 is sponsored by Ameritech, Mayflower Group, NASA Lewis Research Center, the Paleontological Society, the School of Science at IUPUI Geology Department, an association with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and the Indiana State Museum, with additional funding by and with special assistance from. Welcome to DinoFest. We're here to celebrate the 25th anniversary of IUPUI. More importantly, we're here, or equally importantly, to celebrate the 151 years of dinosaur research in a unique way. DinoFest is the first celebration of its kind and we're all delighted to be a part of it. I'm a dinosaur writer and groupie and we're here among some of the greatest dinosaur researchers and scientists in the world. We'll be hearing from them and doing a great many things in the coming hour, a little more, including hearing from some sixth graders and from all of you in a variety of sites around the around the country. So let me give you a brief rundown of what it is we're going to be doing today. This program is being aired live as we talk at WFYI Channel 20 in Indianapolis, but it's also being uplinked live to NASA's educational satellite network throughout North America. Among the many sites viewing in remote places, where it's not even afternoon perhaps, let me run down a couple for you. School systems in Robinsdale, Minnesota, in Washington, DC. Particularly pleased to hear that prior reservation school in prior Montana is among our viewership. School systems in Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit. They're all a part of this network. We're going to have three question-and-answer sessions during this broadcast and we invite questions which will be relayed to me in writing from all of you out there in our satellite network and also from the sixth graders who are very kindly here amongst us. For those who are asking questions from the theater right here, I ask you to look for Joetta, who I'll have stand up for a moment right now. She's here. Well, she will be here momentarily and she will come around to you and if you raise your hand, she'll take your question, bring it forward. So if you wait for her there, she is in the back. All the television and satellite viewers can ask questions of the participants by calling 317-278-7800. The operators will field your calls and they'll be relayed to me and in turn to the audience and the scientists here. We also have a live feed going on and we'll be visiting them several times during the broadcast to the students at John Marshall Middle School who are involved in a dinosaur construction project of their own and that's coming to us through the Ameritech fiber optic network and Ameritech is one of the gracious sponsors of this entire event. So that brings me now at last to the subject of this festivity and that is the central question asked in Jurassic Park. What does Steven Spielberg do with all his money? Actually, not. That's the second question on everyone's mind. The first is can we bring dinosaurs back? And the answer is no. So we could all go home now. However, we can find out an awful lot about dinosaurs by going to the fossil source and among the things we'll be doing today is we're going to go to the Children's Museum here in Indianapolis and their dinosaur dig exhibit and we'll have an interview with Jack Horner, one of the world's leading dinosaur paleontologists who we'll also meet here and he'll be with the museum's Carol Bartlett. We also find out about dinosaurs by bringing them back to museums and research institutions and we'll go over to the IUPUI library where many of these fossils are now housed. The Indiana State Museum curator Ron Richards and the Potomac Museum director Hal Halverson will be there and they'll explain some of these fossil finds to you. We also find out about dinosaurs through some high-tech means and cat scanning is one of them. We'll look at some cat scans of fossilized embryos on tape and then we'll have some of the leading experts analyze and describe some fossil finds through cat scans of their own. We can put bones back together again. We learn about dinosaurs when we begin to reconstruct them or try to and that's where we'll go to the Indiana Public Schools once again and see how they're doing, building their dinosaur. We'll check in with them several times during this broadcast. We can also look for dinosaur DNA and amber and that of course is the theme of Jurassic Park. It's an exciting frontier and Diane Bellis is here to talk to you about that as well, one of the world's experts on fossils and amber. We can reconstruct dinosaurs' environments, find out the world in which they lived, the many worlds in which they lived and we do that by studying the plant fossils that are found with the dinosaurs and last we can put dinosaurs back together again and make them alive. It costs us sometimes 65 million dollars to do it in Jurassic Park. It's been done a little bit less expensively and rather effectively by the model makers such as the folks at Dynamation and you'll meet George Callison, a scientist at Dynamation. He'll describe the process by which they put those dinosaurs back together and you'll see one of them moving as best a human can make a dinosaur move. Let me take you now to the Children's Museum and we'll just have a paleontologist on hand, Jack Horner once again, to discuss how paleontologists find and dig up dinosaur bones. So let me turn you over to Carol Bartlett. I'm Carol Bartlett and we're here at the dinosaur dig in the What If Gallery at the Children's Museum with a very special guest, Jack Horner, who digs up real dinosaur bones. Jack, tell us, how do you know where to look for dinosaurs? Well it's a good question. Dinosaurs lived from about 100 or about 240 million years ago until about 65 million years ago and when they died, they died in sediments of the same age. So all we have to do to find dinosaurs is go out into areas where the rock is exposed at the surface that's the right age. So if we're looking for a Tyrannosaurus rex for example, Tyrannosaurus rex lived 65 million years ago. So we would go look for rock that was deposited 65 million years ago and just walk around and hope we found it. What about our dinosaur dig here? Is this what it's really like when you find dinosaur bones? Have we done a good job of recreating that? Yes, this looks a lot like sandstone and a lot of dinosaurs come out of sandstone. So yes, it looks very realistic. I'm gonna help them here in a minute. Good. What about the tools? You have basically the right tools. We usually use metal picks and brushes. In other words, even smaller tools than what the kids are using here. It's a very tedious job to dig up a dinosaur, isn't it? It certainly is. What do you do with the bones once you get them up? Do you take them out of the rock this clean? I mean, how do you do that and get them back to the museum or the place where you want to study them? We clean them as best we can and then cover them with a glue, very thin glue substance, and then cover the bone with paper or tin foil and then dig all the way around them, not all the way, but partially around it and lay plaster of Paris, strips of plaster of Paris, wet plaster of Paris over the top of it, just like a doctor does on broken arm. And then when that hardens, then you can pick the whole thing up and take it to the museum and it will get broken. The tyrannosaurus wrecks that we collected a couple of years ago, the pelvic block, just the pelvis of the animal, weighed 9,000 pounds when the plaster jacket that we took out. So you had a crane to get that out. Yes, we had a crane to get that out. And then a big truck to take it for you. What's the glue for? When the fossil bone is exposed to the surface, to the air, oftentimes gets very crumbly, and so the glue just sort of keeps everything intact until you can get it out of the plaster jacket and back to the museum. Do we have lots of places in the United States where you find fossilized dinosaur bones? Yeah. Most dinosaur bones come from the Rocky Mountain region because that's where the right age rock is exposed. In the eastern United States, like here in Indiana, most of the right age rock has been eroded away. It's gone. And in some places it's too deep. You don't want to dig down 2,000 feet to find a dinosaur. So most right around the Rocky Mountains is where the right age rock is exposed at the surface. So unfortunately, for all the kids who call us at the Children's Museum and think they found dinosaur bones or dinosaur teeth, there just aren't any here, right? Not in Indiana. Not in Indiana. Gee, that's a shame. Well, listen, Jack, would you like to get in and work with the kids a little bit? Certainly. Okay. Have you got it? Thank you, Lenore and Jack. You may not realize just how rare this is to see Jack Horner actually digging. I know having been out with him, what he does is he goes and finds a new kind of dinosaur, several specimens, beautiful ones, and then likes everybody else do all the digging while he goes out and finds some more. So he's just making work for everybody else. That, however, is a rarity in paleontology. Most dinosaurs of the 285 different kinds we know are known from just a single tooth or a single bone leads to a lot of problems in naming dinosaurs, leads in a lot of problems too, reconstructing them. We're going to turn now to Lenore Tedesco from the IUPUI Department of Geology. She's out of the John Marshall Middle School, and let's see what the students there have done in building their dinosaur. Hi, Don, we're, as you said, at the John Marshall Middle School. I've got a group of eighth graders here, and we're going to try to reconstruct a dinosaur from only a few bones. With me here is Dr. Peter Dodson from the University of Pennsylvania, and he's with a group of students working on part of a skull. Thanks Lenore. Well, we're having a great time here. We've got this beautiful dinosaur bone. This jaw is 65 million years old, and it's real. There's nothing fake here, and we're trying to figure out what kind of animal this is, and with these students here, we've already figured out. So we've already decided what we've got here. What part of the jaw is this? It's the right jaw. It goes right up to the chin. It's complete, and it's got one big shiny thing here, which is tooth, and this is kind of strange, but we have another. The tooth has come out here. Now, is it all just jaw bone here? We've got one, two, three tail vertebrae, so that means this animal has died and really come apart into pieces, and we've got this other bone. I had to ask for help with that bone. What is that? Chevron. It's a bone that hangs down underneath the tail, and this was a plant eater, right? No. Man, this is a tremendous tooth. Look how long that root is, and sharp and pointy. So we're going to work at putting this thing together and making some sense out of it. Right. We have another group of students over here that are working with Dr. Dale Russell from National Museum of Canada, and they have what looks to me like a piece of an arm bone or something. Dr. Russell? Well, thank you very much. We have a remarkable fossil. It belongs to the same kind of animal that our team was just looking at. So comparing this colic, you see over there that must be on the order of five feet long. We have an arm that belongs to the same animal here, and can you tell us what you think about it? What do you think about this arm? You put me on the spot. I don't know. How many, what do you think of the claws? Those are claws of, they like your hands? How does it differ from your hands? The claws, the end part right here is used for clawing at other animals, so they can kill them in for a prey. So you think this animal is a meat eater? Yeah. That matches what we saw from the bones over there that you have teeth in them. Well, it's pretty small for such a big animal, but the claws are real sharp. We were just discussing a few moments ago that this animal probably weighed as much as two medium sized elephants put together. And I think that your arm is not much smaller than this arm. So this is, your observation is really interesting. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yes, it's, we determined that the arm is extremely small. If this was on an elephant, we would think for a big, huge bull elephant, this would be a very small one indeed. What do any of you see anything in the color of it, or anything else in the shape of it that you find is interesting? I'm going to put you over on the spot now, because they put me on the spot. It's brown. I didn't think brown. That's true. This one is stained probably with iron minerals. It's been buried a long time. Sometimes when the bones are on the ground, they turn white, they bleach in the sun. So they look white then. But actually, those bones contain real tissue, they break down components of material that was in the dinosaur when it was alive. So when we study those amino acids that are left in it, we can tell sometimes to whether it's a herbivore or a carnivore, anybody go on a count your fingers and comment on what you see there in front of you. I only see two fingers. And they seem kind of crooked. That's a very good observation. The crookedness of the fingers goes way back deep into the ancestry of dinosaurs. And it appears in the very first ones. But this one is among the very last ones. And it only has two fingers. The most primitive dinosaurs start out with about four. So this one is another very advanced dinosaur with a very small hand, and it only has two fingers in it. We didn't know until a dinosaur was found in Canada about 1910 that Tyrannosaurus actually had two fingers because the original type material of Tyrannosaurus did not have two fingers. Well, what do you think? What are your opinions on how this group is going to handle this reconstruction job? I think the group's going to do very well. They've already studied about dinosaurs at the beginning of school year. They studied Jurassic Park for an entire six week period. They've drawn dinosaurs. And they've done a really good job. So they're really kind of enthused about the entire thing. Thank you very much. We'll see how this one goes. Okay, Don, we're going to keep working here and see what we can come up with and take it away. We'll come back in a few minutes. Thanks, Lenore. It's good to hear from the real dinosaur experts, the students of the school. And it's also a pleasure to see dinosaur paleontologists in their customary position on their knees. It's not just how they work. It's they're praying for someone to come along and help them dig it up. You know, Peter Dodson, one of the fellows you met there, has compiled a fascinating statistic that tells us how many dinosaur bones there are in museums all around the world. And it turns out that there are only, in all the history of digging up dinosaurs, 2100 good skeletons of dinosaurs in museums all around the world. That's all we have to know dinosaurs. So fossils are to be treasured by all of us. They're hard to come by. They're hard to keep. They're hard to put together. And to illustrate that for us with some beautiful specimens right here at the Museum at IUPUI is one of the organizers of DinoFest paleontologist Don Wolberg. So let me bring you to Don. Hi, Don. This is Don Wolberg with Ron Richards, not at the IUPI Museum, but the IUPI Library, which oddly enough appears to have become a museum. Ron, what do you think about all this? This is a really spectacular event. What we have are fossils from all different time periods from around the world. And we've got not only that, but we've got the experts here that have described these and are really cutting edge experts in understanding dinosaurs today. In Indiana, where we're kind of hampered, we don't really have dinosaur bearing strata. We do have big mammoths and mastodons and things, but these really aren't dinosaurs. So this is a great opportunity for people in Indiana, central Indiana, really all of Indiana to move to the center of Indiana and learn about dinosaurs, see reconstructions of these big beasts, see large fishes, mammals, everything reconstructed here and to be able to talk to the experts. A tremendous event here. One thing that is sort of in my mind nowadays when we talk about the environment and the world and this and that, I think what people act off in this sort of a global time perspective. And if you look at the vast, the vastness of time on Earth, you look at humankind has been here a very small part of this time. And yet we're undergoing such rapid changes. We're sort of changing most of our natural habitats today into human habitats. And so it might lend somebody an attitude that maybe we shouldn't do this much. Maybe we don't have to restructure the entire world for just humans alone. So I think this time perspective can help in the long term stewardship of our planet. And I see that as being a good value for everybody. Ron, we've talked about the kinds of displays here. Are there any displays that are actually from Indiana? You bet. We've got in the lower level, actually in the upper level, we have a lot of our large undersea crinoids, animals that flourished in Indiana. We have mastodont skulls and mammoths quite a bit in the lower level. So please come in and see them. Wonderful. We're going to now show a tape of how we put together this huge hadrosaur behind us. It's extremely important in the transit of the specimen that each of the parts be carefully packed. For that purpose, we make use of this air foam bubble packing. And each part, even though it's a cast, again, is carefully packed in the foam packing. Strung out along here are vertebrae, the backbone. And each of these is nicely labeled, again, because they're casts, they're easier to handle and to mount. What we're looking at basically is going from up around the chest, further down the animal, turning around into the very tip of the tail, which is over here. The skull will mount up there at the tip of those two vertebrae in this string. So you have a good idea for how long the entire mount actually is. Stretched out, this will be about 23 feet. What we're trying to accomplish here is arrange the skeletal parts in the appropriate manner so that the right pieces are attached to the right pieces. Are these real? These are castes, in part because the Chinese have seen the wisdom of trying to retain their cultural, historical, scientific properties, but they have allowed American paleontologists and museums to collect and to cast specimens. Since the animal isn't alive, you need a structure to hold it up. This animal lived about 80 million years ago in what is now China. This animal will finally stand 17 feet high and 23 feet long in life. It weighed about eight tons. We're with Hal Halverson. What's behind us Hal? This is a juvenile duckbill dinosaur called an Edmondosaurus. They named this dinosaur Diane. It's named after Diane Tyson, a friend of the Black Hills Institute that put it together. This is not a full-grown by any stretch of the imagination, but this one still stretches well over 12 feet long from head to tail. We don't often find intact whole specimens. Perhaps you can tell us a bit about how dinosaur parts are actually found and what it means to piece them back into a whole intact skeleton again. Well back in the corner here you can see that there is a bone bed. It has been excavated exactly the way it was found in the ground. All of the bones were very carefully picked apart. They were uncovered. They were glued up and put into separate field jackets to bring back to the lab. Once that was accomplished, all the measurements had been taken in the field for each of the bones. Now to come up with a dinosaur of this size, you have to, in a bone bed like this, this is not what you would call an articulated dinosaur field. How many animals are there actually in that bone bed? Well in this bone bed here there are several different animals. How do you know that? Well we have taken some time here to number four bones, just to show us an example of the very sizes. These are all duckbill dinosaurs, edmonosaurus bones. What's number one, for instance? Number one is a very, it's an adult duckbill dinosaur and that's the shoulder blade. It's called a scapula and if you look at number two, that shoulder blade is from a very small juvenile. These dinosaurs are getting very small. Same part. Number three is still different size from the same shoulder blade and so is number four. Now some are from the left side, some are from the right side. So what we have to do in order to put together a dinosaur from this, this is not articulated, this is many dinosaurs, so we have to pick all these bones of the same size and of the right bone structure so that we can put together one dinosaur. How many hours would it take to clean up everything on that block and find all the other parts and recreate one scale? This dinosaur here took 12 years to put together because there are so few amount of these small juvenile bones available. Mostly what we find are adult dinosaurs but you don't find really old ones and you don't find really young ones. So you have to go for a long period of time collecting the right size bones in order to be able to put one together. This shoulder blade looked a lot like the ones that are over in the bone bed and there was only one in that area but there are hundreds of bones here that you have to match to get one dinosaur. For age and size as well and also species obviously. Apart from this specimen, what else is here, Hal? Well there's all sorts of stuff. If you look right over here I'm going to turn the head a little bit on this Diane. There is a three-dimensional large fish from about 70 million years ago called a surfactanus. That's the very first surfactanus that has ever been put together three dimensionally. This is a cast but as you can see by the sharp teeth on that creature it was a formidable creature and this is one of his arch enemies the Mosasaur that's right below him. Looking like he's coming in for the attack. These are all composed of parts, skeletal parts. Over here as well we have what appears to be an automated monster. Would you tell us a few things about that? I know that it'll be explained in the greater detail later. Well this is called a dinonicus and he is put in a position where he has killed another dinosaur and dinimation the company that put this together is recreating these animals to look like what they would look like in their true habitat. This monster here has very sharp long claws on its feet and on its front paws and its teeth and you can see that it can make a mess of a dinosaur in a short period of time. The paleontologists who discovered this animal John Ostrom is here at the conference. We'll now return to Don. Take it away Don. Why don't you get to work on that block at Matrix and see we'll check in with you at the end of the hour see if you can clean up that whole thing in the hour. You know one of the jobs of the host is to make segues to make smooth connections between things that have no connection at all and that's just what I'm about to do so let's see how smooth I can make this. When we go to put dinosaurs back together scientists are human you know at best sometimes and they make plenty of mistakes with dinosaurs and as many dinosaurs as we've named almost as many names have been thrown out because the wrong head has been put on the dinosaur a dinosaur has been accused of being an owl when it turns out to be a dinosaur all kinds of mistakes have been made but they're made within the context of trying to interpret the bones as best we can with a very limited set of information and that's what scientists try so hard to do but dinosaurs are special because they're not just the objects of science they are the objects of fantasy too they are the monsters of our imagination and it's no accident that the word in Chinese for dinosaur kung-lung is the same word as it is for dragon so particularly for children dinosaurs exist in our imagination even more than they exist in reality so let's take a look at something that in the way of fantastic dinosaurs that children around here have done as you can see we have some pretty heated imaginations around here we fortunately have an expert on hand to interpret these and you can relax it's not a psychiatrist instead it's Peter Larson and Peter has excavated the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever collected the infamous Sue subject of some nightmare at least for Peter these days and Peter is the proprietor and president of the Black Hills Institute and he's got some of the drawings right here with him to interpret Peter well as everyone knows dinosaurs are for children for those of us who never grew up we call ourselves paleontologists the the interesting thing about dinosaurs is that they were really monsters that once lived so we like to use our imaginations just as we did when we were kids to try to think of fantastic things and some of these drawings are really neat and really interesting and we have one here if we can see it where the dinosaur has two heads and three legs and one here we have four legs and three heads and another very interesting specimen here where we have multiple heads and multiple legs now one of the things that we have to do as scientists is restrain our imagination a little bit because we're limited on how we reconstruct dinosaurs into what things are possible multiple or dinosaurs with more limbs than four would be something that was really unusual and really irregular because they come from animals which only had four legs so we sort of have to restrict ourselves to to reconstructing dinosaurs with four legs and only with one head now we could have a dinosaur with only two legs as we see some dinosaurs in Lake Cretaceous like Tyrannosaurus actually had reduced their arm to something very small and possibly could have lost that arm in the end but we're sort of restricted as to how we can interpret these these animals so we unfortunately can't make dinosaurs with two heads thank you for you know we can only make politicians with two heads one thing to point out we see many of these drawings that's a little different from what scientists know to be the reality is that we picture a lot of things living this dinosaur world and indeed they did things that flew things that were in the sea the pterosaurs in the air and the plesiosaurus in the water but those were not dinosaurs and if the dinosaurs were here they'd be saying please get us right we're the ones that lived on land we're the ones who walked with our legs underneath us those are the dinosaurs and of course they're all gone with the exception of their direct descendants the birds I'm going to open the floor for questions both from our satellite audience and from you here in the audience here but let me first of all introduce our panel which is something I didn't get around to doing before and I'll do that with a comment that was made by President Kennedy long ago he had his cabinet together all the great politicians and and educators of his time and he said we've never had such a distinguished talented group of people together at one dinner since Thomas Jefferson dined alone well it's a particularly appropriate comment here because Thomas Jefferson was one of America's first great paleontologists and we have some of today's great paleontologists right here at this table you've already met Peter Larson sitting next to him is Philip Curry Dr. Curry is the world's expert on meat eating dinosaurs he's perhaps the only person in the world who can identify any dinosaur meat eating dinosaur from a single tooth maybe we'll put him to the test today next to him is Bruce Rothschild you may have read about Bruce as a dinosaur doctor in Discover Magazine he is a doctor a medical doctor but with a particular interest in fossils and he looks at dinosaur bone and unusual dinosaur bones that show dinosaurs at arthritis and cancer and all kinds of other injuries and diseases Jack Horner sitting next to him you've already met on tape now you see live Jack perhaps needs no introduction but I'll give him one anyway he is he is a model for his all because he never graduated college and yet he is one of the world's foremost dinosaur researchers and Jack has discovered the first dinosaur eggs and babies found in North America he's done a very important research on duckbill dinosaurs on the evolution of all dinosaurs and he's responsible for excavating the second most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found seated next to Jack is Diane Bellis Diane is a geochemist and expert on fossils and amber now does policy work in Washington D.C. and seated at the end is a graduate student Jody Smith of Jack Horner's Jody is a self-professed computer nerd we would call him computer whiz he's a fellow who specializes in morphing as he'll describe and show to you later he has a unique talent for bringing dinosaurs back to life and mixing them with dinosaur scientists I'll leave it there and we'll see how that happens so let me take first some of the questions that have come to us already from the satellite as we're doing it Joetta will move among you with her microphone if you have a question here raise your hand Joetta will come around to you bring the microphone up to you and wait to say your question until she's up to you with the microphone so let me throw a couple of questions that we've gotten here out to this group and see what they have to say Robbie from Fisher's Indiana says how dinosaurs were born so let me ask Jack how dinosaurs were born that's a very good question dinosaurs hatched out of eggs that's how they were born Alit Alisa from Danville, Indiana says who made dinos Jack I think this follows up on the earlier question mother and father dinosaurs he's getting all the tough ones okay we have a question here see if you can get the mic over what was the first dinosaur found what was the first dinosaur found anyone want to raise their hand here well behaved bunch nobody volunteering here okay well let's have a little argument then I'll give you the textbook answer I think which is that the first dinosaur found was tooth of iguanodon identified by Gideon Mantell around 1820 in England actually that's not correct actually that's not correct from two points of view while he was happily married he gave the credit to his wife after the divorce there was another story but I think but I think Jack has a third yeah but I don't know whether we should go into this one or not it was a distal end of a femur found in New Jersey back in the early 1700s yes and it got an unusual anatomical name very unusual name yes if you're interested in the answer to that you'll have to research that yourselves of course the point to be made here is that people were finding dinosaurs for centuries long before they knew what they were in fact their references to them in 13th century Chinese literature and you can even find it back in Roman days that people were finding these extinct giants and not knowing what to make of them maybe that's the reason why we call dinosaurs dragons another question from here how would you go about finding cancer and diseases and dinosaurs I think we know who to ask well the first thing you have to know is what the normal dinosaur bone looks like and once somebody has identified a bone that is abnormal then it's a matter of trying to decide what the type what could cause that type of change and once you've decided what could cause that type of change then you have to determine what it would look like or how you can prove it it's not just saying well I think therefore it is it's a matter of testing it that is forming a hypothesis looking at a way to test the hypothesis and we'll get into that with some examples a little bit later today okay another question from over here okay scientists do that all the time they don't admit it always how can you tell what kind of dinosaur it is I know you can tell by the teeth but how do you tell what it is okay how do you identify a dinosaur when you've dug it up Phil right it's almost like identifying human beings very often when you look at humans or if you look at a dog of a certain breed or something like that they all look the same initially but as you get familiar with them and you understand them better and better then you start to recognize that there are differences and it's the same with law with dinosaur bone when you get a lot of experience you can go out in the badlands and you can see that the leg bone of a duckbill dinosaur looks very different than the leg bone of a tyrannosaurus and by honing in your expertise and your experience over the years you learn to identify more and more bones in the body because they're all different for every animal that's some more over here good good group where'd the first egg come from where did the first egg come from first dinosaur egg that's a very good question now do you mean discovered or what animal and yeah I don't know okay we're getting an answer from Terry who's an expert on dinosaur eggs and preparing them if you all can turn a camera back to Terry for a moment let's come all the way from England to answer this question this is a dinosaur that roamed Europe and it laid its eggs near Marseille okay we're talking about hypsilosaurus eggs hypsilosaurus that's right sauropod eggs a big four-legged dinosaur laid a fairly good cannonball sized egg Terry is answering a slightly different question than you asked but he's doing a good job of it which is which is what the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered and they were discovered early in the 20th century I believe in southern France I think Jack's been to look at them and the first nest of dinosaur eggs was found in Mongolia by the real Indiana Jones Roy Chapman Andrews in 1924 I think and we're just beginning to really figure out who laid those eggs yes have you ever had any problems trying to find what the dinosaur was let's ask Peter about that to find where a dinosaur was it takes a lot of library research and trying to find as Jack mentioned when he was out at the the Children's Museum that you have to know what age of rocks to look in and a lot of times we can find a fragment of a dinosaur a little piece of a dinosaur down in the wash with a cliff face in front of us and we have a very difficult time sometimes tracing that piece back to where that came out of the hillside and trying to find that dinosaur there are a few fossils that I go back to and pick up little pieces on the ground every year but I can never find exactly where it's coming out so sometimes it's very difficult to find where that fossil is coming out of the ground yes here from prior Montana do you want me to go ahead and ask it or do you sure go ahead okay this is from Travis in prior Montana how did they find the DNA and RNA to make Jurassic okay let's try this one on Bruce you want to try well Jurassic Park the expert was sitting next to me but the theory was that it was taken from a mosquito that had allegedly or from an insect that had allegedly bitten a dinosaur well whether what's found in the mosquito represents the last meal and if the last or another biting insect if that last meal happened to be a dinosaur there might be some degenerated or disrupted DNA left and the hypothesis was that you could make up a dinosaur from that type of material well were it so I'm not sure we'd really want to I have enough trouble working in the basement of the Museum of Natural History looking at the Tyrannosaurus over my shoulder much less one diploma it's a complicated question actually we'll get a little more evidence during this broadcast and we talked to Diane about things found in amber and we talked to Jack and others about DNA found in in bones right now we're going to have to cut short this question session but I remind people there'll be two more so you get a chance to ask your question then and please keep sending in your questions if you're at a remote site right now we're going to switch us all over back to to check up on how the students at the school are doing and putting their dinosaur together Hi Don we're back at the John Marshall Middle School and actually we're making a lot of progress the students have decided we're working with the T-Rex skeleton here and they've drawn quite a lot of it we have many groups of students and they're working in groups got one group working with Dr. Dodson working on the skull and they've come quite quite a long way another group working on the vertebrae Dr. Russell's working down by the leg I guess and we've got our artist Joe Lipman working with a group of them on the vertebrae Joe you want to tell us how you're doing Yeah we're doing real good we've got the whole T-Rex and like to say everybody's working on a different section of the T-Rex we're coloring in the hip area and coloring the femur and some of the other bones different colors to differentiate them we've got the whole tail laid out these guys are working on tail vertebrae and the chevrons in the in the tail so it's scaled pretty close we started off with the skull with a four-foot skull and scaled the rest of the animal to the skull so these guys know what they're doing as far as scaling goes we know that the femur is the same length as the skull and the alium is the same length so we've got those basic things done and now we're trying to get all the bones laid out here and filled in and colored in how you guys doing pretty good got it almost fully colored in you know how many vertebrae are supposed to be in that tail here 46 yeah that's right okay doing real well let's go check on what they're doing over by the skull thanks joe we'll come over here and we're gonna talk to Dr. Peter Dodson and geez they've done a great job with the skull good art work and what have you got here well what do you think Lenore are you fighting yet we're doing real well here we um we happen to uh these these guys are really prepared they've studied they've read Jurassic Park they've studied dinosaurs we came up with this nifty model which is helping our work just a little bit one thing we are concerned about is how many teeth was the right number uh what was the right number 15 15 teeth so we've got 15 teeth drawn in here and uh uh where's uh where's the eye the eye's right there and we've got these other openings where's the nose yeah so uh and what do we decide this thing was for we had to redesign this two opening the it was all backwards so we had to return it around because it's uh try something I can't remember and it had two openings so we had to redo it to make the two openings the right way and that's where the muscles that close the jaws ram from there down to the lower jaw and you can bet those muscles are strong do you think so uh we're real happy with the way this is looking now we're right proud of our work you're right proud of it all right any other so what else you got to do to finish up on the on the head you need to just get the neck all attached on there and the vertebra and the neck going right well I think connecting the skull to the neck is just about the next job to do so one end is going to meet the other all right well that's great let's just wander over here and see what the folks working on the leg are doing well come over we sort of abandon the arm for a little while but I guess we'll get back to that in a minute and Dale we've got the femurs going pretty well at the stomach line now we've talked a little bit about the cubic boot here serving as a tripod for these animals we've discussed the possibility that tyrannosaurs crouched in wind blown tree fallen trees and um sat on their pubic boot and with the eyes on top of their head which the other team is working on there they could look above the brush and see what's coming up for dinner ah so they were basically hunting then stalking things that are walking by yeah we don't think that he was nearly as uh unaware of what was going on as first glance might suggest no I don't think he was either all right so we had a little discussion here too about how the tyrannosaur protected himself when he was fighting a horned dinosaur like a triceratops can you remember how that worked? yeah we were well he he sat and like kind of blended in with the trees and waited for his prey and then just caught him off guard because they couldn't tell just looked like a whole bunch of logs and he just jumped out he like tried to hide but he's it all right well done we're gonna uh keep on working and I guess we'll see you again in a little while and hopefully by then we'll have a finished dinosaur at least be a heck of a lot more close take it away thank you Lenora and good luck to you and the students you're doing a great job and to Peter and Dale as well you can see how tough it is to put a dinosaur back together it's just as hard if not harder to take one out of the ground in fact it's done just the same way with the backbreaking labor it's been done since dinosaurs were first found with picks and shovels and uh all kinds of equipment that's very basic so it's a very low-tech science in many regards but a little the backbreaking labor has been saved of late with some high-tech ingenuity and that involves using some of the same techniques that are used to check us out when we go to the hospital we've got a little videotape presentation that shows you how cat scanning has worked with dinosaur science to unveil some things that aren't always obvious about fossils in the What If exhibit at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis a rare find is on display currently on loan from the Indianapolis Museum of Art is a dinosaur egg dating back to the Cretaceous period the egg is from a protoceratops a dinosaur which weighed around 80 pounds about the size of a German shepherd this egg was one of several found in the Gobi Desert in the 1920s on an expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews oh the history behind this one it's wonderful the American Museum of Natural History in the 1920s did an expedition to the Gobi Desert and Mongolia and what they were actually looking for was the history of mankind they were looking for early human remains and they were also looking for any fossils they might find unfortunately they found the dinosaurs I guess it's an abundant place for dinosaur fossils and no early human the ancestors there but now we know their their origins in Africa but they found the eggs in fact that was probably the most spectacular thing that came out of that expedition they just happened to find a cache of several eggs um Roy Chapman Andrews led the expedition and um came across a nice little nest area they were laid in a circular pattern and um in fact the animal that these come from it's um protoceratops Andrews eye so it's named after Roy Chapman Andrews and um we happen to be lucky that um IMA the Indianapolis Museum of Art has been very cooperative they've loaned the seg to us in fact they originally got it from Roy Chapman Andrews Widow it was a gift to the IMA and the collaboration between the two museums has been great and that's why we're able to show it through a cooperative effort between the Children's Museum and Indiana University hospitals the 70 to 85 million year old egg was carefully packed and taken to IU hospitals radiology department here sophisticated imaging technology was used in an attempt to get a glimpse into the earth's ancient past associate curator for the Children's Museum Dallas Evans explains what they hoped to find with the use of the cat scan well to be honest if I were basing my ideas on reality just a gray mass probably very little because dinosaur eggs with embryonic materials is pretty rare on hand to observe the arrival of the egg at university hospital were a group of six graders from Indianapolis public school number 61 prior to its arrival at the hospital the egg was placed in acid-free tissue paper and bubble packing to prevent staining of the egg's surface by skin oils cloth gloves were used to remove and place the egg on the scanning table in charge of the scan was Dr. Ethan Brownstein professor of radiology and adjunct professor of anthropology at IUPUI we have some experience in working with Egyptian mummies but this is probably the oldest thing that we've cat scanned ever and it's certainly the first dinosaur egg that I've cat scanned we're now putting the egg into the scanner and we're going to do a preliminary x-ray of the entire egg just to see where we can localize to do the best scans to see if there's an embryo inside we're going to be comparing these images with previous images of tanned of dinosaur eggs not on cat scans but of plane radiographs in this particular egg we're actually able to see some of the shards of broken shell which have been pushed into the middle of the egg by whatever shattered the egg to begin with as well as seeing the stony matrix inside we saw findings similar to those which represent a real embryo in another egg but since this is a matter of limited experience on my part I can't conclusively say whether we found one or not but certainly we found enough to suggest that there might be an embryo in this egg and we weren't even really expecting that everybody thinks in terms of cat scans and x-rays in hospitals just for medical imaging but I think this is a tremendous example of the use of imaging technology for other scientific or intellectual endeavors whether it be Egyptian mummies or whether it be dinosaur eggs we do have this technology to offer particularly in an academic setting and we look forward to collaborating with people from other departments of the university or from other institutions who have a reason to think that this type of technology will be useful to them well thank you we've got the good fortune to have two scientists who've pioneered the use of this technology on dinosaur eggs and they are the two scientists who first discovered dinosaur eggs and embryos in North America Jack Horner of course and Phil Curry before we go any further Phil presented something very interesting here the other day mentioning to all of us that perhaps this fabled dinosaur nest the first one ever found containing protoceratops eggs doesn't contain protoceratops eggs could you explain that Phil well it's interesting that they found so many different types of eggs and yet they took the simple approach they thought that because protoceratops was the most common type of animal at that particular site that all of these eggs probably belonged to protoceratops so you actually ended up with eggs of different sizes different shapes and different textures on the outside one of the nests of the so-called protoceratops eggs had a theropod or carnivorous dinosaur next to it and they assumed that the theropod was in fact stealing eggs from that nest and was eating them when he got caught in a sandstorm and it's a very imaginative story of course but there was the theropod right next to the nest and so they called the theropod overraptor which means egg thief now a couple of years ago when we were working in china we ran across the same kind of eggs in another nest and we found another overraptor skeleton associated with that nest but this time when we excavated we found that the overraptor was in fact straddling over the nest and was in fact sitting on the nest and then it seemed very obvious to us that if the overraptor was in fact raiding a nest and it got trapped in a sandstorm it's not going to stay in the sand for the sake of a little bit of food it's going to move on on the other hand if it's protecting its own nest it might just stay there long enough to get buried deeply enough in sand that it does get smothered so it makes more sense so we now have a second occurrence of the same kind of thing now can you tell us a little bit about what you've found through cat scanning about dinosaur eggs and embryos we got into cat scanning originally because we found dinosaur eggs in southern Alberta they're quite similar actually to the ones that Jack Horner was finding down in Montana and we knew there were embryos in them yet these were complete eggs and consequently we wanted to see what was going on inside of them we had limited success initially we think that we were doing the wrong thing this is back in 1987 when we first tried it and now that the equipment is actually more sophisticated in our knowledge of using cat scans is better than it was we're going back and redoing a lot of the eggs that we tried at that time and found nothing in because it turns out that they do have embryos inside of them we also got involved in it in terms of our Chinese eggs which there's lots of material from northern China in fact thousands of eggs have been discovered and yet they seem to be all barren some had reported dinosaur embryos inside of those eggs we cat scanned those and found that in fact they did not I became very skeptical in fact that any of the Asian eggs had embryonic material in until last year when suddenly a lot of new material started appearing from central China which definitely has embryos in it and it does show up on cat scans too now Jack is I believe the first person to name a dinosaur ever from an embryo you name a dinosaur from the best specimen you have available available of it Jack named a dinosaur if I'm right from a specimen found inside an egg is that right well kind of we have older individuals of it too but it it was the first it was certainly well it was the first dinosaur embryo found as far as I know certainly identified anywhere in the world and it it was in its fetal position and we we tried cat scanning also and found that that the cat scanner at the time this was 1984 the cat scanner just didn't have the resolution to so that we could see the difference between the between the bone and the rock but as Phil says the cat scanner the resolution is getting much better now and and we are beginning to see in the new cat scans we're doing of eggs we are beginning beginning to get to a point where we can decipher something in the eggs although it's very difficult to tell exactly what bones we're looking at is it ever possible to know what kind of dinosaur you have just from looking inside an egg well depends on what you mean by what kind I mean identifying the species inside of an egg is very difficult because the babies change when a when a dinosaur hatches out of its egg the baby changes the shape of its skull changes and sometimes the length of each bone changes so it's it's really hard it's the baby looks it's like mammals and birds baby mammals and baby birds look very different than their adult counterpart so it's very hard to tell from the embryo what the adult will look like let me ask Bruce a question if I can which is what what you foresee in the future or what technology is available that hasn't been applied yet what we could be learning from cat scans about fossils well as far as technology that hasn't been applied I think that's one of the issues that as soon as the technology becomes available we we tend to try it we've even looked at magnetic resonance imaging and it actually does work for evaluation of ancient bones I think there are several things we can do with three-dimensional imaging we can get views of bones from different perspectives and even from the inside out we can change the equipment registration that is to change the image perspective and see the brain case the insight what the shape of the brain was without actually cutting up the skull with dinosaur eggs with so many being barren I think it's a nice technique to identify those eggs which preparation will yield useful bones to indicate what the embryo actually looked like I think one of the big problems we have is we don't have enough people trained in time for preparation of everything and so it would help us in selecting those specimens which would be better for preparation but we don't have to go quite to CAT scan the CAT scan helps because it gives us a cross-sectional image and a cross-sectional image is very helpful because we don't like to damage our specimens if we can avoid it but sometimes it becomes important and the question that was asked earlier I'd like to answer now with the examples that we have on the side table and if we could bring those up for a moment a number of years ago visiting Dale Russell the specimen that you see on your right was very prominent to my eyes and this is the one of the flanges or toe bones of a seratopsin or horn dinosaur and there was a bump that didn't belong there and so when you see a pathology like that the question is the formal hypothesis is what could have caused it it could have been infection but there was another possibility there's something called a stress fracture and if you look at the specimen on your left that's the this section this specimen we actually did cut and you can see that there's a line running through just at the area where the pointer is through the into that area of a bump and the bump is a callous an area of healing from a from a stress fracture now this is on the on the hind leg of us of a horn dinosaur I guess you kind of through a temper tantrum for whatever reason start stamping his foot if you do it over and over again it's sometimes you get a stress fracture well in looking at this you start seeing not only do you see the fracture but you start seeing independently the shape and size of the bone and we realize that the bones in rest in that were that are coming out of the ground 65 million years old still have intact tissue structures and if we could have this the photograph what we'll show you was something that I find really phenomenal and that is the histology the actual appearance of the bone hasn't changed it's still there even the tissue is there biochemically immunologically which you'll be hearing more about but more importantly when we look at a a thin section of the bone we start seeing something very very interesting and in the pictures that you'll be seeing in a moment the picture on on your right is a dinosaur this is a courtesy of Claudia Beretto and this is some work that she's done looking at the ends of bone where joints occur the articulating surfaces of bones and here she found very interestingly that the shape at the top and this is electron microscopy and the shape at the top looks identical to that on the left side of the film and at higher magnification the same is shown in the bottom frames well the question is what is a dinosaur and what is it related to to my eyes the film the illustrations on left and right look pretty quite similar and quite different from what they look like in mammals and a bit different than what you see in reptiles so dinosaurs come down to what is a dinosaur I should say the image on your left is from a chicken and so if you're going to say is this information for the birds uh is that the are dinosaurs extinct well those who are joining us for the Dino Fest tonight may be dining on one of their relatives back to you Don thank you Bruce we learn an awful lot about dinosaurs even without the aid of CAT scans and microscopes and it often takes just some very talented detective work and there's a great story that comes to my mind but it's came first to the mind of Jack Horner and that has to do with myasora and his discoveries about one particular dinosaur and its social behavior all from analyzing a nest and the dinosaurs that lived in and around that nest I wonder if I can ask Jack to what do you want to know I think a few of us don't know all that you found out just by looking at that nest well there was actually a lot of a lot of nests what we were able to find was was a lot of a lot of nests on a single horizon what appeared to be a single time horizon and these individual nests contained either eggs up to 20 eggs or so some of the nests contained baby dinosaurs which with some of them we could see would fit back in the egg just barely so they were they were probably very close to ones that had just hatched out of their eggs and we found other nests that contained babies that were larger than what would have hatched out of the eggs and initially when the discovery was made it was it was suggested from the evidence that that the baby dinosaurs may have actually been altricial and stayed in their nests and actually been cared for and later on we were able to get information that that substantiated that um but the baby dinosaurs that we found the hatchlings were about 18 inches long and the larger individuals in the nests were about three and a half feet long so it looked like the baby dinosaurs had stayed in their that hatched out of their eggs about 18 inches long and grew to three and a half feet while they still remained in the nest and of course if they're in the nest the suggestion would be that that they did not get out of their nest and go somewhere get food and come back that they actually were brought food and uh what I believe the evidence that actually substantiated this was evidence from their knee joints we actually took thin sections again looked at those what we call epiphyseal surfaces the actual kind of bone at the end end of their joints at like at their knee and found that there was tremendous amounts of calcified cartilage and calcified when bone grows it starts out as cartilage and then calcifies and then ossifies and becomes the bone that we know now calcified cartilage is not very strong and an animal if their bone is all calcified cartilage can't really walk and we see the same kind of we see that kind of bone in altricial birds if you ever look in a nest you see like robins or something sitting in their nest you don't you never see the baby robins hopping up and down and jumping around and going for walks and stuff they just sit there and they do that because they can't go anywhere and it appears that the baby myosaurs had the same situation they really couldn't get up and go anywhere so it seemed to be pretty good proof that the baby dinosaurs were fed by their parents now after they were three and about three and a half feet long their bone ossified and they were able to leave the nest and then of course we have further evidence to suggest that at least the duckbill dinosaurs and probably the horn dinosaurs as well all lived in some kind of social group after the nesting period that they actually traveled in gigantic groups we have there's a sitting here in front of me these odd-looking things right here are dinosaur eggs from China and I understand that some of them have actually produced embryonic remains and the embryonic remains appear to be appear to be theropods or carnivorous dinosaurs possibly even some kind of tyrannosaur be interest very interested in seeing all the CAT scans that come from this stuff I'm very in fact I'm it is the oddest shape egg I've ever seen and real interested in knowing how the dinosaur gets itself wrapped up in here well this by the way these are the biggest among the biggest dinosaur eggs ever found this is as big as a dinosaur egg gets and when you think about how big dinosaurs got as big as his auditorium in some cases they had to grow awfully fast and awfully big from a fairly small egg even though that is a pretty jumbo AAA job there there are actually some eggs from South America that that are quite a bit larger than this very thick shell held really would look to be about a gallon and a half of volume which is a pretty good size egg yeah so omelets for everyone here I'm going to switch the subject a little more to something else found in Jurassic Park and that is amber in Jurassic Park of course this becomes the source of rebuilding dinosaurs but amber itself can tell us a lot about and the insects within the amber tell us a lot about dinosaur environments about the world as it once was even if it doesn't bring back a dinosaur for us this is a subject of considerable research on the part of Dr. Diane Bellis and I'm going to ask her to take it away and tell us a little about her work thanks amber is just fossil resin and you've all seen pitch flowing out of a pine tree as it comes out of the tree it is exposed to the air into the sunlight it starts to harden it polymerizes the small molecules that make up the more liquid resin start to connect to each other and make long chains and then cross as it drips down the tree trunk it can pick up whatever organisms might be climbing up the tree and things can fly in it with the wind dust pollen tree parts I think over on the side there we have a couple of insects that have been stuck in the embers that came out that's a cricket by the way these specimens were loaned to us by Sue Hendrickson thankfully they're very they're just exquisite the the tissue in this resin has become the subject of a great deal of research that there's another insect over there the insects in some cases you see that are stuck in the ember you can see they've probably been half stuck in and half out and predators have come and chomped on and while they were there there are also cases with small lizards frogs once the whatever's going to get stuck in the resin is stuck sometimes the tree will produce more resin and trap air or water the the resin then probably we're not sure why some of it gets preserved and why some doesn't some of it that has to do with the chemistry there is the thought that maybe it has to fall into water in order to be preserved and to be buried by clay usually most resin ember that we know is between 50 and 15 and 40 million years old but quite conveniently ember is found during the last about see the goes back to 120 years so the last from if the dinosaurs were there 65 we can cover and get information about what was going on in the environment for the latest part at least of the dinosaurs existence when the the problem with some of the resin like that we see here and we saw the insects in is that we can't tell the age very well when it falls onto the ground it floats in water and so it usually washes downstream and then gets buried in sediments and certainly we can tell how old the sediments are but those sediments tend to be moved and unfortunately the sediments the ember that has the big bubbles and the best insect specimens we really don't know how how old the ember is I have found and it's quite unusual red not that it's red red's quite not unusual color actually though most of it's this color there's red, blue, green, brown, black I've found some red cretaceous ember that's in place it's some of it's actually in a petrified conifer tree and there's samples around the tree and there also happened to be three different kinds of duck-billed dinosaurs buried in the same quarry so that's interesting because we know exactly we know that what's in the resin was there when the dinosaurs were buried once you find ember or resin that has bubbles in it and I think there's oh this is a leaf ember track you know you get all sorts of things collected in it one of the more interesting I think is the bubbles once you have a good piece of ember that has bubbles in it you crush that I don't know if you can see them very clearly these happen to be pretty small ones some of them you see very clearly they're maybe a centimeter across and they actually some of them have water in them you crush that into a high vacuum and use chemical techniques to analyze the air which gives you probably at least a fingerprint an indication it may not be exactly the air that was there when the dinosaurs were there but we happen to like to believe that what is in there can be interpreted now the question of Jurassic Park Bruce stole some of my thunder but I think there is no doubt that the best preserved DNA the most most likely place to find DNA preserved for any length of time is in ember the mere preservation of this stuff suggests that it hasn't been exposed to very high temperatures or pressures so we know and that's what it requires for DNA to hang around for a long time in this specimen you can actually see a net which we would like or a tick I keep calling it a net it's a tick we like to think he's pretty fat because he's been sucking on something again the problem is he's probably at the oldest only 40 million years old we do know that ember occurs in sediments like I said that go back to 120 million what goes back to 300 there are probably trees around that produced enough resin to trap air after about 120 million that those specimens haven't been found yet there's a lot more interest in ember research now that we know DNA can be found and I think that in the future we will find that cretaceous ember that has cretaceous DNA probably not dinosaur DNA because you'd have to find the bug that bit the dinosaur that happened to get stuck in the resin and the DNA happened to be preserved and the most the trickiest or the least probable is that you would find it so while I think that we're likely to find good DNA it's not likely to be dinosaur DNA right well that the good news is the bad news is that we haven't found it's not likely to be a dinosaur from ember the good news is that researchers in jack's own lab have found what appears to be DNA directly from a tyrannosaurus rex so we do have a little bit of that genetic information we're still a long way from bringing a dinosaur back to life well if if the question most on people's minds since seeing Jurassic Park is whether we can bring dinosaurs back to life the question that used to be the most on the minds of boys and girls at least by the questions I get is how do you tell the boy dinosaurs from the girl dinosaurs and this is my job to provide segues there was one wonderfully provided here and that Sue Hendrickson who provided the ember for this display that you just saw these beautiful specimens is also the namesake the woman for whom Sue the best tyrannosaurus rex ever found is named she's the one who discovered that great t-rex and Peter Larson dug it up and through that t-rex and some other fossils that he examined he's able to figure out a way he thinks and it's quite convincing that we can figure out just which are the boys and which are the girls when it comes to dinosaurs so let Peter explain that well ever since we found the dinosaur Sue people started asking well did you call it Sue because it's a girl as Don mentioned we called the dinosaur Sue because of its discoverer but that did bring up an interesting question is there a way to determine which dinosaurs are male dinosaurs and which dinosaurs are females looking through the literature there's been some work done on that but particularly by a fellow by the name of Ken Carpenter from the Denver Museum who spent a lot of time and thought that he had come up with some potential ways of telling that so we started talking to modern modern zoologists because as we all know we don't find dinosaur skin and dinosaur flesh which have the reproductive organs preserved and in particular I talked to a German colleague Eberhard Frey in West Germany and he had a way that he thought he could determine male crocodiles from female crocodiles and with the help of my colleague next to me Phil Curry who was looking at articulated skeletons we think that we've come up with a way that will actually tell us by looking at a skeleton whether we're looking at a boy dinosaur and a girl dinosaur and I've got a couple models here that may help illustrate this this is two pelvis and some of the tail vertebrae from Tyrannosaurus rex the one on my right is a model after Sue and the one on my left is a model after the the Tyrannosaurus rex that was collected by Jack's group at the Museum of the Rockies and if you look very closely at this region of the tail in both models you'll notice that the specimen on my left which I believe is a boy dinosaur and the specimen on my right which I believe is a girl dinosaur are different it seems as if the boy dinosaur actually has an extra bone under its tail it turns out that in crocodiles that this is tied in with the reproductive system of male dinosaurs and so that the male dinosaur actually has an extra bone and we think that we have been able to demonstrate that this is going to work with dinosaurs and our hope is to see a lot more specimens to see if we can tell them now not just from a whole skeleton but even from individual bones what's the boy and what's the girl interestingly enough it turns out that the female Tyrannosaurus rex is much larger and much more robust than the male sort of like birds of prey like eagles where the female eagle is much larger than the male thank you Peter we're going to make a total switch here to something equally interesting and quite quite different and that is Jody Smith and his work Jody does something called morphing if you watch commercials you've seen people transformed into other people cats turned into cars and you can also turn things into dinosaurs and vice versa as Jody will demonstrate Jody thank you Don probably the most useful purpose that we have for morphing right now as we've talked about earlier today we don't have very many dinosaurs specimens available now with this morphing program we can take a baby dinosaur and an adult dinosaur and morph them together and it'll give us as many steps in between as we would like to see which can help us to visualize what the dinosaurs would look like at various ages some of the other uses that we have for morphing the dinosaurs could be in morphing a dinosaur with its ancestor and visualizing the evolutionary process that may have taken place and through the animation we could see a time lapse in a few seconds of a few million or a hundred million years perhaps we got a little tape we're gonna roll here this is a morph between an animated morph between a nestling and an adult this one's a hipacosaurus so you can see that the the nestling is quite a bit smaller than than the adult and there's some drastic shape changes that take place during the morph this is a morph of a nestling myosaur into an adult now you can see that there is quite a difference in size here also and you may be able to see on here that a lot of the individual bones the seams in the bones morph quite well with this technique also this one is uh sorry Jack I should have warned you about that this is uh I decided to see what would happen if we morphed a mammal with a dinosaur well thank you Jody well so we know if we want to bring dinosaurs back we just take dinosaur paleontologists turn them into dinosaurs well well I'm fortunate to see that we have a number of questions that come in from our remote site I'm sure there's some more that are in the audience here but let's take some of the ones that people have sent us in through the network and see if we can get some answers for them Kyle from Indiana I think it's Kynesville s how many types of dinosaurs there are about 300 genera right now and that sounds like a lot after all dinosaur names are long 300 long dinosaur names a lot to remember but the bottom line is that when you start looking at what's alive today and we've got 8,000 species of birds alive we've got 4,000 species of mammals and we've got 6,000 species of reptiles and amphibians and you start to realize that 300 species of dinosaurs stretched out over 150 or more million years is not very many at all and it's difficult to estimate how many dinosaurs we don't know but we do know that there are literally thousands of dinosaurs out there still to be discovered so with 300 dinosaurs known presently we're still at just the tip of the iceberg yeah in fact kids are finding dinosaurs all the time and some have been named after kids there was just one named in Australia this year after a little boy and so dinosaurs are being discovered at a rate Dr. Dotson calculates is one every seven weeks so I hope you'll get out there and find some if not in Indiana someplace else now from Mark in Allisonville we get a question why didn't they rot in the ground Peter most of them in fact did rot in the ground or on top of the ground and that's why we why dinosaurs are rare it's a very very unusual set of circumstances that allows a fossil or an animal to be preserved as a fossil mostly they have to be buried very rapidly so that as the flesh decomposes the bones don't get decomposed also so it's really rapid burial is the thing that helps preserve the animals now Ashley from Allisonville asks this is for Jack how long does it take an egg to hatch that's a very good question I don't know the answer you weren't there the incubation period of dinosaurs is not known and as far as I know we don't really have a very good way to figure that out either now you do have a pretty good handle yourself on how fast some dinosaurs grew once they got out right well we think we think we can we certainly have ways we think we can figure out how fast they grew right the 18 the myosaur 18 inches hatching out at 18 inches we believe grew to three and a half feet in about three and a half to four weeks so they grew at rates equivalent to birds but the incubation period actually was probably pretty short the eggs are relatively small for certainly for the size of the animal and obviously the shortest period of time in the nest is the best you want to get out of there for some reason if you're a dinosaur you want to get out of that nest well you want to get up you want to grow as fast as you can and as long as as long as the parent dinosaur has to take care of the eggs obviously the eggs are in danger from predators we have any questions from the folks over here good oh it's just been waiting a long time too yes she has if the dinosaurs were born funny like if they had a crooked back or something would you be able to tell if it was a dinosaur or not in fact one of the baby dinosaur one of the baby maya sores in a nest that we have actually had a deformed foot and if you've ever seen the story maya which is a children's book there's actually a reference to crooked leg in there and that is based on a real specimen Maya is written by Dr. Jack Horner and James Gorman published by Running Press I don't get I don't get a royalty I'm sorry further questions yes at what state did you find the most dinosaur bones at at what state did you find the most dinosaur bones at okay at what state what state are the most dinosaur bones found at anyone want to try that one is it a state no we're a province so we've got a Canadian and American here remember that certainly a lot of riches anywhere in the western states and provinces of Canada and the United States so it depends very much on how much badlands exposure you have and how much effort you put into finding the dinosaurs certainly in Canada and one of the richest sites in anywhere in the world for that matter is dinosaur provincial park and there are places in dinosaur park where you can't walk without stepping on bone United States the the state which has produced the most dinosaurs is Montana but that's mostly because Jack Horner's out there looking there's there's a South Dakota now is producing a lot of dinosaurs and North Dakota and Colorado Utah Wyoming traditionally Wyoming has produced many many dinosaurs it's if you have sediments of the right age that were produced on land we can find dinosaurs there and we just have to get out and look and there's a lot more dinosaurs in there are dinosaur hunters we just have to get more good dinosaur hunters I think that the statistic I saw in the book called the dinosauria that scientists use is about 35 states out of 50 or even more now have produced dinosaur remains so there's a good chance wherever you live there's a dinosaur somewhere around there yes except in the how fast can a dinosaur run one more time how fast can a dinosaur run anybody hear that how fast can a dinosaur run okay how fast can a dinosaur run the theropod dinosaurs are the fastest ones we guess that from two lines of evidence number one if you look at the hind legs of the dinosaur you can calculate how long the individual segments of the legs are that is how long the lower leg is compared to the upper leg and and how long the foot bones are and then you make comparisons to modern animals like an ostrich and if you have something like an ostrich mimic dinosaur it's built much like a modern ostrich and we think it can probably run almost as fast the other line of evidence is looking at dinosaur trackways and dinosaur trackways where you have left foot left left foot right foot left foot right foot and so on you can measure the distance between the footprints and using a formula that was developed by a fellow in england and some modifications by other people you can actually calculate approximately how fast those dinosaurs were moving now the fastest dinosaur so far is from texas and it's going at about 40 kilometers per hour but you have to remember that that's across soft mud and you never run your fastest across soft mud so we think that even that dinosaur had capabilities of going much faster so we think that the fastest dinosaur ran somewhere between 40 kilometers per hour maybe 70 kilometers per hour okay remember that phyllis speaking canadian and in in america that's 25 miles an hour faster and actually the fellow who figured that all that out is an indiana researcher james farlow and he's one of the world experts on footprints and dinosaur speed so when you see in jurassic park and they say that dinosaurs moved as fast as cheetahs well the evidence doesn't quite show that we've got a lot more questions and a little bit more time for them later on in the broadcast right now we're going to check in with linoar and see how the people who are working hard while we're playing are doing linoar hi don well we're back at the middle school and as you can see we have an excellent looking dinosaur these guys are really good artists what we've done now is we finished up our t-rex for the most part they're putting some of the final touches on it and i think the fun part is they've actually added on flesh they fleshed it out as the artists call it and they've turned our skeleton into a real dinosaur and the science of paleontology has come a long way with the addition of artists helping them actually fleshed it out and thank god we had an artist here today to help us proportionate all this is a joe tipman he's going to talk about what he's done with some of his models thank you uh these are some of my models here the skeleton is based on the tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed sue from south dakota and i started with the uh with the skull and when the skull was finished i scaled the rest of the model to the skull uh the kids and i talked about scale when we started laying out this t-rex so they know something about how that works and we scaled this drawing basically the same way we started off with a four-foot skull and uh tried to scale quickly the rest of it to that and i think we did a pretty good job or these guys did a pretty good job uh one of the things that artists do in in working with paleontologists is uh we add flesh to the bones or to the skeleton the skeletal models and try and show people scientists what the dinosaur really looked like and in doing that we have a study to do we have to study where the muscles were attached to the bones we have to figure out how to calculate how big they may have been how bulky they may have been uh and uh there's a lot of complex information that goes into fleshing on a model like this however we seem to have a whole bunch of really good artists here that they did a real good job on this drawing all right so you guys do you have to study anatomy at all or work with muscle it's a good idea to study anatomy and muscle groups i'm still studying that stuff i uh i can't get enough study time in uh there's so much to learn and there's a i wish i could go back to school where these guys are at and i could take the time to study that stuff uh i have too much to learn right now but great job with the health of the scientists that i work with accurate models of these all right great thanks a lot we're going to do now is talk to um dr. peter dodson and he's been talking with some of the students and we're going to sort of summarize what they might have learned today Peter well yeah we had a good time here i'm really impressed it looks like we got a dinosaur here and two hours ago we didn't have a dinosaur uh i have a stephanie and erin and albert and uh are you impressed yeah i didn't think that we could do this could have a job it looks pretty good yeah what do you think erin hey stephanie it's kind of hard because everybody kept stepping on the paper but once you got done with it it was easy yeah yeah i agree with what erin said you know i never thought that we could do as good of a job as we did but now how many bones do you think there are in a pheromosaurus a lot yeah there's a lot who can guess like a thousand or something i don't think there are a thousand there are a thousand probably i don't know but there's about 46 in the vertebra yeah a couple i'd say a couple hundred a couple hundred bones and you know what we we've got most of those bones in our own body most of those own bones the femur and the tibia and the humerus and and all these the the vertebrae the ribs and all that are there any bones in pheromosaurus that we don't have in our bodies um the chevrons what's a chevron can you show me one let's see if we can find a chevron there we go yeah those are the bones underneath the tail of course we don't have a tail so i guess we don't have chevrons uh stefanie what part of the dinosaur did you work on come on over here and tell me about the tail what's what's interesting about this tail what surprises you it has 46 vertebrae so i didn't think i could tell how that much vertebrae it's pretty long isn't it you know some dinosaurs had 80 vertebrae in the tail oh that's that's a tail so tyrannosaurus a bit of a wimp here yeah and uh what did you work on oh what's good about behind legs they're they're not very long so it's kind of interesting how it holds up as big a body as the tyrannosaurus Rex has so it holds a lot of weight because the hands don't doesn't really do much for keep holding the dinosaur up that's right it was all all in two legs wasn't it uh what what did a tyrannosaurus weigh oh about two elephants two elephants yeah two two medium-sized elephants six tons 12 000 pounds and of course part of the town tyrannosaurus is only in one leg wasn't it so that's amazing albert what did you work on well um i worked on the skull part over here the skull has um has a lot of um holes in it uh that way you know the dinosaur wouldn't be as heavy in the front because the hind legs had to hold up a lot so um it had uh 15 teeth on the top and about the same amount on the on the bottom as the top and that's on each side so it would have been 60 teeth all together yeah and those teeth are big aren't they look at the size of that wouldn't one of those sticking in you would you well we did a great job with this i'm really impressed with uh how we went from from nothing to something i couldn't have done this but with this with this nice group of artists here we we really did a good job okay great peter well thanks everybody here these guys are really great artists i'm impressed i didn't think we could do this and like any good work of artists here went and signed their picture okay well thanks a lot don i guess we're finished here and unless you guys have some questions for us we're going to send it back to you thank you Lenore you did a great job all the all the students there and clearly you taught peter and dale some things about dinosaurs well putting dinosaurs back together as you found out is is hard work and we obviously rely on artists in many ways to do that don woeberg is with one of the uh scientists who works with the artists at dynamation in their attempt to bring dinosaurs back to life don hi don i'm here with george uh callousan truly one of the premier artists and recreating the past where the goals of paleontology is to restructure what has happened in the past sometimes from almost nothing one of the goals of course is to take parts and recreate a whole animal george is going to explain to us a newer a technique that is extremely interesting and probably accurate as well george thanks don we're really fortunate to live in a time when so much is known about dinosaurs we've heard today about so many different things that tell us about the life and the times of dinosaurs and one of the things that we've learned is that they really were alive and they're the kinds of animals that had some very very unusual peculiarities some that are very difficult to predict and one of the things that the company that i work for which is dynamation international we're responsible for doing things like robot robotizing dinosaurs and behind me is one of those kinds of models it's an animated sculpture essentially showing one of the facts of life and that is that animals have to have to eat to live all animals are adapted capturing energy by eating and this happens to be dynonicus a creature that was discovered by John Ostrom in whom you've seen and this creature is one that's been produced by a whole team of individuals working with the information that dr. Ostrom and some of his colleagues have produced and still other individuals as well and from this effort the planners the sculptors the machinists the engineers the fabricators the plastic specialists and the educators have all teamed to produce one of these kinds of creatures these creatures are used to get people excited about coming into museums and zoos and nature parks all around the lake to tell you more about this by introducing you to a videotape which will just run right now i'm dr. george callison i work as senior science advisor at dynamation international the people who built the wonderful robotic dinosaurs in this exhibit a lot of people ask me about the process of building a robotic dinosaur to be honest it's kind of hard to explain that's why dynamation is put together this short video that brings you into the dynamation factory to see how we bring these prehistoric beasts to life you'll see and hear dynamations own artists and engineers taking you step by step through this exciting process join me now as we go behind the scenes to see dynamations dinosaurs alive and in color the process of creating life-size animated dinosaurs involves the talents of dozens of people at dynamation international varied fossils tell us only half the story of what these awesome creatures looked like and how they acted the rest is left to our imagination dynamation's team of scientists artists and engineers has bridged this gap between fact and fantasy by building robotic restorations of some of the world's most ancient and most interesting inhabitants dynamations dinosaurs alive and in color dynamations always started with the the original documents that is the bones and the scientist takes those bones and makes them a document in three dimensions that can be read by anybody you can read a bit of the story of prehistoric life from this i have to keep in mind that this sculpture has to function as a robot it must be scientifically accurate i have to bring it in on time and i still try to dig deep and come up with something that's unique every time each step of this creative process is carefully monitored for scientific accuracy after all dynamations mission is to educate as well as entertain the end goal is to make the creatures seen as realistic and life-like as possible i think it's important to realize that our final product is a result of a lot of teamwork a lot of creative people bringing a lot of different skills yet each one of these people is concerned about building a high quality product hopefully our exhibits appeal to children of all ages the exhibits themselves should be visually exciting but should also teach the visitor something about the world around them and make them more sensitive to that world thank you all for that presentation i should point out uh in the sense of fair play the dynamations goal and that of other robotic dinosaur makers is to educate entertain and to make money which they do very well uh... the the purpose of this uh... wonderful get together dino fest is to educate and entertain and the purpose of dinosaur science and the research that these people that you see before you do all their lives is to educate and entertain and not to make money and that is really what we're here to celebrate uh... i'm not a particular fan of robotic dinosaurs as well as uh... they try to put them together animation and their competitors are making rather half-sized clunky versions of spectacular wonderful once living animals but they're doing their best because we so much want to see dinosaurs alive all of us really want to know what they were like and that's one reason a big reason that movie Jurassic Park was so popular wasn't a chance to see Laura Dern making goo goo eyes at uh... jeff goblum it was a chance to see real dinosaurs and just how we can imagine them alive again and i've been asked to briefly summarize what we've talked about here today uh... we've talked about a lot of things we talked about the impossibility of bringing dinosaurs back to life we talked about the possibility of discovering an awful lot from the few fragmentary clues that we have and we do that because we have this tremendous curiosity about dinosaurs because we have devoted people with a lot of ingenuity who are able to do that so we can't answer that question can we bring dinosaurs back to life yet we don't know the answer we can answer another question which um... i didn't quite pose but i hope you've been wondering about all this time is how come jack horner didn't graduate college and the answer putting him on the spot the answer is clearly not that he wasn't smart he's a very smart fellow it's not that he was hard wasn't hardworking because he's a very hardworking guy the answer was that he had a reading disability called dyslexia that wasn't diagnosed in those days these days most of you go to school and people check out and see how you're doing and you're reading and you're writing everything else and if you have a problem they try and fix it well that wasn't always the case and jack worked very hard against those odds to become a great scientist and i think one of the lessons to take away from here is that there's a lot more to be found out about dinosaurs or whatever else interests you and that you have the capacity to make that happen you can make it happen in school you can make it happen on your own and you can make it happen right now in your lives and i hope you'll come away from this get together with not only a new interest in dinosaurs but a new interest in what you guys can find out for yourselves we have a lot of questions to answer here we're not going to be able to answer them all we're going to try and take some more from here and from the remote places but you're going to have to go out and find the answers yourselves in the end so that's what we hope you'll do when you leave here let's start with one question before i get to some more from the audience that's come from a long way and now having picked on jack let me reward him because this is a question from prior montana travis wants to know what is the first dinosaur and i guess he means the earliest dinosaur that we know about that are you a raptor? you're a raptor? will we all agree on this one? you're a raptor that's a hard question because it depends on how you define a dinosaur well how do you define a dinosaur well i can't do that people keep changing their definitions if you want to find an older dinosaur all you have to do is redefine it well now we know how old was it wicked old how old what how old is he a raptor what is it two two thirty five two thirty five two forty somewhere two thirty five two hundred and thirty five million two hundred and thirty five million years ago okay that's that's an old dinosaur that's not better in kilometers that's it was moving very slowly eoraptor means dawn hunter was named by paul serino university of chicago it's about the size of a dog and it was a nasty meat eater i think one more for jack sorry this is from mike jack are you coming back to prior what did you find when you were there we actually we it was sort of interesting john ostrom collected in 1964 collected the five skeletons of dynonicas and this last summer we went back in to see if there was anything left at that quarry and we took out parts of a skeleton and we're going to go back again to see if we can find what's left so yes we are going back to prior can we come with you how many of you okay let's take some questions from the kids here how did you come up with the name dinosaurs someone want to tackle that how did the name dinosaurs first get named well back in about 1841 a fellow by the name of richard owens decided that these animals were not exactly the same as other reptiles and this and decided that dino sore for terrible lizard appeared to be a good explanation when what we had at that point were megalosaurus which were these carnivorous large carnivorous dinosaurs and so terrible was it seemed to be a very appropriate name I should emphasize that the name dinosaur came was developed 17 years after mantrel found the first or his wife found the first dinosaur in england it's so what this the animals were found before somebody figured out what to call them right and just because they're called terrible lizards doesn't mean they were lizards and it doesn't mean they were all terrible most of them were plant eaters and probably quite nice and while we're at Jurassic Park it did bring along a little prop this is the real velociraptors claw so among the other things we're finding out wasn't so in the movie that dinosaur was not as big as a person and this was the size of its killer claw have you ever had to look underwater for a dinosaur one more time have you ever had to look underwater for a dinosaur anyone looked underwater for dinosaur fossils and I've actually had to excavate dinosaur footprints that were under a couple of feet of water I think you nearly went under yourself once yeah I definitely went under myself slipped out of the boat of course dinosaurs died on land but their bones get washed into water too how can you tell the difference between a dinosaur bone in a rock how do you tell the difference between a dinosaur bone and a rock peter a dinosaur bone will still show the structure that that animal had when it was alive I guess one of the things that many people don't understand today is that those dinosaur bones are still bone many times the cell spaces are filled with with minerals but that's still bound so if you look at the inside of a modern bone after you finish a steak and you can see the structure of the bones that are left in that from your meal you can see what a dinosaur bone looks like inside too there's another way to tell and that's to taste it and I'm not I'm not entirely kidding this is shown to me by a dinosaur hunter if you ever eat a potato chip when your mouth is real dry and it sticks to your tongue well it's all the little holes in the potato chip that are sticking to your tongue well in dinosaur bone or in anybody's bone there's lots of holes inside if you were solid all the way through and through you'd be kind of heavy be tough to move around dinosaurs the same way there's lots of holes so if you stick your tongue on a dinosaur bone it's more likely to stick than it would to a rock so you can go around tasting the rocks and see if they're dinosaur what is the plate on their head for what is the what is the plate on some dinosaurs head dinosaurs heads for the plate on their heads what well they've got lots of different ornaments on their heads and maybe jack could tell us about that well I mean like triceratops what horn dinosaurs plaits well we got crested dinosaurs like like the dome head of dinosaurs or the armor dinosaurs some of well some things some things on the heads of dinosaurs were probably for defense to keep other dinosaurs from biting their head but animals like triceratops and some of the horn dinosaurs probably had things on their head for display so they could attract their mates they did you know the duck bell dinosaurs also another question what was the longest dinosaur that lived the longest dinosaur no how long did what was the lifespan the longest lifespan of the dinosaur okay anybody know that we don't know the answer to that we don't know how long they lived big animals do live a long time but who knows now you we're gonna have a lot more questions and we're gonna have time to answer we're pretty much running out of time here so let me suggest one alternative if I can forgetting some answers besides looking them up yourself which would be the best way and that is you can write to the dinosaur society which is my plug here it's a charity a nonprofit that a lot of us are involved in it raises money for dinosaur research for which there's very little these days it tries to do things for education particularly for kids it publishes this newspaper called dino times every month it's all the news that's old and answers that kids have about dinosaurs and questions that kids have about dinosaurs are to be found in the dino times and you can find out information about the dinosaur society by writing to the society at 200 carleton avenue east ice lip new york 11740 or by calling 1-800 dino don let me take another moment to put in a plug for the people who are most responsible for making this happen we all owe a great debt to gary rozenberg and don wallberg they've worked very hard in short order to put this event together and it's really been an exceptional event this is perhaps the first time anyone's ever thought to put dinosaur researchers educators artists preparators collectors together with the public educators and and students alike and figure out what we all know about dinosaurs and that's something wonderful that we can all celebrate about this event so thank you all for coming and we hope we can do this again real soon this has been a production of the office of integrated technologies at indiana university prudu university at indianapolis