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80 millions years ago, two dinosaurs,
a crested Protoceratops and sharp-clawed Velociraptor,
fought to the death.
Somehow, as they died in the sands of the Gobi desert,
their battle was frozen in time.
The Velociraptor flat on its back,
its clawed arm caught in the jaws of the Protoceratops.
An extraordinary fossil.
A mysterious glimpse of life and death in the age of dinosaurs.
For more than 150 million years,
dinosaurs roamed every corner of the planet.
Only a very few left evidence of their existence,
their fossilized bones.
And those bones never sees to fascinate us.
Dinosaurs came in amazing shapes and sizes.
Some were the largest animals ever to walk the Earth.
Paleontologists, the scientists, who study prehistoric life,
are discovering more dinosaurs now, than ever before.
And this fossil evidence is allowing them to reconstruct
not only their strange skeletons,
but also their lives.
An example is this gigantic long-necked plant-eater,
known as Seismosaurus.
Found in New Mexico,
it lived during the Jurassic Period,
150 millions years ago,
when many dinosaurs grew to unprecedented size.
Seismosaurus means "earth-shaking lizard",
and there's no doubt,
that their footsteps echoed across the Jurassic landscape.
Measuring 110 feet from nose to tail,
it is one of the longest dinosaurs ever discovered.
Strangely, when it was excavated,
some 240 smooth, round stones were found
in and around its huge stomach cavity.
Some scientists believe,
Seismosaurus swallowed stones to help its digestion.
Others say, that finding the stones
was a coincidence, that they were part of the riverbed,
where Seismosaurus was found.
Seismosaurus weighed over 30 tons,
as much as 8 elephants.
It must have consumed hundreds of pounds
of vegetation every day.
Sometimes scientists can even learn, what dinosaurs ate.
From clues they left behind in their fossilized dung.
Dinosaurs were first discovered in Europe and America.
But in the 20th century, scientific explorers struck out
for the most remote corners of the Earth.
And a full extend in the dinosaur kingdom began to be revealed.
The Gobi desert spans
a half-million square miles of Mongolia and China.
The ancient land of Genghis Khan.
Beneath sands, that camel caravans traversed for centuries,
lay a vast treasure trove of fossils.
Undisturbed for more than 70 million years,
that would forever change our view of dinosaur life.
In 1920s, a team of scientists
from the American Museum of Natural History
set out to explore the little-known Gobi.
Their leader was Roy Chapman Andrews.
Andrews and his team traveled in a fleet of automobiles.
It was one of the first major expeditions
used motorized transport in Central Asia.
To keep his expeditions supplied,
when the nearest gas station was 1000 miles away,
he came up with a novel plan.
Sending out camel caravans in advance,
loaded with food and fuel.
And the camels provided an unexpected service to the expedition.
Hair, plucked from their shedding winter coats
was ideal for packing fragile fossils.
Mongolia was a dangerous place,
full of roving bandits.
But Andrews thought to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones,
reveled in the adventure of it all.
Never again will i have such a feeling as Mongolia gave me.
All this thrilled me to the core.
Somewhere in the depths of that vast silent desert
lay those records of the past, that i had come to seek.
Andrews fended off the bandits,
but he and his team could not avoid the violent sandstorms,
that often sweep across the Gobi.
To their amazement,
they found that each new storm uncovered a wealth of bones.
Dinosaurs bones never before seen,
and perfectly preserved in the desert sands.
Mark Norell and Mike Novacek
of the American Museum of Natural History,
following in Andrews' footsteps,
have been leading expeditions to the Gobi
every year since 1990.
Fascinated by dinosaurs in their youth,
Mike and Mark have become renowned paleontologists.
They have dug dinosaurs all over the world,
but they have made their most spectacular finds here,
in the Gobi Desert.
Dr. Julia Clark has arrived in Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar,
with graduate students Alan Turner and Amy Balanoff
to prepare to this year's expedition.
They are part of a team,
that will join Mike and Mark in the desert.
This will be my sixth summer in the Gobi.
Mongolia has proven so rich in fossils,
i know, that each year,
there will be great new finds to be made.
There are few paved roads outside Ulaanbaatar.
The team's destination in the western Gobi
is a minimum of three days' driving.
A "Mad Max" journey over hot, dusty plains
and through mountain passes.
In 1921, after months of overland travel,
Roy Chapman Andrews' motor-caravan came across
a strange and beautiful place
of eroded canyons and sandstone towers.
The late-afternoon sun seemed to set the rocks on fire.
Andrews named it the Flaming Cliffs.
Here they would come upon one of the greatest repositories
of dinosaur remains ever found.
More than 80 years later,
the Flaming Cliffs are still a fabled and productive destination
for dinosaur hunters.
To find dinosaurs,
paleontologists must first look in the right places.
They know, that fossils are preserved in certain rock deposits.
The only tool, they need at first, is keen eyesight.
Tiny white bone fragments on the surface hint,
at what can be an entire dinosaur buried below.
There's alot of bones in here.
Always a good place.
Hey, come check this out. -Oh, what? - An egg.
With decades of experience,
Mike and Mark readily spot fossils and identify them.
For grad students Alan and Amy,
time in the field is the best way,
to develop their own skills.
This is my first time going to the Gobi with Mark and everyone.
I'm really excited and happy to be a part of a tradition,
that goes back to Roy Chapman Andrews.
The Gobi expeditions are a collaboration
with the Mongolian Acadamy of Sciences.
This year, Mongolian grad student Boldra Mingin joins the team.
My father is a paleontologist.
And when he first showed me a giant skeleton found in Mongolia,
i couldn't believe, such animals really lived.
I have loved finding fossils ever since.
Today, after only a few hours of searching,
the team uncovers a fossilized skull.
Julia is quick to recognize it as that of a large, armored dinosaur.
It's called the Pinacosaurus,
it was sort of a heavy tank of its day.
With experience, we can visualize,
what fossils like this, would have looked like in live.
Pinacosaurus and its relatives, like this Tarchia,
were built for defence.
Their backs bristled with rows of hard, bony plates and spikes.
Even their eyelids were armored.
And their tails ended in a massive bony club.
One of Tarchia's few enemies was the ferocious Tarbosaurus,
whose bones have also been found in the Gobi.
Tarbosaurus was a close relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex,
and it was a top predator.
It was 30 feet long and weighet five tons.
It had a super-sized bite
with razor-sharp teeth nearly six inches long.
Scientists have debated for many years,
how fast or slow these big predators were.
This scale model of a T-Rex skeleton reveals,
how a massive two-legged,
or bipedal dinosaur might have moved.
As they walked, they shifted their entire weight from leg to leg,
as humans do.
Their large tales helped to balance them.
Their legs were directly beneath their hips,
allowing them to carry more weight and move faster.
Dinosaurs like T-Rex could have reached speeds up to 25 mph.
Faster than an average human could run.
Tarbosaurus was at the top of the food chain in the area of Asia,
that is now the Gobi Desert.
But Tarchia was no wimp,
and could use its tale club to cripple or kill an attacker.
In the 1920s, the Andrews' expeditions
found a number of new dinosaurs.
Their most important discovery wasn't a ferocious predator.
It was something rather small.
But one of the great dinosaur finds of all time.
They find the first dinosaur eggs.
Lying in large round nests in the ground.
This amazing find confirmed, that dinosaurs actually laid eggs.
Andrews and his team believed,
the eggs belonged to Protoceratops,
because they found so many of these dinosaurs in the Gobi.
About the size of sheep,
Protoceratops had a distinctive head shield and a hook-like beak.
On top of one nest, they made a puzzling discovery.
The skeleton of a bird-like meat-eating dinosaur,
definitely not a Protoceratops.
They concluded, that it was a predator,
that had been raiding the nest.
It was named Oviraptor,
meaning "egg thief".
It took 7 years to prove, they were wrong.
In 1993, Mark Norell made an extraordinary find in the Gobi.
A fossilized dinosaur embryo.
We discovered,
that it was the embryo of a very close relative of Oviraptor.
In other words, the dinosaur was not stealing the eggs,
it was a good parent, that was brooding them.
The discovery of Oviraptors, preserved on their nests,
sheds new light on these dinosaurs.
They sat on their eggs, just like modern birds.
Many of the Gobi dinosaurs
are in a remarkable state of preservation.
Undisturbed by scavengers or damaged by erosion.
Not only Oviraptors, but many others,
like the fighting dinosaurs.
And even a nest full of barely hatched baby Protoceratops...
How did they die so suddenly, and remain so intact?
Until recently, it was thought,
that sandstorms buried these creatures.
New evidences suggests a much more spectacular scenario.
During this expedition,
heavier than normal rainfall flooded parts of the Gobi.
According to a new theory,
water and sand dunes played a dramatic part
in preserving dinosaur remains.
Scientists now believe, that every few centuries
rainstorms of immense power swept down on this arid world,
with catastrophic effect.
The inhabitants could not have known, what was coming.
A pair of speedy, aggressive Velociraptors were on a hunt,
and approached a large group of nesting Oviraptors.
But on this day, unaware, that they are chasing their last meal.
Bones become fossilized, when they are quickly buried,
protecting them from weather and predators.
Over time, living tissues decay and bone is replaced by minerals,
seeping in from the surrounding sediment.
But bones are not the only clues
to the understanding of dinosaur life.
New evidence is revolutionizing our view
of dinosaurs like Velociraptor.
Long thought to be leathery-skinned or scaly,
Velociraptor was in fact covered with feathers.
And though it could not fly,
it had the same s-shaped neck,
four-toed feet, and many other features, that birds have today.
Julia Clarke is using the very latest evidence
to study one of natureâs most enduring mysteries,
the origin of birds,
and how feathers developed to give them the power of flight.
Understanding the evolution of flight
is to me one of the most interesting questions
in dinosaur paleontology.
Dozens of new dinosaur species
are being discovered in the north of China.
They are preserved in extremely fine volcanic ash
and, for the first time,
we can see distinct impressions of feathers
associated with their delicate bones,
confirming to us that non-flying dinosaurs
were the first feathered creatures on Earth.
But at least one group of dinosaurs,
like this Confuciusornis,
recently found in China,
did develop the body structure and the kind of feathers
that allowed them to take to the sky.
65 million years ago dinosaurs disappeared from Earth.
Or so it was long thought.
Today we know that the dinosaurs are not all gone.
One line of dinosaurs survives, and we call them birds.
Mongolia is a great place to find
some of the last non-flying dinosaurs,
that lived on Earth.
But to go further back in time and find the earliest dinosaurs,
scientists come to places like
the high desert badlands of New Mexico.
The land has a rich and turbulent human history of Pueblo people,
Spanish conquistadors, cowboys,and cattle rustlers.
But it has an even richer history of life
stretching back over 200 million years.
It is one of the few places in the world,
where rock layers span the Age of Dinosaurs.
The deeper the layer, the older the rock.
At the top, rock from the Cretaceous.
Below that, further back in time,
the gold and white cliffs of the Jurassic.
And near the bottom, the oldest, red Triassic badlands,
when dinosaurs first appeared.
Alan Turner is having a busy summer.
In addition to trekking across the Gobi,
he is working with his fellow grad student Sterling Nesbitt
on a new excavation at a place called Ghost Ranch.
Sterling grew up in the Southwest,
reading about dinosaurs and the amazing discoveries
that had been made at Ghost Ranch.
I have spent every summer since i was 15 digging for dinosaurs.
I have always wanted to be a paleontologist
so the chance to excavate at Ghost Ranch is a dream come true.
Ghost Ranch was explored in the 1940s
by paleontologists from the American Museum.
They discovered rich fossil beds 220 million years old
with hundreds of bones of a small, early dinosaur
now considered a kind of blueprint
for the carnivorous dinosaurs yet to come.
Named Coelophysis, it grew to nine feet long and weighed 100 pounds.
Its size and leg bones indicate an ability to run fast.
On each hand it had three-clawed fingers
for catching and holding prey.
Its large eye sockets suggest very acute vision.
It all adds up to a small but effective predator.
Pursuing his graduate research, Sterling became intrigued
by the dozens of unexamined fossils at the museum,
collected from Ghost Ranch in the 1940s.
He knew that not all dinosaur discoveries are made in the field.
Each expedition collects fossils
and brings them back for later examination.
But some remain in museum catacombs for decades, unopened.
It's amazing,
When you walk through these catacombs,
filled with tens of thousands of dinosaur bones,
some still wrapped in plaster,
and you realize
that they were dug up by really famous paleontologists.
To get the chance to see,
what they saw for the first time in 70 or 80 years,
is pretty incredible.
It took me a few months to prepare
and remove the bones from that old plaster cast,
but by comparing it to Coelophysis directly,
I very quickly realized, that this was not a dinosaur at all.
It was actually an animal new to science.
It is not often that a grad student discovers a new species.
And when his find captures the attention
of leading paleontologists like Mike and Mark,
it is a memorable day.
Sterling named this new creature Effigia,
the Latin word for ghost, in honor of Ghost Ranch.
It was up to nine feet long and weight about 200 pounds.
It really looks like a dinosaur,
but one bone tells a different story.
The ankle is that of an ancient relative of crocodiles,
telling us that Effigia was a member of the crocodile group.
But strangely Effigia walked upright on two legs.
After the discovery of Effigia, i knew i had to go to New Mexico.
My first stop was to see Alex Downs,
curator of paleontology at Ghost Ranch,
who has been working for years on Coelophysis.
This is one of the few places in the world,
where fossilized bones of early dinosaurs
and their closest relatives are found together.
There is a somewhat larger one here.
This is a tip of the snout, and we can see the teeth here.
And we have a beautiful skull...
It's just missing one tooth. -That's great.
For grad students like Sterling and Alan
who work in classrooms and labs most of the year,
the opportunity to spend a few weeks
at a hot, dusty hunt for dinosaurs
is what they live for.
The new dig at Ghost Ranch is a joint project
of the University of California Berkeley
and the American Museum.
Once the overlying tons of rock are removed,
the grad students soon realize
they have come upon a huge fossil site.
For Paleontologists great work is often accomplished,
while lying down on the job.
We hope to piece together a picture
of which creatures lived in the Late Triassic.
What their surroundings were like,
and where they fit into the family tree of reptiles.
When dinosaurs first appeared,
this part of North America was a very different environment.
The region had a wet tropical climate.
Tall evergreen-like trees grew
along the banks of streams and rivers
cutting through a vast floodplain.
All in all, it seemed to have been a rich habitat for life.
The question is,
how did early dinosaurs interact with other animals?
Raptiles appeared on Earth before dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are reptiles too, but over 200 million years ago,
they branched off from the evolutionary line
leading towards crocodiles.
Effigia was an early crocodile relative.
Coelophysis was one of the first dinosaurs.
Undoubtedly, they came across one another
in the canyons and forests of the Triassic Southwest.
The prospect of a new dinosaur discovery
has brought Mike, Julia, and Mark
to Ghost Ranch to see for themselves.
The number of fossils here is staggering.
Layers and layers of animals
are piled up in this mass burial place,
which seems to have been a sharp bend in an ancient riverbed.
What happened here?
The high desert landscape is dramatic,
and so are the torrential rainsqualls
that can turn dry canyons into raging rivers of death,
as they must have done back in the age of dinosaurs.
In Arizonaâs Petrified Forest National Park,
200 million year old fossilized trees are reappearing
as the ground erodes around them,
evidence of the ancient floods
that violently uprooted and buried them.
Though now extinct,
these giant trees of the Triassic
were similar to the Pacific redwoods of today.
But it was not just trees that were swept up in ancient floods.
Early dinosaurs like Coelophysis were always on the defensive.
They lived in a world still dominated by larger reptiles,
like this 1500-pound Postosuchus.
Flash floods washed the drowned bodies of reptiles and dinosaurs
into concentrated deposits.
Perhaps this is why Sterling and team
are finding so many in one area.
When they locate a skeleton,
they carefully excavate around it,
then cover it up with a jacket made of plaster and toilet paper,
which always comes in handy out in the field.
This protects the fossils
so that they can be transported to the lab,
where the bones will be delicately separated from the rock.
This summer's dig at Ghost Ranch
has been productive beyond our greatest expectations.
We have found something really exciting
and we think it maybe a new dinosaur.
It is thrilling to find a dinosaur we have never known before
that has not seen the light of day for over 200 million years.
It will take many months to determine
what it looked like and how important it is,
but it will surely change our views
of how dinosaurs rose to dominance.
There are things, the fossil record cannot preserve,
that we may never know,
such as the color of dinosaurs
or precisely what sounds they made.
But year by year, we learn more about them.
Some dinosaurs traveled in herds and hunted in packs.
We know that they made nests, protected their eggs,
probably cared for their young.
From som fossils we learned, who were the hunters,
and who were the hunted.
That feathers first appeared on non-flying dinosaurs,
before birds evolved.
And that some dinosaurs live on, as modern birds.
Those who love to contemplate
the secrets of the history of life,
must come to places
like Ghost Ranch and the Flaming Cliffs.
It is hard to imagine our own human sense
of who we are and where we come from
without the records buried beneath our feet.
For young paleontologists like Sterling and Alan,
the adventure is just a beginning.
Three quarters of a century ago,
Roy Chapman Andrews discovered a whole new world of dinosaurs
beneath the Flaming Cliffs.
Camping in this magical place, he wroted in his diary,
of a sense of having traveled back in time.
It is a feeling shared by paleontologists then and now.
In the evening shadows, the rocks took on fantastic shapes
We seemed to be living in the world of a long-gone yesterday.
At any moment,
I imagined that dinosaurs might wander to the doorways of our tents.
We have discovered less than two percent
of all the dinosaur species that once lived.
Imagine...
All those dinosaurs out there yet to be found.
Translation: jierro Contact: podnapisi.net
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