How to Build a Dinosaur Page #2

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Let me take a closer look.

You can see the bones

right here, and here, and here.

It's very difficult to see what exactly they may be.

They're very thin.

It would probably be worth coming back

and cleaning this a little bit

and taking a closer look at what they may be.

Amazingly, less than 100 metres away,

there are more clues to the past.

Luis's colleague has found

the remains of a sauropod.

There's a piece of rib here

that's going into the ground,

about this angle,

and then there's a piece of the...

a pubis, the hipbone, right here,

and it's almost complete,

save for the very back end,

which is already starting to weather off.

Luis has to decide what to do with these finds.

Starting a new dig is a huge undertaking,

requiring time and money,

and he has limited resources.

We already have two very good sites

with long-necked dinosaurs.

I'm reluctant to open another excavation.

Just half a mile away is one of those sites.

Luis's team began work on it a year ago.

Most of the bones are still embedded in the rock

and must be painstakingly excavated.

Luis knows from the layer of rock they're digging

that this dinosaur died 150 million years ago,

but he doesn't know what species it is,

and it's potentially a dinosaur that

has never been seen before.

We are actually collecting in an area

that has not been sampled, no-one

has really worked here before.

The possibility of having a new species is very,

very, exciting.

A fossil dig is like a murder scene -

every piece of evidence about

what happened 150 million years ago

has to be salvaged.

The layout of the entire site will be mapped

and the precise location

of every bone fragment recorded,

to help piece together the remains.

The more complete the skeleton,

the easier it will be to identify

and the greater the likelihood that this dinosaur

will be turned into an exhibit.

We have hind limbs, we have forelimbs,

we have a lot of the tail,

we have ribs, we have many parts of the skeleton,

and now we're starting to uncover the neck.

I would anticipate

that we're going to have to keep

opening the quarry

to uncover many other neck vertebra and,

hopefully, the skull.

Working out what species this is

won't be possible until the bones are back in LA.

But fossils are fragile and moving

them is a risky business.

Ready? One, two, three, move.

It has to be 400 pounds at least,

right? If not more.

Go slowly.

The team begin the precarious

task of shifting a femur,

the single heaviest bone in the dinosaur's body.

Try to keep in a line,

because if we go on this side,

it's just going to be really difficult.

Doug, why don't you go that way?

Because the fossil is so delicate,

it's been cased in plaster and reinforced with steel bars.

'When you're handling bones

that are heavy and fragile,

'that is definitely not an easy process.'

Down.

'If, you know, you don't have the right people,

the bones can break.'

It will take many more months of work

to excavate the entire skeleton

and get it back to LA for analysis.

Good, good.

But to build an exhibition,

you don't have to spend months in

the desert digging up bones.

There are other places to find fossils.

There are plenty of palaeontologists

working out in the field

and excavating new fossils,

naming new species every year,

but there are also scientists

who are combing through existing

collections in dusty store rooms,

hoping to make new discoveries

from bones that were found decades,

if not centuries ago.

I've come to the Natural History Museum in Oxford,

and I'm here to meet Darren Naish.

He's a palaeontologist who looks for new dinosaurs

in the back rooms of museums.

There are always a huge number of

specimens behind the scenes...

..either because they're incomplete,

unglamorous, or unidentified.

Darren, I do love these museum collections,

when you come behind the scenes

and you suddenly feel that you're

surrounded by treasures.

It's amazing to think that there are

new discoveries to be made in here as well.

In a way there are almost too many specimens

for the number of experts out there.

There's new stuff to find in collections.

You don't have to go out in the field.

You can rummage through museum drawers.

You WILL find something new.

Recently, Darren and a colleague did exactly that.

They came across a bone

that had been lying on a museum

shelf since Victorian times.

It may look unremarkable,

but with several unique features,

it didn't fit with anything that had

been found before,

and it was enough for them

to describe a new species.

It must have been really exciting to name

a whole new species of dinosaur.

Yeah. We realised straight away that, wow,

this is something completely new.

Naming a new species, not such a big deal.

- It's quite easy to do.

- Really?

- But finding...

- There are...

- For me, you'd think that would be a kind of once in a lifetime,

wow, I've named a new species of dinosaur,

but no?

No. There's huge swathes of the tree of life,

there's very little work been done.

It's quite easy to find new species.

We're in a golden age of dinosaur discovery.

- There's about 50 new species of dinosaurs named every year.

- Really?

About 90% of all named dinosaurs have been

named since about 1990.

If you were to generate a discovery

curve of dinosaurs over time,

you'd have a curve that's shaped like this,

and we're currently on the steep upward

curve of the graph.

Why do you think there's such a craze for

naming new dinosaurs at the moment?

Regions of the world are being explored more

that haven't been really looked at much beforehand.

So, places like southern South America,

much of central Asia,

parts of Africa and Australia,

more people are going out to those places,

finding new dinosaurs and bringing them back.

'And the more we find,

'the more complete our understanding of

the world of the dinosaurs becomes.'

It makes you realise just what a vast body of knowledge

we've now amassed about these extinct animals,

so that a palaeontologist can come along,

look at a single bone and say,

"This must be a whole new species".

And it also makes you wonder how many other dusty,

unloved specimens

are sitting there on store shelves,

just waiting to be recognised.

'Back in Los Angeles, Luis's team are working

on the bones that were dug up in Utah.

'The next step in turning them into an exhibition

is to work out exactly what they are.'

Well, this is where the fossil bones end up,

and here the preparators continue

the process of excavation,

this time using delicate tools

and cleaning away the last of the hard sediment,

revealing the bone itself.

It's here in the dino lab

that the dinosaurs really start to come back to life.

So, Luis, is this one of the specimens from Utah?

Yes, it is.

It looks like it's taking ages

- to extract this from the stony matrix

that has built up around it.

- Yeah, yeah.

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