 sounds good. All right so thank you all for joining me this afternoon on this Easter weekend. And our topic or my topic today is I'm gonna say our meat eating dinosaurs of Maryland and Virginia. As you know dinosaurs is one of my favorite topics. I've talked several times on this last summer. We did our first project where we had one of my students, Darian Bradley, collaborate with a lovely cast in Switzerland and did a comparison of the Jurassic of Switzerland with that of Como Bluff Wyoming which is mostly Jurassic in age. But recently due to COVID I've been stuck inside. I'm trying to figure what exactly kind of research I could be doing basically quarantined at home. And of course there are some fantastic resources. And one of the things that I stumbled across is a bunch of dinosaur bones from Maryland and also dinosaur footprints from Virginia. And that's gonna be the topic of this discussion. And like I said this is gonna be an exercise in cami. I'm sorry the graphic is so small. Normally we think of you know we think of dinosaurs. You think of western states of the United States. You think of triceratops from the Hells Creek formation of Montana. Or you think of Colorado. Or you think of the Jurassic Como Bluff area of Wyoming or New Mexico. Yeah all along the spine of the or you know even in the Canadian Rockies you get some really nice dinosaur pie. But in this case I was surprised to learn that there's actually been a lot of dinosaurs found in Maryland. Hundreds of bones that I was not aware of. By the way you may notice that there's another avatar, Sontor Succas probably mispronounced and that's our good old good friend Alex Hastings who's here. And I'm grateful that he's he has come to join us and he's participated in this project in a couple ways that we're gonna be discussing. In fact there's several themes or threads that you're gonna see running through this talk. There's the science which I think is really interesting. But then there's the educational component. And I'm happy to say that I'm getting I'm getting a number of my high school students interested in this. And Abba Brooke is saying wasn't there an early one found New Jersey? The answer is yes. There was a Hadrosaur found by Edward Drinker Cope believe in the latter part of the 19th century. Hadrosaur in Virginia. No in New Jersey. And I've just learned that those dinosaur bones are now stored in Philadelphia at one of the museums that's there. In fact I just heard a talk from the American Museum of Natural History last weekend where a guy was talking about those bones. And by the way Alex Hastings feel free to jump in. If I'm off course, please feel free to turn on your mic or type some maybe if there's a question you can you can answer it. But anyway, getting back to the talk. Yeah, we were joking. I got Alex here by saying I'm an invertebrate paleontologist. What I'm doing talking about dinosaurs. I have no idea. So I'm grateful that he's here for his expertise. So anyway, if you zoom in on the map, the dinosaur bones we're going to be talking about come from Laurel, Maryland. And there's actually a whole park called Dinosaur Park that is that was found there. And they have a park set up mostly for young children. And this is a great idea to get kids interested in paleontology. Basically what they do is they open up a park and the kids can go in there and they can scratch her out and see if they can find any dinosaur bones. If they come across something that's really unusual, it gets confiscated and sent to a lot of these are sent to the Smithsonian. And we have Phil saying we know if dinosaurs made noise, they sound like birds or crocodiles. Certainly, I would think they made noise. There have been a number of studies done on the vocal cords. I believe the neck is trying to figure out what kind of sounds they made. I have no idea if they sound like birds or crocodiles. Alex, you want to take that one. A lot of thinking on dinosaurs. Okay, I'm glad you're jumping in on this. Alright, so that's the location. And feel free to throw answer questions in there. And if you don't know me, I have no problem whatsoever. Monitoring the local chat, I'll stop. And so what you want me to talk about, or Alex can put some information in there. Alright, so the formations we're talking about is are from the arid, adendale and the toxic formations in Virginia and Maryland. The adendale is the ones that have produced the dinosaur bones in Maryland. The Patuxent has the dinosaur footprints that have been found in Virginia. Keep in mind, we got dinosaur bones from Maryland. We do not have any dinosaur bones in Virginia yet. There are some experts like Rob Weems that says we don't have any Alex Hastings at lunch told me one time. He thinks there's just better time before we find it. And let's see. Shiloh is asking how old bones next slide shows the age relationships. So the Patuxent and the arendale are about the same age. Okay, if you zoom in here, you'll see the arendale is a little bit younger. They are Albion, or that is lower quotation, early cretaceous, whatever you want to say, think about 112 million years. That's the sort of number that I think about for these four actions that we're going to be talking about. All right, so how is it that how is it that we get information on dinosaurs? Okay, being that we're COVID and restricted. So last Christmas, basically, I was stuck inside. So I went to the Smithsonian Institution's website. And here's the URL collections dot nmn.si.edu backslash search backslash. And a good friend of mine, the Smithsonian told me about this resource about a year ago, and I finally had a chance to play with it. And if you haven't been to Smithsonian, they have an amazing website. They've got thousands of specimens that they've inventoried. And they also have many cases of pictures of the finds, some with scales and so on. We'll discuss. And the cool thing about this website is that you can actually filter it, the information. So you can go in there and you can say, show me information on all the fossils that have been found in Ireland, show me all the fossils that have been found in New Mexico. Or I want to see all the fossils from cretaceous age from Wyoming, or, let's say, Montanibus, which it has. You can go in there and you can say, I want to see any things that you had kind of raptors you have or velociraptors. So you can, you can filter by scientific name, you can filter by sort of common name. Now, there are some restrictions on that. So for example, you can go in there and you can say, I want to see all the ceritia, which includes meeting dinosaurs and long neck dinosaurs. Or I can go by the a fist, probably mispronouncing it, the ornithistia, which would include a lot of the other dinosaurs. But you can't narrow it down. If you said, show me all the theropods, those are the eating dinosaurs. There is no search link. And so you sort of have to make your way through the Smithsonian filter and do the best you can. But it is an amazing resource. And I do like the way the Smithsonian. All right. So I went through and I just started showing me everything from the early cretaceous from Maryland. And I got hundreds of fossils. And I'm going to show you some pictures of some of the fossils that pictures that I came up with. I thought this was an amazing specimen. It's the paw of a turtle from the early cretaceous. I see it's still a good discussion going on about dinosaur sounds. And if I'm going too fast, I know it's going to take a while for these things to res, let me know. And I figured that Alex Hastings was going to be here. So I figured I better put in a crocodile tooth. So there you go, Alex. And by the way, I contacted the, I contacted the Smithsonian, I said, do I have permission to use these pictures? And they said, absolutely, if you want to use them in talks or in science papers, all they ask is that I reference the specimen. So put in the location of, you know, if somebody wanted to actually go to Smithsonian and find it, they could. Although, unfortunately, the Smithsonian is closed now. Alright, so now let's get to the meat of, you will, of the talk, which is meat eating dinosaurs. Oh, yeah. Sumo, you asked a really good question. What are the units? And the answer is, I'm not sure. I'm not going, I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe Alex, you can address it, but I found some amazing pictures of dinosaurs, and then they put a scale there. And I'm not sure what the markings are. I presume they are millimeters. That is my guess. That would make sense, depending upon it. And there were a couple of fossils that had a regular scale. Yeah, a coin would have been better. There are a few specimens I found where they actually went to Walmart and got a regular scale. But in many cases, a lot of the specimens, all they had was this bar scale at the bottom. It looked like somebody had used a magic marker to put the markings there. And again, I'm not sure why they did it. They did. One of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to flip through these. And then I'm going to go back because I ran this, yeah, homemade, yes, scale bars. I gave this lecture earlier in the week to a friend on Second Life. And she said, show a picture of the dinosaur first, and then show the fossils. And I was debating which way to do it. So I said fine. So here is the most common dinosaur fossil that's been found in called Astrodon. It belongs to the scientific group, the sauropods. But we think of them as the ones with these are the four-legged long neck dinosaurs with the small heads, the same group as you would think of, deplodocus and adisaurus and brontosaurus, if that's even a dinosaur anymore. But there are hundreds of these fossils that have been laurel, beryl, and now unfortunately, this one I don't have a scale on. All right, so I'm going to flip back here. And here's some of the some of the fossils. And by the way, the scale, you want to talk about the scale of Astrodon. This gets a little tricky because a lot of the dinosaurs that we've found, or a lot of the Astrodon fossils are clearly from juveniles. So we're not talking about a dinosaur in Maryland that was hundreds of feet long. I'm guessing that Astrodon juveniles were probably on the range of maybe long, something like that. And that's going to be an important question. And I'm going to go I'll go back to a minute, shallow. But let me say a little bit. Here's a vertebrae of Astrodon. Okay, the backbone. Here's a femur or the leg bone of Astrodon. Here's the peg-like tooth of Astrodon. And I want to talk about where the name came from. When these fossils were first found in Maryland, they were sent to a dentist who decided to take a rock saw and slice through the bone. And what he found was that there was a star shaped pattern in the cross section. And he pointed astro meaning star and dot meaning tooth. So that's where the name came from. Right, the star tooth animal. And this guy was a planner, obviously, we're going to see some some meteors in a minute, we're getting there. Okay, this is not a, you know, okay. So anyway, Alex, do you want to say something about hooves? Not sure about not who's? Yeah, yeah. So it does kind of look a little funny in the art there. I think it's mostly because these don't seem to have had claws on the front, like you see in Diplodocus or Brontosaurus. So instead, it kind of just looks like the toes just end. So what these were probably a bit like an elephant, probably a little less kind of, like if you really look at an elephant's foot, they're kind of little nails, not exactly nails either. But anyway, so wouldn't have looked like that per se. But it wouldn't have been anything you would call a hoof like on a horse or something. So it's kind of its own thing, which is a little bit more frustrating. But yes, they are. And a lot of sauropods are actually pretty different between the front and the back feet. Alright, now we have a question of the back feet more like a croc. I mean, in that they have claws on them. So those would have been covered in keratin and crocodiles have claws, I would say it's kind of more similar to other kinds of, you know, dinosaurs, even including things like sauropods or serotopsians, just kind of having these these claw digits on the back feet. Okay. Alright, then we get to these guys. I give them interest. There were ankylosaur fossils that were found in Maryland. These things look like armadillos in the early Cretaceous, extremely well armored on the head and the back. And certainly, certainly they were going to need it. Okay, in a minute, we're going to talk about some of the meteors that are present. So this is what the dinosaur looked like. And this is what the tooth looked like. It's very distinctive. These in kylosaur teeth, they almost have a sort of a sore tooth triangular shape to them. So they're real easy to pick out. And there are a number of these in the Smithsonian collections. Alright, now it's time to get into, like I said, the meat of the topic, which is the meat eaters. And there were several meat eating dinosaurs. This lecture, I want to talk about two acrocanthosaurus. And I'm also going to talk about dinomictus. And we have a model of an acrocanthosaurus right below the slide viewer. Acrocanthosaurus gets its name. If you look at the dinosaur right below in front of the slide viewer, you can see that there were extensions along the spinal column. So the thing almost has like a little fin there. And Alex, do you have any idea why the animal would have this? I mean, it's certainly not going to be like a stegosaurus or metronaut. Is this a sort of some kind of heat regulatory thing or protection? So it's likely much too low to have function in that way that a lot of people think for like spina source that had very, very big pronounced ones. So this is probably more likely kind of a more of a ridgeback for musculature, particularly for the front end. So you see these kind of exaggerated spines on things like even bison because they're just so front heavy that you need so much muscle just to actually manipulate the front end of the animal. So that's the idea for acrocanthosaurus. Okay, thank you very much. Alright, so we have a question about, yeah, is the edge straight? Absolutely. We're going to talk more about in a minute. You notice that the tooth is recurve. I presume that's due to when the animal bites down the predator to it from escaping. That would be my understanding when you see a recurve tooth like this. So we have acrocanthosaurus. Here's a reconstruction of what it might look like. But I think it's even better in, well, and thanks to Chantel for getting some amazing dinosaur models to put around. Alex talked about aceratopsin. We have a styrocosaurus on the right hand side of the stage here with all the horns coming out of it. We have a, I guess should go from right, we have a T-rex on the far right hand side. And my understanding is acrocanthosaurus got up to about the size of a T-rex or maybe a little smaller. By the way, these were not contemporary T-rexes from the very end. Acrocanthosaurus was early cretaceous, so they're separated probably by maybe 60 million years. Then the next one to the left is styrocosaurus, is a ceratopsin or dinosaur that Alex just mentioned. Then we have allosaurus. The next one to the left, allosaurus, again, was not a contemporary of acrocanthosaurus. Allosaurus was mostly Jurassic. You get them in places like Como Bluff. I'm not changing the slides yet. I'm talking about the dinosaurs. There's a dominus rex. I'm sure it was that just a fictional thing in Jurassic Park. And then we have a styrocephalic, I can't pronounce these things, which looks like a Pachycephalosaurus or headbutting dinosaurs. Alright, so let's go on to the next one. Alright, so here is a dinonictus tooth. And we don't have a model of that, but here's what dinonictus may have looked like. It was basically a raptor. So the two main eating dinosaurs that we'll be talking about for the rest of this talk are dinonictus, a raptor like dinosaur, and acrocanthosaurus. We got wings on it. There was an expedition by the American Museum of Natural History to China and one of their latest expeditions showed that raptors had wings. And I asked Dr. Alex Adam Pritchard at the Virginia Museum of Natural History about what he felt was thought about a dinonictus that put feathers on the thing, would be his interpretation of it. Alex, how do you feel about feathers on dinonictus and raptors? Oh, heck yes. The evidence is pretty strongly supported. I will say that we don't have direct evidence for dinonictus or really any of the North American ones. But given that every single time we find any members of this group where feathers actually have a chance of fossilizing, not only do they have them, they have them like over their entire bodies. So I think it's really just the the preservation bias that we have in North America that we're not really getting that kind of soft tissue preservation with those. So I think really all of the quote unquote raptors would have been pretty feathery. Do we have any idea about pigment? I heard something that the feathers were black on these raptors, or anything about that? Yeah, so so the way pigment is worked out on fossil feathers is the cellular structures called molana zones that are actually creating the color, the pigment have a different shape depending on what color they are. So things that are like blue, red have different shape. So even though the color isn't actually there anymore, based on the structure of those molana zones, if they're preserved, you can figure out what colors they were. So there was one a few years ago called K-hong that had actually iridescence. I had the same kind of molana zones that we see in certain kinds of birds today that have that kind of would have been pretty black most of the time. But when they caught the light, right, they would have actually sheened, which is really cool. And we've been able to figure out in a couple other extinct things that have had birds as well to go to reds or black and white banding. So it's it's a new frontier. It's really fun. Yeah, we have a question from Scissor G about all of these things were endotherms or what my understanding is that they were based on John Desmond's book from the 70s, said a lot of arguments that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, you know, in terms of predator-prey ratios. Alex, any thought updates? Obviously, last time I looked at this was 50 years ago, has already changed. Yeah, the short end is it's not as simple as is hot and cold-blooded. There's it's actually a spectrum. And depending on what kind of dinosaur you're looking at, it seems to be, you know, further or closer to the warm-blooded spectrum side of the spectrum. So things that generally the going thinking is as you get closer to birds, you're more on the endothermic or the warm-blooded side. And you get into some fun stuff like gigantothermy, which is like you're so big that you're retaining temperature for things like the sauropods, the big long neck dinosaurs, the other really big ones, even if they're not closely related to birds particularly. So things like raptors and even things like tyrannosaurs are thought to have been fairly close to the warm-blooded side, maybe not quite in the same way that we see in birds today, but still retaining a good temperature in turn. All right, so here's what we get into the science part of it. There were a whole bunch of bones, ifat or teeth in the Smithsonian that were clearly labeled acrocanthosaurus. There were some that were clearly labeled dinictus. And then you got a bunch of them that had no labeling on them at all. They were just labeled ceritia. All right, so ceritia include, like I said, the meat-eating theropods and also the sauropods. Well, obviously this thing is not a plant-eat. No, it's not pey-like tooth that we saw earlier. This is from a meteor. So the question I ask my students is, we're going to look at these teeth, and there weren't a lot of them, but I asked my students in January 2, go ahead, or maybe it was December, to go through and do some simple measurements on these teeth and see if you could figure out are they close related to acrocanthosaurus or dinictus, or are they maybe a new genus of meat-eater? And we'll go to the next slide. So like I said, I assembled a team of students. And what we did was I picked some of the best students I had in Virginia, but I also had a guy from New York to the New York paleontological site that was interested in dinosaurs. So he joined the group as well. And so this was a collaborative New York Virginia project where I had students going through and analyzing which I thought was neat. And we did some very simple measurements. Okay, all we did was we measured the length of the tooth from the tip to the bottom. And then we measured the indentation, or the amount of curve here, call that I, and then across the bottom of the tooth, we call that the width, okay, which is pretty standard measurements. And being that we had this weird scale, we had no idea, we weren't even sure what the units were, I decided to play it safe and go with ratios. So it didn't matter, okay, what the units were. And I had the students plot on this axis, zoom in here, the on the x axis is the amount of indentation over the length, and along the y axis, we did the width over the length. And Alex suggested color coding points, which I thought was a great idea. So here you go, Alex. So the teeth that were from Dino nyctis are blue diamonds, the green acrocanthosaurus teeth are shown green, and then our unknowns are in red. And the first thing that we saw was overlap, there was no separation whatsoever, that we could clearly see between the Dino nyctis and the acrocanthosaurus, there wasn't a whole lot of distinction between our unknowns and either of the other two generand are granted. We don't have a lot of data here. You notice, you notice it's not a lot of points, there's a lot of scatter. Okay, along here as well. I had the students do averages and indentation over length for acrocanthosaurus was 0.126, or Dino nyctis was 0.121, and the unknowns was about 0.1. My students tend to think that if there were anything, maybe they were Dino nyctis was the idea. So then we had the idea of of going into the literature and both Adam Prichard and Alex Hastings sent me a lot of references that students and I could read over. And basically what we found out was that we're not it's not surprising that we had a lot of overlap that the characteristics we measured really are not great at distinguishing different genera. I we went through the literature we found out that things like the number of denticles the serrations per inch or per millimeter are considered a better characteristic for distinguishing different groups, things like the ornamentation of the crown at the tip, the surface features of the surface textures of the teeth are considered better characteristics in better ways. So anyway, what we did was we contacted several people to Smithsonian. And one of the things that I was really impressed with is that considering this was a high school project, the collections managers were very nice to us. They said, let us know any way that we can help you. What you're doing is exactly what the Smithsonian wants teachers to do is to be able to use these pictures to try to use some kind of studies. This was also sent to this was also sent to Richmond, Virginia, which is where the Virginia Department of Education is how is located and our education thought that this was amazing sort of research turns out we're about the only one that's doing it. But if ironic part of education past never was really on dinosaurs in earth science, but they really like the science that we did. So like I said, the Smithsonian is currently closed. I would love to be able to go to DC and examine these teeth in person and use better scale and make better observations of it. But I guess we're gonna have to wait until COVID is it's past. Alright, well, I'm not in Maryland. I'm in Virginia. And we don't have dinosaur bones or teeth in Virginia. But what you're looking at is the very latest dinosaur footprint that's been published by Dr. Rob Weems at the believe he's publishing this in the New Mexico bulletin of geology. And these are the latest footprints that he's found of a three toad theropod or meat eating dinosaur. And I think that these are the best pictures that I've seen best evidence I've seen for meat eating dinosaurs in Virginia. And sumo's asking so the dinosaurs went to Maryland to die. I don't think so. I think it's really weird, you know, you might say how come there are hundreds of bones of dinosaurs near Laurel, Maryland, but you just don't get anything in Virginia. And so now we're talking about taffani. Maybe it's because we haven't looked hard enough. Maybe it's because younger rocks of Centus Oak Age are covering the cretaceous ones, but it might be an outcrop thing. I know the Department of Mind, Spirals, and Energy has talked about this and Rob Weems has given presentations at the theology symposiums spring. And I point blank asked Rob what he feels about this. And he said that he doesn't think there are dinosaur bones in Virginia period. He said there's just too much water flushing through coastal plain. And you know, they just doesn't think they're preserved. I know other people have said maybe they are they are there and they're located around Danville, which is in southern Virginia. So I contacted folks at the Danville Museum of they have a little Natural History Museum there. And the curators there said, you've talked about that problem is the rocks around Danville are really hard to get access to. The enemies during the war months, what happens is that you have thick thickets and rush that grows on top of them. So even getting physical access to those rocks to try and look around is true. But you know, maybe people just keep looking who knows maybe we'll find something. Yeah, I say the same thing. I think it's naive to think with all the dinosaurs that have been found in Virginia and Maryland. And there are some in believe in North Carolina. We don't have any horn dinosaurs in Virginia, but there have been some found in the south, I believe Mississippi, there was a horn dinosaur tooth that was there. I think these things will walk it up and down the coastal plains. And 112 million years ago, there wasn't any barrier between Maryland and Virginia. So I think they were here. They just get preserved or maybe. And if Alex has more that he wants to say about that, be my guest. Yeah, sure. I can I can just jump in here quickly. I more or less agree with most of what you were just talking about. I'll say, in terms of actual fossil bone being found from the age of the dinosaurs, you're limited to the Triassic, which is the earlier part. And that's a time when dinosaurs were not nearly as abundant and widespread as the later parts of each of the dinosaurs. However, it's not zero. And we are finding bone from that time of other kinds of things. So even though the probabilities are against you, it's not zero. And in my opinion, if with enough of a concerted effort over enough time, eventually, someone will turn up an identifiable dinosaur bone within the Commonwealth of Virginia. But the odds are kind of against you. So it's it might take a very long time. Well, yeah, I tell my students in class, I said, you know, go out and look. I mean, what's the harm? All right, so you bet you strike out, but at least you try to find the sense. I mentioned that there were armored dinosaurs in Maryland, these and Kyla source. This is a footprint that Rob Williams is found from Virginia that may have been made by one of these dinosaurs. There's a lot of footprints that Rob Williams is found around Fredericksburg, which is sort of the northeastern part of Virginia. And the last thing I want to do to wrap this up is show you this. You know, we're all familiar with Second Life, and we all love this platform. Obviously, it's a great way. It's a huge community, and it's a great way for people to get together and collaborate, share ideas, and you can res models like we have here. Problem is that Second Life is not so good when you're trying to use it well. And these days, what's happening is that more more students are going online for virtual learning, but they're doing it with Chromebooks. So even if schools would allow Second Life to be because in mind doesn't, Second Life is only available for teachers, not for students because of adult content that's here. So last year, I looked for another platform to use, and I came up with 3D Web Worlds, and I talked with the developer Yvonne DeBandy, and she was one happy to help. Yes, synergy. And what we did was I created a whole ecosystem on 3D Web Worlds. Here's a screen capture of what the ecosystem looks like. So I was able to import dinosaurs from Astrodon, Acrocanthosaurus. I put in a orthopod or a birdfoot dinosaur we got in Kylosaur there, with some labels underneath it. And the cool part is that you could actually log into 3D Web Worlds with a web browser on just about any computer. It could be a Mac, it could be a PC, it could be a Chromebook even, and navigate around and walk around. I'll put the here. I'm going to put the general log in here for those of you that want to try this. There is the general website for 3D Web Worlds, and this is a public sim that is on there. The cool part is that you're online done, so websites based. 3D Web Worlds is what I mainly use with my students. I just put the website in there. And you can go to that. Here's the beauty of this. You go to that website. There is no download. There's not a client to use. You do not have to create an account. I mean you can log in there with a guest login if you wish. So you just go in there, we click guest login. And then what you want to do is search for Cretaceous. I meant to get you guys a direct link. And there's only one Cretaceous sim on there and boom, you're in. Somebody wants to try to be my guest. There are signs that you can tell around the sim. There are boxes or prims that I put in front of each dinosaur that are labeled learn more. So if you mouse over, then you can actually you'll get a pop up and it'll tell you a little bit more about each of these dinosaurs. But like I said, this is a great alternative for if students can't get into second life either because of technology or you know it's blocked by schools. You know this is another way for them to go in. Students can also create their own account just like you would in 3D Web Worlds or what I do is I create accounts for my students so that I know who's who, but their privacy is protected and then they can go in as an avatar just like we would in second life. And there's chat, there's voice, so you could hold a lecture like this. There are, I think you can also do a slide projector. It's a little trickier than second life, but there's a lot of number of other options. And I believe, yeah, I'd like a copy of the chat too. If you right-click, Andre, and click select all, and then you can do a copy, I believe. Oops, let's try this again. Select all. Yeah, and copy. Then you can just paste it into your favorite text program. Click on the bubble button. Alright, and I purposely ended early because I know that, yeah, thank you, Shiloh. Shiloh just sent me the transcript of this. I purposely ended early, so this way, if you guys have questions, feel free to bring them up right now. And I'm sure Dr. Hastings and I will do the best we can to answer them and get you guys out in an hour. What's the name of the... Alright, let me go in there and find it. I meant to do it beforehand and I didn't. So let's do it now. I'm gonna log in with my account. And while you're doing that, I'll answer. There's a question about T-Rex. I've heard that big raptor... Oh shoot, I just lost a question. I've heard that big raptors like T-Rex. T-Rex isn't a raptor. They have lost many or all of their feathers as they matured. Is this thought to be true? So there's a lot of back and forth on would T-Rex have been feathered. Again, so T-Rex is found in places where soft tissue preservation really doesn't show up very well. So things, delicate things like feathers don't have a very good chance at it. There are a couple of cases where there's been sort of skin impressions found in certain parts of the T-Rex body that some people have argued means that it would have been fully unfeathered. However, with the discoveries particularly of Dialong and Euteranus which are both kind of relatives of T-Rex, but kind of lower or earlier on the T-Rex family evolution, they would have been, they were pretty darn feathered across their whole body. And the idea is that that would have been something women carried on throughout the rest of the family. So if T-Rex didn't have feathers would have been a loss of feathers in order to account for that. Now, because there's kind of evidence pointing in two different directions people are kind of, you got the situation where people on like one camp or the other more or less. So I'd say the science is really just not settled yet on T-Rex. I'll say even if it wouldn't have been like big pronounced feathers or something like that they still might have been kind of these much more subtle feather-like features. So something similar to like a hair on an elephant like they're not a particularly hairy animal but they do have hair kind of thing and it in my opinion is at minimum that. But it's new progress to be made there. All right, I found something even better for you guys. All right, I just put a link in local chat and if you click on that link it will open up a browser and boom it'll take you right to the center. You won't have an avatar but you will be able to navigate around using your arrow keys. I think this is so cool to give you an idea about how far the technology has come that we can actually run a virtual world in a browser with no download no account. One click boom you're in. All right and I can't tell you how cool this is. Now if I'm looking for a resource for my students and you know I'm you're working in a learning management system such as Ambis and I just want to put a link in there for the kids to go in and take a look around. I see this as the next sort of level of a sort of evolution in our instructional process because we all know that there's too much zoom going on. Teachers use learning management system like Canvas or Blackboard and Zoom and the kids are just had enough with it and how cool is it for them to say we're going to go on a virtual field trip right now and boom you're in. And like I said if you go to the trouble of creating an account which is not too hard they're free on 3d web worlds you know you can go in there you can use voice you can do a virtual field trip. I could tell you I know the person that runs 3d web worlds and she has told me there will be zero adult content on that platform okay there's not going to be any vanity, nudity, violence, anything and we have a bunch of teachers on there that are constantly going to the Sims on web worlds if any inappropriate content is found we report to her immediately and boom it's gone it is wiped out. So I think it is a very cool platform that I hope we use more of. The other thing that I want to mention is that we are in the process of writing a paper on this and publishing hope to publish it in the New York paleontological society notes this spring the manuscript has already been submitted and I talked to the editor and he's looking it over and all the students that worked on the project are going to be authoring it which I think is awesome to get students involved in you know into actually doing science to investigate something I have some of my students are young and here's the tricky part a lot of my students they can they can you know get the dinosaur teeth and they do measurements on it they'll come with a conclusion I haven't found many high school students that are at the point where they're willing to write something up the New York student is 17 and he's doing more the writing which I think is the next step in developing the next generation of scientists is getting students to not only do the research but to analyze it and then write a coherent paper on it um I talked with uh Jim Beard at the Virginia Natural History and he told me Bill for students that want to go into geology or paleontology or any science please have them work on their english he said I'm the editor of a major geology journal and he said you would be amazed at the garbage that comes across my desk that adults scientists think is appropriate for publication in a journal uh they're you know just filled with grammatical uh errors and so on and often I have to send it back just I can't even um I can't even understand what you're saying um so certainly english skills are something that we encourage and it's projects like this that I think are what uh the Department of Education calls authentic learning experiences I hope that this signals a transition away from the can multiple choice standardized test what I call the fast food approach to education um that might feel good in the moment to decision makers and Pearson but actually does not uh nourish the educational health of our young people um yeah as soon as gee it's it's I they were actually got in the journal um I'm just saying that I think this is the trend that we want to go in so I'm excited by this project I'm hoping that when the Smithsonian opens again I can go up there and actually uh go through and and I see these teeth a little bit more um like I said now I think I'm better prepared to to study these things anybody else have any other questions or about either the educational side of this or the scientific side oh I've got one other thing that I want to add as long as we have time um and this is a project that I'm working with Adam Pritchard about is um when you go if you go to that link that I just put in local chat and go into 3d web worlds uh by the way if you log you're not going to be able to see anybody else this is what they call portals so it's a single player uh way of accessing the simp you can walk around but you can't see anybody uh one of the things you're going to notice is the dinosaurs are animated and I talked with Ivan Debandy who helped me with setting up the simp she did a lot of landscaping and even taught me about the how you do animation you start with a mesh and then you go into a program called blender and uh there are a number of things you have to do in there in order to get the animation to work and then you bring it you know into the 3d web worlds yes max and one of the things that I noticed as I was doing this is the parallel I mean stay a 3d modeler and somebody that studies the anatomy of dinosaurs because basically when you go in blender when you when you download these meshes sketchfab sometimes you just get the mesh you'll get some bones and then it's surrounded by the skin but um to we call this process rigging you can actually add bones to a dinosaur model it turns out I think there are a lot of parallels between rigging a 3d model of a dinosaur and trying to understand how the anatomy of a dinosaur really worked you know only find the bones so I'm talking with Adam Pritchard this is Alex one of the side projects that I hope to get together with Adam on some time because Adam is playing around with blender too is can we use 3d models of I know I'm learning a lot more about the bones you know about femurs and tibia and that sort of thing and you can actually in blender you can actually go in and label the bones that you put on the dinosaurs so I see this as a great way of learning about dinosaur anatomy or anatomy in general maybe this is a way of sort of a crossover between biology where's Steven and paleontology and I know that I've got I had one student her name is Lindsay Yat who got her PhD and teachers paleontology and but also does anatomy because and Sumo's right blender is a great program it does have a steep learning curve and all I can say is you don't have to learn all but in one shot there are some simple things that you can move blender there's a huge number of of video tutorials in YouTube so it's really just a matter of playing around with it and see what happens but Alex what do you think about that that you know this project Adam and I are talk about using 3d models of dinosaurs to better understand or dinosaur I mean it's excellent it's how a lot of things are done at least in certain labs and really getting into the full potential of biomechanical modeling and kind of working in muscle segments like from the bones up it does tend to get very data intensive so you end up needing kind of some pretty powerful graphics systems to actually process that kind of thing but you know anything you can do in along those lines I think will be really informative for students but it's also there's a whole other foray that's not even really scientific but getting into the uses of these things in animations and in like video games and stuff like that which is a whole giant billion you know multi-billion dollar industry where they're starting to actually think about these things in that kind of more scientific way so there's kind of other applications that this kind of lesson could have which is really you cut out oops yeah one of the things we ran into was I started with models of dinosaurs and then they call them bones in blender but the bones have more of a polygonal polygonal shape and I know Adam wants bones that actually look like dinosaur bones and there was a question of hey we could do 3D scans on actual dinosaur bones and then it becomes a matter of in order to get a realistic bone inside of these virtual dinosaurs you really need doshits you talk about thousands of vertices to model them correctly and that'll bring even a game right to its knees just trying to get bones to look right within the models and then build the skin on top of them so I'm not sure how accurately we could put real looking dinosaur bones inside the models but like I said I'm learning a lot more about dinosaur anatomy Mike said he's using blender to process molecule and protein models from x-ray data yeah that and the other one is 3ds max I'm a huge fan of 3ds max is a 3d modeling program and Tav Scott saying Jack Horner explored SL when SL couldn't handle the things you discussed oh really I didn't know that Tav sooner G ask it again please I'm sorry I've had a flood of questions and I'm sure I'm missing something because they're coming through the chat really fast and I know Alex and I are doing the best we can to field them so please if there's there's still time we got five minutes if there's a question that you raised that did not get answered then post it again please why is there a front back foot difference in astronaut uh yeah so I I did get that but it might have gotten buried in the the rapid fire stuff in here so but the the short end is I'm trying to get an answer in real time here but so far as I'm seeing that there's not like a good front foot preserved of astrodon so I'm guessing that that illustration was a bit of a guess and what we see in some other kind of uh sauropods is that they're they kind of toes just kind of come more or less to a column so it's really just about supporting the front end in several kinds of sauropods they're they're kind of a little bit more front heavy so you see kind of bigger and more robust front limbs versus back limbs so the idea is that they have a better degree of flexibility in in the back legs so if you do need claws for a particular task it's better to kind of reserve this and the one that's a little less weight bearing where you have a little bit more ability to use them and really a lot of the adaptation is just in supporting the weight to go with this selection towards this you know extreme body size yeah I think tagline is footprints might be a good way of looking at function and I know people have looked at uh footprints where they're preserved I mean sometimes like a t-rex you only get one print if you get a trackway like at cull pepper you might start being able to make and I know Rob has done this he's looked at he started plotting out uh footprints cull pepper is those of Triassic Age rocks but maybe 230 million years old where we've got hundreds maybe thousands and he's actually started looking at mapping those footprints and he can actually make out Trent suggesting that the dinosaurs were walking along a shoreline of an ancient lake so there have been efforts to try and turn behavior based on footprints and we don't mean to ignore anybody if we missed your question please post it again as Alex said it's been rapid fire so Berrigan is talking about the the rarity of footprint tracks suggesting that they they didn't like places that were muddy I suppose a lot of us don't really like walking through mud if we don't have to there there is a sort of a difference in how footprints fossilize or can be preserved versus bone and they're usually not the same so typically when you do get fossil tracks in a good kind of setting for it you often get more than one so like the the cull pepper mine in Virginia is a really good example of that because there's actually thousands of them there because the the circumstances were right and dinosaurs were walking through but there's like no bones preserved there at all because it's a different kind of context so that's why we don't tend to see you know a direct association between those two and it actually creates a problem to then figure out what dinosaur made the tracks so it's kind of more of a geological settings more so than that they're necessarily rare it's just it takes the right kind of circumstances to get them in the first place yeah i mean it almost reminds me of the old paintings that i saw at the American Museum of Natural History where a hundred years ago they used to draw pictures of sauropods in water because they felt that these animals were so heavy that their legs wouldn't be able to support them and and then later paleontologists go you can't put an animal that big in a pond and have the water support it because the mud on the bottom would make it sink in or in some case they even add the water up to the level of the neck of the dinosaur which makes no sense because now the water pressure is going to crush the the wind pipe so there there've been a number of changes in the way that we look about dinosaurs and and how what their ecology was like yeah that's that's absolutely true and i i you know i'm not that old but i still remember my kids book still having the the sauropods the long dinosaurs in swamps and one of the ideas was that because you do see that uh and a lot of them the nostrils are pretty high up on the head a bit like you see kind of in whale so they're thinking like oh okay these things would have been you know just tipping their head up to the surface there to get some air and they'd you know spend their whole time in the water but it really doesn't make sense for a bunch of reasons not least of which being the environments in which we find them are not like that um in terms of why the nostril migration there's still not like a great answer behind it um one thing that we it does seem consistent though with these giant animals that they would have had to been basically feeding every single waking moment so even just the simple thing like getting your nostrils away from your mouth might actually enable them to um kind of feed more continuously more easily and that might have been enough of a factor to kind of see that happening within the natural selection process to see that those nostrils migrating backward a bit all right just anybody else have any questions we're almost at two o'clock I like to try and wrap these things up in an hour and thank you so much Alex for coming uh I'm glad you were here otherwise this would have been very embarrassing by some of the questions I got and maybe this is something we need to do have sort of an online ongoing dialogue about these uh about these animals yes Phil found a picture thank you that's what I was thinking of yeah all right I'm gonna head out and um do some lawn mowing and stuff around the house Shiloh how was our reinterpretation no understanding reinterpretation of geology I'm not so sure um you find fossils to try um I'm not sure how much it's changed your understanding of geology Shiloh um it's certainly changed the way that we look at these animals all right like I said if you have more questions then I'll be around at uh I'm coming back to second life so long everybody