New Dinosaurs in Jurassic World Dominion
It's time for the newest installment in the Jurassic Park/World franchise. We talked with renowned paleontologists Kenneth Lacovara (who discovered Dreadnoughtus) and Steve Brusatte (an advisor on the film) about the newly featured creatures. "Jurassic World: Dominion" is already being called the worst movie in the franchise — not by us, of course. Challenge accepted!
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00 - Hello, science fans.
00:04 Welcome to Live Science,
00:05 where we live science on a daily basis.
00:08 Today, we are discussing the new movie,
00:11 "Jurassic World Dominion" coming out tomorrow
00:14 in all theaters.
00:15 It's out in New York today, so I'll be seeing it soon.
00:18 But my colleague, Laura Gagel and I,
00:21 we talked with some amazing paleontologists this past week
00:25 about the movie.
00:26 And so I wanted to show you guys those interviews now.
00:30 Enjoy.
00:31 - We are joined by Kenneth Lacovara.
00:33 He's the founding dean and professor
00:35 at the School of Earth and Environment,
00:37 as well as the founding director
00:38 at the Jean and Rick Edelman Fossil Park and Museum
00:41 at Rowan University.
00:43 Ken, thank you so much for joining us.
00:45 - Hey, thank you, it's a pleasure.
00:47 - All right, I'm so excited to talk with you
00:49 because your dinosaur that you helped discover
00:51 is one of the largest titanosaurs
00:54 that we know of that's so complete.
00:56 And when did you discover that this dinosaur
00:58 would be depicted in the movie?
01:00 - It was, I think, last summer.
01:05 I got a tip off from Steve Bruce Lee,
01:08 message on the down low,
01:11 that Dreadnoughtus was going to be in the movie.
01:13 And I was unreasonably happy about that.
01:17 I was kind of doing the 10-year-old dinosaur boy dance
01:20 around the living room when I found that out.
01:23 - Yeah, everyone at Life Science was cheering for you.
01:25 I know you haven't seen the movie yet,
01:27 but from the little bit that you can see,
01:29 what do you think of how they depicted it?
01:31 - I really like this.
01:32 This particular shot, I think, is really quite accurate
01:37 as far as the anatomy of Dreadnoughtus.
01:40 I really like how muscular the legs are.
01:44 And you can see those wide sternal plates there
01:46 separating the chest.
01:48 They had a very wide gauge stance.
01:52 I like also how the body is mostly parallel with the ground,
01:56 which I think is your kind of at-home posture
02:01 for these kinds of creatures.
02:02 So it looks massive, it looks powerful.
02:05 It doesn't look particularly friendly.
02:08 This is how I imagined Dreadnoughtus to be.
02:11 - Yeah.
02:11 And I know Dreadnoughtus
02:13 is kind of enjoying the spotlight lately.
02:16 Can you tell me a little bit
02:17 about the discovery and excavation of its fossils?
02:22 - Sure.
02:23 I found Dreadnoughtus down at the bottom of South America,
02:27 the bottom of Patagonia in 2005.
02:31 And we worked down there for five field seasons
02:34 to excavate this giant.
02:37 We ended up excavating and jacketing
02:40 and removing 145 giant bones,
02:44 as you can see there on the screen.
02:46 Some of them weighed more than cars.
02:49 And we were out there, for the most part,
02:51 without any mechanized equipment
02:53 at the end of a field season.
02:54 I could usually get a front-end loader
02:56 to the site for a day or two.
02:58 But usually we're moving these bones
03:00 with just hand power and pulleys
03:03 and winches and things like that.
03:05 And it was just an amazing and a backbreaking excavation
03:09 in a very remote part of the world.
03:11 We were about four hours on dirt roads
03:15 and then no roads from the nearest little town.
03:19 And I spent over a year of my life
03:22 living in a tent next to Dreadnoughtus.
03:25 - Yeah, lucky for us.
03:27 Let's talk about the name.
03:29 It's just a wonderful name.
03:30 How did you and your colleagues pick it out?
03:32 - Well, I think of naming a dinosaur as,
03:37 no pun intended, as a very weighty responsibility.
03:40 And really, when you think about it,
03:43 like our ancestors, right?
03:46 Me at the time, were these little tiny shrew-like
03:48 creatures living in the hidden and forgotten recesses
03:52 of the dinosaur world, hoping never to be noticed.
03:55 And then we evolve into these sentient beings
03:59 that do things like paleontology.
04:01 And now the legacy of this whole other species
04:05 is in my hands or another paleontologist's hands
04:08 or whoever is describing that animal.
04:11 And this is an animal, Dreadnoughtus,
04:13 that lived under its own auspices
04:15 and evolved in a very hard knock world
04:18 and lived for millions of years as a species.
04:22 And now I have to somehow support its legacy.
04:27 And so I've always been bothered
04:29 that these large herbivores are so often portrayed
04:32 as like these dopey, passive plant eaters,
04:35 just kind of wallowing around in the mud
04:37 with some salad hanging out of their mouths,
04:39 waiting for a T-Rex to come up
04:40 and take a bite out of them.
04:42 That's not how they are.
04:44 And if you think of the world today,
04:45 what are the most dangerous animals to humans?
04:48 Well, it's elephants, it's hippos, it's rhinos,
04:53 it's water buffalo, it's bison.
04:55 The big herbivores, they don't want to eat you,
04:57 they just want to kill you
04:59 'cause they're surly and territorial.
05:03 So Dreadnoughtus, 65 tons.
05:07 Imagine a big bull Dreadnoughtus in the breeding season
05:10 defending a territory.
05:11 It would be a fearsome creature.
05:14 It itself would have nothing to fear,
05:17 so Dreadnought fears nothing,
05:20 which I thought really was a way to honor the legacy
05:24 and success and ferocity of these animals.
05:28 - I did actually want to show you this.
05:32 My neighbor is like, "What's Dreadnoughtus?
05:34 "I know about the ship."
05:36 (laughing)
05:37 - Oh, you found a Dreadnoughtus.
05:39 You know, as with most wonderful things in this world,
05:42 Star Wars.
05:43 - Yep.
05:44 (laughing)
05:46 - I just love it.
05:46 It's like, "Oh no, it's a dinosaur.
05:48 "It's a really well-known dinosaur."
05:49 And he's like, "No, you mean Star Wars."
05:51 (laughing)
05:52 - Well, the battleships were part of the inspiration
05:54 for the name Dreadnoughtus.
05:56 And in the scientific paper that describes the species,
05:59 I actually mentioned in there that its name was inspired
06:04 by two Argentinian dreadnoughts
06:06 that existed around the turn of the last century.
06:09 The ARA Moreno and the ARA Rivadavia.
06:14 And those ships were built in Camden, New Jersey,
06:19 across from Philadelphia,
06:19 where I was working on Dreadnoughtus
06:21 then taking to Argentina.
06:22 So I thought that was a good idea.
06:24 - That's a great tie-in, full circle.
06:27 'Cause didn't you ship the bones back up to your lab
06:30 on a boat?
06:31 - I did, yeah.
06:32 I shipped them from Rio Gallegos,
06:35 the third most southern city in the world.
06:37 They made a bunch of stops.
06:38 I was up all night long during those weeks
06:40 on shipwrecker.com watching Dreadnoughtus
06:43 sail up the Atlantic.
06:44 And I had them in my lab,
06:47 in actually three labs for about five years,
06:50 and then sent them all back home on a ship
06:52 and went down to this little dockside bar
06:56 on the Delaware Bay and had a beer
06:58 and literally watched Dreadnoughtus
07:00 (indistinct)
07:02 - Wow, oh man.
07:04 Definitely full circle, Dreadnoughtus on Dreadnoughtus.
07:07 - Yeah, it's so appropriate.
07:08 I wonder if the name helped catch the attention
07:10 of Jurassic World Dominion.
07:12 (soft music)
07:15 - I'm sure that there are gonna be kids
07:18 watching Jurassic World Dominion
07:20 who are going to become paleontologists
07:22 or scientists because of these films,
07:24 which is amazing.
07:26 Are they textbooks?
07:27 No, they're not.
07:29 So, you know, don't get your science from these sources,
07:33 but certainly get your inspiration from them.
07:36 These CGI animations are just unbelievable
07:40 and really inspiring for me.
07:42 And, you know, hopefully this will stimulate
07:44 people's interest and then they'll go
07:45 to the actual sources to find the information.
07:49 I always talk about the Jurassic World movies
07:51 as, you know, these are fun summer monster movies.
07:54 That's what they are supposed to be.
07:55 And they do a great job at that.
07:59 So, you know, I'm not one of those paleontologists
08:03 that's going to nitpick every little detail
08:05 that might not be correct in the dinosaurs
08:07 because this isn't a documentary,
08:10 this isn't a textbook, it's a monster movie.
08:12 And they're great.
08:13 And they do a great job of inspiring the next generation.
08:15 - Yeah, I was gonna say they're a great jumping off point.
08:19 And I don't think I've been in a movie theater
08:21 since the COVID pandemic started,
08:23 but I think I might go for a Jurassic World Dominion.
08:26 - Yeah, me too.
08:27 - I've got my tickets for Thursday the 9th.
08:30 - Oh, that's great.
08:34 So that was Dr. Kenneth Acovara.
08:38 We've had him on before to talk about his book years ago,
08:41 and he's a delight.
08:42 Love having his expertise on that.
08:44 Let's talk about dinosaurs.
08:46 If you guys have any questions,
08:47 feel free to put them in the chat.
08:49 I'll be having my colleague, Laura,
08:51 on to advise on such matters,
08:54 unless I feel confident enough to say something.
08:57 But for now we're going to watch the next interview,
09:01 which is with Steve Rosetta,
09:03 who was actually an advisor on the movie.
09:06 Enjoy.
09:07 - Today we're joined by Dr. Steve Rosetta.
09:10 He's a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.
09:13 Thanks so much for joining us.
09:15 - Yeah, my pleasure.
09:16 Really excited to talk to dinosaurs and mammals
09:19 and films and books with you, Laura, and with you, Judy.
09:23 - So pop culture now, we're so hot and trendy.
09:27 - Yeah, Steve has authored more than 150 scientific papers
09:31 about prehistoric animals,
09:33 and he wrote the New York Times bestseller,
09:36 "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs,"
09:37 and his new book, "The Rise and Reign of the Mammals,"
09:40 just came out.
09:41 So we're so lucky to have him.
09:43 And he's also the scientific advisor
09:45 for the "Jurassic World" Dominion movie.
09:47 So you've been really busy.
09:49 - It's been busy.
09:50 It's been a whirlwind couple of weeks,
09:51 and I'm joining you from Los Angeles.
09:54 I'm here for the film premiere, which has just happened,
09:57 which was a whole lot of fun,
09:58 and some press and publicity and some outreach events.
10:01 There was a big outreach event we did about the film
10:04 for high school students the other night,
10:06 350 high school students from across the country.
10:08 They're all gonna be the first in their families
10:10 to go to college.
10:11 So they got this trip to come out to California
10:15 and go to Universal Studios and see the film
10:17 and meet some of the actors.
10:19 And they had me along to talk dinosaurs with them.
10:21 So it's been a really surreal scene.
10:22 And so then the book comes out today.
10:24 See the book behind me?
10:25 So I'm in full book marketing mode.
10:27 So it's kind of a few weeks of not real life
10:32 here as a scientist.
10:33 Normally I'm in the classroom, I'm teaching,
10:35 I'm in the lab, I'm digging up dinosaurs,
10:37 which is really cool.
10:38 All that stuff is cool.
10:39 But doing all this work recently,
10:42 pop cultural stuff has been a whole lot of fun.
10:44 And I think it's always fun to just bring the science
10:47 that we do to audiences, different audiences,
10:50 whether through books or films, however we do it.
10:54 - Yeah, actually, was your first book,
10:55 was that caught the attention of the Jurassic World franchise?
11:00 Like how did they reach out to you
11:01 to ask you to be an advisor on the movie?
11:04 - It was really random and really funny.
11:07 And it definitely was kind of a right place,
11:09 right time kind of thing.
11:11 So the book you mentioned,
11:13 "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs,"
11:14 I published that one in 2018.
11:17 And you guys, very generously at the time,
11:20 we did a video and interview and stuff.
11:22 So you guys helped get that off the ground, live science.
11:25 And so the book came out a little bit
11:29 before the last "Jurassic World" film.
11:32 My editor is very savvy.
11:34 He wanted the book to come out around the time
11:36 this big dinosaur blockbuster was hitting theaters.
11:40 And so a few months after the film came out,
11:43 I got an email from a guy purporting to be Colin Trevorrow,
11:48 a name I recognized immediately
11:50 as a director of "Jurassic World."
11:52 And the subject line was just, "I read your book."
11:55 And if you remember from the first "Jurassic Park,"
11:58 there's this snotty little kid
11:59 who goes up to Alan Grant, Sam Neill's character,
12:01 and says, "I read your book."
12:03 And so he put that in the subject.
12:05 And then he said, "Hey, my name's Colin.
12:07 "I make scientifically inaccurate dinosaur films.
12:10 "I'm gonna be up in Edinburgh."
12:13 And I live in Edinburgh in Scotland,
12:15 and that's where I teach.
12:16 And so he said, "I'm gonna be up in Edinburgh.
12:18 "Do you wanna meet up and talk dinosaurs?"
12:20 So I thought this was some kind of hoax.
12:23 I thought one of my students or something
12:24 was just playing a trick on me.
12:26 So I had the book people look into it,
12:30 and they came back and they said, "Yeah, that's him.
12:32 "That's the email he uses."
12:33 I said, "Okay."
12:34 So I responded, and then we got on the phone,
12:36 and it really was him.
12:37 And he did come up to Edinburgh
12:38 for the Fringe Festival with his family.
12:41 And like me, Colin is an American guy
12:44 who's moved to the UK with his family.
12:47 So I think there was just, he read the book,
12:50 the book came out at the right time.
12:51 I was living in the UK.
12:52 I think he wanted somebody to talk to locally.
12:56 And he basically laid it on the line.
12:58 He said, when I first met him, he said,
12:59 "Look, I'm starting to write the next film.
13:01 "I wanna put in a bunch of new dinosaurs,
13:03 "and I wanna put in some feathered dinosaurs, finally."
13:08 And that's something we've all been pining for
13:10 in the paleontology world,
13:11 put feathers on some of these Jurassic Park dinosaurs.
13:14 So once he told me that, I said,
13:17 "Oh my God, I'd love to help out."
13:19 And so I've been working with him since,
13:21 working with him and the artists making the dinosaurs,
13:24 just to try to make them as realistic as possible
13:26 within the confines of a blockbuster film.
13:29 - Do we wanna mention this again?
13:30 'Cause I know you talked about Colin a lot,
13:32 but it's nice to acknowledge our past mistakes.
13:36 - Yeah, there were reasons
13:41 for not having the feathered dinosaurs in the earlier films,
13:45 but the time was right for now.
13:47 They do explain that in the film,
13:50 why we're seeing feathered dinosaurs now.
13:52 And I'll just say, in the Jurassic Park,
13:55 Jurassic World universe, that explanation makes sense.
13:59 And you gotta think of these,
14:00 it's like the Marvel universe.
14:02 I mean, this is kind of a world onto itself.
14:05 There's reasons for different things,
14:06 but I'm just very happy that we do have feathers
14:09 on the dinosaurs, on some of the dinosaurs.
14:12 And this is Zhen Huan Long.
14:13 This is one I described a few years ago
14:15 with my dear friend who sadly passed away a few years ago,
14:18 Jin Chong Liu, who was one of China's great dinosaur hunters,
14:21 but this is a real feathered dinosaur.
14:23 There's the fossil.
14:25 You can see the feathers, you can see the wings on the arms.
14:27 This was a raptor.
14:28 This was a very close cousin of Velociraptor.
14:30 Look at that wing.
14:31 And so when people ask me,
14:32 are these feathered dinosaurs real?
14:34 I show them photos like this.
14:35 I say, these are real fossils.
14:37 You can see the feathers yourself.
14:38 I've studied these things.
14:39 I've described them.
14:40 Like I assure you, these things are real.
14:43 And you look at a picture like that,
14:44 and if you didn't know what you were looking at,
14:45 you'd be like, oh, that's some kind of dead bird.
14:48 So those are the real raptors.
14:50 And I'm glad that moviegoers around the world
14:52 will get to see that.
14:54 - Yeah, and it's so fun to like watch the movie
14:58 and then see what the science is that it's based on.
15:01 I always get a thrill out of that.
15:02 - Yeah.
15:03 - Yeah, us plebeians could be on y'all's level now.
15:06 - I'm really curious about how the back and forth occurred.
15:10 Like, did he run a scenario by you
15:12 or show you images?
15:14 How did it work?
15:15 - It was, in practice,
15:17 it was a lot of emails and phone calls.
15:19 It was a lot of questions.
15:20 It was a lot of chats.
15:21 You know, I mean, I didn't help write the film.
15:24 I didn't come up with storylines or plot lines.
15:26 I didn't decide what dinosaurs were in there.
15:28 I didn't help edit the film.
15:29 None of that, you know.
15:30 Those are the Hollywood, you know, movie magic,
15:34 creative genius people doing that work.
15:36 For me, I was just always on call to answer their questions.
15:40 Anytime they wanted to know something about a dinosaur,
15:42 how big was this dinosaur?
15:44 How would it have moved?
15:45 What colors might it have been?
15:47 What kind of environment might it have lived in?
15:49 Those kind of questions.
15:51 I would answer those questions.
15:53 Other times, you know, a lot of times the artists,
15:55 people like Kevin Jenkins, David Vickery,
15:57 you know, the people behind a lot of the art,
16:00 and it's both digital art, CGI,
16:03 but there's a lot of animatronics and puppets.
16:05 So it's all three types of things in the film
16:08 for the dinosaurs.
16:09 They would design, be designing characters.
16:12 They would show me drafts of what they were doing.
16:15 They would ask me, is this on the right track?
16:17 Is this looking, you know, correct?
16:19 Is there anything egregiously wrong?
16:21 Or sometimes they would say,
16:23 oh, we're trying to make this kind of soft tissue.
16:25 We know there's no fossils for it.
16:27 Is this realistic?
16:28 So a lot of questions like that.
16:30 And even some funny ones.
16:32 So, I mean, I got a phone call.
16:33 I think I was working on the mammal book.
16:35 I was, you know, at home just typing out
16:38 one of these chapters about whales or something.
16:40 I can't remember exactly,
16:41 but I was definitely doing the book.
16:43 And I, you know, a phone message pops up
16:45 and it's Colin, like Colin's name flashed on the phone.
16:48 Okay, I better take this one.
16:49 And he says, hey, Steve, I'm here on the set.
16:53 And Mamadou is one of the actors.
16:54 He plays a really awesome new character.
16:57 Mamadou is about to say the name of this dinosaur.
16:59 And the way he pronounces it is gonna dictate
17:02 how we say it throughout the entire film.
17:05 So we gotta get it right.
17:07 And it's the dinosaur Giganotosaurus,
17:09 the new movie monster, the new villain in the film,
17:12 you know, bigger than T-Rex.
17:13 And so it was really funny because I had to tell Colin,
17:16 I had to be that guy.
17:18 And I had to say, well, actually,
17:20 there's two ways you can pronounce it.
17:23 I say it one way, other scientists say it another.
17:25 I say, you should call it Giganotosaurus, which they did.
17:28 So there were moments of levity like that.
17:29 I did get, you know, I visited the set.
17:31 There were very strict COVID protocols
17:33 because they were filming right in the heart of the pandemic
17:36 via the early stages.
17:37 But I got to visit the set.
17:38 I got to meet a lot of people, a lot of the actors.
17:40 So it was just a really totally surreal experience
17:44 to be part of it.
17:45 - Yep, so here we got, yeah,
17:51 this is a dinosaur called Parasaurolophus.
17:53 And there's Chris Pratt on horseback wrangling them,
17:58 as one does.
17:59 But this was a duck-billed dinosaur.
18:01 They lived in the late Cretaceous.
18:02 They had that big crest of bone on their head.
18:04 That was actually a resonating chamber
18:06 that connected to the nasal passages.
18:08 So a good friend of mine, Tom Williamson,
18:09 who I worked with in New Mexico,
18:11 who's actually one of the world's leading mammal experts,
18:13 but he studies dinosaurs.
18:14 And several years back, Tom cat-scanned
18:17 the skull of Parasaurolophus.
18:19 And they used software that he worked with physicists,
18:21 kind of using some of the methods
18:23 that instrument makers use
18:24 when they're designing instruments
18:25 to simulate what kind of sound it would make.
18:27 And this thing would have had this kind of trumpeting sound
18:30 that came from that crest.
18:32 Whether you could pet one like that
18:34 without it getting too aggressive,
18:36 I don't know, but Chris Pratt is superhuman.
18:38 So we could probably-
18:40 - Actually, I love that it's in a snowy landscape.
18:43 What do we know about dinosaurs living in the Arctic?
18:46 - Yeah, that's a good point.
18:49 This isn't normally the imagery we think of.
18:53 When we see dinosaur art,
18:55 whether it's paintings of prehistoric scenes
18:57 or museum exhibits or films,
18:59 you're almost always seeing dinosaurs in the tropics
19:02 or subtropics or in jungles and in volcanoes.
19:04 And there's lots of ferns and there's lots of greenery.
19:07 You don't normally see dinosaurs in the snow.
19:10 There would have been some dinosaurs
19:12 that did live in the snow.
19:13 I mean, the earth was much warmer
19:14 back in the Jurassic and Cretaceous
19:17 when most of these movie dinosaurs lived,
19:19 but there were no ice caps at that time.
19:23 But above the Arctic Circle
19:24 and even close to the Arctic Circle,
19:25 I mean, it would have been cold,
19:27 especially during the winter months.
19:28 So some dinosaurs would have had to deal with snow.
19:31 And we have fossils of dinosaurs from Alaska, for instance,
19:35 that lived above the Arctic Circle.
19:37 There's ways you can tell from the rocks,
19:39 the temperature, and we can tell that those temperatures
19:42 would have gotten below freezing.
19:43 So yes, some of these dinosaurs
19:46 would have had to deal with snow.
19:47 Probably maybe not as much snow
19:49 as I did growing up in Chicago, but some snow.
19:53 - Some snow.
19:55 - So here, yeah, so now these are the raptors.
20:01 And these are the kind of genetically altered raptors.
20:05 That's Blue and Blue's baby, which is named Beta.
20:08 And so, yeah, they're velociraptors.
20:12 But these ones are not real, proper,
20:14 completely accurate dinosaurs.
20:16 There's intentionally some, not just movie magic with these,
20:20 but part of the storyline of the entire Jurassic World
20:23 trilogy is those genetically modified raptors.
20:27 And it's a big part of this storyline.
20:28 So Beta, that character, is a big part of the story arc.
20:32 - Yeah, actually, it looks like the parent
20:34 is kind of like watching out for its offspring.
20:37 What do we know about parental behavior
20:39 in raptors or other dinosaurs?
20:42 - We know that some dinosaurs were very good parents,
20:45 and fossils tell us that.
20:46 So first of all, fossils tell us that all dinosaurs,
20:48 as far as we know, laid eggs.
20:50 And those eggs were usually pretty small.
20:52 I don't think there's ever been a dinosaur egg
20:54 that's been found that's bigger than a football.
20:58 Even that's getting really big.
20:59 So even the biggest dinosaurs of all,
21:01 the brontosauruses and the dreadnoughtuses,
21:04 like in the film, that's the long neck one.
21:06 I mean, they would have hatched from small eggs.
21:08 There's dreadnoughtus right there.
21:10 And a fun fact about dreadnoughtus, by the way,
21:12 it was discovered on an expedition by a friend of mine,
21:15 Ken Lacavara, and his colleagues in Argentina.
21:18 That expedition was funded
21:19 through what's called the Jurassic Foundation.
21:21 It's a charitable organization
21:22 that Universal donated a lot of money to over the years,
21:25 proceeds from the film, actually supporting the science.
21:28 So that dinosaur wouldn't be known
21:30 if it wasn't for Jurassic Park
21:32 in a roundabout way, the film funding the dig.
21:34 Anyway, parental care.
21:37 Some dinosaurs, like the big long neck dinosaurs,
21:38 probably didn't have much parental care at all.
21:40 I mean, can you imagine an animal the size of a jet plane
21:43 sitting on a nest?
21:44 Like, it's just, you know, it just wouldn't happen.
21:46 But a lot of the smaller dinosaurs,
21:48 the ones that had feathers,
21:50 the ones that were very bird-like,
21:52 they did care for their young.
21:54 We actually have fossil parents sitting on their nests,
21:57 protecting their eggs,
21:59 very sadly protecting their eggs
22:01 from like sandstorms and floods that ended up burying them.
22:06 And, but the way they're sitting on the nest,
22:08 the way that their posture is,
22:11 the way that the arms are folded out covering the eggs,
22:14 it's just exactly like modern birds do it.
22:17 We're not totally sure if those are mother
22:19 or father dinosaurs, by the way.
22:21 You know, you probably assume they're mothers,
22:23 a lot of people would,
22:24 but there's a lot of birds where fathers do a lot of care
22:26 and others where, you know, both parents do.
22:28 So we don't really know.
22:29 What we do know though, is that those dinosaur parents,
22:32 and these are things like some of the over-raptor
22:34 type dinosaurs, they were very good parents.
22:37 - Steve, I saw you had a tweet the other day saying that
22:39 you thought they did a pretty good job with the anatomy.
22:42 - So, you know, this dinosaur is in the film,
22:43 it's Moros, is what it's called.
22:45 It's a tiny little Tyrannosaur.
22:47 It's basically a T-Rex ancestor or a T-Rex cousin.
22:50 It was the size of like a little puppy dog.
22:53 It's a really cute character
22:56 and it plays a small but important role in the film.
22:59 And this dinosaur, it was a real dinosaur,
23:01 it was discovered a few years ago.
23:02 It was named by a friend of mine, Lindsey Zano,
23:04 who's an outstanding paleontologist,
23:06 a great discoverer of dinosaurs.
23:08 She's a curator down in North Carolina.
23:11 And I know Lindsey is very excited
23:14 that her dinosaur is gonna be in the film.
23:16 - How would you compare it to the previous movies?
23:19 - Well, you know, there's a lot of dinosaurs
23:23 and other things like this thing on the screen here,
23:25 this huge Mosasaur, I mean, that's not a dinosaur,
23:27 but it's a reptile cousin of dinosaurs.
23:29 There's pterodactyls, pterosaurs in the film
23:32 that are also not dinosaurs.
23:32 There's a few early mammals actually.
23:34 And so in "The Rise and Reign of the Mammals"
23:36 in the new book, I talk about two of these mammals.
23:38 There's a Dimetrodon in the film
23:40 and there's a Lystrosaurus.
23:41 Dimetrodon is that one with the sail on its back.
23:43 It looks like a dinosaur,
23:44 but it's actually an early relative of ours.
23:47 It's more closely related to us than it is dinosaurs.
23:49 And then Lystrosaurus was this little thing
23:51 that lived after the end Permian extinction,
23:53 cute little thing.
23:55 Anyway, there's lots of characters, lots of new characters.
23:57 They're not all dinosaurs.
23:59 And generally they're pretty good.
24:00 There's Pyroraptor here.
24:02 This is one of the new villains
24:03 and this is a proper raptor.
24:04 You know, this is what raptors really would have looked like.
24:07 They would have had feathers all over their bodies.
24:09 They would have had wings on their arms,
24:12 just terrifying, like, you know,
24:15 maybe a turkey or a ostrich or something,
24:17 but even more terrifying, you know, running after you.
24:20 So I think, you know, by and large,
24:22 I really liked the dinosaurs.
24:23 Yes, there's some inaccuracies.
24:25 You know, some of those things are because
24:27 the original Jurassic Park nearly 30 years ago
24:30 established a look, a design
24:33 that basically become a brand, you know?
24:35 So there's certain things, you know,
24:37 they're not just gonna put feathers
24:39 all over the T-Rex, let's say, you know,
24:40 that just wouldn't really work in the Jurassic universe.
24:45 But for a blockbuster movie,
24:47 I think these dinosaurs are really good.
24:50 And if you think about it, I mean, you know, Star Wars.
24:55 I mean, do they get all the astrophysics right?
24:57 No, probably not, it's a blockbuster movie.
24:59 So here, I think what Jurassic Park
25:01 and Jurassic World have always done,
25:02 is they have a really high bar.
25:04 And even if these dinosaurs might not be
25:06 exactly 100% in line with every single fossil,
25:09 or if they're not, you know,
25:12 maybe at the same level as things that are done
25:14 in an actual nature documentary or science documentary.
25:17 For a blockbuster movie to have this quality,
25:20 to me, that's really astounding.
25:21 And also very important because, you know,
25:23 moviegoers around the world
25:24 are seeing pretty realistic dinosaurs.
25:27 - Yeah, I had a question about a scene that's coming up.
25:30 So let's see this trailer to the finish.
25:33 - Okay, let me do this, here we go.
25:36 Okay, this is the Therizinosaurus.
25:41 This is a great scene.
25:43 Bryce Dallas Howard confronts, encounters this dinosaur.
25:48 And it's a big dinosaur with feathers.
25:51 And it's terrifying, it has claws that are like a meter long
25:57 like three of these meter long claws on each arm.
25:59 Like imagine like a giant sloth, like these kinds of claws.
26:02 And yeah, the body's big, this thing weighed several tons,
26:05 big pot belly and covered in feathers, ferocious thing.
26:09 But it's a plant eater and that's part of the storyline.
26:11 And it turns out to play a really key role in the story.
26:14 But this is one of the new dinosaurs.
26:15 This is being shown in a Jurassic film
26:18 for the very first time.
26:19 It's one that right away Colin told me about early on.
26:21 He said, "I wanna get a Therizinosaurus in there."
26:23 I said, "Yes, people are gonna love this.
26:25 "These are some of the weirdest dinosaurs of all."
26:27 You know, people are gonna watch this and not, you know,
26:30 and think that these things are totally made up.
26:32 There can't possibly have been an animal
26:34 that looked like that.
26:35 But these things are real,
26:36 we find their fossils in the Gobi Desert.
26:38 And this scene here that's alluded to in the trailer
26:40 is, you know, one of my favorite scenes in the film
26:43 and Bryce Dallas Howard, who's very nice by the way,
26:48 spent a lot of time with her at the outreach event
26:51 the other night.
26:52 So she was there inspiring the students.
26:56 But this scene I think is her strongest.
26:58 It's a great, great piece of acting
27:00 and a really, really great piece of acting
27:02 by the dinosaur too, I gotta say.
27:04 (laughing)
27:06 - We're racing toward the extinction of our species.
27:10 Those are claws, not feathers?
27:12 - Yeah, those are claws on the arms, yeah.
27:16 They look kind of like feathers,
27:17 like some big streaming feathers, but those are,
27:18 so it's feathers on the rest of the body.
27:21 - So, and are they fast like sloths?
27:25 - You know, there's a lot we don't know
27:28 about Therizinosaurus because the fossils are very limited.
27:31 We have fossils of those claws.
27:33 So some of those claws have just been found on their own,
27:35 like the hand, but there's not a lot of fossils
27:37 of the rest of the body.
27:39 We have enough to generally know what it looks like,
27:41 but as far as knowing like how fast it could move,
27:45 really, really iffy.
27:47 - Cool, very cool.
27:49 I like how they camouflaged it with the forest.
27:53 - Yeah, yep.
27:55 - Oh, everybody's showing up again.
27:59 - And you're seeing all the actors, you know,
28:01 everybody, everything comes full circle in the film.
28:03 - Oh, here we go.
28:07 Okay, yeah, so there's Pyroraptor on the ice.
28:10 There's Chris and Dewanda, that's Dewanda Wise.
28:12 She's gonna be the breakout star.
28:14 She's an awesome person, incredible actress,
28:17 and a lot of fun.
28:17 We've been bantering a lot about the last few days
28:20 about which ones are and aren't dinosaurs.
28:22 So I had to break the news to Dewanda
28:25 at our STEM event the other night
28:27 that when she said her favorite dinosaur is Quetzalcoatlus,
28:29 it's because of this scene where she's flying a plane
28:31 and the Quetzalcoatlus is attacked.
28:34 I had to butt in and say, oh, sorry, Dewanda,
28:36 they pay me to be the science advisor on this thing.
28:39 I gotta tell you, it's not a dinosaur.
28:41 She couldn't believe it.
28:42 - My colleagues always get me on that.
28:44 I'm literally on this one.
28:45 - Yeah, this is Quetzalcoatlus.
28:47 It's the largest flying animal that ever lived
28:51 as far as we know.
28:51 Its wingspan was somewhere in the 10 to 12 meter range.
28:56 You know, we're talking about 35 to 40 feet.
28:59 So this is like bigger than a fighter jet.
29:01 And here it is, you know, attacking the plane
29:06 that Dewanda's character is flying.
29:09 And Chris Pratt's character is in the plane too.
29:12 Bryce's character, as you can see, is parachuted out.
29:15 But it's an awesome scene.
29:18 And it really conveys to me just the size and the strength
29:23 and the power of these pterosaurs.
29:25 I mean, pterosaurs are extinct.
29:26 They went extinct when the asteroid hit,
29:28 you know, with the dinosaurs.
29:29 So there's nothing alive today like that.
29:32 They're one of only three groups of animals with bones
29:35 that have ever evolved proper powered flapping flight
29:38 with birds and bats being the other.
29:40 So pterosaurs are the only one of those three that's extinct.
29:43 So, you know, they're so weird.
29:45 They're so alien.
29:46 They're so otherworldly.
29:47 And they got to be so big,
29:49 so much bigger than any flying bird or any bat.
29:52 And I think these scenes convey
29:54 just how enormous these animals were.
29:56 And yeah, if you were in a plane
29:58 and you were flying around with these things,
30:00 probably wouldn't want to be in their airspace.
30:04 (laughing)
30:06 - I did read a critique online saying that
30:10 maybe this pterosaur couldn't fly with such long distances
30:13 given its great size,
30:16 but it's nice to take liberties in a monster movie.
30:18 - Yeah, I mean, there is good evidence for me
30:21 that they could fly.
30:22 There has been debate, you know,
30:23 could they be secondarily flightless?
30:26 Are they like pterosaur versions of ostriches
30:28 because they're so big?
30:29 But there's been some cool research that, you know,
30:31 people like Mike Habib, who's a friend of mine
30:33 who's an expert on pterosaur flight
30:36 and other people like, you know,
30:37 Daryl Nation, Mark Witten,
30:39 and you know, some of the real pterosaur experts
30:41 have studied these things.
30:42 And they think that these pterosaurs,
30:44 even though they were so big,
30:45 they could still fly and they could fly well.
30:47 And we find bones of giant pterosaurs in the late Cretaceous
30:50 not only in North America where Quetzalcoatlus is,
30:52 but there's a bunch of them in Europe.
30:54 There's a bunch of them from Romania
30:55 where I do a lot of field work.
30:56 There's one called Hatsagopteryx.
30:58 And so it seems like they probably had pretty big ranges.
31:02 You know, they probably could sail on those wings
31:05 for very long distances.
31:07 So I think really they probably were pretty good flyers.
31:11 - Nice, well then more accuracy than I realized.
31:15 Anybody else show up at the end?
31:18 Oh gosh.
31:20 Oh, Triceratops.
31:21 This is a veritable who's who of dinosaurs.
31:25 - Well, you got all the classics, you know,
31:28 and there's, oh yeah, not, you know,
31:30 there's Dilophosaurus coming back,
31:32 one of the villains from the first film
31:34 with that crazy frill.
31:35 There is no scientific evidence that it had that frill.
31:38 That is movie magic, you know,
31:40 that's based on some lizards and some other things.
31:42 This is going back to Creighton and Spielberg
31:44 and their vision.
31:44 Awesome movie monster.
31:47 Probably didn't have that frill,
31:48 but it did have the two crests of bone on his head
31:50 and it had big sharp teeth.
31:51 It would have been really terrifying.
31:53 It probably did not spit venom either, but you know,
31:56 again, that's some movie magic.
31:58 And it's one of the most awesome characters.
32:00 When I visited the set,
32:01 I saw the animatronic version of this
32:03 and I didn't know at that point
32:05 it was gonna be in the film for sure.
32:06 So they kind of surprised me and they showed me this.
32:09 I said, yes, you're bringing back the Dilophosaurus.
32:12 One of the best dinosaurs of all time in the franchise.
32:15 So there's some great action scenes in the film
32:18 with this monster.
32:20 - Uh-oh.
32:22 - Oh yeah, so here they're saying, don't move.
32:24 Is this a T-Rex or another dinosaur that's after them?
32:27 Now, the T-Rex, of course, it wouldn't be a Jurassic film
32:31 if there was no T-Rex.
32:32 So there is a T-Rex in the film,
32:33 but there is another dinosaur, one that rivals T-Rex.
32:37 And that's the one that they needed me to pronounce
32:39 when they called me from the set.
32:40 That's the Giganotosaurus.
32:42 And the real Giganotosaurus, it comes from Argentina.
32:46 And it was big.
32:48 It was about the same size as T-Rex.
32:50 Maybe it was a little bit longer than T-Rex.
32:52 It seems like it didn't weigh quite as much.
32:55 T-Rex maybe weighed a ton or so more.
32:57 It was just a bit stockier.
32:59 But by and large, this was another meat-eating dinosaur
33:01 that would have looked like
33:03 and behaved pretty similar to T-Rex.
33:05 This is ultimate apex predator type of stuff.
33:08 So in this film, you have the two apex predators,
33:12 the T-Rex and the Giganotosaurus.
33:14 As you can imagine, chaos will ensue.
33:17 I won't give away the storyline,
33:19 but when two super alpha apex predators go at it,
33:24 there's gonna be some action.
33:25 - Yeah, I really can't wait to see it.
33:30 I wanted to ask you this.
33:32 This movie franchise has been going on
33:34 since the early '90s.
33:36 What do you think it's done to dinosaur interest
33:39 and people who have seen it?
33:40 - Well, I think it's been huge.
33:42 I think really it's the most important thing
33:45 that's happened to paleontology,
33:46 at least in the last half a century.
33:49 The "Jurassic World" franchise,
33:51 and I've always been a fan of it.
33:52 So being able to work on it is really a dream.
33:56 But I think the franchise as a whole,
33:59 it's just brought dinosaurs
34:01 to a massive international audience.
34:03 And it's brought a new vision of dinosaurs.
34:05 When the first film came out in '93,
34:06 I remember seeing it in the cinema.
34:07 I was nine years old.
34:08 I was there with my dad and with my brothers.
34:10 And I mean, the special effects were so far beyond
34:12 anything that had ever been done in a film by that point.
34:15 And those dinosaurs were so realistic.
34:17 They were so different from the ones that
34:19 were in the books in the library and in the school lessons.
34:22 And so on.
34:23 I mean, these dinosaurs seemed real.
34:24 They seemed like real animals.
34:26 And the world saw that.
34:29 And then as the franchises continued,
34:31 hundreds of millions of people have seen these films.
34:34 And that's led to more museums
34:35 putting on more dinosaur exhibits,
34:37 more universities putting on more dinosaur courses.
34:39 That's led to more jobs for paleontologists.
34:41 As I mentioned earlier,
34:42 there has been this direct funding of research digs
34:45 and projects from proceeds from the film.
34:49 So all in all, it's had a great influence.
34:52 And I think a lot of us, probably me included,
34:55 wouldn't be here, wouldn't be a paleontologist,
34:58 wouldn't have a job, or wouldn't even ever
35:01 kind of had an entry into the field,
35:03 any reason, any inspiration to go into the field
35:05 if it wasn't for "Jurassic Park."
35:07 And I have colleagues from all over the world.
35:09 It's not just like little boys growing up
35:11 in the middle of America like me.
35:13 It's young boys, young girls, all over the world.
35:17 I have colleagues from China, from Argentina.
35:19 I mean, they say that these films
35:21 are what inspired them to become paleontologists.
35:24 And now they're the ones out there
35:25 that are making the new discoveries
35:26 and pushing our field forward.
35:28 - That's so great.
35:30 I can't wait to see what dinosaurs pop up
35:32 in the next movies, whenever they may come out.
35:35 - Well, so that was Lauren, Steve chatting.
35:41 Oh man.
35:42 So I don't know if you guys have seen
35:45 the reviews yet come out.
35:46 It's not great.
35:48 I just reloaded "Rotten Tomatoes."
35:50 It was at 38 this morning.
35:52 It went down to 37.
35:53 Now it's at 36.
35:54 Seem like people are not happy with this movie as much.
35:58 Here's one review from Neil Pond at Parade.
36:01 CGI dinosaurs just don't feel as awesome anymore.
36:05 Versus this review that says the visual effects are amazing.
36:10 So I kind of feel like if you're here for the dinosaurs,
36:16 it's gonna be fine.
36:17 We know the last movie was a bit of more of a fun watch,
36:22 right, drink every time you hear something silly being said.
36:26 But I mean, yeah.
36:31 Suspension of disbelief.
36:33 Yeah, guys, we don't have dinosaurs here.
36:35 Like let's be clear.
36:36 This is more cool to feature all these new dinosaurs
36:40 that we have not talked about.
36:41 And like both Ken and Steve said,
36:43 it makes people more interested in dinosaurs
36:46 and history and science and all that stuff.
36:49 And I mean, so this is one review
36:52 that I'm a little concerned by.
36:54 I did see a lot of mention of locusts.
36:57 I don't know if you guys recall me in other live streams.
37:01 I'm not a fan of bugs.
37:02 I'm already planning to go see this movie soon.
37:04 So, but we do have coverage on live science about locusts.
37:09 So I will be reading up on that to make sure
37:13 that I can in fact handle it.
37:15 So I wanted to feature some questions.
37:19 First of all, Mac has read Steve's book.
37:24 That's great.
37:24 He does have a new book, "The Rise and Reign of the Mammals."
37:29 So please, you know, check that out.
37:33 But then we also got a comment from Javier.
37:37 Are there air sacs in the new movie
37:39 like in the new "Planet Earth" series?
37:42 Now I believe that Javier is referring
37:44 to prehistoric planet, which is on Apple Plus TV.
37:46 We have covered this before.
37:48 And in fact, we did get Ken talking about this.
37:53 If I can just load this part of the interview.
37:59 That was, it was a pretty cool bit.
38:02 - It was quite a long scene of Dreadnoughtus.
38:05 Here they are.
38:06 - A fight scene.
38:08 There was a fight scene in this territorial battle
38:13 between males.
38:14 And I think this was actually kind of based on our science
38:18 because what we found with the two Dreadnoughtus individuals
38:22 is that the much larger one, the 65 ton one
38:26 was osteologically, that means it's bones,
38:29 was osteologically quite young.
38:31 You might even think of it as a teenager
38:33 who was growing rapidly at the time of its death.
38:36 Whereas the one that we found that was one third smaller
38:39 osteologically was much, much older.
38:43 And so where do you find this in animals today
38:45 where you find older, smaller individuals
38:48 and younger, bigger individuals?
38:49 That's in species where you have sexual dimorphism
38:53 where the two sexes are of different sizes.
38:57 And usually that happens where you have male dominated
38:59 sexual selection, which means that two alpha males
39:03 are going to compete with each other
39:05 to control a territory or a group of females.
39:08 There's also female dominated sexual selection.
39:11 That's where you see the males showing off
39:13 with all kinds of colors and doing fancy tricks
39:16 and buying Corvettes and things like that.
39:18 And so with Dreadnoughtus, we have just a hint
39:23 that we have sexual dimorphism and then kind of a hint,
39:27 based on a hint that maybe it was male dominated
39:31 sexual selection.
39:32 And that's what you are seeing here.
39:34 And then-
39:35 - These air sacs, we gotta talk about these air sacs.
39:37 - Yeah, let's talk about the air sacs.
39:38 What do you think about that?
39:39 - Well, the air sacs are kind of hard to miss.
39:42 I have to tell you that there is zero evidence
39:45 that Dreadnoughtus had air sacs.
39:48 These are pneumatic gular pouches
39:51 like a grouse would have today.
39:53 Is it impossible?
39:55 No, it's not impossible,
39:58 but we don't have any evidence that they do have that.
40:00 Now, I was told by the consultant on the show
40:04 that they wanted to find a way to illustrate the fact
40:09 that extinct animals must have had
40:11 amazing soft tissue structures
40:14 that will never be preserved in the fossil record,
40:16 which is certainly true.
40:17 If we only knew elephants from their skeletons,
40:20 I probably wouldn't really know what an elephant looked like.
40:23 So this is an example of a hypothetical feature
40:28 that maybe we're missing completely in the fossil record
40:31 that could have existed.
40:33 Did they specifically have this?
40:36 Probably not.
40:37 Is it impossible that they had this?
40:38 No, it's also not, but we don't have any evidence of it.
40:42 What we do have though,
40:43 is we have their cervical vertebrae,
40:46 cervical vertebrae,
40:47 and the cervical vertebrae are very pneumatic,
40:50 meaning that they have a system of air tubes
40:54 and air bladders that invade the bone
40:57 over the lifetime of the animal.
40:59 So the bone becomes more honeycombed with air over time,
41:02 making it very light,
41:03 but still retaining most of the strength.
41:05 Because if you have a 40 foot long neck, right?
41:07 A 40 foot long lever,
41:09 you don't wanna put a lot of weight
41:11 at the end of that lever.
41:12 So they have these very lightly built pneumatic necks,
41:16 which I guess gave them the idea,
41:17 okay, there's air in the neck.
41:19 There's a lot of air in the neck.
41:21 Why not something like male grouses in the breeding season
41:25 that have these pneumatic cooler pouches
41:27 that pop out like that?
41:29 - Thinking of a story of Dreadnoughtus.
41:32 (laughs)
41:33 - I know it's always interesting to draw inspiration
41:36 from modern creatures.
41:38 - There he goes.
41:39 - I guess we'll have to hold out
41:41 for any more fossil or soft tissue preservation.
41:45 - Yeah, there's certain things
41:46 that we're just never going to know,
41:48 and we kind of have to live with that disappointment.
41:51 But there are a lot of soft tissue features
41:54 that extinct creatures have
41:55 that we're just never going to find.
41:58 We can make inferences about them.
41:59 Sometimes we can do that from molecular work
42:03 with modern creatures.
42:04 We can look at the DNA from groups of related creatures
42:08 and kind of figure out where that trait must have started.
42:12 Occasionally you get soft tissue structures preserved
42:17 if you have very clay deposits
42:21 that can preserve that kind of resolution,
42:23 but that's very rare.
42:23 And I don't see that scenario happening
42:25 for big things like sauropods.
42:26 That happens for little things like birds.
42:30 And then there's always the promise
42:31 of molecular paleontology where we routinely cover now,
42:36 we cover blood vessels and blood cells
42:39 and proteins from dinosaurs and other extinct creatures.
42:43 A few DNA bases have been recovered.
42:45 Is it possible we'll have a genome of a dinosaur,
42:48 of an adlion avian dinosaur in the future?
42:51 I don't know.
42:52 It's a pretty high mountain to climb,
42:54 but I can't say that it's impossible.
42:55 - So there you go.
42:58 Parasects in prehistoric planet, zero evidence, zero.
43:02 At least we know things because of the fossils.
43:08 So obviously like the more these paleontologists find,
43:13 the more they tell us and the more we tell you.
43:16 So that's kind of how this goes.
43:17 But I started watching a little bit of prehistoric planet
43:24 and I found it a little bit too phantasmal
43:27 for what I was looking for.
43:30 And so I guess maybe I'll go into Jurassic World Dominion
43:32 with a little bit more fanciful.
43:35 Here's another review on it.
43:37 Instead of a fitting swan song to a successful franchise,
43:40 it becomes a creative misfire.
43:43 Katie, I mean, that sounds tough.
43:48 And apparently Laura Dern, which I mean, guys,
43:53 we get to see Laura Dern and Sam Neill again
43:56 and Jeff Goldblum.
43:57 Like these are like, that's why we're going
43:59 for the nostalgia.
44:01 But, Shakoos, this never gets old.
44:06 And I'm sure if you were seeing real dinosaurs
44:10 in real life, it probably wouldn't get old.
44:11 So I'll let that slide.
44:13 But finally it's like satisfies the fan
44:18 who comes from the dino fights and the nostalgia
44:19 while leaving the rest of the audience cold.
44:20 And I'm curious who else is seeing this movie
44:24 that isn't into dino fights and isn't into nostalgia.
44:27 Like I just don't know where the genre lies otherwise.
44:32 But thank you for joining us.
44:35 That's our live stream on Jurassic World Dominion.
44:39 Maybe we'll review it after this weekend
44:41 when more people have actually seen it
44:43 and not just the critics.
44:45 And if you want that, let us know.
44:48 In the meantime, check out life science.com
44:50 where we live science.
44:51 Thanks guys.
44:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]