - [James] This is the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

They've got a museum full of dinosaurs, many of which were found in Wyoming.

And like most museums, they have a fossil prep lab.

But this lab is open to the public.

But the thing that's most unique about this place is that just a few miles down the road, you can dig up actual dinosaur bones.

- When we're first out prospecting for a new dig site, we start looking at the ground as closely as we can, but we're not looking for black bone like we find at our other sites.

We're looking for blue bone.

There's not many things in nature that turn rock blue.

And in this case it's a manganese inside of our bones.

- So is it like an oxidation process?

- Oh, yeah.

Sitting out in the oxygen, sitting out in the sunlight and everything else will turn these things from solid black to bright blue.

- [James] Wow.

- Once we found these little pieces, that's when we start to look uphill.

We move our way up the slope, we look for more pieces, we look for bigger pieces.

And sometimes if we're really lucky, we'll find pieces that are still in place, still in situ, and that tells us this might actually be a really good place to dig.

- Okay.

- If we can and we have the time and the road access, we come up here and we start digging.

- [James] Don't fall.

Don't fall!

It's a big drop down there.

- So we're going to head up to ABB.

This site is called Above Bone Bed because it's on top of another site called Bone Bed.

And what we have here is a river channel deposit with a lot of Diplodocus bones.

- All right.

- We're gonna try to isolate some of these caudal vertebrae, which are vertebrae in the tail from a Diplodocus.

18 and a half long by 14 wide.

A is 159, and then on B, 160.

I'm just measuring the strike and dip.

So the orientation to north and then the angle that it's dipping into the quarry.

85% complete.

You're going to dig down at an angle so it's on like a little pedestal.

I would hit it this way and putting a little bit of thin glue to stabilize it before we jacket it.

We have our paper so the plaster doesn't touch the bone.

Any of the chunks, just kind of push 'em up against the side of the bucket and just kind of smooth them out.

Is this your first time plaster jacketing?

- [James] Yep.

- This is my favorite part of the fieldwork.

So we need to create a fracture underneath.

Go ahead and grab your fingers on this corner and we're going to just flip it that way.

Oh, we got a little bit of breakage, but it's okay.

Now we are going to take all these pieces and then glue them back on and then we'll run some thin glue in the cracks as well.

All right, so we'll just clean up this loose stuff and we should be good to go.

- All right.

All right.

So now that we've pulled the bone out of the field, we're gonna go ahead and remove it out of the jacket so we can prep it out.

- There we are.

- [Jessica] Perfect, so go ahead and lay it down.

- I spent the next two days in this lab delicately removing matrix surrounding the fossil, using an air scribe, dentist pick, toothbrush, and other precise tools.

Once all the pieces were cleaned up, I reassembled this ancient jigsaw puzzle and filled some of the gaps with an archival clay.

So, here is as far as we're going to take this Diplodocus caudal vertebra.

That'll be finishing this one up and then it will go into the collections.

- [Dad] Beautiful, well done.

- [James] Nearly five years after our first visit to Utah, we went back to the Museum of Ancient Life, where we met up with legendary paleontologist Dr.

Jim Kirkland.

In the mid-'90s, he oversaw the difficult extraction of a nine-ton chunk of rock from the side of a mountain.

He and veteran fossil preparator Scott Madsen provided a guided tour of this giant Utahraptor block.

- If you want to come in close here, we can give you a real good look at some of the bones in here.

This is the end of a femur.

So we have femur here, a second one here, a third one here, a fourth one here, a fifth one there, and a sixth over there.

This is a maxilla, sort of the upper part of the jaw bone, and an ischium, that's this one right here.

And that's the way it's oriented.

- It looks like there's another claw right there.

- Yes, good eye, good eye.

A lot of this stuff in here is pretty subtle.

Anyway, it just goes and goes.

You really can't go down without bumping into something pretty quickly.

The targets are used in photogrammetry.

You can take hundreds of pictures looking down on the block here and feed them into this computer program.

And so by the time we get through this years from now, we'll have a three-dimensional representation of how these bones all relate to each other.

(light music) - You know, this material, this resin is actually not that different than the real keratin would've been in life.

So I say, "Okay, let's get someone, one of these in both hands and jump on an elephant.

See if you can take it out."

(laughs) So you wonder why those bones are so massively built.

This thing is built to kick this through inch-thick rawhide, you know, holding on with those big claws on its hands, stabbing through the ribs and in the neck, you know, just (whooshing) into these big animals.

This thing would've been nasty and no one has ever portrayed it properly.

(lively music) - [James] It can be hard to satisfy some paleontologists, but artists like Keegan Kuhn work to maintain scientific accuracy while creating engaging experiences with dinosaurs, including Utahraptor.

- There's this whole movement of wearable dinosaur costumes, but I wanted something that gets the anatomy a little bit more accurate, and then obviously feathered.

So now when you stand upright, you can stand flat-footed, but now try and stand on your toes.

Nice.

Now try and bend over at a 90-degree angle at your waist and walk, because that's what you're going to be doing.

Right on.

Cool, man.

You got it.

Go ahead and slide through there.

This is again, like a super rough proof of concept prototype.

- [James] Prowling the streets of Sedona, Arizona.

Nature's deadliest killer.

He's sizing you up, he's looking at you.

"You wanna go, man?

You wanna go?"

- [Keegan] So go ahead and stand all the way straight up and push up.

- Aah - There you go.

- [James] My noble raptor cry.

Aah!

- So, not the most comfortable, but not too bad, right?

- [James] No, not too bad at all.

Just got to get used to walking on my tiptoes.

- [Keegan] Yeah (laughs).

- [James] You might be wondering about all the feathers you've been seeing on some of these dinosaurs.

How do we know that dinosaurs were so fluffy?

Canadian paleontologist Phil Currie was an important figure in that tale of discovery and is one of the most accomplished paleontologists in history.

- So there's all these mysteries surrounding dinosaurs, and you feel like a detective.

You're going out and trying to solve a 75-million-year-old mystery, and it's fun to do that.

When Archaeopteryx was found and studied in the 1860s, several scientists realized that this is the perfect intermediate between dinosaurs and birds.

But in the 1920s, things went kind of awry.

A Danish scientist called Gerhard Heilmann, he pointed out that birds, of course, have a wishbone.

If dinosaurs have lost that bone, then they can't be directly ancestral to birds.

And even though clavicles or wishbones had been found in dinosaurs by the 1970s, you have a certain amount of inertia in your thinking.

If you've been raised to think that birds and dinosaurs can't be related to each other, then basically you can't accept that idea.

You'll look for reasons why it's not so.

One of the scientists who was very much against the idea, she said you would have to find a dinosaur with feathers on it.

And later that summer, I got to see the very first feathered dinosaur from northeastern China.

We're up to something like 100 feathered dinosaur species now.

And we've even found feathered dinosaurs here in Alberta.

(claw thundering) - I would say one of the most critical connections is that bird-dinosaur connection because it is so fundamental.

The fact that birds inherited so many of their features from dinosaurs, from relatively hollow bones to nesting behavior to probably living in groups.

And so when we look at birds today, we should have this sense of wonder and awe about them because they are the representatives of T-rex and Stegosaurus and everything that are still with us on a daily basis.

(wondrous music) - [James] So new dinosaurs are being discovered all the time.

At the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Canada, we saw perhaps one of the most amazing fossils ever found.

- So every year we get calls from industry, we don't know where they're coming from, but we know every year we're gonna get a call to go investigate something.

And when it comes from one of these bigger industrial mines, it's usually going to be pretty good.

We went to Fort McMurray in 2011 expecting to get a nice plesiosaur and turned out it was even better.

It was the world's absolute 100% perfectly preserved dinosaur.

Unfortunately, it was found by a bucket.

It scooped away the first half, dumped it, and it wasn't until the shovel operator saw some chunks fall down, he realized, "Oh, there was something there."

But meanwhile, that truck's gone and dumped somewhere in the mine.

I'm so glad we got the front half.

It's nice to put a face on a fossil.

- So often when we collect things in the field, we'll basically carve around an outline of the specimen, but we won't know what the specimen looks like in detail until it's been in the preparation lab.

So the preparators are the first people who actually get to uncover the rock from the bone or the fossil surface, and they're often the ones who make the biggest discoveries.

- Borealopelta took five and a half years to prepare, to slowly chip out of the surrounding rock.

Mark Mitchell's the one who spent 7,000 hours preparing the fossil.

- Every square millimeter, Mark went over at least twice: once with his little tool to expose the fossil and then to put a drop of glue on it.

That's why we named it after him: Borealopelta markmitchelli.

- It's a one-of-a-kind specimen.

I don't think we'll ever find anything like it again.

First off, you have the preservation of the soft tissues.

So all the skin is preserved on the surface, all the keratinous sheaths are preserved, and at the same time, the specimen is preserved in three dimensions.

It looks like the animal has just kind of fallen asleep and turned to stone and it could wake up at any moment.

So when you go to a museum and you see all these fascinating specimens on display, think of all the people that spent countless hours searching for and finding the specimen, cleaning it up, preparing it, conserving it for future generations, doing the research, and then putting it on display for the public to see.

(uplifting music) - [James] With fossils from so many different ancient creatures, how do museums keep track of their massive collections?

- As a collections manager, I basically do everything that a book librarian does for books, but I do that for fossils, so I keep them conserved, preserved and accessible as much as I can to the public and to scientists.

- To keep track of all the bones that we have here, we number everything.

So I assign them a unique number, and I put that number in our database system and all of the documents that go with that.

Field notes, field photos, annual reports, publications, CT scans, photos, everything gets associated with that number.

So I physically number the specimens, but I also put them in the database and I curate digitally.

- There's also a lot of 3D scanning and photogrammetry happening now.

So being able to take a digital model of your specimens and putting those online for people to use, just like the real thing, only it's a digital model.

So you don't have to send these incredibly important, rare fossils across the world anymore.

You can just send them an exact scan of it and they can study it just like the real thing.

- Paleontology is a wonderful way to show the scientific process.

It's not the sort of thing where you need necessarily years and years and years of education to make a major discovery.

That certainly helps, but we've had some of our best discoveries made by high school students, and I think it's really exciting to show these students and anyone else that you don't necessarily have to be working at a large research university to make a contribution to science.

I started out as a kid, you know, collecting fossils locally, and so that was a big part of who I am.

I mean, what got me interested in the field, but at the same time as a museum professional, I recognized that for things that we want to do science on, they have to be in a publicly accessible permanent collection.

You know, you can't necessarily expect that a fossil that's in someone's garage is going to be around in 10 years or 20 years.

However, I recognize that, you know, being able to collect certain fossils that are maybe very common or that are in areas that are legally accessible, that can be a really important way for people to engage with the science.

- After evolving from newspapers and books to movies and TV, the internet is now the primary way that people engage with dinosaurs.

On social media, partially thanks to science communicators, paleontology is more accessible and inclusive than ever.

So can you guys tell us a bit about your podcast?

- Sure, so we run "I Know Dino."

It's the world's largest dinosaur podcast, and every week we cover the new dinosaur discoveries.

We discuss dinosaurs with dinosaur enthusiasts and dinosaur experts like paleontologists, and we have a "Dinosaur of the Day" that Sabrina covers.

- We learned that there was something new being discovered and written about almost every week, which was amazing, and then we sort of ran with that and turned our passion into a podcast.

- Science communication is taking these complicated, abstract concepts and twisting it into a way that people can understand in more digestible chunks.

It's a tactic that teachers have been using in the classroom for years.

- It's amazing to teach kids about dinosaurs.

When they're at Jurassic Quest interacting, they're learning so much about the world, maybe it sparked interest in paleontology or science, and I'm thankful to be a part of that.

- There is something about dinosaurs that causes a spark to light up in a kid's eyes.

Like seeing a four-year-old point out an Acrocanthosaurus is amazing.

They can't remember to brush their teeth, but they remember the names of these dinosaurs.

There's definitely something there.

- Kids who are interested in dinosaurs are more likely to end up in science, technology, engineering, and math.

And so you can thank dinosaurs for all the incredible scientists that we have today.

More than likely, that was their first gateway into this whole world.

- One of the big things that has always drawn me to video games is how they use the fossil record to inform creature design and the environmental backdrops.

- Social media, if you incorporate science into it, people can learn as they're scrolling through their feed.

- It's really bringing in a new generation to the field.

You can actually see photos of somebody in the lab or in the field or in the classroom and actually see what they're doing.

- It's an amazing thing to see so many women just out there, and they're so confident and powerful, and they have such a wide range of jobs.

- Dinosaurs are not only fascinating, but through them I've discovered an incredible network of people who love them, from professional paleontologists, museum volunteers, paleoartists.

I now have Dino friends all over the world.

So in my opinion, it's the human element that breathes life into the bones we find here in the field.

- [James] So what does the future hold for paleontology?

How are today's scientists answering questions about dinosaurs and why do we need to keep studying them at all?

What value could fossils possibly provide to the modern world?

- So molecular paleontology is a young science, but it's really going to take over.

I think it'll take over paleontology, and I think we can find really incredible discoveries with these chemical methods.

You can see if there is potentially some ancient DNA still preserved, you know, in these very, very old fossils.

For example, reconstructing the colors of the feathers of the dinosaurs or birds.

You know, you could tell if they were white or black or red or iridescent.

You know that some dinosaurs were laying blue-green eggs because you could find pigments in the eggshells.

- Technology like CT scanning or even histology, where you can look at, you know, thin sections of the bones to see any of the inside bone tissue structures with regards to growth and age, we're getting like this amazing, amazing glimpse into dinosaur fossils, and not just dinosaurs, but all types of fossils that we've never really had before.

- If you have a scan, you can send it to a scientist in Australia who can look at it and they could send that scan to somebody in Germany and they can send that scan to somebody in China.

Suddenly we have more information flowing.

- And I think that that's going to help get us over this weird taboo that we have against replicas.

I'm standing right next to a replica of a T-rex, and it is cool.

If we can get the public to understand how great replicas are, if for a fraction of the price, we can print you off a full-size T-rex for your front room, and you can leave the real bones to science.

- If we want to understand this grand, epic story, the biggest story out there, the history of life on Earth, we have to travel back in time.

And I think that paleontologists are essentially time travelers.

- I'm interested in how life completely transforms itself and in a way that you couldn't possibly guess or imagine unless you had a fossil record.

- If you think about it, the search for extraterrestrial life maybe should be by paleontologists, not biologists.

Chances are better that there was life there and it's gone than there is life there today.

- As much as I really like the big organisms, the microscopic world out there is fundamental.

If you think about viruses and bacteria and they can reproduce so quickly and change and modify so quickly, we need to understand that as big organisms, because they're our biggest threat probably.

- We need to make sure that people understand that science is for our own benefit because science continues to be under attack.

We see it when we talk about climate change.

We see it when we talk about vaccines.

- From icehouses to greenhouses, to rapid warming, to rapid cooling, sea-level rise, a loss of forests in favor of deserts.

Paleontology is kind of the intersection of all of these.

- 99.9% of all life has gone extinct.

If we can't grasp that and how fragile the environment that we're in is and what that means to our future, you know, I'd like to see the human race continue on.

- If we are the cause of this mass extinction, we can also be the solution.

But in order to do that, we need to look at how organisms have been affected by mass extinctions.

And dinosaurs are a perfect group because they originate after a mass extinction and survive two subsequent mass extinctions.

- The dinosaur line in the form of birds came through both of those, and now birds are the most diverse terrestrial vertebrate in the world.

Birds will recover from whatever happens in global warming.

We might not.

- The decisions that we all make in the next generation will dictate where this planet's going for the next thousands to millions of years.

It's a big responsibility.

We're at this pivotal turning point, and I think understanding something of our deep past is important as we think about where we're going in the future.

- [Dad] Okay, what have you got?

- I've got the letter from UC Berkeley for their decision.

Yes!

I've been admitted for the fall semester.

- Yes!

Yeah, nice!

- Yes!

Yeah!

- How cool!

- Oh, that's awesome.

(gentle music) - [James] Through nearly 70 interviews with paleontologists, fossil hunters, artists, and enthusiasts from around the world, we discovered a diverse community of friendly and intelligent people joined by a common love for dinosaurs.

But did we ever answer the question, "Why dinosaurs?"

We certainly explored the history of dinosaurs in popular culture, learned how to find, dig up, prepare, and store fossils, and discovered a lot about the science of paleontology, including how it might just help us avoid another mass extinction.

But as to why so many people are fascinated with these incredible prehistoric creatures, the reasons we uncovered are as unique and varied as the dinosaurs themselves.

Along our journey, my dad entertained endless conversations about dinosaurs and fossils.

It was interesting to see how his knowledge and understanding grew over time the more he was exposed to it all.

Though I'm sure my passion for paleontology will continue to exceed his.

But I guess that's the case for many parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and mentors, whether it's sports, music, or science.

Through their mentorship and support, they inevitably become fans themselves.

For me, the question, "Why dinosaurs?"

is whether I want to pursue paleontology as a career to become a scientist, knowing what I know now about the process, the practice, and the people.

And for me, the answer is yes.

The path may not be an easy one, but it will certainly be a journey worth taking.

(inspiring music) (epic music) (epic music continues) (wondrous music) (wondrous music continues) (wondrous music continues) (wondrous music continues) (wondrous music continues) - This one is for you.

- [Dad] Oh, nice.

(both grunting) - [Member] Geez, you're going to pull him off.

(group chatting indistinctly) (group laughing) - This is a prototype I made as a wearable mask.

- [James] Oh, wow.

- Do you want to try it?

Yeah, you're going to have to force it on there.

- Is that good?

- Uh-uh.

- [James] I am dinosaur.

(group laughing) - For me, for my career, this has been an amazing place.

Obviously, you know, I'm glad I can share some of the magic with you.

But of course, for you, this is just the beginning of a long journey, but it's a nice, good place to start, right?

- Yeah.

(epic music) (intriguing music) (no audio)