David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive Page #4

It's hard to imagine a time

when the world didn't know

about dinosaurs,

but until relatively recently,

nobody knew they had ever existed,

let alone that they once

ruled the world.

The story of their discovery

starts in the 1820s

when a doctor named Gideon Mantell

living on the south coast of England

in Sussex

picked up something odd

in a sandstone quarry.

And this is what he found.

It's clearly a tooth of some kind.

This is its outer surface

and in shape,

it's very like the tooth of

a living lizard, such as an iguana,

which is why the animal

it belonged to

came to be called lguanodon -

iguana tooth.

And with it were a number

of other bones.

They were the hips and back legs

of some kind of giant reptile.

More of them were discovered

and soon, there were enough

to get some idea

of what the whole animal

had looked like.

One odd little bone seemed

to have nowhere to go,

so the reconstructors put it

on the end of its nose,

making the animal look like

some kind of reptilian rhinoceros.

It was like nothing anyone

had ever seen before.

So a great fossil hunt started

in the quarries of Sussex.

And eventually, the bones of several

different kinds

of big animals were discovered.

They were brought here

to the museum.

Professor Owen examined them

and he decided that

they should belong

to a completely new kind of animal,

an animal he called a dinosaur -

"terrible lizard."

In due course,

more complete skeletons

of Iguanodons were discovered

and it became possible

to reconstruct them

with greater certainty.

Iguanodon could stand upright.

It had small arms and was over 25 feet

7meters tall.

And that horn on its nose

was actually a spike on its thumb.

Before long,

new and even bigger species

were being unearthed

all over the world,

from the instantly recognisable

three-horned Triceratops

to the sensational

Tyrannosaurus rex.

These astounding beasts

have inspired and captivated

not only scientists,

but writers, artists and filmmakers

for almost two centuries.

But it was Professor Owen,

here in the Natural History Museum,

who first identified them.

And his work has been continued here

ever since.

This is the laboratory

where the museum prepares

its fossils

for study and for display.

It's here that they painstakingly

remove the excess rock

to reveal the fossils

in all their extraordinary detail.

This is the fossilised egg

of a dinosaur,

one of the first to be discovered,

and it was found close to some bones

of a sauropod dinosaur.

Sauropods - this is a model of one -

were gigantic vegetarian dinosaurs

that wandered around on four legs.

There are lots of different species

of them,

they're found all over the world,

and they're the biggest land animals

that have ever existed.

Of course, you can't prove

that it was a sauropod

that laid this egg.

But I would like to think

that it was.

The weight of the sand that

eventually covered it squashed it,

but if we could see it

when it was first laid...

...we would see

that it's much rounder

than a chicken's egg,

more like that of a turtle

or a crocodile,

and of course, very much bigger.

Sounds like something's in there.

But how will that something

make its way out?

Most dinosaur eggs are shell

filled with rock,

but not so long ago,

someone in South America

found a sauropod egg,

and inside,

there was a baby sauropod.

On its nose,

it had a little egg tooth.

Birds and crocodiles

have the same sort of thing.

They need it, as the sauropod did,

in order to be able to break

out of the shell.

Oh.

We know that baby sauropods

were very small

and left their nests very early,

perhaps to avoid being trampled upon

by their huge mothers.

They probably hid in the forest

until they grew large enough

to join the herd of adults.

Hello.

Well, this is just one leg bone

of a fully grown sauropod,

so you can see this little fellow

has got quite a lot of growing to do

over the next few years.

The museum, of course,

has the skeleton of

a fully grown sauropod -

of a kind.

And its story is one

of kings and millionaires.

Back in 1902, King Edward VII,

then Prince of Wales,

saw a picture of

a huge sauropod replica,

one of the biggest yet discovered,

while visiting the Scotsman turned

American millionaire Andrew Carnegie

at his castle in Scotland.

The prince immediately said,

"Well, I would like one of those,"

and in those days,

what princes asked for, they got.

And so, in due course,

another replica turned up right here

in the Natural History Museum.

And there it is.

There are two ways of pronouncing

its scientific name.

It's either "DIP-lo-DOH-cus"

or "dip-LOD-ocus".

Either way,

it's a bit of a mouthful,

so I'm going to use the nickname

that is commonly used around here.

This is Dippy, and what's more,

although there's no way of being

sure whether it was male or female,

I'm going to assume

that Dippy was female.

But what did Dippy look like

when she was alive?

This strangely-shaped fragment

of a dinosaur called Edmontosaurus

was mummified before

it was fossilised,

so not only the bones but the skin

was almost perfectly preserved,

and it was covered in small scales.

They didn't overlap

like those of a lizard,

but formed a close-fitting mosaic.

Maybe Dippy was like that too.

But what about her colour?

My suspicion is that Dippy,

like many large mammals today,

such as elephants or rhinoceros,

was a general all-over

neutral plain colour,

so if we add a little bit

of skin and flesh,

we can get some idea of

what she actually looked like.

So now, after 150 million years,

we've got a pretty good idea

of what Dippy looked like.

But how did she behave?

Well, animals her size and weight

must have moved in

a rather ponderous way.

And in any case,

since she was a vegetarian,

as we know from her teeth,

she had no need to be speedy

to get her food.

But it's the tiny bones

in Dippy's inner ear

that can give us a clue

as to what she sounded like.

These little bones are basically

the same shape

as that of the dinosaur's

closest relatives, birds.

The range of sounds a bird hears

is related to its size.

A small bird makes and hears

high-pitched sounds,

whereas large birds can communicate

with low-pitched sounds.

So huge Dippy, with her inner ear

bone shaped like those of a bird,

could probably hear very low-pitched

frequencies of sound.

And she could probably make them,

too.

We know that elephants today

can communicate using infrasound -

sound with frequencies so low

they're below human hearing

and those sounds travel

through the ground,

sometimes for many miles,

and are detected by elephants

through their large, flat,

sensitive feet.

Dippy, too, had large, flat, feet.

So maybe the giant dinosaurs

communicated with one another

in much the same way,

as well as by bellowing.

And those may not have been

the only noises

that Dippy could make.

Some scientists think that because

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes