Dinosaurs - you've probably seen
hundreds of them.
You might think you know what they look like,
but almost every dinosaur you've ever seen
is a work of fiction.
LOW GROWL You turn on the television,
it almost feels that we know everything
about them,
and that's not really the case.
But now, a groundbreaking new
exhibition is working
with the world's leading dinosaur scientists
to revolutionise the way we see these animals.
We've found, using computer models,
that a human sprinter
would probably be pretty well matched
for a muscular tyrannosaurus.
Scientists are pushing the frontiers
of our knowledge
in new and surprising ways.
We can say these dark stripes were not red,
- black or whatever - they were ginger.
- That's just amazing.
But we've never even found a complete skeleton
of a Tyrannosaurus rex,
the most famous dinosaur.
So, how on earth have we worked out so much
about animals that lived millions of years ago?
How do we get from an incomplete pile
of broken bones to this.
ROARING
How do you build a dinosaur?
I'm Alice Roberts. I'm an anatomist used
to working with human bodies.
It's not hard to put a human skeleton together.
You only need to look in the mirror
to get a pretty good idea of
where the bones go.
But what do you do when the bones belong
to animals that went extinct
millions of years ago?
We all think that we know
what dinosaurs looked like.
We've seen plenty of them
- pictures, in films and animations,
even in toy shops.
But given that the last of the dinosaurs
died out
about 65 million years ago,
none of us has ever actually
seen a living dinosaur.
So, how do we know what they looked like
and how can we be sure that
we're getting it right?
Here in Crystal Palace, in south London,
you can still see the first dinosaur exhibition
that was ever built
anywhere in the world.
The sculptures were unveiled in 1854.
It was the start of an obsession
that we've never got over.
But it wasn't long before the science
behind these reconstructions
had lost credibility.
Even by the end of the 19th century,
our ideas about dinosaurs
had changed so much
that these models were already
looked upon with scorn.
This megalosaurus, for instance,
is shown walking on all four legs,
but we now know he would have been bipedal -
he would have stood on just his hind legs
and his forelegs would have been quite small
and lifted right up off the ground.
When the first iguanodon was discovered,
only one thumb bone was found,
so palaeontologists thought
it must have been a horn.
But iguanodon didn't have a horn.
It's very easy to walk amongst
these massive models
and to laugh at the 19th-century idea of
what a dinosaur was like.
We now know so much more.
We've worked out a phenomenal
amount about the dinosaurs.
But how have we done that?
How do you start to get close to animals
that lived hundreds of millions of years ago?
From 19th-century London,
to 21st-century Los Angeles.
I want to know how we can be sure
that we're now getting it right.
So, I've come to LA's Museum of
Natural History.
The museum is undergoing major
redevelopment at the moment,
and at the centre of it all
is a multimillion dollar new dinosaur exhibit.
'Luis Chiappe is director of
the museum's Dinosaur Institute
'and curator of the new exhibition.'
- Hello, Luis. Hello.
- How are you?
- I'm very well. Nice to meet you.
- Likewise.
'He'll be packing it with everything
we know about dinosaurs,
'from the biggest to the smallest,
with the latest science
'on how they looked, moved and interacted.
Beyond the fact that the exhibition
is about dinosaurs,
what's the idea behind it?
It's really how do we know what
we know about dinosaurs?
You're not just presenting facts,
you're showing how you got to that knowledge?
Yes, how do we translate the evidence
that we find in the field
into scientific knowledge.
- So, can I get a sneak preview?
- Sure, of course.
- Yeah?
- Yes.
'Our knowledge of dinosaurs has been
transformed over recent years,
'and that means that when it opens,
Luis's exhibition
'will aim to be the most scientifically accurate
representation of dinosaurs ever.
'The science will be brought to life
'by a wide and varied cast of dinosaurs,
but right now,
'the exhibition hall is a building site.'
We are approaching the centrepiece of
the exhibit, a large platform
that will support three Tyrannosaurus rex,
what we call a growth series of
Tyrannosaurus rex.
Because a complete T rex skeleton
has never been found,
Luis's team will have to reconstruct
the missing bones.
Then he'll have to choose poses that reflect
the latest scientific thinking
on how these animals stood and moved,
and with three T rexs on a single platform,
he'll even be considering how they interacted.
All this for animals that went extinct
But dinosaurs weren't all big and scary.
We're still learning more about
some of T rex's relatives,
and Luis will also be reconstructing
a tiny chicken-sized dinosaur called fruitadens.
As you come in to the other gallery,
there's going to be a platform
with a very large dinosaur, a long neck,
called mamenchisaurus,
and a tiny little one, the tiny fruitadens,
the smallest dinosaur in North America.
They have to build fruitadens
from little more than these fossil remains.
It's never been reconstructed before,
so working out what it looked like is
a huge challenge.
And Luis's team will be doing much more
than just piecing bones back together.
They'll be creating a lifelike model of the animal,
which means adding muscles and skin.
I think when most of us go to
an exhibition like this,
we don't think about all of the
work that's gone into it,
and an exhibition on this scale
requires hundreds of people to be
working together,
from scientists, to engineers,
to artists, and designers.
But absolutely none of it would be possible
without the starting point of the hard evidence,
the fossils themselves,
because if we'd never found their bones,
we wouldn't ever have known that
these ancient animals ever existed.
Luis has come to the southeastern corner of Utah.
Today, this is Wild West country,
a stopoff on the way to the Grand Canyon,
and its past is equally epic.
All the rocks you can see around
here are mostly of Jurassic age,
so this is prime dinosaur country.
At the time of the Jurassic,
the dinosaurs were in their prime
and this was their home.
But it was a very different world.
Back then, this area was awash
with streams and flood plains.
It was the perfect habitat
for the largest land animals that have ever lived -
the sauropods,
long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs.
It's just a phenomenal place.
It's beautiful and it's filled with clues about...
the ancient life.
In a vast desert, most of us wouldn't have a hope
of finding those clues.
But if you know what you're looking for,
the hint of a different colour on
the ground is all it takes.
Let me take a closer look.
You can see the bones
right here, and here, and here.
It's very difficult to see what exactly they may be.
They're very thin.
It would probably be worth coming back
and cleaning this a little bit
and taking a closer look at what they may be.
Amazingly, less than 100 metres away,
there are more clues to the past.
Luis's colleague has found
the remains of a sauropod.
There's a piece of rib here
that's going into the ground,
about this angle,
and then there's a piece of the...
a pubis, the hipbone, right here,
and it's almost complete,
save for the very back end,
which is already starting to weather off.
Luis has to decide what to do with these finds.
Starting a new dig is a huge undertaking,
requiring time and money,
and he has limited resources.
We already have two very good sites
with long-necked dinosaurs.
I'm reluctant to open another excavation.
Just half a mile away is one of those sites.
Luis's team began work on it a year ago.
Most of the bones are still embedded in the rock
and must be painstakingly excavated.
Luis knows from the layer of rock they're digging
that this dinosaur died 150 million years ago,
but he doesn't know what species it is,
and it's potentially a dinosaur that
has never been seen before.
We are actually collecting in an area
that has not been sampled, no-one
has really worked here before.
The possibility of having a new species is very,
very, exciting.
A fossil dig is like a murder scene -
every piece of evidence about
what happened 150 million years ago
has to be salvaged.
The layout of the entire site will be mapped
and the precise location
of every bone fragment recorded,
to help piece together the remains.
The more complete the skeleton,
the easier it will be to identify
and the greater the likelihood that this dinosaur
will be turned into an exhibit.
We have hind limbs, we have forelimbs,
we have a lot of the tail,
we have ribs, we have many parts of the skeleton,
and now we're starting to uncover the neck.
I would anticipate
that we're going to have to keep
opening the quarry
to uncover many other neck vertebra and,
hopefully, the skull.
Working out what species this is
won't be possible until the bones are back in LA.
But fossils are fragile and moving
them is a risky business.
Ready? One, two, three, move.
It has to be 400 pounds at least,
right? If not more.
Go slowly.
The team begin the precarious
task of shifting a femur,
the single heaviest bone in the dinosaur's body.
Try to keep in a line,
because if we go on this side,
it's just going to be really difficult.
Doug, why don't you go that way?
Because the fossil is so delicate,
it's been cased in plaster and reinforced with steel bars.
'When you're handling bones
that are heavy and fragile,
'that is definitely not an easy process.'
Down.
'If, you know, you don't have the right people,
the bones can break.'
It will take many more months of work
to excavate the entire skeleton
and get it back to LA for analysis.
Good, good.
But to build an exhibition,
you don't have to spend months in
the desert digging up bones.
There are other places to find fossils.
There are plenty of palaeontologists
working out in the field
and excavating new fossils,
naming new species every year,
but there are also scientists
who are combing through existing
collections in dusty store rooms,
hoping to make new discoveries
from bones that were found decades,
if not centuries ago.
I've come to the Natural History Museum in Oxford,
and I'm here to meet Darren Naish.
He's a palaeontologist who looks for new dinosaurs
in the back rooms of museums.
There are always a huge number of
specimens behind the scenes...
..either because they're incomplete,
unglamorous, or unidentified.
Darren, I do love these museum collections,
when you come behind the scenes
and you suddenly feel that you're
surrounded by treasures.
It's amazing to think that there are
new discoveries to be made in here as well.
In a way there are almost too many specimens
for the number of experts out there.
There's new stuff to find in collections.
You don't have to go out in the field.
You can rummage through museum drawers.
You WILL find something new.
Recently, Darren and a colleague did exactly that.
They came across a bone
that had been lying on a museum
shelf since Victorian times.
It may look unremarkable,
but with several unique features,
it didn't fit with anything that had
been found before,
and it was enough for them
to describe a new species.
It must have been really exciting to name
a whole new species of dinosaur.
Yeah. We realised straight away that, wow,
this is something completely new.
Naming a new species, not such a big deal.
- It's quite easy to do.
- Really?
- But finding...
- There are...
- For me, you'd think that would be a kind of once in a lifetime,
wow, I've named a new species of dinosaur,
but no?
No. There's huge swathes of the tree of life,
there's very little work been done.
It's quite easy to find new species.
We're in a golden age of dinosaur discovery.
- There's about 50 new species of dinosaurs named every year.
- Really?
About 90% of all named dinosaurs have been
named since about 1990.
If you were to generate a discovery
curve of dinosaurs over time,
you'd have a curve that's shaped like this,
and we're currently on the steep upward
curve of the graph.
Why do you think there's such a craze for
naming new dinosaurs at the moment?
Regions of the world are being explored more
that haven't been really looked at much beforehand.
So, places like southern South America,
much of central Asia,
parts of Africa and Australia,
more people are going out to those places,
finding new dinosaurs and bringing them back.
'And the more we find,
'the more complete our understanding of
the world of the dinosaurs becomes.'
It makes you realise just what a vast body of knowledge
we've now amassed about these extinct animals,
so that a palaeontologist can come along,
look at a single bone and say,
"This must be a whole new species".
And it also makes you wonder how many other dusty,
unloved specimens
are sitting there on store shelves,
just waiting to be recognised.
'Back in Los Angeles, Luis's team are working
on the bones that were dug up in Utah.
'The next step in turning them into an exhibition
is to work out exactly what they are.'
Well, this is where the fossil bones end up,
and here the preparators continue
the process of excavation,
this time using delicate tools
and cleaning away the last of the hard sediment,
revealing the bone itself.
It's here in the dino lab
that the dinosaurs really start to come back to life.
So, Luis, is this one of the specimens from Utah?
Yes, it is.
It looks like it's taking ages
- to extract this from the stony matrix
that has built up around it.
- Yeah, yeah.
Well, Erica's been working on
this bone for several weeks.
It will definitely take years
for the entire skeleton to be prepared,
to be cleaned up.
Do you have an idea at the moment
what species of dinosaur this might be from?
Not entirely, in terms of the species.
But we know it's a camarasaurid.
'Camarasaurids were a family of
long-necked dinosaurs.
'We currently know of four different
species of them,
'but Luis is hopeful that he might
have found a fifth.'
So, what features will you be looking at,
as the bones are cleaned up,
to help you refine your identification?
Well, you'll be looking at the shape of
the centrum here,
the configuration of the different processes,
the struts,
the spines of the vertebra that are, in general,
very diagnostic, they're very telling.
You must have to be an amazing anatomist,
and you must have to know
the anatomy of so many different dinosaurs,
to be able to work out what it is you're looking at?
Yes, but sometimes it's difficult.
For example, here...
we have two bones of one dinosaur.
Can you figure out what they are?
Well, mm... I'm a human anatomist
so this is stretching my expertise somewhat,
asking me to identify dinosaur bones!
- And these ones are not very well preserved, I'm sorry.
- Brilliant!
You know, they're fairly kind of flat pieces of bone,
so I would think maybe this is part of
the skull or the jaw.
- Am I anywhere near?
- Yes, you're absolutely right.
So, what you have here are two lower jaws of
a duck-billed dinosaur.
So, they'd come together in the mid-line somehow?
Yes, they actually come together right here.
- SHE CHUCKLES
- The other way round!
Brilliant.
I know how difficult it can be to piece together
an ancient skeleton from fragments,
but I've only ever worked with one species, humans,
so I'm really impressed by palaeontologists,
who have to understand the anatomy of
hundreds of different dinosaur species.
Identifying a dinosaur is just the starting point
for unlocking its secrets and getting it
ready for display.
It will be years before this dinosaur is
ready for the public.
Instead, the centrepiece of Luis's exhibition
will be three T rex skeletons that have
already been excavated
and are now ready to be mounted.
They're being put together in
a workshop in New Jersey.
Resurrecting these awe-inspiring creatures
will require mounting the bones in a way
that reflects the latest scientific understanding
about posture, movement and behaviour.
But the fossil remains of each of these animals
are desperately incomplete.
Paul Zawisha is in charge of turning the partial,
distorted skeletons,
into the most up-to-date reflection of scientific
knowledge.
Okey-doke...
We've got another several weeks and I'm trying to
figure out where everyone's at. Tommy?
Right now we're about...
Everything is articulated. We have to get
the new bases built.
Did you get those hands straightened out?
- Yeah, I think we finally figured it out!
- That's good!
Two days later.
Working closely with Luis,
Paul and his team will turn
a miniature model of the three T rexs
into a finished exhibit.
The science will come alive through
a combination of art and engineering.
Luis came out here several months ago,
he pretty much shifted things around to the scenario
that's going on here.
But again, we have a little liberty,
because we want to make
these things come to life, otherwise they just...
they just don't move and they don't look real.
Fossilised bones are essentially solid lumps of rock,
which means that mounting them into
a skeleton is an enormous challenge.
Most of the bones are real,
which makes them extremely heavy.
We're estimating the total weight of the bones
is a little over a ton.
The femur's probably...
a good 200, 250 pounds apiece,
and we have to set those in place
with special rigging devices.
Heaven forbid one of them falls
because it would take quite a bit of time
to get those back together.
The entire skeleton will be held together using
a custom-made steel frame,
which needs to be strong enough
to support the enormous weight of the fossils.
This will fit in, this will get attached,
to this other section over here,
and I'll take one of these ribs here,
and I'm not sure exactly which one
goes where at this point.
This is number five, so it would...
lay down right in there.
That will actually get screwed in at the bottom
and just settle itself right... right in here.
Like many T rexs,
this one has been given a nickname - Thomas.
He's one of the best T rex specimens ever discovered
but is still only 70% complete.
The missing bones have all been made
by Paul's team,
based on over 30 partial Tyrannosaurus rexs
that have been found so far.
This particular rib, you could see where the real rib
goes together with the artificial rib,
and this is a section that we had modelled
and you can see how it blends in with the real rib,
how it's glued, and it's also pinned on the inside
so it doesn't break.
And these ribs will break like icicles.
If you pick them up the wrong way,
they'll just crack,
break right apart.
It's not just about hanging the skeletons safely.
The steel frame will be a work of art in itself,
millimetre perfect
and subtle enough not to draw attention
away from the dinosaur.
Hon Chin is filing down part of the rib armature.
Again, this is specifically made,
like a piece of jewellery.
It has to hold a specific piece in a special way.
He's at the point where he's starting
to clean up the welds
and it's going to be gorgeous by
the time he's finished, so...!
The pose in which the dinosaur is hung,
while being true to science,
will also involve a degree of artistic interpretation,
to really bring the exhibit to life.
- A little bit more of a sine wave in it.
- OK.
- It's a little too flat
and it's not moving well, so...
Myself and Kevin have been working on the tail
and I don't like the way it looks,
and now we're going to be taking that down next week
and putting a slight bend in that,
to give it a bit more life.
But it's just a visual movement. For instance,
we might change the toes just a little bit
to give this thing a sneaking feeling,
or a pausing feeling.
But it's very, very, very subtle.
You might move one toe just one inch,
in one direction,
and that changes how you visualise this whole thing.
But putting dinosaurs back together
is about more than just reconstructing skeletons.
We need to work out how they stood,
how they moved,
and even understand the details of their physiology,
and that's not something that's easy to get right.
For example, we used to think that
T rex held its head high,
with its tail dragging along the ground.
We saw it as a cold-blooded,
lizard-like creature.
It wasn't until recently that T rex became
a forward-thrusting aggressor,
so fast, it could apparently outrun a car.
So, how did a T rex stand,
and was it really that quick?
LOW GROWL
Palaeontologists now have access to
an incredible set of clues
that can help us understand the posture
and movement of dinosaurs.
It's a set of clues that can tell us what they
might have looked like in the flesh,
a set of clues that can even shed light
on how quickly they might have run,
and a set of clues that we all see every day.
Birds are the living descendents of a dinosaur
because dinosaurs have living descendants.
Dinosaurs are not extinct
they did not become extinct at the end
of the Mesozoic era.
'It's an incredible idea
'but most experts now believe that today's birds
'are the direct descendents of ancient dinosaurs.'
- So, does that mean birds actually ARE dinosaurs?
- Yes, absolutely.
How can you be sure about that?
You have evidence from the skeletal anatomy,
you have evidence from the shape of the eggs
and the microstructure of the eggshell,
a discovery of a wealth of feathered dinosaurs,
animals that are unquestionably dinosaurs
and yet have feathers that look just like
the feathers of modern birds.
'It's a discovery that revolutionises
the way we see dinosaurs.'
Even some tyrannosaurs were feathered,
but the relationship between birds and dinosaurs
can tell us much more than simply
what they may have looked like.
So, does this mean that we can use living birds
to help us understand dinosaurs?
Absolutely.
You know, you have 10,000 living species of birds
that are providing you an enormous
amount of information
that you can use to understand the biology
of the ancient dinosaurs.
It's quite amazing, but it also makes
a certain degree of sense
when you really look at them.
If we want to learn about how
the ancient dinosaurs moved,
and even how quickly they ran,
few animals can tell us more than ostriches.
They evolved on an early branch
of the avian family tree,
and like the dinosaurs they're related to,
they're large, bipedal and flightless.
- We have some living dinosaurs here to take a look at.
- Yeah, a whole field of them.
Hello, ladies.
- They're all ladies, are they?
- Yes.
Yes, they're a bit more manageable
when they're females.
'Dr John Hutchinson is based at
the Royal Veterinary College just outside London.
'He's one of the world's leading experts
on dinosaur movement
'and Luis has been consulting him
'to make sure his T rexs reflect the latest theories.'
- Can I touch them?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Yeah? Will they peck me?
- They'll peck at your rings.
- Will they?
- Don't peck at my rings.
- They'll try to take them off.
- But they're not very strong at pecking.
- No.
SHE LAUGHS
I want to feel your feathers.
Now, this might be what a dinosaur felt like to touch.
- That's really soft and lovely.
- Yeah, just like a cuddly toy.
Aww!
- I'm stroking dinosaurs.
- Dinosaur.
- Yeah.
Get off me.
They do look like dinosaurs, especially
when you know some dinosaurs were feathered.
They do, and those feathers are quite
primitive in their structure,
a lot like some of the fossil feathers we find.
'The similarities aren't just on the surface.
'We can get a much better understanding
of ancient dinosaurs
'by looking at the anatomy of
their modern relatives in depth.
'And a local farm has recently had to
put down one of its ostriches.
'As an anatomist, I'm very used to
dissecting cadavers.'
Now, I don't usually wear Wellington boots
when I'm dissecting, I have to say.
'But this will be the first time that I've ever
dissected a bird
'or, for that matter, the descendant of a dinosaur.'
So, John,
talk me through the anatomy that
we can see on the surface.
That's our heel, the ankle joint,
but birds walk with that clear of the ground,
just like their dinosaurian ancestors did.
And really just two toes, and one main one.
The middle toe is their dominant toe,
just like in a dinosaur,
the third toe is the major toe of the foot.
'And there are other similarities to
their ancient relatives.'
I don't know if you can see this,
but here's the tip of the wing right here
- and there's a...
- Oh, there's a claw.
- ..lovely little claw coming off it.
- Yeah.
- So...
- That's at the end of one of the digits
- on their arms, on their wings?
- Yep.
- And it's just there as a relic of their ancestors.
- Mm, yeah.
'The real clues about dinosaurs
'come from seeing what the relationship is
'between a bird's muscles and it's bones.'
Right away we can see some of
the thigh muscles here.
- You can see this lovely...
- Yeah, I can see these.
- ..red colour,
beautiful beefy muscle.
So, based on dissections like this,
how accurately do you think
you can reconstruct the musculature
of extinct dinosaurs?
You can look at any bone and tell something about
the soft tissue anatomy of the animal,
from the scars,
the muscle scars and ligament and
tendon scars on the bones,
that are attachment points for all these things
that we see here as soft tissue.
Actually, if I bring a bone over,
we can superimpose these two.
It's got one big muscle attachment right here,
- and dinosaurs have a muscle scar just like this.
- Do they?
- It appears in the first bipedal dinosaurs,
this scar on the outside of the fibula... - Yeah.
..and is not present in earlier animals.
So, this is another link between dinosaurs and birds.
- So, the next time I see a bipedal dinosaur,
I must look for this lump.
- T rex will have a huge one of those.
- Yeah.
- It's just a massive scar, like this big.
- Yeah.
By estimating the muscle sizes of extinct animals
and inputting them into computer models,
John is able to get an incredible new insight
into how dinosaurs actually moved.
It's basically running a simulation.
The computer's figuring out what is the best way
to use these muscles,
given what we've put in, to raise the body up.
We're not animating it, we're not saying,
"Do it this way".
We're just giving it some basic rules of biology,
this is what kinds of things you should
be trying to do overall,
- and then it finds the best solution.
- Yeah, yeah.
So, John, you've actually done work
trying to reconstruct how T rex would have looked,
how his muscles would have worked,
how he would have run.
What kind of results have you got from that?
Yeah, we've found, using our computer models,
that a human sprinter
which can do 25 miles an hour or a little faster
would probably be pretty well matched for
a muscular tyrannosaurus,
or an average human who can run about
would probably be a pretty good match for
a skinnier version of a T rex.
John, I've heard some theories
where T rex has been put forward as running very fast,
probably faster than that.
So, has your work basically disproved that?
Yeah, I think it's put a lot of doubt in that idea,
that T rex could run as fast as a racehorse,
or even faster,
so 40 miles an hour, something like that.
I don't think you'd need an automobile to outrun a T rex.
We'd have a chance of outrunning them?
- Running away?
- Maybe, but it's never going to happen, thankfully.
The work of scientists like John has allowed us
to not only refine our ideas about these extinct animals,
but has actually transformed our image of them.
If you think about Tyrannosaurus rex as an example,
we used to think of him as standing upright like Godzilla,
but now we know that he couldn't have worked like that.
If you treat him like an engineering problem,
inform that using comparative anatomy of living animals,
and now we know that his body
was much more horizontal,
with his tail held up in the air,
and our reconstructions are much more robust.
We're getting as close as we possibly can
to what this long-dead animal would have looked like.
But even working out exactly what an adult
T rex would have looked like
only gives you a snapshot of a moment in time.
To really understand this animal,
we need to know how it changed over
the course of its entire life,
and that's why Luis's team
are attempting the first ever reconstruction
of a baby T rex.
There are some small,
very tiny segments of the baby,
but some of them are so small that
we can't match anything up.
Nothing like this has ever been found before.
It's much harder to recreate a baby than an adult.
Only a few tiny fragments of a skeleton
have ever been found.
Paul's colleague Tommy is trying to piece
together the remains
from little more than dinosaur dust.
There's not a lot of pieces and it's only for the skull.
See, I mean, I've gotten several little pieces put together.
All these bones had similar colour,
the texture on the surface was pretty close,
and a lot of times I'll look at the edge of the bone.
You'll see this one has a little white and a little black.
A lot of times it's just trying the piece,
seeing if it will fit.
A lot of people find it boring.
I don't know, it calms me!
Although useful for scientists,
these fossil remains are far too limited
to bring a baby T rex to life for an audience.
And that's why the entire baby skeleton will be a model,
its bones made not from fossils but
from foam and resin.
This is where the artists come in.
They will produce creatures from their imaginations,
but they have to be guided by the science
which provides them with a range of possibilities.
Ultimately, the animal that they draw or sculpt
will be a blend of science and art.
The baby T rex will be sculpted by Doyle,
one of Luis's artists.
When you're doing something that's brand new,
that there is no precedent for,
it can be a little nerve-racking and it can be a lot of fun.
For my baby T rex, there's no reference for that,
so there's a lot of interpretation there.
'With his miniature model of an
adult T rex for reference,
'along with the growing patterns of close
relatives of tyrannosaurs,
'it's possible to work out the likely
proportions of the baby.
'The starting point for the sculpture is
a simple illustration.'
So, I'm going to start off.
T rex, usually, an adult skull is a great way to measure,
because it's so big.
But in babies,
the skull is going to be thinner,
and the rule is always that the orbit
is going to be larger.
And also when you look at human babies,
I've noticed that they are about three heads tall,
versus an adult human, which is anywhere
from seven to nine,
depending on how tall they are.
Do you find yourself at all looking at
other people's reconstructions
and thinking, "They've got that wrong"?
Ah... Yes. SHE CHUCKLES
There are a bunch of people who are out there
who are coming from maybe film or special effects
or something like that.
They're doing this kind of work from
a less informed background.
So, I'm very privileged to work with a scientist,
and that's definitely an asset
that I don't dare forget.
- He's looking nice, this T rex, this little two-year-old.
- Yeah.
'But with limited fossil remains,
'the reconstruction has room for creative licence.'
So, can you draw me another baby T rex...
- Sure.
- ..based on the same evidence,
but taking it off in a different direction?
Let's do the same thing.
We have our head.
There's a lot of evidence
that some of them had feathers,
and that maybe some of them,
when they were young, would have had some
sort of downy covering
that would have left in adulthood,
so that it would have been shedded before
they were fully grown.
This little baby's looking extraordinarily bird-like
- and has really long legs.
- Yeah.
Is this a reasonable interpretation?
- There's nothing that says that it can't be this way.
- Right.
Fantastic. It's the same creature,
but they're very different.
The length of the legs is quite
extraordinary in this one.
And I love the feathers.
That immediately makes it look like
a completely different creature.
It shows you there's quite a bit of room
for artistic manoeuvre
- in these reconstructions.
- Yes. Definitely, definitely.
'The questions about Luis's baby T rex
'run even deeper than its appearance.
'With such limited fossils,
some scientists have actually questioned
whether the bones
'might belong to a different species
of dinosaur entirely -
'something like a T rex, but much smaller.'
You're presenting a mounted skeleton
of this baby T rex,
and this is the first baby T rex
that's been found and has been put on display.
How can you be sure that it is indeed a T rex, if it's a baby,
because bones change as juveniles turn into adults.
You can read the characteristics of the bone tissue
and that can tell you if the animal is
a full-grown individual
or if it's a baby or a very young individual.
So, we know that perhaps in future,
discoveries may prove
that there was another species of tyrannosaur
that essentially lived together with T rex
and that maybe this is a baby of
that particular species.
But at the moment, with information
that we have,
it seems that the most reasonable
hypothesis is to say
that this one represents a baby of
a Tyrannosaurus rex.
I think that's quite brave
to put something like a baby T rex in
this exhibition as a mounted skeleton,
because there's nothing to compare it with.
It is our responsibility to make sure
that people understand
that things are not written in stone
and our scientific conclusions change
as we gather more evidence.
Back in New Jersey,
the T rexs are nearly complete,
and Luis has come to inspect them.
This is phenomenal, you know.
- You like it?
- It looks awesome.
It's just fantastic. Really fantastic.
Everything you thought it would be?
- Better, better, better.
- Good.
It's hard to describe
but I feel that it's very dynamic, you know.
Well, we brought the right-hand foot over
the centre line quite a bit...
- Yeah, I can see that.
- ..with a turning, and...
I can see that.
- It gives a little... quite a bit of movement.
- Yeah.
I'm glad that you like it, Luis.
I think it's phenomenal.
But it's not completely finished.
Paul and his team need Luis's advice on
a couple of issues.
There are several unknowns,
and a complete tail has never been found.
So, on the older drawings that we have,
there's maybe 53 tail vertebra.
The newer thinking is, there's close to 43.
Palaeontology, mostly it's a soft science,
so theories change with new evidence
that is found.
One of the big questions about T rex
is what it's surprisingly short arms were used for.
They might have been used to hold on to prey,
or to push the body up from a sitting position
- no-one knows.
And that's partly because each arm
is anchored to the body
by the shoulder blade or scapula,
and there's no easy way of telling
exactly where that sat.
With the scapula I've seen
they've gone up closer to the vertebra
on the backbone.
I've also seen where they're lowered almost to
where the belly is.
There's parts of the front end of the scapula,
the coracoids.
Some people think they go together this much,
some think this much.
But that all has to do with how everything hangs on
the front end of this,
and also how the hands were used.
Those arms are just about the same size as
a human arm.
The difficulty in placing the scapula on Thomas
is compounded by the fact that the bones
were distorted
over the millions of years that they spent
buried underground.
They're flattened
and they don't really have the curvature
that they may have had
when the animal was alive, before.
It's really difficult to fit them on the sides
of the ribcage.
I guess that that's the nature of the beast.
We're going to have to find a compromise
and we'll live with it.
Back in LA, there are two months to go before
the exhibition opens.
The three T rexs are now installed.
Oh, this is a bit different.
There are dinosaurs here.
- Now, these guys I recognise.
- Yes.
So, this is your famous Thomas.
- Can we get up here?
- Sure.
- Yeah?
- You can... Absolutely. Feel free.
Face to face with a baby T rex.
'With three T rexs of different ages
on one platform,
'it's possible for the first time ever to get
an understanding
'of the entire life cycle of this legend of
the dinosaur kingdom.'
- Having a series of juvenile skeletons gives
you insights into the way dinosaurs grew?
- Absolutely.
The dinosaurs had growth spurts, so this animal
- is estimated to have died at the age of two.
- Right.
And this one here is estimated to have died
at the age of 13.
There's, you know, there's a size discrepancy here,
but they're also 11 years apart.
- Mm.
- Yet this animal is only four years...
- Yeah.
- ..older than this one, yet is enormously
bigger than this one.
What this is telling you is that between 13 and 17
they were able to add about 1,500 pounds -
that's, what, 750 kilograms a year.
Wow. And when you see the two skeletons close
to each other like that,
you really get a kind of physical impression of that.
'Although Thomas towers over the younger T rexs,
'even he wasn't fully grown.
'But at about 17 years old
'he was already 11 metres long and over
three tonnes in weight.'
- So, this is a juvenile? This enormous skeleton?
- Indeed, indeed.
- This is an animal that probably died at the age of 17.
- Right, OK.
- So, rather young.
- So, still a teenager?
- And you can tell that it's a juvenile,
not only based on the histology on the bone tissue,
for which we have studies of it,
but also because there are many bones that would fuse
when the animal was a full-grown...
- Yeah.
- ..that have not yet been fused.
One of them is here, the calcaneum and
the astragalus are completely unfused,
and both with the tibia.
'And it's not just the phenomenal speed
at which they grew
'that Luis is shedding light on.
'The final addition to this platform
'will be the carcass of another dinosaur
- the T rex's dinner.
'It will give us an insight
'into how the three T rexs may have interacted.'
So, how realistic do you think it is
to show three tyrannosaurs coming together like this?
We have evidence suggesting that these animals
lived in groups.
It's very reasonable to imagine a scene like this,
in which you have a juvenile
eating a carcass of a duck-billed dinosaur,
and other individuals coming and being attracted
by the carcass.
If there's going to be a skeleton here representing
an edmontosaurus,
a duck-billed dinosaur, being eaten by the T rexs,
is there actually evidence that they ate
this type of dinosaur?
You have evidence in the shape of bones of duck-bills,
like edmontosaurus,
that have tooth marks, essentially,
and those marks, those scratches on the bone,
coincide well
with the shape of the crowns of the teeth
of Tyrannosaurus rex.
That's quite forensic.
- So, you've actually got gnaw marks on a duck-billed dinosaur.
- Yes.
- Fantastic.
But the exhibition isn't only about T rex.
In amongst the 20 major mounts will be fruitadens,
the smallest dinosaur ever to be found
in North America.
Working from his own illustration,
Doyle has created five fruitadens.
It's the first time that this dinosaur has ever been reconstructed.
This is full-grown, to scale.
It's a very small dinosaur and one of
the smallest in the world.
Because the specimen
is so fragile and sparse,
the information that we can gather,
a lot of it is inferred,
or we're guessing that it fits with a group of animals,
based on what information we do have.
We don't have a full skeleton.
By comparing the size of a forelimb to a thighbone,
it was clear that fruitadens was bipedal.
And by studying close relatives,
it's possible to get a good idea
of what a complete skeleton would have looked like.
The real challenge was to turn that skeleton
into a fleshed-out animal.
Musculature can be inferred from the bones.
You can see muscle attachments.
Every animal has some sort of muscle
that pulls the leg back
and also something that supports the leg in front,
a calf muscle, gastrocnemius,
or any sort of tendon that would go down to the feet.
That's something that exists on every animal
that walks on land.
With large teeth for mashing plants
and sharper teeth for eating insects and worms,
we can even tell that fruitadens was an omnivore.
The final piece of the puzzle in recreating
this animal
is its colour, and that's something
we can't be sure about.
If you push things too far,
you go with polka dots and purple and pink,
your audience simply won't believe it.
But if you draw upon the examples of our living animals,
we can actually gain a lot just by looking
at crocodile skin
and the colouration and maybe some
lizards and fish, even,
and it will remain believable.
Like everything in the exhibition,
the finished work will have to be approved by Luis.
So, one thing we need to keep in mind
is that although we want to have
some variation in pattern,
or in colour, they obviously all need to
look the same species.
You going to give me some freedom
- to experiment with colours, maybe in the face or the throat?
- Yeah...
I still think that overall we want to stick to standard grey,
green, brown.
I think that it will be nice to be subtle,
but something that can be...
can be viewed when you're looking at it from,
you know, six feet away.
Although the colour of fruitadens is unknown,
new scientific breakthroughs
are allowing palaeontologists to see some
dinosaurs in a way
that's never been possible before.
We're still learning more about dinosaurs
as increasing numbers of specimens come to light,
but also as the techniques that we use
to analyse them
become more and more sophisticated.
And I'm off to meet somebody now
who's made great discoveries
in one particular aspect of dinosaur science
that many people thought would remain hidden for ever.
Here's another one we're going to look at.
I'll just put it in.
It will take a minute or two to fire up the vacuum.
'Professor Mike Benton recently came across
'the remains of a dinosaur that was
so exquisitely well preserved
'that feathers, as well as bones,
had fossilised.
'Incredibly, those feathers can tell us
the colour of a dinosaur
'that lived 125 million years ago.'
Going back, say, ten years ago, would you ever
have imagined that you would have been able
to tell what colour any dinosaurs would have been?
No. I mean, I think at that time I,
and everybody else,
would have said that is one of the things
we'll never know.
And so if we just focus up,
see what we've got here.
'Using a scanning electron microscope,
Mike can find clues
'about the pigmentation of these ancient fossil feathers.'
If we have a look at this...
- We're at quite high magnification - that's 9,000 times.
- Right.
All of these sausage shapes, then,
are melanosomes,
and in a living feather they would be full
of the chemical melanin,
which, in fact, gives the colour.
And these sausage-shaped ones
are a sure indicator of a particular kind of melanin,
which is the one that gives a black or dark
brown colour.
So, in some cases like this,
the field of view is completely packed
with the sausage-shaped ones,
so we know this must have been intensely black.
If they were more loosely spaced,
we'd know it was a paler colour,
maybe dark brown, or grey.
Right. So, is it just really the presence or absence
of the black pigments that you're able to ascertain?
The wonderful thing is that there's another form
of melanin that gives a ginger colour.
And it is packaged in a different shape of melanosome,
not this kind of cigar-shaped,
or sausage-shaped one,
but a spherical one, a little ball.
Close it up, get the vacuum going.
'A sample from a different fossil shows
what the structures that carry this ginger pigment look like.'
Oh, that's entirely different.
This surface looks as though you've taken a melon baller
and scooped out lots of little spherical hollows.
So, what colour would these
melanosomes have made?
This is definitely ginger.
If you look at a ginger hair from a mammal
or a human being, that's what you'd see also.
So, is it relatively easy to compare
your dinosaur feathers
with what's already known about
the feathers of living birds,
to get that comparison, to know what colours
you were looking at here?
We can put the specimens in one after the other.
There's the modern one, there's the fossil.
Spot the difference. No difference at all.
And who on earth would have thought a dinosaur
is close to a bird?
But there we are, it's kind of proved in the skeletons
and now, if you like, proved in the anatomy
of the feathers.
'For those few dinosaurs from whom
fossilised feathers have been found,
'largely in China,
'we can now put the finishing touches
to a reconstruction.'
Has this changed the way
that artists are painting their reconstructions, then?
We've got some dinosaurs
where you've got a very good idea exactly
what they look like.
Yes, it is changing the way people view them.
If we have a look at these paintings
of sinosauropteryx,
which is one of the lovely little dinosaurs,
this was probably done five or six years ago.
It looks a bit odd. They've got the texture
of the feathers
and that's more or less what we would believe
from the fossil,
but they've made it a strange sea green
kind of colour.
A few years later, the same artists
are able to produce
a picture like this, which shows the same dinosaur,
but with a very definite
ginger, white, ginger,
white sort of barber's pole stripe on the tail.
- So, this is based on your analysis of colour in
this particular dinosaur?
- Yes. Yes.
Of this particular dinosaur we took samples
from the dark stripes
and we can say these dark stripes
were not red or black or whatever
- they were ginger.
Right. That's just amazing.
So, this is more than just being able
to put a bit of colour
on your illustrations -
it's actually telling you something quite
important about dinosaurs?
Yes. It may say something about behaviour,
which we wouldn't have thought we could ever get to.
If they are coloured, and if they are striped
and patterned,
- there must be some visual purpose,
signalling of some kind.
- Yeah, yeah.
Camouflage, or sexual display,
or a warning thing -
you know, "I've got a flash of colour,
don't mess with me", you know.
So, there's all sorts of reasons they may have
had those colours.
These new discoveries really do bring dinosaurs
right out of the realm of the mythical and the fantastical.
They're not imagined creatures at all,
they are real.
And with some of them,
when we have all this information,
we can look at a reconstruction and know that
that is a lifelike representation of that animal,
from the size and shape of its body
to the way it holds itself, the way it moves,
down to its colour.
All of that is rooted in science.
Back in Los Angeles, last-minute preparations are under way to get the dinosaurs ready for the public.
It's only now that you get a sense of just
how many people have been involved
in creating this exhibition, from the artists,
to the designers,
to the teams that made the interactive media
and the mounts for the dinosaurs,
all of it bringing to life the decades of research
our current scientific understanding relies on.
CHEERING
The exhibition consists of over 300 specimens.
It's taken more than six years to complete
and cost tens of millions of dollars.
We've created an exhibit
that this part of the world has never seen.
And it's very rewarding for me to think about
the millions of kids
and the millions of people that during the next 20 years
will visit this exhibit
and will remember this exhibit for the rest of their lives.
These animals look like something out of a comic book,
or a Hollywood studio, but they were real.
From a pile of dusty bones millions of years old,
we can put a skeleton back together,
flesh it out, tell what colour these creatures were,
and even say something about how they grew up.
I think this is a unique time to be
a dinosaur palaeontologist.
We're finding so much, discovering new dinosaurs
and learning new things about them.
There are certainly still gaps in our knowledge
but I find it amazing just how much we do know
about these extinct animals that no-one
has ever actually seen alive
and that lived so many millions of years ago.
The creatures themselves are utterly awe-inspiring
but I think so is the incredible amount of work
and the vast numbers of people involved
in reconstructing them
so that we can come face to face with a dinosaur.