 young love and things other things that most parents would rather not think about and It's a good thing of course that kids do grow out of these situations. Otherwise, the streets would be clogged by unemployed paleontologists and horse trainers. I've seen a bit of this at paleontology meetings. It is not a pretty sight. Now once in a while in a case of arrested development an individual gets stuck in the dinosaur infatuation stage. Our speaker this afternoon is one of those people. Phil Curry has been able to live out a grade school kid's dream to travel the world hunting, collecting, reconstructing, and interpreting the most spectacular monsters of the geologic past. Of course this dream job didn't just happen. Phil prepared himself for this career by getting a degree at the University of Toronto and a PhD from McGill and as paleontologists and head of dinosaur research at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, Phil has done elegant and prolific research in a wide variety of vertebrate groups. Like most paleontologists, he has become intrigued with whatever fossil animals his prospecting has turned up. So Phil has worked on creatures ranging from Permian, Madagascar, Aquatic reptiles to Gigantosaurus, the biggest and nastiest carnivorous dinosaur of Argentina, to the delicate enigmatic feather sprouting dinosaurs of China. Phil's research provides for us a wonderful example of how paleontology reveals the story of life. Phil Curry visits St. Peter with his wife and colleague Eva Kapelhus and they've both been involved in editing the forthcoming book Feathered Dragons. So we're pleased to have Phil here today to tell us about the latest chapter in his research. Well, I guess I'm kind of tall for a kid who never grew up, but that's the way it is. It's good to be tall when you're in paleontology sometimes, but with some of the countries we go to it would be very nice to be short, too. The whole thing about the changes in dinosaur paleontology I think are very interesting. When I grew up there really weren't that many books on dinosaurs and consequently my influences were quite limited. My first real contact with dinosaurs was actually a plastic dinosaur in a cereal box when I was six years old and turned out it wasn't even a dinosaur it was dimetred on and out of some kind of curious sense of humor I ended up working on Sphinacodon pelicosaurs is my master's thesis and animals very much like dimetredon, but dinosaurs is really where my heart was and I was lucky that I grew up in a place near Toronto, Ontario and Toronto has a wonderful display of dinosaurs and whereas a lot of kids I think grew out of the idea that dinosaurs were need animals, I was always able to reinforce that idea by going to the Royal Ontario Museum and seeing these wonderful specimens and these wonderful specimens all came from Alberta, Canada. So my decision to become a dinosaur paleontologist was at 11 when I read a book by Roy Chapman Andrews about the American Museum Expeditions to Central Asia, but my decision to work in Alberta at 11 and a half was because I knew the dinosaurs all came from that part of the world and so I set my sights on doing that and as luck would have it that's exactly what I ended up doing and I couldn't believe it for the longest time I just felt like I was in a dream and my life has almost been like that. Roy Chapman Andrews once wrote that he was born under a lucky star and I kind of think that too because I've had so many wonderful opportunities, but you know working with graduate students and knowing people from around the world who are in similar situations and you also realize that you make your own luck. If you know what you want to do sometimes it's a lot easier to do those things and when the opportunities are there you have to be ready to move into them and for me all I want to say right now is that a very satisfying thing for me is not just finding dinosaurs or seeing them put on display or seeing your research papers published it's also being able to see students develop and not necessarily working on dinosaurs, but working on other things and develop their own enthusiasm and their own careers and that's very satisfying too. In terms of the connection to your genetic heritage I'm very happy to say too that things have changed and more than half of my students are female students these days we like dinosaurs and probably 50% or more of the letters I get from kids now are also from females, so something's going on and we'll be interested to see how that develops. Now today I decided to talk about feathered dinosaurs because it's a hot topic and you can't really even go into all the different aspects of what this has meant for paleontology. I got interested in birds kind of through the back door. Dinosaurs were always my big interest and when I came through University, it really wasn't a popular idea that birds came from dinosaurs. Most people were thinking that birds came from somewhere else and I'll get into that too. But when I started working in Alberta one of the very first things we did was leave Alberta and we went to British Columbia to collect dinosaur footprints there and we were very successful at that but in the fourth year we had a very lucky find. In these early Cretaceous beds we found bird footprints and it was a big slab of bird footprints, about 180 footprints on the slab. There were unquestionably bird footprints and it got me thinking about these things. Well, why is a bird footprint so different than a dinosaur footprint? Why is it that we can look at these things when we have small dinosaur footprints that are almost the same size as the bird footprints, about four centimeters or two inches long and you can always tell them apart. So that got me looking into the anatomy of the lower leg and foot of birds and then I realized that even though it's not talked about very much, actually birds are very highly developed in their feet as well and because of the fusion and the realignment of the ligaments in the lower part of the leg, birds have very distinctive feet, very different than what we see in most dinosaurs and this was an interesting lesson and got me working a little bit on bird anatomy. Shortly after that we also started working on small carnivorous dinosaurs and we were lucky enough to find several skeletons of these animals in Dinosaur Park and other parts of Alberta and as I looked at them I was quite amazed by how bird-like they were. We were familiar of course with carnivorous dinosaurs but the information on the small ones has always been a little bit patchy. When I was working on Troodon, specifically looking at the brain case of this animal, at one point I can remember putting the specimen down and just going back to look in the drawers that all the evidence I had to show me that was a dinosaur because as far as I could see from the brain case, that animal was not a dinosaur, that was a bird and it was such a striking revelation to me that as I looked into it deeper, I became overwhelmed and very convinced that in fact, birds and dinosaurs must be very closely related to each other and I ended up getting drawn deeper and deeper into this. Now I have to point out that most of the rocks where I live are late Cretaceous in age and one wouldn't think that the late Cretaceous is a very good place to look for bird ancestors, especially considering the earliest bird is known from late Jurassic Beds. But to see the similarities really got me thinking and it convinced me that if we wanted to find what was really going on with these connections, we would have to look in earlier beds at the same kinds of dinosaurs that we were finding in Alberta and that we would have to look at earlier forms and that we would find the earlier forms and that was part of the basis for the development of the Canada China dinosaur expeditions and we worked in late Jurassic, middle Jurassic and early Cretaceous and late Cretaceous beds as well, but one of the better specimens that we found, which I won't include here, was a little Troodontid, very closely related to the Troodont I worked in in Alberta and this was early Cretaceous in age and it was clearly a Troodontid, but it was much earlier in time and showed us that these animals must have come from an even earlier time period. Well, to start with I'll have to show you where I work. I mean this is part of my fantasy world as well. This is the Royal Terrell Museum of Paleontology and we're unique in that we're one of the very few museums in the world, large museums, that is actually situated in the area where we can collect fossils and we can walk straight out the back doors into the valley of the Red Deer River and we can find dinosaur fossils, you know, a hundred feet from the building and we've had some very remarkable finds in Drumheller itself. Since moving there in 1982, we found more than a dozen dinosaur skeletons within city limits and life is very easy. The wonderful thing is that you know, if we ever lost all our budgets, we could still work. We could still walk out the back door and find out what about dinosaurs and the area is actually extremely rich. Drumheller is surrounded by what's called the Horseshoe Canyon Formation. The Horseshoe Canyon Formation is produced about 300 dinosaur skeletons and there are still things we don't know about this particular formation. Very short distance from us, about two hours by vehicle. We have dinosaur Provincial Park. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was the first paleontological site put on the UNESCO list and for a very good reason. It's incredibly rich. There are literally millions of dinosaur bones exposed at any one time in that place and there are places where you cannot walk without stepping on dinosaur bones. The volume is one thing, but the diversity is even better. I mean, we have at least 40 different species of dinosaurs from that one time period. It's a little bit earlier in time than the beds we find around Drumheller, but nevertheless we can see something that's quite different. If we want to go the other way up the river, another hour to the north of Drumheller, we end up in the terminal cretaceous beds and in those beds we find Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops and all of the late cretaceous dinosaurs that have become the most famous in the world. The unique thing about the Red Deer River is we see a succession of dinosaur faunas covering the last 10 million years of dinosaurian history and basically the Red Deer River is a river of time. We can float down the Red Deer River and go through the cretaceous tertiary boundary and look at the last 10 million years of history of dinosaurs. And there's three major dinosaur faunas there, successional ones. We see changes going on between those faunas, but there's also minor ones that have not been explored well yet and will tell us a lot more in the future. Well, flight, of course, is something that vertebrates have adapted easily to often and there are many animals we call flying animals, flying squirrels, flying frogs, flying fish, and even a flying snake, believe it or not. Obviously, becoming airborne is a very efficient way for vertebrates to move around, to escape from predators, to capture prey, to move over great distances and vertebrates have adapted to this type of lifestyle often, and to varying degrees of success, of course. The active flyers, though, are really pterosaurs, bats, and birds. And these are animals that have all developed independently of each other and have therefore developed in very different ways. If you look simplistically at the wings of all of these animals, you'll see that they're doing it in very different ways. Birds, of course, have feathers, pterosaurs have elongated their index finger and stretched the skin from the back part of the body to the tip of the finger to form a flying membrane. Bats have done a similar kind of thing, but instead of using one finger, I've used four fingers. And these are the active flyers that we're most concerned with. Now, I'll take a few minutes more on pterosaurs because a lot of people think, first of all, that pterosaurs are dinosaurs, which they're not. They're a slightly more ancient lineage. They're kind of the second cousins to dinosaurs. And a lot of people also think that perhaps pterosaurs gave rise to birds because their histories do overlap. But in addition to having differences in the wings, totally different structure that way, pterosaurs are different in so many different ways that they're not considered by paleontologists as being viable bird ancestors. And one of those ways that's recently been discovered is that when you look at pterosaurs, especially the very small ones about the size of robins or wrens, these were clearly active flying animals, and it was hypothesized a long time ago that because active flyers probably need to be warm-blooded that pterosaurs may have had fur feathers as well. And quite a few years ago now, probably 20 years ago, there was a little one found in Central Asia called sordies, and sordies had what appeared to be fur on its body. But that was largely discounted until recently when these remarkable finds started coming from northeastern China. And among those remarkable finds were this animal, Jehaloopteris, and this animal clearly has fur covering on its body as well. And we now know that pterosaurs were not covered by feathers. They were in fact covered by fur. Now the origin of birds is something that has been a hot topic ever since the discovery in 1862 of Archaeopteryx. Archaeopteryx for all intents and purposes is the beginning and end of all discussions on the origin of birds. Archaeopteryx is an amazing fossil that in terms of preservation and in terms of anatomy, both. When you look at the skeleton of Archaeopteryx, there's not much doubt at all that we're dealing with an animal that's very closely related to dinosaurs. In fact, if you didn't have the feathers preserved on an Archaeopteryx skeleton, you wouldn't know that this was a bird. And there is no way that the original discoverers of Archaeopteryx would have identified it as a bird without those feathers. There is another very closely related dinosaur to Archaeopteryx in size, at least, on an animal called Comsignathus. And for a long time, if you look at the old textbooks of dinosaurs, you would always see that Comsignathus was listed as the smallest known dinosaur. It's a little bit bigger than Archaeopteryx, but not an awful lot. But anatomically when additional specimens of Archaeopteryx were found, and one of them was discovered with the feathers not being obvious. It turned out there were feathers on the specimen, but initially they weren't seen because they weren't too obvious, and it was identified for a long time as Comsignathus, and it's not a surprise. Now, the fact that the skeleton of Archaeopteryx and Comsignathus are so close to each other, is telling you something right there about the relationship between dinosaurs and birds, I think. And the closer you look at these skeletons, the harder it actually becomes to distinguish them. In fact, Sir Thomas Huxley already in 1868 started thinking about this, and by 1870 had published a paper where he clearly said that in his opinion the closest animals to birds and the most likely ancestor were dinosaurs. And so in 1870, I think that already we had the answer to the origin of birds. We had the specimens with Archaeopteryx and Comsignathus, and we had the idea, and it was there. And that was really the prevalent idea. There were arguments about it, of course. Scientists are always arguing about things. That's part of the process, and that's how you really learn. But for the most part, people did accept that. In the 1915 to 1925 period, though, one person had an amazing effect on our thinking about the origin of birds, and that was Gearhart Heilman. He was a fellow countryman and my wife. Heilman was from Denmark, and he was actually an artist by training. And he did some superb illustrations both for his studies of Archaeopteryx and Danish birds and all kinds of other things. But he was a very good thinker, and he went through the anatomy of Archaeopteryx and Comsignathus and all kinds of other animals in a very analytical way, determined that without a doubt, anatomically, the closest thing we had to Archaeopteryx were dinosaurs. However, he pointed out, there is a problem because no dinosaur was known to have a clavicle. Now, clavicles are very ancient bones. They're found in fish, they're found in amphibians, they're found in mammals, and they're found in birds. And in birds, the clavicle has fused to form one medial element, which is called the furcula, or it's also known, of course, to us better as the wishbone. And it's got a very definite chevron shape to it and a type of anatomy that's quite distinctive for birds. The problem was that no dinosaur was known with any clavicles, and it appeared that dinosaurs had lost their clavicles. We have clavicles, that's our collarbone. Now, if dinosaurs had lost the clavicle, how could they give rise to an animal that still had clavicles? It seemed not impossible, but highly unlikely. And consequently, Heilman proposed that dinosaurs and birds, yes, are very close related, but that dinosaurs could not have given rise to birds, that birds must have come from a more ancient animal that still had the clavicle. And what he picked as the probable ancestor was once called a thecodont. I won't go into all the problems we have with classification of thecodonts, but the thecodont idea is like this little animal, ornithosuchus, and ornithosuchus is typical, it looks very much like a dinosaur, but in its anatomy it is much more primitive than either dinosaurs or birds. Another idea developed over the years, and that is that perhaps birds came from a different type of animal, and one of the most commonly cited one, especially after the 1970s, was the crocodilia. And crocodiles seem like a very unlikely ancestor to birds when you look at modern forms. However, when you look at the anatomy of modern birds and you compare it with the anatomy of other modern animals, there's no question at all that the most closely related living animals to birds are, in fact, crocodiles. And when we look at ancient crocodiles, we see they don't necessarily look like modern crocodiles. They're not as derived for their present type of lifestyle. And there were small crocodiles in the Triassic that are so agile looking and look so much like dinosaurs, in fact, that some people have speculated they were living up in the trees. So crocodiles did seem to be a pretty good candidate for a long period of time, and until only the last few years were a serious contender as possible ancestors of birds. This is another one that's come up recently very loudly. This is an animal called Longi Squama. Longi Squama is actually quite a primitive animal in most respects. It looks very much like a lizard, although it's not a lizard. Longi Squama has very peculiar long scales. And when you look at these scales, they have sidebars and are filled in. And one would think that that's a primitive type of feather until you examine it more closely. And then you realize these are large hollow structures. They're solid. They're not broken up into the velcro-like structure that we see as modern feather. And they are quite different. The other thing that's quite remarkable about this animal is that it does have a fercula that looks amazingly like the fercula of a bird. And let's see if I can point to this. That's in this region right here. But in all other aspects of its anatomy, this animal is clearly very, very different than dinosaurs. It's very different even than crocodilians and clearly very, very different than birds. And to make this into a bird ancestor I think would be extremely difficult because there would be so many changes required in it that we wouldn't be able to recognize the intermediate stages as having come from this animal even. It turned out that Heilman was wrong though about the fercula because before the English edition of his book was published, the American Museum of Natural History working in Mongolia actually found a specimen called Overaptor. I'll come back to Overaptor later. And Overaptor curiously has a fercula. And it's a fercula that looks very much like the fercula that we see in Archaeopteryx. Unfortunately, when the specimen was discovered, the fercula was misidentified as a different bone, an interclavicle. And nobody really seemed to notice this until the 1970s when it was finally recognized that this animal had a fercula. Once people realized that one theropod or meat-eating dinosaur had a fercula, then people started looking around a little bit more and sure enough we started turning them up into other animals. Now in Alberta, we are very good at collecting Tyrannosaurs. In fact, we've collected more than 20 full skeletons of Tyrannosaurs in recent years. And this is a job of one Tyrannosaur called Displetosaurus. And we've just thrown a rattlesnake in there for size or scale to give you an idea just how big those teeth are and how nasty this animal probably was. Displetosaurus is not one of your more famous dinosaurs, but in all probability, this was the direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex. Now amongst this Tyrannosaur material, a few years ago, we noticed suddenly that we had fercula like bones. And in some of our articulated specimens, these bones were actually in position at the front of the chest and articulated with the shoulder girdle just like we would expect to see it. And we do see it, of course, that way in modern birds. So now we know that even Tyrannosaurs, which is a very unlikely ancestor to birds, those animals have fercula as well. And it seems to be much more widespread than we thought. The reason that it wasn't noticed for so long in these animals is mostly because they have a series of bones covering the stomach region. These are called ventral ribs or gastralia. These in Tyrannosaurs were probably part of the breeding system. They form a very elaborate pumping system, but they were also there to help hold the guts in. And these could be quite wide, almost as wide as the ribs themselves. And some of them were fused in the middle, so they do tend to look a little bit like the fercula too. And very often the fercula gets mixed in with these bones and therefore doesn't get distinguished. I went to the Royal Ontario Museum recently, my childhood haunts, and found my horror that they had the ventral ribs articulated on the skeleton, but they had actually found the fercula too. But they mounted it on the wrong end of the ribs, these ventral ribs. So it's there. And if you want to go to Toronto and check this, you can see a fercula very much like this one, sitting at the wrong end of the ribs. We have many, many bird-like dinosaurs. And what really started us thinking about the fact that maybe dinosaurs came from birds again was the discovery of Dynonicus. And Dynonicus was discovered in early Cretaceous beds in Montana. We have similar forms up in Alberta though, one of them being Dromiosaurus. These are small, child-sized dinosaurs that have this incredible claw on the foot, which has been raised above the ground and the claws developed into very large, recurved weapon, which had to be held off the ground because it ended in such a sharp point that it would have broken otherwise. And these claws are quite offensive. I know you can't really tell from this picture, but the claw on the second toe of this animal right here is about half the length of the whole lower jaw of the animal and considerably bigger than any of the teeth. And it's quite clear that this was involved in the killing of its prey. Now when Dynonicus was discovered and described by John Ostrom, Ostrom did a very elaborate study, and up to that point I would say that small dinosaurs really weren't all that well-known or well-recognized. People always thought of dinosaurs as being big monsters, shall we say, and didn't give much attention to the smaller ones, although we realized there were small ones like compsignathus. And it got John and Bacher and other people thinking about the fact that maybe dinosaurs that had this kind of anatomy were perhaps very active animals and may have been warm-blooded. And that's one aspect that started off and triggered what became known as the dinosaur renaissance that is actually still going on today. I should digress a little bit and say that in spite of the fact that dinosaurs have always been popular, the reality is that after the Great Depression there really wasn't an awful lot of dinosaur research going on anywhere in the world. There were very few dinosaur researchers. You could count them on the fingers of one hand. And in the late 70s that had all turned around and we were certainly into the dinosaur renaissance and since then the numbers of positions for paleontologists has increased, the number of finds has increased dramatically, but we're still really at the beginning of our understanding what dinosaurs are all about. We're still discovering brand new species at a rate of I think one every three months right now. We're still discovering whole new types of dinosaurs and we're still discovering whole new regions of the world that we didn't think had dinosaurs before are turning up some very interesting things. So there's a lot going on with dinosaur research right now, but a lot of it comes down to the discovery of Dynonicus as being the trigger to the modern dinosaur renaissance. And when John Ostrom described Dynonicus one thing he noticed was that there was a very strong similarity between it anatomically and archaeopteryx. And in the late 70s he resurrected the idea that maybe birds in fact did come from dinosaurs and that began the great debate that went on for about 20 years. Some other very interesting dinosaurs that look very much like birds and have become involved into the debates in to varying degrees or the ornithomimans or nithomimans or bird mimic dinosaurs. These things look very much like ostriches in some sense or actually it's the other way around. Ostriches look like these dinosaurs so who's the mimic really. There's been some remarkable specimens discovered. This one was found in Albert in 1995. It was found completely by accident. We had a crew of paleobotanus out digging up the badlands trying to get down to a very rare plant site in dinosaur provincial park. And they had moved something like 20 or 30 tons of rock when suddenly a lot of bone chips started flying all over the place. And they stopped and basically called me in and much to their chagrin they got closed down because we had to take this dinosaur out first. And this turned out to be probably the best specimen of an ornithomime had ever collected in North America. It's complete from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. It would never have been found if it hadn't been found by that jackhammer because it was so deep in the rock at the time it was discovered that erosion wasn't going to expose it maybe for 100 years and even then we don't know if we would have found the thing as it was eroding slowly outside of the hill. But the wonderful thing about this specimen is not only is it so well preserved but even the beak was preserved on the specimen. And if you may be aware that the beak is something that's supported by bone but in fact the beak itself is keratin very much like our fingernails. It's a horny sheath on the outside of the bone. And this is the first time we had an a theropod dinosaur as a meat eating dinosaur the preservation of the beak. Tyrannosaurs are as I mentioned before quite common. You don't tend to think of tyrannosaurs as being particularly bird like but they are in fact. This is a specimen that was found in Alberta. It's a juvenile gorgosaurus. There was only one bone sticking out of the ground when I ran across this thing. And when we dug it up there was virtually no overburden. The thickest the overburden was was about 10 centimeters or a foot. And we ended up getting this thing complete again from the tip of the nose down the neck and right through to the end of the tail up here. And the last vertebra on the tail is only about three millimeters long. So it's a remarkable specimen too. Now when we look at tyrannosaurs we find in fact that when you get past the general anatomy of teeth and claws that tyrannosaurs are actually extremely bird like as well. And as an example if we look at a modern bird's skeleton we can see that birds have a very interesting breathing system. It's basically a one-way system that allows them to take air in through one tube essentially put it through the chest in a one-way system and expel the air out the other way without actually crossing the air. So it's a much more efficient system than what we have. And it's only accomplished because they have a lot of air sacs that infill parts of the body. Now in addition to the air sacs there are little tubes that go inside many of the bones. Many of the bones inside the skull and the neck the front part of the body and also into the shoulder girdle and the upper arm bones. And it turns out that dinosaurs were in fact doing this. Although dinosaurs weren't flying of course they had to worry about their balance and when you think of a tyrannosaur you have to think of it in terms of being a teeter totter. Tyrannosaurs were animals that were balanced on their hind legs. They were horizontal in their body morphology not like us who stand erect. So as tyrannosaurs got bigger and started loading more weight on the front end of their body they had to compensate for this by reducing the weight at the front of the body or by increasing the weight on the tail. And of course if you increase the weight on the tail without reducing the weight on the front of the body then you're increasing your overall body weight and you become slower and more clunky and that wouldn't work very well for them either. So tyrannosaurs and a lot of other meat eating dinosaurs ended up developing pneumatic bones in the front part of the body. Basically what they did was they took tubes from the lungs certainly and probably also from air sacs because we think they existed in these dinosaurs as well and they made the bones of the front end of the body pneumatic. And so if we look at a tyrannosaur vertebra for example we can see that on either side of the vertebra are these pneumatopores that go inside and that inside we have these spaces of interconnected sacs that run between the bone. The bone is still there to reinforce the whole thing and because there's a lot of weight involved in these things but they're wonderfully designed structures that are very thin on the outside and hollow on the inside. And clearly tyrannosaurs had lost a lot of weight in the front end of their body as a way of not falling on their faces essentially. So it turns out that these pneumatic bones at the front end of the body are not something that were developed by birds as an adaptation to flight. They were in fact developed by dinosaurs already as a way of lightening the front end of their bodies. Now when we go through the skeleton, I won't do this here, we in fact find that there's more than 125 characters in the skeletons of theropod dinosaurs and birds that convinced most paleontologists more than 10 years ago that in all probability birds came directly from dinosaurs because when you have more than 100 shared derived characters that are only found in dinosaurs and birds then it says loud and clear that you have a relationship there. And you know it doesn't prove it but what it does do is it's a very strong indication, it's a very robust theory. And still though the arguments went on as to well did birds come from dinosaurs or they in a lot of cases people were rebelling against the idea. I mean you get stupid statements being tossed around well I can't imagine a robin coming from a tyrannosaurus rex. And really that's just a rhetoric because there were lots of small Medellin dinosaurs known by that time and the more we study these animals the more small forms we are in fact finding. So small dinosaurs in fact may have been far more common than big dinosaurs but the way we look for dinosaurs and the way dinosaurs are preserved has always favored the discovery of big ones. But that's changing pretty rapidly now. So with 125 shared characters between birds and dinosaurs as I said most paleontologists became convinced that birds did come from dinosaurs. Now one of the people who argued most vehemently against the idea that birds came from dinosaurs was asked in 1996 ironically what would convince them that birds actually did come from dinosaurs and he said you'd have to find a dinosaur with feathers and as I'm going to tell you now within months of him saying that somebody actually met his challenge and did that. Now I have to diverge a little bit here and go to China and tell you about this site. This is in Laoning. It's a wonderful place. It's mountainous. It's been known for fossils for a long time and since the 1930s people have been collecting fish fossils and insect fossils here and they're there in the millions but the site has never been known until for fossil birds until 1994 and in 1994 a single specimen was found that got sold to a museum in Beijing and the farmer who found that I don't think made very much money but he did make a little bit of money and when the specimen was described people of course in China were very excited about this and our colleagues from the institute of vertebrate paleontology went up to Laoning and started digging as well looking for more of these birds. Well this guy celebrating the fact that he had made some money on this fossil and knowing what they look for now started looking harder and he found some more and he sold those too. He made some more money and his neighbors saw that he had made some money so they thought wow we should go try this and you know what they found some too and they made some money and at that stage at that time on average Chinese farmer would probably only make in that area about a hundred dollars a month and we're talking about many hundreds of dollars with one single discovery. Well this kind of broke on the world in later the same year but in a way that you wouldn't expect it wasn't through the scientific media it was in fact by going to the Tucson rock and mineral show that we realize that something had happened because close to a thousand specimens of fossil birds from Laoning suddenly showed up in the markets in the United States Europe and Japan and these birds at the time were thought to be late Jurassic in age about the same age as Archaeopteryx but since then most people have come to accept that they're probably early Cretaceous birds but it doesn't matter in terms of skeletal anatomy Confucius Ornus as it became known is only slightly more derived than Archaeopteryx. If you look at the skull the skull no longer has teeth in the jaws they've been lost and replaced by a beak there isn't a long bony tail anymore that's been replaced by these feathers and it has a fairly short tail with a pygastyle at the end just like a modern bird but in terms of the rest of its anatomy this is an extremely primitive bird and you can see for example the separate fingers with claws on the wings now these specimens were so well preserved that they do include the feathers as well and you can see most of the downy type feathers near the body here but if you look really close you can probably also see these long flight feathers on the arms and of course the long tail feathers as well which are characteristic of sexual dimorphism this is a beautiful slab with both morphs on it what we think is a female in fact don't have these long tail feathers and there's a reconstruction by Jan Sovak what this particular bird Confucius Ornus looked like I don't know how many specimens of this bird there are now as I said in 1994 already there was a thousand specimens known and I think there are now several thousand specimens and there's some very good anatomical descriptions and some good studies going on of this particular animal now in 1996 Eva and I were in China and the Beijing newspaper carried us a front page story a story that a feathered dinosaur had been discovered and we decided we really wanted to see it not because I really believed it was a feathered dinosaur in spite of the fact that I thought dinosaurs should have feathers I really didn't think we would see one in my lifetime I mean what are the chances of that to be so lucky to actually see one so we had made arrangements to go to the National Museum of Geology in Beijing to see the specimen itself because it was a small carnivorous dinosaur from what we could see of the photograph this thing appeared to be very much like comsignathus and it definitely came from the same beds that produce Confucius Ornus so another interesting parallel there you have comsignathus and archaeopteryx in the beds in Europe and you have Confucius Ornus and something that looks like comsignathus in the beds in northeastern China and took a few days to do this because nothing progresses very fast in China and everything goes at its own pace and you have to be patient we had dinner with the director of the museum one day and it was almost a week later before we actually finally got to see the specimen and it was quite an unusual circumstance because when we walked into the museum we were taken in front of a boardroom and the whole boardroom was full of the Chinese press and we hadn't been warned of this and basically specimens were brought out one by one to us and we were shown incredible specimens from leoning not the dinosaur of course these were fossil fish fossil insects even fossil mammals if you can believe it but eventually they brought one of these wonderful Chinese gift box which are kind of cardboard or wood covered with silk and they opened it up and there was a specimen inside the one on the right of this this photograph and the specimen as I said I'd already forgotten about the fact that this thing was supposed to have feathers but as soon as I saw it within milliseconds my eyes had focused on these feather-like structures running around the outside of the body and I actually became a believer almost instantly and I think most people who have actually seen the specimens would have to say the same thing you tend to discount this as being more likely going to be dendrites or some kind of fungus fungal growth that was on the animal after it died or whatever but when you actually see it it's a different matter and I became convinced there was all kinds of politics that surrounded this specimen as it turned out and the whole world went crazy for me for more than a year because of what we saw that day fundamentally I came back to Canada I went back to China twice more I got to see the other side of the specimen which was in a different museum and it's because the farmer was also a very good businessman and so what he ended up doing was he took half the specimen to the museum in Beijing he took the other half to the Nanjing Museum of Geology and Paleontology down in Nanjing and that's where the other half resides to this day now you can see the two halves together like this thanks to the wonders of Photoshop but otherwise the two sides of the specimen never shall meet because rivalries between institutions in China are actually very strong and deep and so that introduces a whole level of politics that generally we don't run into in North America but it's it's a very real thing in other parts of the world the North American politics came in though by the time I got back to North America the Chinese reports that spread to Japan and I started getting calls from the Japanese press from Japan they spread to North America and England first actually and then North America and they only got to North America when we were in New York City for the Society of Irritable Paleontology meetings at the American Museum of Natural History and that's where they hit the front page of the New York Times in fact and the whole world went crazy now in science we don't normally like to release stories about fantastic new discoveries until we've actually done the work on them and published on them ourselves so we tend to hold these things pretty close to ourselves because there's all kinds of problems that result if you don't do that and in this case the cat was out of the bag long before we had a chance to even do that long before we even worked out who was going to study the specimens or anything else and it really did go crazy I mean there was for example scientific papers published by other people that predated any of our scientific papers that were published on the basis of photographs that have been published in several other places and the real specimens hadn't been seen at all and of course that wasn't mentioned in the articles that they were published on the basis of photographs but it happened and I just couldn't believe it and really dinosaur studies have never been the same I know that this kind of thing has existed for a long time with paleoanthropology and you certainly have my sympathy on that one but it's a reality with dinosaurs these days as well. Now cytopterics in spite of what you may have read in some of these articles really is a remarkable animal and this is a close-up of the head you have to remember that the skull has been split right down the middle and so the bone isn't necessarily in good condition in this specimen you can see that the eyeball is actually preserved as a dark stain and this is not uncommon in that part of the world many of the fish fossils and bird fossils for example do much the same thing and I'm not really sure exactly what's causing the stain but it's there and you can see these feather-like structures running down the top of the head in this region it's been said that this is a crest of scales running down the back but in fact when we look at where it is on the head it's not in the middle of the head it's on the edge this is the edge of the eye on the other side the skull's been flattened in a certain way but there are feathers to preserved in other parts of the body including here behind the skull and behind the limb bones and in fact if you look between some of the ribs you can see feathers on the lower side of the body as well so the feathers are far more universal than just being a crest down the middle of the back and I apologize for this picture I've never been able to get one that's better in focus yet for some reason but what it shows is a close-up of some of these feather structures this is where the the vertebral column is right here but what you can see is these parallel relatively thick stalks of the feathers and these show us that these feathers do have a thick stalk that eventually breaks up into much finer filaments that makes up the bulk of that stain you see around the animal and the structure of these things is a simple branching structure these aren't simply hair-like structures these are in fact branching structures completely and what they tell us is that probably these things were there for the purpose of insulation and I should point out that this is an amazing discovery in the sense that it was something that was predicted a long time ago in the 1970s when the dinosaur renaissance started and people started talking about the possibility of warm-blooded dinosaurs and started talking about the possibility that dinosaurs were ancestral to birds then two and two went together basically if you're a small warm-blooded dinosaur you need some kind of insulation on your body so you can maintain your body temperature number one secondly if you're ancestral to birds and we know that birds couldn't have just started flying once or developing feathers once they decided to fly evolution doesn't work that way feathers had to have been on the bird before it became a bird therefore feathers should be on the ancestors of birds and if dinosaurs small meat eating dinosaurs were ancestral to birds then maybe they were covered with feathers and maybe that was what formed the insulation so already in the 1970s people started doing pieces of artwork showing dinosaurs with feathers and here we had for the first time with sinosuropteryx a dinosaur with feathers now fortunately because so many people got involved in collecting these specimens from northeastern china and i should say that at one point it was said that there were 3 000 farmers digging up the hill sides of leoning and science advances very fast or at least the recovery of fossils happens very fast when you put that much manpower into it and i kind of doubt that there's that many people today but i could be wrong too because the it has become a problem i mean a lot of specimens are coming out but a lot of specimens have been collected in a very amateurish way as well and although a lot of institutions are working in northeastern china now to find specimens of their own the farmers are still a lot more efficient because they're there 365 days of the year and they're there literally up to 24 hours a day they even operate night shifts in some cases so a lot is happening but more specimens of these dinosaurs are turning up here's a second specimen that was found in leoning it also has these feather-like impressions running down the sides of the body actually cover the whole hip region in this this area right here and this specimen though is kind of neat because inside its stomach are mixed among the ribs jaws from two mammals here's a pair of jaws from a symmetrodont and here's a jaw of a multi-tuberculate with a very large slicing tooth of the multi-tuberculate right here two mammal jaws inside the stomach of this guy and one of the other sinusoropteric specimens has a lizard inside its gut and possibly even has two of its own eggs inside its gut so these specimens are remarkably preserved and they tell us a lot about this little dinosaur which again is about the size of a chicken here's a new specimen that we're just working on now it's at the trail museum for for preparation and study it's in the process right now here's the skull the body running down through here here's a very long tail like other sinusoropteric specimens very long feathers at the end of the tail actually and the legs are here unfortunately the arms have been lost but we do have the humerus in this this area close up of some of these feather-like structures and there's just the tip of my foot for scale this happens to be a very big dinosaur it's it's about the size of myself and shows us that it's probably a different kind of sinusoropterics feather dinosaur different species but a much larger animal and it still has feathers it's a reconstruction by Michael Skrepnik of what sinusoropterics probably looked like we do know it was covered with body feathers it's a very unlikely bird ancestor because when you look at its arms they're almost as short as the arms of t-rex in terms of relative body size but what's very curious about it is that the claw on the thumb is as long as the upper arm bone it's a huge claw and obviously that's what it was using for catching mammals and lizards and the tail is remarkably long on this animal as well now this of course caused a lot of debate about where birds came from and the next stage though was to discover we have more feathered dinosaurs and this was a particularly interesting one that we found in the museum in Beijing it was supposed to be a different one called prodarchiopteryx but we realized pretty quickly that it was in fact a brand new animal this is called cadipteryx and cadipteryx is long-legged animal these are just legs right here it's got relatively short arms there's the neck and the skull the tail is relatively short but the tail ends in this long fan of feathers and behind the arm we also have long feathers as well and unlike sinusoropterics which has simple down-like feathers in the case of cadipteryx what we have are feathers that have a long shaft which is broken up into barbs and you can see that these barbs are parallel to each other except at the base of the feather where they're downy in their appearance and the fact that these barbs are parallel and also the fact that we can see them in some cases we also see barbules this is the kind of feather we find in modern birds and it's impossible to distinguish this feather from a feather we will see in a modern bird and so here we had a little animal that clearly had bird-like feathers the body was covered with the simple down-like feathers that we see in sinusoropteryx but the tail and the arms had good modern style bird feathers complex a reconstruction by Michael Skrapnick about the animal look like it certainly looks very bird-like and of course that brought on the criticism right away that this must be a bird that just gone back to the ground and lost the ability to fly and that's what the argument centered on for a while but it was an animal that is a beautiful trump card because when you actually look at the anatomy of cadipteryx you see that it is quite primitive in all of its morphologic features that if we take for example the ankle bones of this animal we see that the astragalus has a long process that goes up the front of the shin bone and it's for a long time we've known that meat-eating dinosaurs do this and we also know that birds do this but the argument for a long time has been that dinosaurs and birds do it differently and most of us who thought that birds probably came from dinosaurs looked at it and said well the argument isn't that strong that it's the calcaneum this is the calcaneum it's the second little ankle bone that produces this structure in birds but it was ambiguous but if you wanted to argue that cadipteryx is a bird rather than a dinosaur then suddenly we have all of these dinosaurian characters that had been used as evidence to show that dinosaurs and birds were not related and they were found in a bird so it didn't matter whether we classified cadipteryx as a bird or as a dinosaur it was sitting in a nice intermediate position as a bird that was anatomically a dinosaur but had feathers like a bird and really it was the trump card and it was the turning point on this. This was published both jointly in National Geographic and Nature and it did attract a lot of attention when it came out it did cause some more controversy of course. Now I wanted to just spread the argument out a little bit more in my last few minutes here and talk about the Canada China dinosaur project because when we were working there we made a remarkable discovery too this is a site called Bayanmandu it's not the flaming cliffs this is actually in China and one of the specimens we found was the skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur and this is how it looked in the field and underneath that meat-eating dinosaur we found eggs and these were the eggs that had previously been identified as protoceratops and the bones were bones that had been previously identified as overraptor which means egg thief. Now it seemed unlikely to us that for the second time we were going to find a specimen of this meat-eating dinosaur on top of a nest of protoceratops because you know even dinosaurs are smarter than that if it came down to dying for your food I don't think dinosaurs would normally do that and this dinosaur was probably caught in a sandstorm about 75 million years ago and in all likelihood it would have escaped if what it was doing was eating those eggs and so it seemed to us it was more likely that this dinosaur was in fact sitting on a nest of eggs and was protecting its own nest because maternal instincts are much stronger than feeding instincts in many cases and these overraptor nests are really interesting because they're essentially donut shaped they're circles and you can see the paired structure of the eggs here and here they're always in twos and what the mother dinosaur was doing was standing on one spot and she would lay two eggs and then she would turn her body and lay two more eggs and then turn her body and lay two more and she would eventually close the circle and once the circle was closed she would start another layer so these eggs are in fact another layer and she would close that circle and in some cases would actually lay a third layer so these overraptored nests are very peculiar we know that what the overraptor was doing was scooping sand onto the eggs as she was laying them because there is sand that separates the eggs in the nest and it now seems likely that what she was doing was laying on top of those nests of eggs and protecting them this is one of the overraptor specimens collected in recent years by the american museum of natural history expeditions to mongolia and now we've got four of these from china and mongolia and we also have one from montana of a different dinosaur troodon and here you see the mother the skull unfortunately is gone but this is the chest region here and you can see the circle of eggs underneath the body running in this direction right here her feet are standing in the middle of the nest and her hands are stretched out to the outside but the curious thing is if you look at the eggs themselves you see that the only place they're really exposed is between the arms and the body now if you think of that drawing i showed you or painting i showed you of cadipteryx cadipteryx had long feathers on the arms that were in this position and cadipteryx is very closely related to overraptor and now we know that unquestionably overraptor when it lay on its nest was in this kind of position this was a drawing we did before we knew these things had feathers but almost certainly they do have feathers and all of these eggs would have been covered up um it doesn't end there right now there are so many more specimens of feathered dinosaurs and there's new ones coming out all the time there's almost i think nine species known now of feathered dinosaurs and they include animals like cyanernithosaurus cyanernithosaurus is an animal closely related to velociraptor it also has these long feathers on the back of the arms and perhaps that shows us the next stage of feather evolution that these long stiff feathers um perhaps developed to cover up the eggs or perhaps they developed as a way of displaying to each other but once they had them those long stiff feathers would have given this animal some aerodynamic advantage that uh if it was leaping out to try and capture insects or if it was in fact trying to run away from something else and use that ability to to jump it would get a slight aerodynamic edge on which evolution could then act to produce longer feathers and animals that could actively fly uh bipyosaurus is a totally unrelated type of meat-eating dinosaur it's a very peculiar one it's called a therosinosaur um this animal is very large much larger than me and it shows us that it wasn't just the small ones that had feathers and um when we look at the family tree of these dinosaurs what we see is that very primitive ones had the down-like feathers like cyanosteropteryx and comsignathus then we had animals related to velociraptor and it was like cyanornithosaurus that had feathers and we had cadipteryx which is related to overraptor and even though we don't have feathers on overraptor the relationship to cadipteryx suggests to us that overraptor did have feathers and on the same family tree now we also know that the tyrannosaurids and ornithomimans are there and this suggests to us that because more primitive types of meat-eating dinosaurs had feathers and all of their closest relatives had feathers therefore maybe at some stage in its life even tyrannosaurs had feathers now we have the skin of adult tyrannosaurus but it's just small patches from certain parts of the body and we know that adult tyrannosaurs did not have feathers but for all we know when a baby tyrannosaurus hatched from the egg it may have had feathers this is pure speculation at this point but it's a possibility because of the relationship to other feathered dinosaurs and what we know about dinosaurs of course has changed the way we view them under a modern biological or paleontological classification birds which are on the same branch the family tree as dinosaurs as meat-eating dinosaurs are technically dinosaurs and it is not inaccurate anymore to refer to birds as part of the dinosauria and in that sense more than 10,000 species of dinosaurs are still alive and well today and it's changed the way we think about dinosaurs tremendously so get rid of that old idea that dinosaurs were one of the greatest failures in histories in fact dinosaurs are one of the greatest success stories we've ever seen and they're still successful today thank you very much I'd like to invite our panelists up for one last once again I do have an important message here would Ruth Maud please report to the registration desk that's Ruth Maud if you would please pass your questions to the central aisle here they'll be collected and we'll be under