Steve Brusatte, the paleontologist behind Jurassic World’s science and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Story of Birds, walks through what fossils actually prove versus what Hollywood invented.
Brusatte traces dinosaurs back to footprints smaller than a house cat, found in Poland just after the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history, and explains why those early survivors spent millions of years as background characters next to car-sized salamanders and armored crocodiles.
About the speaker: Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist who hunts and writes about dinosaurs. He is on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, but grew up in the Midwestern USA. Steve has traveled around the world digging up dinosaurs and, working with many international colleagues, has named more than 15 new species, including the tyrannosaur 'Pinocchio rex' (Qianzhousaurus) and the raptor Zhenyuanlong.
Timestamps
00:00:21 Chapter 1: The rise and fall of dinosaurs
00:03:17 The first true dinosaurs emerge
00:08:01 Spectacular giants
00:15:06 The last morning
00:19:16 Chapter 2: T. Rex: The king of dinosaurs
00:22:30 Everything Jurassic Park got wrong
00:25:12 The mystery of the tiny arms
00:31:13 A new dinosaur species found every week
00:32:02 Chapter 3: The rise and reign of mammals
00:40:19 How flowers changed everything
00:44:34 Mammals go dumb, then huge
01:05:44 Should we bring them back?
001:09:21 Chapter 4: How birds became the last dinosaurs
01:23:54 Flight was an accident
01:37:31 What did dinosaurs sound like?
01:40:30 The pigeon is a dinosaur
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Steve Brusatte. I’m a paleontologist. I dig up dinosaurs. I teach at the University of Edinburgh. I advise on films like the Jurassic World films, and I write pop science books like The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and the new one called The Story of Birds.
Chapter 1: The rise and fall of dinosaurs
The story of dinosaurs actually begins in tragedy. Dinosaurs emerged from the worst mass extinction in the history of life. The closest life has ever come to completely dying out. And this happened about 250 million years ago at the end of what we call the Permian period of Earth history. And this was the time where there was the supercontinent, Pangaea. All of the land was gathered together as this one enormous landmass stretching from the North Pole to the South Pole. And it was a landmass that was ruled by a lot of early relatives and cousins and ancestors of us, distant mammal ancestors.
But then, in what is now Siberia, these enormous volcanoes started to erupt about 250 million years ago. And these are not volcanoes like those that we know today. It’s hard to even envision what these were like. These weren’t the Hawaiian volcanoes or Mount Pinatubo blowing its top one day. No, no, no. These were enormous fissures in the earth. It’s like the earth was slashed with a giant machete and it bled lava for millions of years. And as that lava came up through those cracks in the earth it burnt its way through all the rocks and that released unholy amounts of carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases that warmed the atmosphere led to runaway global warming and that that caused an extinction. And not just any extinction, but the granddaddy of all mass extinctions, 90 or 95% of all species died out.
But there were a few plucky survivors. And among those survivors were some small little reptiles that had long arms and legs that could move fast, that were agile, that were smart. And it’s in those reptiles that we find the roots of the dinosaur family tree.
Some of the fieldwork that I’ve done with friends and colleagues of mine in Europe has identified some of the first very tantalizing clues of those dinosaur ancestors living soon after that terrible extinction at the end of the Permian. And these are in many ways very meager clues because they are not nice, beautiful, complete skeletons like you might see in a museum. But they are tiny little footprints and handprints, just a few centimeters long. And we find them in Poland. And these little footprints, they were made about 249, 250 million years ago. They were made by these little reptiles that we call dinosauromorphs, which were no bigger than a cat, than a pet cat that we might have. I could hold one of these in my arms.
From those humble ancestors came the true dinosaurs. And the first true dinosaurs, we find their fossils about 230 million years ago in the Triassic period. And really, they’re just distinguished by a few changes in the pelvis and the backbone that allowed them to walk more upright and move more quickly. And these very first dinosaurs, they split into the three major groups of dinosaurs. And these were the theropods. Those are the meat-eating dinosaurs, the ones that would eventually become T. rexes and velociraptors and birds. Then secondly, there’s the sauropods and their close relatives. Those are the long-necked dinosaurs, the brontosauruses and plodocus and brachiosauruses. And then the third group is the Ornithischian dinosaurs. And this is a whole variety of mostly plant-eating dinosaurs that had beaks and that could chew their food really well, like Triceratops. The ones with plates on their backs, like Stegosaurus. The duck-billed dinosaurs. The armored dinosaurs. The ones with the dome heads that head-butted each other. Those are all Ornithischian dinosaurs.
So, as you can see, there’s this great diversity of dinosaurs that was starting to establish itself in the Triassic period on the supercontinent of Pangea. But this was not an easy thing for these first dinosaurs to do because they had a lot of competition from the animals that were living with them, but they also were kept in check by the weather, by the climate. When it comes to the physical environment, Pangaea was not an easy place to live. Not at all. This enormous supercontinent was so big that much of the interior was thousands of miles from the oceans, from the shoreline. So there were vast deserts covering much of the supercontinent. But the shorelines weren’t really that much more hospitable because the shorelines were battered by storms, by what geologists call mega monsoons, which sounds very hyperbolic, but it is what they were. They were supersized monsoon systems.
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