Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur Page #2

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their nests are wherever I look.

In fact, it's quite difficult for me

to take a step without walking

on a dinosaur eggshell.

Over thousands of years,

the wind and the rain have

cleared away the soft rock

that once enclosed these fragments

and they can tell us quite a lot

about how titanosaurs reproduced.

Careful excavation has

shown that these dinosaurs

laid eggs in clutches of

up to 30 or 40 at a time.

They would have looked

rather like these replicas

because they lay on the

surface of the ground,

not covered by soil,

but in a shallow depression.

Sometimes, though,

remains of vegetation have

been found in some nests,

which suggests that the dinosaurs

might have used rotting leaves

to help with the incubation.

The dinosaur that laid these

eggs here were medium-sized.

Our dinosaur that we're excavating,

probably laid eggs as big as that.

I'm shown around by Dr Luis Chiappe who,

with his team,

discovered this remarkable site.

Dinosaur eggs here were

laid on an old river plain.

Then the river flooded and

covered the unhatched eggs,

preserving them in mud.

You see, you know, many eggs...

There.

..for kilometres and kilometres.

Here's a nice one.

- Oh, that's a huge piece!

- Yup.

- And this is the actual surface of the egg?

- Yes.

Astounding.

Do you suppose they could have

been coloured like birds' eggs?

They may. Maybe they were off-white.

- We can't tell really.

- Yeah.

Well,

we can see all the tiny pores on the surface.

And the texture.

Yeah. What a beautiful piece.

You must admit it's pretty romantic.

THEY LAUGH:

I think it's incredible.

I think it's absolutely extraordinary

and I must put it back where I found it.

Thank you.

The fragments could tell us quite a

lot about how the dinosaurs nested.

But some, amazingly,

can do even more than that.

All these examples have

something quite special.

This one is my favourite.

And what you can see is a very

large patch of baby dinosaur skin.

How wonderful!

It's extraordinary.

- And this is not just an impression, this is the mineralised skin.

- It is.

Yeah.

Astounding.

The eggs were not just preserving the bones,

- they were also preserving the skin of these babies.

- Yeah.

This was just on the surface.

I remember picking this up

and brushing it a little bit

and then using my hand lens

and looking at this exact patch

of skin and I realised that

we had found something that no

person had ever seen before.

- You are the first human being ever to see a baby dinosaur's skin.

- Yes.

It was just an amazing...

amazing moment.

It must have been very close to hatching.

- It's almost complete, this thing.

- Yes, that's what we believe.

And then a flood...

Killed them all.

- Unfortunately for them, good for us.

- Yes.

Luis Chiappe has dozens of

complete eggs in his museum and

he allows me to examine some of his

most precious specimens for myself.

There are many other remarkable things

in these astonishing time capsules.

This one has got,

perfectly clearly, the limb bones.

Here is a skull.

That's the orbit of the eye,

there's the lower jaw, there's the snout.

This one also has a skull,

but on the tip of the snout you can

see a little spike which is like the

egg tooth that a bird embryo has to

help it crack itself out of a shell.

And here is a replica of what the complete,

un-crushed shell must have looked like.

With all these details,

it is possible to imagine how a

baby titanosaur entered the world.

BABY SQUEAKS:

To get an idea of how these

youngsters might have lived,

we can compare them with their

closest living relatives - birds.

Rather like baby ostriches,

a young titanosaur

would have been able to

walk soon after hatching.

They may well have gathered

into groups to give some safety

from predators, as young ostriches do.

Microscopic analysis of

dinosaur leg bones show rings,

rather like tree rings,

and these indicate that

titanosaurs grew very swiftly

early in their lives

and they could have lived for some 50 years,

plenty of time to become enormous.

The team now has 150 bones of our titanosaur,

enough to get an idea,

not only of its weight,

but also its height and length.

Now,

the plan is to build a life-size reproduction

of the complete skeleton.

It's a challenge to find a place

big enough to house an animal that's

four times longer than a London

bus and nearly twice its height.

But Diego thinks he's found one.

It's an old wool warehouse.

One, two, three, four,

five, six, seven...

We have been looking for

a place that is big enough

to fit our dinosaur.

This seems to be it.

This is a warehouse that we could use,

not only in terms of the length,

this is 70 metres long,

but also it's very important

in terms of the height.

So we need a place not only long,

but really high.

It really needs a little bit of decoration,

but I think it will do it.

It's going to be awesome!

Putting the skeleton together will help us

understand the particular

challenges of being such a giant.

So, next, an international team

of skeleton builders arrive

to scan the bones ready to make a

3-D computer model of each of them.

3-D scanning,

accurate to 0.01 of a millimetre,

allows images of the bones to be

placed in a virtual reality world

so that they can now be

examined from all points of view

without needing eight people to lift them.

One of the mysteries

surrounding our dinosaur is,

how could an animal as big as

it was actually move about?

The computer data allows us

to put our dinosaur leg bones together in 3-D

and then compare the arrangement with

what we know about living animals.

Elephants are the largest

land animal alive today.

They, like titanosaurs,

have to move their massive bodies around

without their bones shattering

under the enormous weight.

I've come to meet Professor John Hutchinson

here at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo.

He's studied elephants for many

years and has joined the team

that's investigating the internal

workings of our titanosaur.

We have about a one-metre long

pressure sensitive mat out there

with several thousand sensors in

it and it's telling us, in very

high resolution, what the pressure

on an elephant's foot is like.

We can see on the elephant's foot here...

- Here she goes...

- Oh, yeah! Great.

- Oh, that was a perfect one!

- Bull's-eye!

The pressure hits the ground,

rolls over and then pushes

off with its toenails.

So we can see there some hot colours,

or reds and oranges,

on the toenails of Melvin's

foot indicating high pressure.

And then some cooler colours

back towards the heel pad

in the greens and light blue.

That's low pressure.

So elephants are supporting most

of their weight on their toenails.

That pressure gets transmitted

up to their toe bones

and then up to their wrists

and ankles and so forth.

John's analysis suggests

that our titanosaur's legs,

like those of an elephant,

were placed vertically beneath the

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