Hi everyone this is Ezekiel O'Callaghan
with Raptor chatter here to talk about
all the news and paleontological finds
that happened in March 2019 so to start
we're gonna be looking at news that came
out on March 29th and we're doing this
because the paper itself wasn't
published until April 2nd but the news
came out earlier because it was
essentially released before the paper
was published and there's a lot of
issues with this that we need to discuss
for paleontology as a whole. So for
background a team of scientists found a
new fossil site which they claim shows
the impact from the extinction that
killed the dinosaurs, and to be specific
they claim that they have pieces of the
meteorite that have come back down and
landed in amongst a bunch of fossils
from the same time period however
there's not really anything that we can
say about that yet because the paper
wasn't published yet in order to
understand how this newspaper article
relates to paleontology and to
scientific literacy as a whole we need
to first understand how scientific
papers are submitted to scientific
journals, which is essentially just a
process of peer review which means other
scientists look through the paper and
try and find flaws in it before it's
published in that way the scientists can
be sure that what is coming out in the
paper is as verifiably true as possible
not necessarily that it is true which is
that's the best answer that we have with
evidence given in the paper with that in
mind these scientists who are reviewing
the academic papers need to be as
impartial as possible and any news that
comes out on a new site or find
beforehand can influence that perception
of what the paper is actually saying. But
we do need to discuss how if a newspaper
article relates to the sciences as a
whole
and particularly how some of the
gravitas and grand ideas that are put
into it aren't necessarily
representative of paleontology or of the
sciences as a whole. One issue in the
paper is the idea of the Indiana Jones
of paleontology going so far as to say
they played the soundtrack of Raiders of
the Lost Ark on the way out to the dig
site and that's just an incorrect
mindset. Paleontology isn't a single
person's efforts but a collaborative
one. There's no singular hero in
paleontology and that idea needs to die
Also paleontology shouldn't be painted
as a science that's just for white guys
There's a lot of people from many
diverse backgrounds that go into
paleontology and pushing the idea of a
gruff white guy isn't going to help
bring more diversity and bring the best
people to the science and I understand
the irony of me a nerdy white guy saying
this but if we take the science for what
it is a science that is to be used for
all of humanity's benefit then we can't
be picking and choosing we need to
encourage all people to get into the
sciences and to understand the sciences
better and this New Yorker article fails
to do just that. There is a lot that we
could unpack about the article itself so
I'm gonna leave some Twitter threads
down below of different researchers
discussing the article. And now looking
at the published scientific papers we're
gonna be looking at a middle Eocene
swordfish coming from Chile this genus
of swordfish has been called Loancorhynchus. Due to the fact that it's a
very early swordfish it helps us to
understand how quickly the different
types of billfish such as Marlin
sailfish and swordfish began to
diversify and how they might be impacted
by overfishing today. A new species of
Mastodon has been described coming from
the United States Pacific coast
Mammut pacificus has been found in
Idaho and California and represents a new
species due to very specific traits such
as having slightly more narrow molars
than that of the American Mastodon
which is more famous more importantly
though most of these fossils had already
been found which is why going back and
looking at old collections is so
important now that we have more advanced
techniques for looking at the bones and
differentiating between different
species. The authors even go so far as
this is just looking at all North
American Mastodon and mammoth lines to
try and get a better understanding of
just how much diversity there may have
been. Going back to the extinction that
killed dinosaurs many people have
suggested that the dinosaurs were
already beginning to die out before the
impact from space killed them off for
good, and that doesn't seem to be the
case one piece of evidence for the idea
that the dinosaurs began dying out
before the impact is the fact that in
the few millions of years and layers
just before the impact we find less
dinosaur fossils however it's been
debated as to whether that's because
there were less dinosaurs or just less
dinosaurs were preserved and found there
the current evidence from the new paper
published this month suggest that the
dinosaurs were always there and not
necessarily because of new fossils that
are being found but rather the
environments didn't change. So if you
have something like a Tyrannosaurus Rex
that's the apex predator in its
environment, it isn't likely to go
extinct if there isn't a major change in
that environment. And the same things
with the animals like Edmontosaurus or
Triceratops which also existed up until
the KT boundary. With new research
suggesting that the environments were
very stable all the way up until the
impact it makes it far more likely that
the dinosaurs were doing actually quite
well rather than dying off before the
impact struck and that the meteor was
very key to their extinction and then
the later rise of mammals.
The Burgess Shale is one of the most significant
finds that we've ever made particularly
in Cambrian rocks. The Burgess Shale
contains many species found nowhere else
in the world and helps us understand how
early life got started as many of these
soft-bodied animals don't fossilize well
in other
types of rocks, the shale here just
happened to be very good for it.
now though there's another site that is very
similar although a few million years
older coming from Qingjiang, China the
fossil site found there has very similar
fossils to the burgess shale but also
some incredibly unique ones such as some
of the first kinorhynch worms and this
is important because they're still
around today however today they're only
a few millimeters long at best well the
ancient ones that they descended from
for a few centimeters long which is a
very significant change and
understanding how some of these bottom
dwellers and bottom the food chain
animals developed and changed over time
being larger and then evolving to very
very small sizes can help us understand
the general environment of the oceans
and how we developed into the oceans
that we have today so we can try and
protect them better for the future.
Adult Tyrannosaurus Rex ate hadrosaurs
and occasionally other animals, we know
this because there's fossil evidence of
feeding on some of the hadrosaur fossils
that we found such as big gouges in some
of the tail vertebrae that happened to
fit Tyrannosaurus Rex teeth very well or
a Triceratops pelvis that's very clearly
been fed upon. Subadult t-rexes though
have been much less studied for their
feeding mainly because we haven't really
found any feeding traces that seem to
match the size that would be found in a
sub adult t-rex now though it seems like
that might be becoming true that we do
have those specifically a t-rex in the
age range of about twelve to fourteen so
not quite fully grown like they would be
at about eighteen or nineteen but
definitely on its way there. The new
hadrosaur bones that were found with
these feeding traces show that the T. rex
was eating on part of the vertebra and
the back of the animal and that it was
biting into the bones fairly hard
nearly as hard as an adult Tyrannosaurus rex
and that helps us understand that eating
bones was a very key part of their
survival strategy. Often we find
coprolites fossilized dinosaur dung with
bone pieces and fragments in
a really good indication that
Tyrannosaurus Rex was eating bones and
now we have evidence that even the
sub-adults were and so well we have a
few very juvenile t-rex with very thin
blade like teeth it seems as though the
Tyrannosaurus Rex began to develop its
ability to eat bone very rapidly and
even by just a few years older than the
smallest specimens we have we've already
well on its way to eating the bones of
its victims.
Sue the T. rex is the most complete
Tyrannosaurus rex ever found and was
making headlines as far back as its
discovery in 1990. Often considered the
largest or one of the largest T Rex's
Sue's position in the Chicago Field
Museum helps to shape our understanding
of just how massive these animals were
but Sue may not have been the most
massive T. rex. Scotty a T. rex coming from
Canada has been found and described
formally in a scientific paper and it's
been found to be about 400 kilograms
heavier than Sue was and for context
that's almost a (half) ton this helps to show
just how much variation there was an
adult T. rex as even the most massive
t-rexes would you still have a lot of
variation even when fully grown now
there are reasons that these kinds of
differences can be found it could be
something as simple as variation within
the species. No species has two
individuals that are exactly alike, and
all of them are going to be a little
different and size could definitely be a
component of why Scotty the T. rex is
larger it could even be something like
sexual dimorphism where males and
females have different body sizes
however although we call these dinosaurs
Sue and Scotty we don't know if they
were male or female there's no evidence
in the rocks that helps us to indicate
if they were or weren't male or female
in fact Sue is just named Sue because of
the woman that found the fossils, Sue
Hendrickson, and so there's not nearly
the same kind of concrete evidence that
we can have about sexual dimorphism in
Tyrannosaurus Rex. With that said though
it does show there was some variation
within the species
and that they could have reached
potentially even larger sizes than that
that we thought they could and so this
is something that's really important
when we're trying to understand just how
the different species interacted with
one another because by understanding the
variation within a single species we can
try and understand the variation
throughout an environment.
Hi everyone, thanks for watching we have another
video coming up shortly that's gonna be
for the honors part of one of my classes
so that'll be exciting so newswise for
Raptor chatter and us we're having a
baby my wife and I are having a baby
so that's really exciting some of the
news in running around doctor's
appointments and stuff is part of the
reason we were a little late the last
couple months but getting back onto the
production cycle so should be a little
bit better from here on out thanks for
watching take care be safe
don't go extinct.
