Well, hi everybody!
Welcome to the Geology 106 class Dinosaurs.
Looking forward to the quarter ahead with
you.
I think you will enjoy this class and I think
you will do well.
My goal is for all of us to achieve our goals
and enjoy the skills that we will be learning.
You have already seen some of the videos from
the orientation module.
This is really going to the first video about
some of the content of the course.
These videos are meant to be short.
As you know if you have played the orientation
video that you can speed me up and make these
videos even shorter through the button down
at the bottom of your screen.
Turn me on about 25 percent faster or slow
me down if you need to catch what we're saying.
But a couple more things I just want to mention
before we start with the slides.
You'll notice that most of these videos or
some of these videos are closed-captioned.
We're trying to do as many of those as we
can.
Our goal is to have them all closed-captioned
but at the moment we are working as fast as
we can at doing that.
You can maximize the screens and I am trying
to maximize the resolution to make the video
as clear as possible.
Sometimes I use the video as the main screen
and you'll see that it is in both screens
and I recommend that you maximize either the
small or the large window by going into the
right-hand corner of that window and click
on that little box.
One of those will probably be more in sync
with the audio than the other so check that
out and decide what works best for you.
If you have trouble starting these videos,
I have learned that you can do a stop and
start over again.
Sometimes the video doesn't open up the first
time through.
So if you have any trouble and the screen
remains blank or dark, just stop the video
and start it over on the timeline at the bottom
and I think that will work.
But if you have any questions, please contact
me.
Or contact the e-learning office.
They are at 934-3738.
Okay.
I want to mention this is our textbook.
You probably hopefully have a copy of this.
If not, please get one as soon as you can.
I am excited by this book.
It is a new edition, it just came out a few
months ago.
It has some up-to-date information in it and
also has some outdated information in it because,
as you know, the research on this particular
topic is exciting and accelerating and things
are coming out almost weekly.
So we will be bringing the textbook up to
speed.
We have a public blog on which we may talk
about that.
The authors of the textbook may come to our
public blog and we'll be able to give them
some advice on what we've noticed in their
textbook both plus and minus.
Okay, well let's take a look at these slides
here.
This is Geology 106.
I want to make sure that you know that these
slides are sort of a combination of things
I have put together, and Dr. Jerry Harris,
a friend of mine and paleontologist, has also
basically put these slides together initially
and I have modified them for this particular
course.
I want to make sure Jerry gets credit.
And, in fact, there is Jerry on the left side
of your screen being chased by a Monolophosaurus
outside a very famous institute in Beijing,
China, the IVPP, the Institute for Vertebrate
Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
Jerry and I visited that museum a few years
ago on a trip to China to see the feathered
dinosaurs.
I'll be talking more about those.
And there I am safe in my office just for
comparison there.
The study of dinosaurs, let's introduce that.
It's just a branch of paleontology.
A lot of times when you think about paleontologists,
you think okay this is about dinosaurs.
But not all paleontology is about dinosaurs.
Paleontology is the study of ancient life.
It could be flora, it could be fauna.
It usually involves fossils because that is
what we have to work with for the study of
ancient life.
So the dinosaurs are just one branch of this
science and I have here sort of a selection
of photos showing you all the different areas
in which paleontology tries to unravel what
happened in the past.
And, in fact, we'll be studying more than
dinosaurs in this course because we want to
learn what was the type of world that the
dinosaurs lived in, how did they interact
with the other organisms, insects, vegetation,
predators, prey.
Marine life we'll have to learn a little bit
about.
Paleontology, of course, is the best science.
And so you are taking the best science course
there could be.
I may be a little biased on that.
But it includes principles, techniques and
information from all these different sciences
here so we'll be covering a lot.
We have to realized that there are not all
that many paleontologists studying dinosaurs.
Most of the paleontologists that we will talk
to are studying other organisms.
And so this is a special group.
Dinosaurs themselves -- we'll learn more about
what a dinosaur is.
It is a very specific group of animals, has
very specific anatomical characteristics,
and we'll learn the details of those anatomical
characteristics as we go along.
We'll learn some of the anatomy, the basic
anatomy of dinosaurs.
The way that dinosaurs are defined is based
on anatomy and anatomy of the bones because
that is what we have.
Dinosaurs lived during a very particular period
of time, at least most of the dinosaurs we
will be studying.
We'll talk a little more about that.
Very few fossils are of dinosaurs.
So it is amazing how much we have learned
about dinosaurs from the few pieces of evidence
that we really have compared to other organisms.
We really just have sometimes a few bones
from a dinosaur and drawn as many conclusions
from those bones as possible.
So, sort of in summary, just because something
is a fossil does not mean it is a dinosaur
as you might know.
Just because an organisms is extinct does
not mean it is a dinosaur.
Just because an organism's name ends in "saurus"
does not mean it is a dinosaur.
And just because an organism lived during
a particular period of time, like the Mesozoic,
250 to 65 million years ago, does not mean
it is a dinosaur.
Most important, just because an organism appears
in a pack of toys or in a book and it is called
a dinosaur, or even if its on the Internet,
especially if it is on the Internet, and it
is called a dinosaur, does not mean it is
a dinosaur.
There is a lot of misinformation out there.
So, for example, here's a quiz.
This is a rather famous type of fossil.
Is it a dinosaur?
No, it is a trilobite which you may have guessed
lived 570 to about 250 million years ago.
It was sort of a vacuum cleaner creature living
on the sea floor gobbling up detritus.
It went extinct before the dinosaurs were
around.
What about this, another famous fossil, a
mammoth.
Is this a dinosaur?
No, this is something that existed well after
the dinosaurs, most of the dinosaurs, became
extinct.
Something that our ancestors may have hunted.
But not a dinosaur.
Here's a Dimetrodon.
This guy might look familiar if you have a
collection of toy dinosaurs, as I do.
But this is not a dinosaur either.
It has been called a dinosaur many times but,
no, it is totally unrelated to dinosaurs.
It is actually in a group of reptiles, the
therapsids, that we call the "mammal-like
reptiles" because they led to the lineage
of mammals which led to us.
This guy actually lived in the Permian and
went extinct before the dinosaurs were on
the scene.
Okay, there's something that was around during
the Mesozoic, during the dinosaur times.
This is a marine reptile, a plesiosaur.
Is this a dinosaur?
No, there were no dinosaurs that swam like
this.
Part of the definition of a dinosaur has to
do with its skull.
This is not a dinosaur, not that closely related
to dinosaurs either.
Marine reptiles were not dinosaurs.
They happened to be coexisting with dinosaurs.
How about this flying reptile?
This Pteranodon, is this a dinosaur?
No, this is not a dinosaur either.
It is fairly closely related to dinosaurs.
We'll get into that a little bit more.
It's limb structure is different than dinosaurs.
And it existed during the same period of time
but it was not a dinosaur.
So then we get to a big question here.
Are dinosaurs extinct, yes or no?
And the answer is actually NO, dinosaurs are
not extinct.
Birds are dinosaurs, birds are descended from
dinosaurs, essentially birds are feathered
dinosaurs.
We have 9000 species of dinosaurs living today,
they just happen to be feathered and flying
around and they sing beautiful music.
You might say we are still in the age of dinosaurs
because, compared to mammals, there are just
many, many more species of dinosaurs -- birds
-- than there are of mammals.
Now I've got a little simplified lineage down
here of the mammals and how the humans are
related in some way to other mammals like
whales and cows.
And birds are related especially to the theropods,
the carnivorous dinosaurs as we'll learn,
so those pigeons out there and sea gulls have
some connection to Tyrannosaurus rex.
You just want to be aware of that.
In this course, we will be talking about dinosaurs
and the extinction of dinosaurs.
And just to be clear on that, and our textbook
addresses this too, birds are avian dinosaurs
and everything else is a nonavian dinosaur.
Nonavian dinosaurs are dinosaurs which are
not birds.
And when we are usually talking, we use the
short-term "dinosaurs", we are talking about
the nonavian dinosaurs, the ones that went
extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million
years ago.
So sometimes, as a short-cut, I'll be talking
about the extinction of the dinosaurs and
what I'm really referring to are just the
nonavian ones because we still have the avian
dinosaurs around.
So I'm going to end this video here and start
a slide show to give you some idea of what
it is like to find fossils in the field and
how paleontologists go about doing their work.
So, hang in there, I'll be back shortly.
