Uncovering the Late Jurassic in Wyoming

Uncovering the Late Jurassic in Wyoming—Descriptive Transcript

[AMNH logo unfolds over overhead footage of a paleontological dig.]

MARK NORELL (Macauley Curator, Division of Paleontology): When people go out say they want to look for dinosaurs,

[NORELL appears on screen, outside with a rock bluff in the background.]

NORELL: everybody always ask this, where do you want to dig? 

[Scientists walk around a paleontological dig site, with a tarp tent covering the area.]

NORELL: So this year we’re excavating in the south end of the Big Horn Basin, in the Morrison Formation, looking at dinosaurs.

[An arrow points to the middle of northern Wyoming on a map of the United States. The rough outline of the Morrison Formation appears, going as far north as Canada and as far south as southern New Mexico, covering the width of Wyoming and a bit further east into North and South Dakota. NORELL reappears on screen.]

NORELL: The Morrison Formation is one of the most iconic formations within paleontology, because it’s the place where the first great dinosaur discoveries were made in North America.

[Archival photographs of paleontologists crouching over jumbles of fossil bones flash by.]

NORELL: It has brontosaurus,

[An old illustration of two brontosauruses, one wading and one on land.]

NORELL: it has stegosaurus,

[An archival photo of a stegosaurus fossil articulated and on display at the American Museum of Natural History, with a little girl seated below and looking up at the fossil.]

NORELL: it has the dinosaur species that everybody on the planet has heard of.

[An archival photo of an articulated fossil mount of a sauropod, with a child and an adult man standing below. The child is pointing at the dinosaur. NORELL appears on screen.]

NORELL: This expedition is the 2018 installment

[Lower third reads: “Mark Norell. Macaulay Curator, Division of Paleontology.]

NORELL: of the American Museum Niarchos project.

[Paleontologists walking up an incline carrying tools toward the paleontological dig site covered in a tarp. NORELL reappears on screen.]

NORELL: So, this is a joint project that’s run between the American Museum and the University of Lisbon, and my colleague, Octávio Mateus.

[OCTÁVIO MATEUS appears on screen, outdoors with the dig site in the background. Lower third reads: “Octávio Mateus. New University of Lisbon, Portugal.]

OCTÁVIO MATEUS (New University of Lisbon, Portugal): We have to imagine 150 million years ago this as a big plain

[The camera flies over a swampy landscape.]

MATEUS: with some vegetation, a few forests, very large rivers, and the entire ecosystem preserved.

[MATEUS reappears on screen.]

MATEUS: And it gives a good glimpse, a good photograph of the life during the late Jurassic.

[Paleontologists gather around a paleontological dig site under the shade of a tarp. The camera pans over many people working.]

MATEUS: One of the goals of having this expedition is also having a training ground

[MATEUS appears on screen.]

MATEUS: for our students in paleontology. We run the Masters in Paleontology in Portugal

[Close up shot of two pairs of gloved hands working on a fossil dig. One is using a hammer and a chisel, and the other is indicating something in the ground.]

MATEUS: and we invite the students to come here to dig.

[The second pair of gloved hands belongs to MATEUS who is indicating something on the ground to two students.]

MATEUS: Let’s keep this one protected with film.

[Close up of someone hammering with a chisel into the ground.]

NORELL: The basic way that we extract fossils

[NORELL reappears on screen.]

NORELL: from the ground is just like, you know, Barnum Brown did

[Archival photo of Barnum Brown, wearing a fur coat, suit, and hat in front of rocks while he writes in a field notebook.]

NORELL: when he was tearing around here and stuff in the 1890s.

[Archival photo close up of a pickaxe next to two limb bones still embedded in the ground.]

MATEUS: We are still using

[Archival photo closeup of a broom head without a handle sitting on a plaster jacket (plaster covering over a fossil bone). Archival photo of a person hammering with a pickaxe at some large fossils still embedded in the ground. ]

MATEUS: the same techniques that Barnum Brown and others have done.

[Quick archival shot of Barnum Brown in the field. Archival photo of a person with many brushes, cans, chisels and hammers around them. Camera pans over an archival photo of someone using a broomhead to move dirt near a fossil.]

MATEUS: So, we still use the hammer

[Camera pans over present-day footage of a broomhead sitting next to NORELL and MATEUS while they chisel into the ground.]

MATEUS: and chisel and brushes. It’s always a destructive process.

[Gloved hands chisel at the rock and dirt.]

NORELL: A typical day in the field is all weather-dependent,

[NORELL sits on rock, pounding a chisel with a hammer.]

NORELL: but you get up, go out there, and you just sit there and pound rocks all day.

[LAUGHS]

[NORELL reappears on screen speaking.]

NORELL: We can’t use dynamite anymore, which I wish we could.

[LAUGHS]

[Closeup of hands brushing dirt and debris away from bits of fossil bone.]

NORELL: Hey, Octávio,

[NORELL is crouched over the same bone, looking at it and indicating where he’s looking with the chisel.]

NORELL: I think this might be a bone. Like a surface. This rounded thing here.

MATEUS: Yeah, looks like it.

NORELL: So, if it is, this could be like a therapod metatarsal.

[Closeup of NORELL on the dig site.]

NORELL: If you make an assessment to excavate,

[NORELL reappears speaking onscreen.]

NORELL: then you just start digging. And you start pretty far away and you go closer and closer and closer and closer,

[Closeup of hands indicating the edge of rock. Closeup of NORELL digging on the site.]

NORELL: until it feels safe. Then you do the jacketing process,

[NORELL reappears speaking on screen.]

NORELL: which is just like covering it with toilet paper

[A student brushes liquid onto strips of toilet paper applied directly to rock. Strips of burlap covered in plaster are applied in many layers on top of rock.]

NORELL: and burlap infused with plaster of Paris and then let that dry. Crack it on the bottom.

[A student chisels at the bottom edge of a fossil covered in a plaster jacket. NORELL reappears on screen.]

NORELL: Have that dangerous moment of flipping it over when you hope that the whole thing isn’t going to fall on the top of it, which has happened.

[Two students chisel at the bottom of a plaster jacketed fossil.]

NORELL: And then plaster the bottom of it.

[Archival photo of Barnum Brown next to two fossils that he was excavating.]

NORELL: The Morrison Formation isn’t just dinosaurs. There’s a tremendous number of other fossils which have been found there.

[Archival group photo of paleontologists in the Morrison Formation.]

NORELL: When the early dinosaurs came out during

[Archival photo of a man next to a dig site with a pickaxe.]

NORELL: the big dinosaur rush in the late 19^th century, they dismissed a lot of the smaller animals, because they were looking for

[Zoom out on an archival photo on two small girls looking up at the American Museum of Natural History mounted dinosaurs.]

NORELL: big animals to fill their dinosaur halls. And that’s one of the reasons that we started this excavation,

[NORELL reappears speaking on screen.]

NORELL: is to try to fill in the picture, by looking at the stuff that was ignored by all the earlier collections.

[A current-day paleontologist uses a small chisel to pick at a tiny piece of fossil in the rock.]

NORELL: It gives us one of the best pictures of the

[A paleontologist looks at rock fragment with a hand lens.]

NORELL: origin of a lot of the major animal groups—

[Closeup of MATEUS drawing a map of the paleontological site. NORELL reappears on screen.]

NORELL: be they frogs, be they lungfish, be they….

[MATEUS reappears on screen speaking.]

MATEUS: …a turtle, perhaps. A pterosaur. So, all those animals which are more obscure, harder to find, hard to preserve

[An SUV car drives on a barely-there two-track road at a steep angle.]

MATEUS: and that will tell us a lot about the environment around here.

[Closeup of NORELL digging onsite with a student next to him.]

NORELL: Well, this year we have two sites that are about 5 kilometers apart.

[Birds-eye view of NORELL working with two students on a flat, sandy site.]

NORELL:But they’re quite different, in some senses. In one place,

[NORELL and a student use hoes and picks to remove sandy material from a site.]

NORELL: the material that we excavated is very sandy and soft. The other place is more

[Camera flies around a student using a hoe while NORELL uses a jackhammer to loosen hard rock from a cliff.]

NORELL: what we call “indurated,” meaning that it’s harder and we have to use

[NORELL continues to jackhammer while a student uses a hoe to clear and sort the broken up rock chunks.]

NORELL: more jackhammers and that kind of thing.

[NORELL chisels at hard rock with several students sitting near him.]

NORELL: We’re still early in this whole project here, because we’ve been at it for three years now. But we’re just going to excavate and excavate and excavate.

[MATEUS uses a broomhead to brush away rock bits while another person chisels. He leans over the rock to blow dust away.]

MATEUS:  Because there are so many bones. We’re talking about many skeletons in the same position, in the same layer.

[MATEUS reappears on screen speaking.]

MATEUS: It’s definitely a lot of fun. But scientifically, it’s much harder. If we have one single skeleton, you know exactly every bone belongs to that animal. If you have many skeletons together—

[A student brushes at the edge of a rock to expose more bone. Closeup on her hands brushing away dirt and debris from the fossil bone.]

MATEUS: is that femur, for instance,

[The same student chisels rock and removes and inspects rock bits by hand.]

MATEUS: from animal to the right or the animal to the left?

[MATEUS reappears on screen speaking.]

MATEUS: We don’t know.

[Closeup of ALEXANDRA FERNANDES, the same student in the previous shots.]

ALEXANDRA FERNANDES: There’s a vertebrae here.

[Closeup of hands indicating along the rock and chiseling with a hammer and chisel.]

CARL MEHLING (OFFSCREEN): Well, if this is the only thing in the way, maybe I can go that way, eventually.

[CHISEL CHIPPING AWAY AT ROCK]

[Closeup of ridges of fossil bone in the rock.]

NORELL: Collecting one bone can just take a lot of time.

[NORELL sits on the dig site, chiseling with a hammer and chisel.]

NORELL: So you have to have large crews and you have to be able to come back to the places

[NORELL reappears speaking on screen.]

NORELL: year after year, year after year.

[Closeup of MATEUS on the dig site applying a bit of adhesive to a small rock fragment.]

MATEUS: Every time since the first day,

[MATEUS reappears on screen.]

MATEUS: every time we see this site, one gets overwhelmed.

[MATEUS and CARL MEHLING inspect fossil fragments on an inclined rock face.]

MATEUS: Overwhelmed with the landscape,

[The camera flies along the rock ledge where paleontologists are working on the inclined hill covered with fossil fragments.]

MATEUS: with the geology of the region, but also with the amount and the quality and diversity of bones we find in the site.

[MATEUS reappears on screen speaking.]

MATEUS: In the first week we got here, we found four skulls. And that’s normally,

[Camera pans along a line of paleontologists working on a rock ledge cut into the side of a hill incline. Closeup of MATEUS working on the rock ledge next to a student.]

MATEUS: that’s more than one has in their entire life.

[NORELL reappears on screen speaking.]

NORELL: Well, the thing about being a paleontologist is that

[NORELL using a jackhammer on rock.]

NORELL:you never know what you’re going to find when you go out to the desert.

[Camera flies away from the paleontological dig site with paleontolgists working.]

[Credits roll.]