How scientists solved this dinosaur puzzle

Key Takeaways

in 1908 in Montana paleontologists uncovered this the remains of a sharp-toothed carnivorous dinosaur at the time it was the largest one ever discovered they called it Tyrannosaurus Rex today it's mounted here well some of it is because they didn't find a full dinosaur in 1908 what they found was the skull most of the tails the ribcage pelvis and most of the vertebrae but the rest of what you're seeing here it's man-made and that's true for most dinosaur exhibits when paleontologists uncover the bones of a dinosaur they usually only find part of it leaving them with a prehistoric puzzle full of missing pieces so how do they fill in the blanks [Music] when we first started mounting dinosaurs in the 1900s researchers had to make a lot of educated guesses the first step was to get the bones they did have in the right places and one thing that helps is to look at animals that exist now we can just look at this try to source rex and we can see a lot of characteristics on it that are present in like chickens for instance dr. mark Norell runs the paleontology division at the American Museum of Natural History if you look at the feet it has three primary toes that all face forward it has an s-shaped neck it carries its backbone parallel to the ground and from there they had to start filling in the missing pieces for this t-rex both hind limbs and both front limbs were missing but judging by the skeleton researchers determined it was closely related to an Allosaurus so an artist was commissioned to hand carve the missing pieces using the Allosaurus skeleton as a reference years later they'd be replaced by replicas of real t-rex bones it turned out that t-rex feet do look a lot like Allosaurus feet but there were other times this kind of guesswork didn't work out so well this long-necked dinosaur is called an Apatosaurus but for a long time we called it something else when researchers originally discovered it was missing its skull so they made it one but they made the skull based on some bad assumptions they made the skull look like a Camarasaurus which is a very different group of dinosaurs so it has a very high dome skull so they put the Camarasaurus skull on the Apatosaurus body and gave the new dinosaur a named brontosaurus the error was finally corrected in the 1970s the skull was replaced with a new more accurate version and brontosaurus was renamed Apatosaurus but today I can confidently walk you through the fossil haul in a museum and say these skeletons are 99 to 100 percent accurate because designing exhibits now it has very little to do with guesswork today the field of paleontology has exploded to the point where we're uncovering almost one new dinosaur species a week today that there's more dinosaur paleontologists and there ever have been there's more dinosaurs being discovered than there have been at a quicker rate each year and with more dinosaurs come more accurate exhibits while we still haven't found a fully intact t-rex we now have the information to build one I first got my job here thirty years ago there was about 10 t-rex is down and now there's 46 so if we just put all those together we know what the whole skeleton will play so this t-rex is ultimately kind of a Frankenstein monster the pieces used to complete it were copied from various other tier X's and finally in special cases like su an exceptionally large t-rex on display in the Field Museum researchers used computers to scan and mirrored limbs as in if they have the left leg they essentially flip it to create the right leg of the same size it's efficient and precise work in other words it's highly unlikely you'll stumble across a dinosaur with the wrong head today because even though dinosaur skeletons don't show up in one piece there's no longer a lot of mystery around how they're supposed to look take a look at Norrell's newest exhibit at the Museum of Natural History and you can see that today dinosaur researchers have moved on from the skeleton to asking other questions about t-rex how did it move how did it grow how did it live now we work with everything from neurobiologists to material sciences to engineers just to you know do some of the work on these things and that's pretty much of a new thing I mean 30 years ago that really wouldn't have happened in this case neural and his team have reconstructed full models of the enormous predator that are more lifelike than ever before so why are we even piecing together skeletons anymore why not just display what's actually found paleontologists say that it's because exhibits aren't just about boasting discoveries when you make an exhibit that you have to tell story and that story isn't about how humans found some fossils in 1908 it's the story of a living animal that walked the earth millions of years before us in this video I briefly mentioned a time when scientists took the wrong head on a dinosaur and mislabeled it brontosaurus and while I didn't have time to fully explore that topic in this video I wanted a quick and easy way to compile some of the research around the debate on whether brontosaurus ever existed so I created a website Wix where I can easily organize some of the theories it's a super easy way to create a website click on the link below to make your own Wix doesn't directly impact our editorial but their support does make videos like this one possible so go check them out