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TYLER LYSON: Even
though I've collected
thousands and thousands
of dinosaur bones
and other fossils, every
fossil that I find,
it's just quite a thrill
because you're the first person
to have ever seen that
particular dinosaur bone.
And then it's a lot of
fun because then it's
a guessing game.
It's like, well, what is it?
It could be anything.
It could be the skull.
It could be a rib.
But you just never know.
And you slowly uncover it.
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So you can see right
here there's just
a little bit of bone poking out
of this big iron concretion.
It's only about that
big in diameter,
and we're chasing the animal
kind of into the hill.
And one of the important things
about not only this dinosaur
but kind of this
whole valley here
is that we have several
dinosaurs preserved.
We have a hadrosaur here.
Across the valley, we
have a triceratops.
Across the valley over there,
we have a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
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So this is basically
how you find a dinosaur.
You know, you're walking around,
looking in these gullies,
and then you spot
a piece of bone.
And you can see
it's very porous.
And you know that it
had to travel down,
the force of gravity.
You can see the bone trail.
Here's a bone.
Here is a bone.
Follow the trail of bone
up, and then here you
have the shinbone of a
duck-billed dinosaur,
really broken up.
And then here is where it would
articulate with the knee joint.
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I think a big misconception
in paleontology
is that you just
kind of-- you go out
in the badlands with your
brush and you brush off
a complete articulated
velociraptor hand,
and that we have a lot
of high tech technology
that we can image the
ground with and to determine
where the fossils are.
And it's just not the case.
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You walk around, you know,
in the badlands out here
and you'll pick up numerous--
just chunks of dinosaur.
Chunkasaurus, that's
what we call it.
And that's about it.
So usually you find
piles of bones.
And so this specimen is
unique in that it's--
it is articulated,
meaning that the bones are
in the right order here, making
it a much more significant
specimen than your dozens
and dozens of chunkasaurs
that we find.
And I've been looking in the
Hell Creek Formation for about
17 years now, and I
found only a handful
of articulated dinosaurs.
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A lot of people always think
of the Hell Creek Formation,
you know, they think when
the dinosaurs-- triceratops,
hadrosaurs, and T-rex.
But turtles also made up
a very large component
of the ecosystem then.
And bits of turtle shell
are really, really common
out in the field.
But turtles that are
this well preserved,
where you have complete
shells like this--
and then here you have
a beautiful turtle shell
on its side.
So this is where the arm
would come out, right here.
And here is where the
leg would come out.
And you can actually see
this beautiful leg preserved,
and this exquisite foot, all the
way down to each of the claws.
Turtles, as a
whole, have survived
many extinctions, including the
world's greatest extinction,
as well as the one that
killed the dinosaurs.
But, unfortunately, turtles
today are not doing so well,
and that's because of
humans and the fact
that humans like to eat turtles.
So their numbers are
actually starting to dwindle.
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