The Great Fossil Race: Uncovering Prehistoric Dinosaur Bones | Dino Hunt | Real Wild

[Music] it's the season of the dinosaur the world's top paleontologists dig into Canada's prehistoric past to unearth a living world buried in time go we got dinosaurs they'll battle heat and floods and the chicking clock as they track the footsteps of dinosaurs and the most incredible creatures ever to walk the earth we live again on Dino Hunt this week on Dino Hunt two teams dig into Alberta chasing two different horned dinosaurs in a Grand Prairie riverbed the paky Rhino team tries to solve a 73 milliony Old Cold Case why did a whole bunch of the

same species die all at once before the bones get washed away it was the worst day of my life and in the bad lands the horned Dino team is searching for the skull bones of a brand new species we've got the frill we need the pH that's been dead for 80 million [Music] years Milk River Alberta this Dry River Valley in the Badlands is a hot spot for hunting dinosaurs and for the next few weeks weeks it'll be home to the next generation of paleontologists they're hunting a mystery horned dinosaur the horn Dino team is

led by David Evans as I walk through the Badlands and see these fossils on the ground I feel like I'm walking through an ancient landscape one fossil find can drastically change the way that we view The evolutionary story at the age of 26 Evans was hired as of paleontology by the Royal Ontario Museum the youngest in the Museum's 100-year history when I got the job here it was like a dream come true to say I was a kid in a candy store is an understatement I pinched myself I mean what were they thinking to hire

a 26y old and I'm so happy they made that decision the Royal Ontario Museum boasts A Century of major discoveries and some of the biggest skeletons in the country some real big names have come through here and they're big shoes to fill and now Evans is about to step up and step into those shoes he's already onto a discovery that could be a real GameChanger so what we have here are the bones of a brand new species of horn dinosaur and this is what we were able to excavate in our first year we realized we

had a configuration of these Hooks and and horns coming off the neck Shield that was completely unique and so we really can't wait to get into the field and try to find more it's what I love to do I'm not thinking about a legacy or making my name I'm just thinking about the dinosaurs there's no guarantee Evans will find the skull bones he's looking for embedded in the mudstone but he's willing to gamble another season to find out what we're really hoping for here is that we find the rest of the skull in particular the

horns over the eyes and the horn over the nose because it's the the shape of those bones that will allow us to more precisely place this new species in the family tree of horn dinosaurs there's a reason they call it the Badlands the Quarry can become a fiery pit when temperatures climb over 40° Centigrade the horn dyo team mostly grad students will be working in a harsh terrain under a blistering sun when you're actually down the Quarry you you know you really bake you really feel it they'll each need to carry four L of water

or they won't make it through the day heat stroke is probably the biggest danger out here David is joined by his partner Michael Ryan a Canadian paleontologist working for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History a very hard day hot days work ahead of us the Sun is bright the crew is Young and viral we'll get a lot of fossiles but it's just one specific set of Bones Evans wants to find the face of a new species this kind of represents our gamble the big question for us now is uh who finds the first B the

first shovel hits P dirt so we've got a little Tyrannosaur tooth here it's nice little fine for the first first few minutes of the day but Evans didn't come looking for Tyrannosaurs he's looking for proof of a new species of horn dinosaurs Evans thinks his mystery dinosaur lived here 80 million years ago the bad lands was a green riverfinn 45 million years earlier the first ceratopsians called protos ceratopsians lived in Asia then they migrated to North America across a land bridge they were the size of large dogs with Frills and neck shields but no horns

we know from the pieces we have that this is something really spectacular that's going to tell us a lot about the early evolution of the of the horn dinosaur family that includes the famous Triceratops we're on the edge of our seats as paleontologists because every bone that we find here is going to tell us something new about an animal that we didn't know existed 2 years ago 1,000 km North another crew of dinosaur hunters makes their way to Grand Prairie Alberta it's a Boom Town best known for oil and Grain and in nearby Pipestone Creek

an unsolved mystery 73 million years old over Millennia this River has carved out something remarkable a mass grave containing the bones of thousands of dinosaurs this bone bed is one of the richest bone beds anywhere in the world making the discoveries in the field is probably the most exciting thing I do and and that's something you never ever get tired of as one of the world's top paleontologists Dr Philip J Curry has made discoveries on every continent he's the Rockstar inspiration for the Dino Hunter in Jurassic Park in 30 years he's discovered 25 new species

and proved that Tyrannosaurs hunted in packs Grand Prairie is a place place where we've worked for more than a dozen years we've excavated hundreds and hundreds of specimens from there in fact thousands of specimens but all the bones here come from only one dinosaur species pinosa surus Bone Bed um is fantastic for us because it tells us so much about the biology of one particular dinosaur paky rhinosaurus paky rhinosaurus was a ceratopsian species a relative of the famous Triceratops these were enormous herbivores that lived in the Canadian North 73 million years ago reaching up to

6 m in length and weighing in at 3,000 kilos we have up to 300 bones per cubic meter in this bone bed I think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required we're estimating there are thousands and thousands of paky rhinosaurus remains in this Bond bed Curry's paky Rhino team is mostly made up of grad students like Scott person's it's really strange that we have a whole bunch of pachyrhinosaurs in one spot and nothing else so the mystery if

we think of ourselves is being served homicide detectives here is not just why did a whole bunch of animals die but why did a whole bunch of animals of the same species die presumably all at [Music] once Curry's number two is 31-year-old Australian Phil Bell Phil was my mentor uh I I read about him in books when I was a kid and to come to Canada to work with him it was a dream come true for me Bell has been preparing a pinosa surus all pulled directly from Pipestone Creek up the front end we've got

the beak which is typical of these animals these ceratopsian Dinosaurs the eyeball would have been right here it was about the size of my fist moving back we've got this big sweeping Shield that would have protected the back of the skull uh and a variety of horns uh that it would have used for display with other members of its herd uh and possibly even to frighten Predators this animal like countless thousands of its kind died swiftly and unexpectedly you're looking at a crime scene that happened 75 million years ago all of the evidence is cold

two teams and two mysteries in the Badlands the horn dyo team digs for a brand new species of ceratopsian and in Pipestone Creek team paky Rhino is on a forensic fossil hunt looking for clues why thousands of dinosaurs died in one killing [Music] in the bad lands of Alberta the horn dinosaur team is trying to identify a brand new species of dinosaur we've got the frill we need the face and in Pipestone Creek Alberta Phil Curry's paky Rhino team is hunting for answers to a 73 milliony old mystery this is a mass death and a

mass burial clearly something that must have happened over a very short time but what happened what wiped out an entire herd of paky rhinosaurus and turned these forests into a killing field Curry's team has just weeks to find an answer and after scraping off 73 million years worth of dirt grad student Scott psons uncovers a massive pile of bones I started out by finding the limb bone and so I started to excavate around that and that led me to the rib that's on top of it and that led me to the vertebrae which has led

me to this next rib so digging here is like a game of pickup it's hard to find one bone you can take out without running into another we have uh two skull bones here which we call sosal the sosal is part of the frill at the back of the skull and so you have these nice scallops along the edge that helps us age this animal we know it's a uh at least a young adult knowing the animal's age gets Curry that much closer to determining the cause of death it was what we call a catastrophic

death assemblage because it includes those mediumsized animals which were the young adults and always the strongest members of the population what catastrophic event took down the entire herd including its strongest members so many dinosaurs buried in one spot gives them a clue about the herd's behavior we're probably looking at hundreds or thousands of animals in this herd they could not have stayed in one place for very long these animals had to have been moving 73 million years ago these dinosaurs would spend their summers in the Arctic but as the long nights of winter approached they'd

migrate south to the fertile forests of Northern Alberta an animal with such short stocky legs probably wasn't a particularly fast animal but it got protection out of being in these herds despite their strengthen numbers the pachy rhinosaur were still vulnerable to the ultimate Predator so if you're a pachy rhinosaur you're out there grazing you're always mindful of a pack of Tyrannosaurs the second most common thing in this bone bed after pinosa surus are Tyrannosaur teeth they ripped apart the carcasses of the pinosa surus so that is a Tyrannosaur tooth and those teeth were probably shed

as the Tyrannosaurus came down to those heaps of carcasses and were munching on them these Tyrannosaurs had left their calling card and they were ripping up those carcasses pretty good but uh it seems highly unlikely that the Tyrannosaurus could have killed that many py rhinosaurus how the paky rhinosaurus actually died is still a mystery any bones they uncover will eventually be displayed in a brand new Museum Museum named for their famous Mentor Dr Phil Curry I've had my success in part because I just enjoy doing what I do and uh for people to recognize that

of course is is a very humbling experience while Curry's paky Rhino team struggles to solve the mystery of the Pipestone Creek Bone Bed Phil Bell skims down river searching for a new site and new fossils to fill his boss's Museum we're on the Smoky River and we're heading Downstream Uncharted Territory basically no paleontologist has been there for the last 20 years or so Marine fossils discovered along this Riverbank show that this entire region was underwater 80 million years [Music] ago and today Bell is on the hunt for a deadly Cretaceous Era Marine reptile the Mosasaur

these marine reptiles are 15 M long Marine Predators long necks big sharp teeth they essentially the TX of the sea like sharks today these creatures were perfect prehistoric killing machines inside the jaw we have not only these outer teeth but along the pallet I have a separate row of teeth here that ensured that anything that it put in its mouth stayed there the skeleton and Bell's lab is a replica but for the curry Museum Bell wants the real deal no one has found a full skeleton yet so I ideally what we'd love to find is

a complete skull and skeleton to really give an idea of what these animals [Music] were Bell wastes no time following his instincts straight up [Music] hill so I just uh lick it to clean it off paleontologists eat a lot of rock in the field this area is quite dangerous we've got overhanging rock and it's continually sluffing off the slope here Phil says he's got something big mollusks Big B valves would had a good size oyster come out of that one and then right in front of us here we've got uh these tubes which are Burrows

from uh invertebrates that were scuttling around on the sea floor at times so where you find their prey you should be able to find the [Music] Predator this is really great even these smallest pieces are are informative for us uh they tell us that we're in the right rocks they're the right age and where you find one you can probably find others Bell didn't find the Mosasaur skeleton he was looking for but the day is still a success he'll be [Music] back in a sweltering dig site near Milk River Alberta the horn Dino team is

still trying to put a face on their mystery dinosaur it could be a major Discovery for Evans and his paleo partner Michael Ryan probably within the last 50 years to have a completely Associated skeleton of a brand new type of dinosaur horn dinosaur otherwise I can't think of another occurrence right now team leader David Evans is hoping he'll uncover a brand new species here Evans isn't the first paleo to prospect these Hills for ceratopsians almost a century ago one of paleontology early Superstars made a name for himself during the great dinosaur Rush at the dawn

of the 20th century his name was Charlie Sternberg in 1937 he discovered six horn dinosaurs [Music] here 75 years later David Evans wants to add another new specimen to the ROMs collection and cement his own name in the history books it's going to be you know one of the most exciting um new dinosaur discoveries to come out of Albert in many years and after 3 days under a roasting Sun the horn dyo team has finally Unearthed the first bone we think perhaps it might actually be just a section of a of a lower limb so

it's cool cuz we don't have much of the skeleton yet it turns out that our big gamble to remove almost half a hillside was a good one it's just a huge relief it's not the frill or skull they were hoping for but the Bones still size up the mystery dinosaur it's at least 2 m tall much bigger than its dog-sized Asian ancestor they know that their dinosaur lived 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period roaming these bad lands when they were a sprawling Green Space grazing the edge of an inland sea they know

their dinosaur is a ceratopsian a horn dinosaur store with a frill like its cousin Triceratops what they don't know is what its face looked like but they suspect and hope it looks like nothing anyone has ever seen before what really keeps us awake is knowing that there's something in the ground within inches of our Discovery we're either going to be validated for our 2 years worth of work or we're going to come up flat as the days tick away the two dino hunting Crews keep digging the horn Dino team is still on the hunt for

the of its new species wait wait wait while the paky rhinosaur team will face off against the elements as they search for the answers to a prehistoric Cold Case the weather can be very harsh in Alberta in Pipestone Creek the paky rhinosaur team is chiseling into the Quarry walls searching for evidence of the cause of a mass killing sometimes you get lucky and you can find the evidence that you want in Milk River Alberta the sun blazes down on the horn dyo team as veterans and and rookies dig side by side both hoping to unearth

a brand new species of dinosaur this is my first time out into the field on a paleontological dig David was my professor in a course and I was lucky enough to be able to tag along on this trip and anybody with a shovel or a chisel has the same chance at hitting perder there's an old joke in paleontology that you're not a real paleontologist until you break something important you're good you're good that's great it's not broken at all so it's looks like part of a rib potentially okay go for it the bones are fragile

they may have survived 80 million years underground would be very gentle but they can still shatter with the twist of a blade perfect nice there it is perfectly done way to go thank you not bad for your first one eh looks like we have an almost full rib here so I'm pretty proud of my work more and more of this mystery dinosaur is rising out of the ground but its head is still buried in the sand graduate student Nicholas Campion may have found a clue in a color the rock is gray bone is kind of

brown because of its shape kind of flat has the weird bumps kind of knobs to it uh it may actually be part of the skull this appears to have a slight semicircular curve to it this is one of the elements that forms the eye socket it doesn't tell us definitively which type of horn dinosaur it is but it does tell us it's a horn dinosaur they know the skull belongs to a ceratopsian but is it from the particular horned dinosaur they're looking for the shape of its frill May provide a positive ID the Frills are

an extension of the top of the skull so they extend back away from the the body some members of the copsin have the largest known skulls for any land living animal that's ever lived on the earth the bones of our dinosaur have been disarticulated jumbled up broken up and deposited like prehistoric forensic artists if they can collect enough skull fragments they'll be able to piece together a picture of that face what are challenge is is to put those pieces back together uh and reconstruct the skull of our of our new dinosaur while Phil Curry tries

to crack the Grand Prairie Cold Case Phil Bell heads back to a dig site he excavated a year ago we were here August last year now we're returning to collect the last of the bones that are still in the cliff the site is just off a busy nature trail but not everybody who walks it is a nature lover has a a spent shotgun shell people camp and drink and fire off their guns it's a it's a bit of a lawless area really people I have no respect none of this is safe anymore so this is

a site that we found last year uh we only found it because this Boulder had actually collapsed off the cliff and that had exposed part of a skeleton of a hadrosaur a duck build dinosaur hadrosaurs were large duck build herbivores that roamed in huge herds some adults were 9 M long and the largest weigh in it over 5 1/2 tons but when Bell came to reopen the site somebody had beaten him to it when we came up this slope we'd seen that the the plaster and burlap jacket that we put over the bones to protect

them had been torn off and was thrown into the back of the Quarry here all the bones that were exposed uh anything that they could get their fingers on had been literally torn up and shattered and thrown down the hill behind us it was the worst day of my life I was uh I was close to tears the am amount of work that we'd put in here um and then to see such blatant disregard guard for the natural world I I just don't understand it Bell and his team will try to salvage the rest of

the hyur now we need to dig this back out and retrieve the bones that are still in sight just uncovered the pubis this is uh part of the pelvis of this animal it's actually heading back into the cliff here so we're going to have to take out some of this uh to try and get it out safely obviously we don't want to borrow too far under this cuz uh then we're in trouble they coat the bones in plaster to protect them on their Journey Back to the lab can you manage think so I'm just trying

you want me to put it in your arms you got no I'm just trying to get a good grip yeah we've got part of that bone already in in the lab that we had to take out with the rest of the skeleton uh so we're going to piece it all back together now this is part of that same animal that was vandalized that's become a big story around here so I think people are going to be quite eager to see [Music] it back in Pipestone Creek the paky rhinosaur team has to hold off their hunt

there may be a storm headed for the dig site our big problem right now is the weather system is pretty unstable and we really need some kind of protection over over the site otherwise every time it rains we have to stop work and what's the what's the next step boss we'll uh put a tarp over top of the whole system and then we'll have a tarp extending out over the Quarry so that we can work when it's raining now Curry needs to protect the site or he risks losing any clues to what killed a whole

herd of paky rhinosaurus 73 million years ago having all that water there with the mud that it carries in you can refill in a quarry very quickly and then of course we have to dig it out again pull that out mother nature is on the move and Phil has no idea how much of his sight will be there in the morning in Milk River the horn dyo team sees the face of its mystery species lies from the earth for the first time in 80 million years now we're going to see just how much of it

is here in the Alberta Badlands the horn dyo team gets their first glimpse of an unknown species we hope to find more of the skull but there's always the chance that we'll fail but in Grand Prairie Alberta heavy rains have pelted the region causing major [Music] flooding in the Pipestone Creek Bone Bed the paky rhinosaur team's dig is in Jeopardy the rains triggered a Mudslide that total the dig site and almost buried the crew I was uh in the Quarry with everybody else when this wall was caving in on top of us so at that

point we basically all ran out of the Quarry and 2 seconds filled back in a week's worth of work I would guess there was something like 10 tons of rock slid into the Quarry once again and uh now has to be moved it's very wet very slippery and very dangerous all you need is an inclination of half a degree from horizontal and you're going to go down they've only got four more days to work the Quarry so this is a major setback for Cur we would normally be Excavating bones right now and we're not Excavating

bones right now we're still digging before they can get back to Digging Up Bones they've got to dig themselves [Music] out in Milk River the Quarry sizzles like a skillet in the burning Sun David Evans and his horn dyo team are searching for the bones of what might be a new species of dinosaur even in Canada the heat can be stifling It's Not Unusual to have 40 to 45° CSUS days but they can take the heat because a picture of their mystery dyo is finally coming into Focus this is part of the neck Shield part

of the skull of this new horn dinosaur and what we're looking at is paired bones that form the sides of the frill and as we go up into the the back part of the frill these small bumps actually develop into these huge hooks that project forward over the frill unlike anything we've seen before but what was the function of the catopian frill there are two schools of thought horn dinosaurs are are unique in having these large weird ornamentations coming off the back of their skull perhaps those large Frills were for protection you can imagine a

Triceratops being attacked by trosa surus rex that frill would have protected the back of its neck [Music] it turns out not all ceratopsians could have used their Frills for defense they were too thin to offer much protection so what were they for we're thinking now that the large Frills and the ornamentations are actually used for recognition between species in the late Cretaceous Period these forests were overrun with dinosaurs and it wasn't always easy to find your species or a mate so maybe Frills evolved just to be Frills at the Dig the races on to find

more key pieces of the skull so far so good but we're really hoping to get those horns in Pipestone Creek Phil Curry's pyur team struggles to get the dig site out from under flooding has caused a massive mudslide dumping 10 tons of rock back in the Quarry burying any clues to what killed an entire herd of pachyrhinosaurs once you get down to the last few days then uh you're you're wishing you had a lot more time in a race to make up for L time the team hammers away at the Earth desperate to bring up

more of the paky rhinosaur Bones the bones here could belong to one animal or could belong to 11 animals or any number in between Curry knows these hornfly herds but what lethal force of nature trapped thousands of dinosaurs leaving them with no hope of survival seasons of sifting through the Bone Bed allow Curry to rule out two possibilities we have for example associated with The pinosa surus Bone Bed volcanic ashes and that suggests well maybe the volcanoes of that time produced so much Ash that they smothered these animals so they died in that way however

uh we don't have an awful lot of Ash in The Bone Bed itself so this seems unlikely forest fires are another possibility we know they happened we do find char charcoal in a lot of our bone beds but not in this particular bone bed this is the reason you keep going back to a bone bed year after year because you may not have the answer it's challenging us to try and come up with an answer for why so many animals are together Curry and the rest of the py rhinosaur team has just two days to

find the missing evidence in the Cretaceous Cold Case and in Milk River David Evans and the horn dyo team need just one more fossil to identify their mystery dinosaur with any luck we'll pull the horns out of here in the Alberta bad lands David Evans and the horn Dyno team are still looking for the horns of the unknown dinosaur it's going to be you know one of the most exciting um new dinosaur discoveries to come out of Elbert in many years the pipe Stone Creek dig has been a tough dirty job the paky rhinosaur team

still hasn't solved the mystery of what dropped a herd of dinosaurs in their tracks on this very spot after days of backbreaking work Curry's crew puts down their tools to support their Mentor at a fundraiser for his Museum it's more formal kind of black tie event so definitely dressed up really really nice well as and nice as we can be with you know coming fresh out of the field look for curry fundraisers are just another way to finance his digs and the dino ball is a chance to spread the word and raise some cash for

the museum ready as I'll ever be I guess and for his students it's a chance to get cleaned up and hit the town this is one of the farm girls dresses um it's from [Music] Tiffany all for the [Music] job once the dino ball's in full swing everybody gets to relax and enjoy the [Music] party the next morning no stranger to swinging a shovel Dr Curry breaks ground on the museum that will bear his name our namesake Dr Philip J Curry the reality is that uh this area is incredibly rich in dinosaurs you have Forest

covering dinosaurs so it's a little harder to find but still if you know what to look for you're going to find them but Curry still hasn't found the answer to what killed a herd of late Cretaceous dinosaurs do and time is running out like a detective he needs proof and he has just one day left to find it back in Milk River David Evans horn dinosaur team is pushing to complete the composite sketch of their Dino's face and find out if they really have discovered a brand new species lots of skull bones in this area

so with any luck we'll pull the horns out of here the size and placement of the horns will help identify their mystery ceratopsian we've already uncovered vertebrae ribs parts of the skull parts of the limbs we know way more about this dinosaur now than maybe we even had hoped but we're still looking for the horns to put a face uh to our uh new horn dinosaur no horns No Frill no new species for Evans and his crew and in Pipestone Creek the storm that almost washed them out might just give Curry the clue he needs

hey maybe that's actually what happened in our dinosaur Court in Milk River Alberta David Evans and the horn Dino crew are in the final stretch hoping to uncover the face of a brand new species just a matter of time really until we get all the all the pieces but what will this Dino look like in Pipestone Creek Alberta It's the final day of digging for Phil Curry's paky rhinosaur team what lethal force of nature killed thousands of pachyrhinosaurs right here 73 million years ago with so many bones in one place it clearly representing a place

where these animals died almost instantaneously any animal that moves in groups uh will encounter situations where uh they die together on mass and we can look at modern environments and modern animals and we can see that this is the kind of thing that happens very frequently a very good example of that was in Northern Quebec in 1985 where over 10,000 animals died in a very very short time I mean we're talking hours essentially as best as I can tell the animals in the pinosa surus B probably drowned because it's the best explanation it's the simplest

explanation as the massive herd searches for a new food source they're caught in a storm desperate to escape the rising Waters they try crossing a powerful Rushing River maybe these animals were in a system where the waters became too high for them they panicked they started pushing each other underwater the herd of 4 ton dinosaurs are suddenly out of their depth out of control in the churning water unable to swim unable to breathe the animals in the pinosa surus bulling bed are associated with moving water moving water buried them [Music] when the water receded it

exposed thousands of carcasses the bodies were scavenged by Tyrannosaurs then they lay buried by the sands of time for 73 million years it may seem incredible that a single flood could wipe out a herd of a thousand healthy animals but after their own brush with nature Curry's crew knows only too well how powerful and deadly a flood can [Music] be mudslides and Rain cut short this year's dig with so many bones in the ground the team has only scratched the surface and they know they'll be back in the future to dig deeper in the past

a thousand kilometers away Evans and the horn dinosaur team plaster the bones they've pulled from the Badlands we got critical pieces of the FR we also got a piece of the nose horn we actually even got one of the horns from over top of the eyes which was one of the prizes that we were looking for so this here is probably the most important fossil that we collected all season this is the center point of the skull the midline and then on this side of the midline you can see there's a spike or hook coming

off forward and you can see it even better on the other side so you've got the two hooks coming off one either side they're both the size of your hand I would not be surprised at all if this piece right here actually attached to uh the other sections of frill that we have in the lab and actually gave us a complete picture of a single individual frill for this this new species if the frill pieces match David Evans will have discovered a brand new species of ceratopsian dinosaur it will be months before David can unpack

his prizes at the lab in the Royal Ontario Museum here the bones of the unknown dinosaur are pulled from their protective plaster jacket the bone that Ian is preparing is the back middle part of the frill and it's this bone that allows us to say for sure that this is a brand new type of dinosaur it's a delicate operation one slip could shatter months of work but in the end the prized piece of frill surfaces what's particularly exciting is that on on either side you've got welldeveloped hook like ornamentation if this frill piece matches with

the specimens Evans collected on his last dig it'll reveal the first traces of a face the face of a new species right that is pretty amazing yeah this clinches it with the pieces that we found last year we're in a position where we can actually start to put together those pieces into a very good idea what our dinosaur look like I've worked with my artist um to give a general uh view of what this new dinosaur would look like do you want to see it well here it is this is the first reconstruction of the

Southside catops it doesn't have a name yet but it has these Wicked drooping hooks all around the back part of the frill it has quite long horns over the eyes looks like our dinosaur has quite a big nose horn and it's a little bit unexpected with this bone and this complete picture of the ornamentation on the frill of this early horn dinosaur it just confirms that we have a brand new animal to add to the dinosaur dictionary every species that we find tells us something new about the diversity of past life on this planet it's

going to be a fun uh challenge to uh to describe and name this particular animal the unnamed new dinosaur will go on display right here at at the Museum when I design an exhibit I try to take myself back in time to when I was five or six huge dinosaur lover what would blow me away to be able to see a new species so quickly after it was une that would make an impression on a young budding paleontologist this is why David Evans became a dinosaur Hunter for The Rush of a new discovery to witness

a prehistoric creature come to life before your eyes [Music] on the next Dino Hunt in the bad lands of Alberta a young paleontologist is looking for the last piece of a Mythic puzzle it wasn't collected with a head or a tail Club I'd be happy to just find the hole where it had been collected from because you never know what you're going to find if they can solve a 100-year-old mystery they might find the missing Bones from a 74 milliony old dinosaur and in a secret VC location stop filming a husband and wife team have

uncovered the province's first complete dinosaur lying right where it died there's no roads into the site so we have to take it out by air they can get it out of the ground but can they get it in the air we'll be worried we'll be worried we'll be concerned it's the season of the dinosaur the world's top paleontologists dig into Canada's prehistoric past to unearth a living World buried in time bingo got dinosaurs they'll battle heat and floods and the ticking clock as they track the footsteps of [Music] dinosaurs and the most incredible creatures ever

to walk the earth will live again on Dino [Applause] [Music] Hunt this week on Dino Hunt a new generation of Dino Hunters is searching for a long lost Quarry we're looking for an individual animal called ankylosaurs the armor dinosaurs if the ankylosaur team can solve a 100-year-old mystery something large came out of here they might find missing Bones from a 77 milliony old dinosaur and in a secret BC location stop filming a husband and wife team have uncovered the province's first complete dinosaur lying just where it died there's no roads into the site so we

have to take it out by air the hadrosaur team can get it out of the ground but can they get it in the air we'll be worried we'll be [Music] concerned the spring thaw comes late in Alberta it's already deep into May when a team of young scientists from the University of Alberta lands at Dinosaur Provincial Park [Music] dino hunting season has begun the students are led by renowned Canadian paleontologist Dr Philip J Curry you get close to the bad lands coming over the crest and you suddenly see them spread out below you and you

know there's all these bones there the excitement is pretty intense the world famous fossil hunter has spent his career in the field and dig sites from Montana to Mongolia linking feathered dinosaurs to modern-day birds and proving the T-Rex hunted in packs today Curry's back digging on home turf the reason I've come to dinosur park so often over the years is simply because it's the best place in the world and for good [Music] reason 75 million years ago this was Lush Forest a steamy fertile home to dozens of species of Plante eating dinosaurs who in turn

served as dinner for dozens of meat eating dinosaurs it looks pretty nice down here though it [Music] does so this this is upside down right for curry this trip is a chance to Mentor the next generation of Dino Hunters I've always felt that if I could do something that's rewarding to them then I've accomplished something their funding buys these grad students only 3 weeks of digging so every day counts PhD student Scott psons is looking for meat eaters last year I found on one day a total of six Tyrannosaur teeth I'm looking to try to

best that record this year it's like when you're in grade school and you play that parachute game doctoral student Victoria Arbor has had a passion for paleontology since she was a teenager this is my seventh year here I've always liked dinosaurs ever since I was really young so being able to collect in Dinosaur Provincial Park is like you know the Holy Grail of dinosaurs and Canada a century ago the first fossils were discovered lodged in the craggy moonscape of the Badlands by 1910 Adventurer and fossil hunter Barnum Brown grabbed headlines with a Triceratop skeleton and

the world's first T-Rex a century later this new generation of explorers is determined to make discoveries of their own this is just a fragment of bone but there's the outer surface and the inner side which is spongy based on the inside it's probably from one of the Plante eating dinosaurs but Victoria is looking for a very specific plant eater I like ankylosaurs the armored dinosaurs because they're the ugliest dinosaurs and I feel like they don't necessarily always have their day in the sun they might not be pretty but they were tough ankylosaurs were the tanks

of the dinosaur world their bodies were covered in bony plates for protection like crocodiles or armadillos [Music] 77 million years later Victoria is on a mission to find one particular ankylosaur the missing pieces of a skeleton first found in the bad lands 100 years ago so we're looking for an individual animal called nhm ukr 5161 and that was collected almost 100 Years Ago by someone named William Cutler it has all of its armor still in place on its body and there's even skin Impressions but it wasn't collected with a head or a tail Club Cutler

was an amateur Bone Collector who had a habit of misplacing fossils and neglecting to document his dig sites it would be really cool if we could relocate the head or the tail Club but I'd be happy to just find the hole where it had been collected from Victoria's here to finish Cutler's work but finding Cutler's cave won't be easy yeah go stuck my hand on a cactus I do not have the skills of a mountain goat I wish that I had a mountain goat [Music] Jean 1,000 km Northwest there's a different Dino Hunt underway Tumblr

Ridge British Columbia population 3300 there isn't much here but Creeks coal and Uncharted Forest but 15 years ago locals stumbled on signs of dinosaurs here they called in the experts bump bump it and they never left Richard McCrae and his paleo partner wife Lisa Buckley made a career walking in the footsteps of dinosaurs they spend every summer searching these mountains for Dino tracks if you're looking for Treasure around every Bend you never know what you might find I had grown up always wanting to be a paleontologist so to actually hear that there was dinosaur remains

in British Columbia that was pretty exciting Footprints Footprints big footprint we have the back of the uh foot here and then side toe middle toe and other side just because the digits are pretty rounded at the tips it could be a large ornithopod ornithopods were three Plante eaters the cows of the dinosaur age they left deep Footprints which sealed in the hardened mud and petrified over [Music] time after 10 years in these Hills rich and Lisa have found enough tracks and fossils to fill a warehouse so they commandeered an abandoned building and filled it with

dinosaur bones well what we are walking through right now is a decommissioned Elementary School their museum has been filling up with small dinosaur fossils found in the area this is a rare find it's one of the Tyrannosaur tracks one of the very few worldwide none of the full skeletons are from British Columbia but if they're lucky that's about to [Music] change hidden deep in the woods outside Tumblr Ridge rich and Lisa have uncovered the first complete dinosaur ever never seen in British Columbia it's taken them 5 years to get this far and now it's ready

to come out of the ground it's a 74 milliony old hyur a plant eater spanning 9 M from snout to tail and weighing in at 5.6 tons on the floor here we have a fairly large section of the proximal tail part of the tail this specimen weighs about uh 700 to 800 kg musles aren't just buried bones once a dinosaur is covered in sand minerals seep into its skeleton making it as hard and as heavy as rock which is why the main hyur we're looking at something that weighs 2,000 to 3,000 kg and there's no

roads into the site so we have to take it out by air so we need a fairly substantial helicopter what we're bringing back is British Columbia's First Complete dinosaur it's a very short short flight that it needs to make but that is going to be the most hair raising thing that I've ever done out here and I've hung off of ropes on vertical surfaces looking at tracks we'll be worried we'll be worried we'll be concerned there'll be some nail chewing and if everybody knows what they're doing it will land in one piece and not in

many pieces will they be able to airlift the hadrosaur team's 74 milliony old prize sacred will their hopes for a homegrown dinosaur exhibit shatter on impact and in the bad lands the ankylosaur team might just have a picture of where to find Cutler's cave we're on the right track Tumblr Ridge British Columbia the hadrosaur team is ready to dig out a dinosaur that's been hibernating all winter I'll always be worried about the jacket surviving lift and in the bad lands of dinosaur park the ankylosaur team prospects the rocks in search of fossils but Victoria Arbor

only has eyes for one dinosaur I like ankylosaurs because they have this really cool tail that's been modified into a club or like a battle axe a swing of its club tail could snap a bone or shatter a skull with deadly force and if the Legends are true one might be waiting for her on the other side of this River the mystery they're looking to uncover is only a century old barely a blip in the timeline for a paleontologist in the early 20th century American paleontologists flocked to this area to plunder dinosaur bones by the

train load that didn't sit well with Canadians so Ottawa hired its own Dino Hunter Charles hazelia Sternberg who had Decades of experience collecting fossils in the American West Sternberg and his three sons came to Alberta to compete with the American fossil hunter Barnum Brown and Trigger what is now remembered as the Canadian Dinosaur rush they would go to any lengths to STI a claim to the biggest find there's no question that brown and the sturs had a good time when they went out because the material had been eroding for hundreds or thousands of years and

much of it was on the surface thanks to the Sternberg many of Alberta's dinosaur fossils stayed in Canada and can still be seen in Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum the dino Rush attracted plenty of amateurs who hoped to find their fortune in the bones one was William E Cutler who uncovered a complete ankylosaur skeleton in a nearby cave but soon after the discovery the prized tailbone and skull went mysteriously missing along with the coordinates for the dig site that specimen is on display play in London England right now we'd love to find the rest of it

to help Victoria find it Curry has called in some local talent named Darren tanky aka the dino detective Darren is like the go-to person for finding these old quaries and dinosaur parks if anyone knows where the Cory is it will be Darren he looks for everything every little bit of evidence you can possibly imagine sometimes it's just a mark in the Rock sometimes it's a newspaper that's buried just outside the Quarry tanky from the local Royal tyal Museum of paleontology has made a career finding abandoned dig sites and tracking down missing dinosaur bones so I've

been trying to find this site for quite a long time but all we've had is a very poor photocopy of an old photograph but recently we were able to find a uh original copy of the magazine so there's a better picture to work from now the photograph shows the fossil being lowered from the Quarry which reveals a clue about the surrounding land landscape so we're looking for basically a place where you've got a vertical Cliff face with a sharp undercut forming a shadow exactly where the picture of Cutler's cave was taken is still murky Cutler

was an amateur collector who came to Canada in 1898 he decided around 1912 to become a dinosaur collector Cutler became the only person in human history to be attacked by an ankylosaur while he was Excavating it thing fell on him severely injuring his upper body other people collected the rest of the specimen for him but they didn't really record where it came from the sternberg's created a map documenting all the dig sites of the day and it might guide the team to Cutler's cave okay so we're camped here we're going to cross the river go

to this flat here where Cutler had his Camp so we're just going to be going up that Valley up there but the bad lands have been pounded by rain and wind for over a century since that photo was taken even an expert like tanky can't be certain Cutler's cave [Music] survived meanwhile a few kilometers away Scott persons may have just pulled a tooth oh out of the ground all right so that is a Tyrannosaur tooth this tooth belongs right in the front of the Tyrannosaur mouth so it would use it to stab in and then

sort of cookie cutter out a great big chunk of Flesh there's a reason the Tyrannosaurs held the top spot on the food chain with their strength speed and heightened senses these Fierce bipeds were pure Predator Scott has found his first Tyrannosaur fossil of the season so he's off to a good [Music] start meanwhile in Tumblr Ridge British Bri Columbia husband and wife paleo team Rich McCrae and Lisa Buckley have discovered an articulated hadrosaur their worried their dig site will be destroyed before they can get their specimen out we do feel paranoid but it's been Justified

with the vandalisms at other sites so to keep British Columbia's First Complete dinosaur skeleton safe they're keeping its location secret the couple is taking no chances rich and his assistant and Dustin will drive equipment down to the dig site Lisa will lead the film crew to the dig site by way of a secret Trail all right we're off so I'll get you guys to stop filming while the hyur team Fades to Black the ankylosaur team goes face to face with a 100-year-old Dino Hunter Cutler was sitting right there in Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park the ankylosaur

team is searching for a 100-year-old dig that could be hiding 77 milliony old bones we're looking for an individual animal called nhmuk R 5161 and in an undisclosed BC location a 74 milliony old hadrosaur skeleton waits to be airlifted to safety the hadrosaur team who discovered it is doing their best to protect the site from vandals so our camera crew has been asked to travel blind and not to film the route to the dig site all right well we're in the middle of nowhere now and I bet that you guys have no idea where you

are right now so we can start filming oh shouting seems like an odd way to keep a place under wraps but this security measure isn't to keep fossils safe it's to keep people safe we have to be careful bears are using this Trail oh the call I just made right there is our uh bear alarm system to let the Bears know that we're coming right down here we have bear scat scat is poo scat is definitely poo feces dookie Rich lands at the site for the first time in 6 months this is the site and

we're very excited to get back at it uh hoping to get the main dinosaur out this year this is it right here this hump the massive skeleton has been buried to keep it hidden from vandals there rich and the team need to dig it out to get it ready for the airlift but they're no strangers to moving dirt over the past 5 years we've removed probably about 300 plus cubic meters of rock by hand it's starting to be free with the dirt cleared it's time to see how their dinosaur slept through the [Music] winter weathered

very well so I'm not worried about the jacket surviving the lift well I'll always be worried about the jacket surviving lift but it is as good as we left it last summer under the plaster jacket is a complete fossilized dinosaur lying in the same position as when it took its last breath and you see the writing here shows where we have identified different parts of the bones in the animal so there's Chevrons these are the those spines that are on the underside of the tail this area here the neural spines these were the first set

of articulated vertebrae that we found the dinosaur's spine is arched backwards as though it died violently and in great pain the original thought back in the early days of interpreting fossils was those were the death throws of the animals but as more work has been done we have found out that as an animal's body decays and falls apart the tendons and the ligaments they dry out it's going to pull the entire body into this arched neck arched tail pose after lying underground for 74 million years their hadrosaur is ready for its new home but the

question remains will their dinosaur fly in the Alberta Badlands the ankylosaur team has learned that Cutler's cave the dig site that went missing a century ago might be right across the river from their camp [Music] the search party is led by Dino detective Darren tanky and he may be on to something so now we're entering Cutler's Camp from 1914 and his tent was just situated over that area right there very cool well if you just stand right here you can see that these Hills here oh yeah are those Hills there and this hill here with

the rocks on top and spilling down the slope is that one right there yeah that's great so very cool Cutler was sitting right there almost 100 years ago oh great now that they found the camp tanky and the ankylosaur team split up searching for clues that might lead them to Cutler's cave and you can even see here there's some wire where tent was it's just an extra way of making sure the crate didn't open during shipment on the railroad almost 100 years old I think we're off to a good start today we we've actually matched

the 1914 Cutler Camp photograph with the actual site he didn't have a truck or a car so he had to camp near Cory we're on the right track deeper in the bad lands Scott psons is tracking Tyrannosaurs but stumbles on something a little less terrifying so this is the end of a limb bone from Turtle these particular turtles like to hang out in water these are not um dry land tortoises so so again that tells us that we're dealing with a wet warm environment 75 million years ago Alberta was beachfront property on the shores of

a warm Inland Sea that cut deep into North America it was hot and swampy and dense with vegetation for the herbivores to eat and dense with herbivores for the carnivores to [Music] eat so this is a radius from a hosur or a duck bill dinosaur we can be certain of that from its overall shape this is a pretty big forearm you can see it's much much larger than mine so this is an animal probably exceeding 30 ft from the tip of its ducky snout to the end of its long tail Scott's fossil is from a

hadrosaur a duck build dinosaur this was the biggest plant eater in Alberta but what makes it really really cool if you get down low you can see over here there are some tiny scratch marks on the surface of the bone and finally this one really really deep gouge those are tooth marks only only animal in the dinosaur park ecosystem that can leave a deep gouge like that on a bone is a kind of Tyrannosaur a Tyrannosaur called Gorgosaurus who hunted in this area 75 million years ago at 9 M long it could Sprint up to

40 kmph the very first one was found in 1913 by Canada's first paleontologists the sternberg's right here in Dinosaur Provincial Park Scott has found a bone worth taking back to the camp but to get it out of the ground he's got to use a delicate touch or he'll shatter his prize across the river Darren tanky and the ankylosaur team are zeroing in on the mystery Quarry we are now roughly here a map of the area was made by the stern BS over 60 years ago it's LED tanky to what he thinks is Cutler's cave which

might contain the missing ankylosaurus skull and tail we're having some conflicting GPS issues the arrows are flipping around back and forth the problem is the 100-year-old map and the crew GPS can't agree on directions we cannot be 100% sure that we've found the site there are no photographs to tell us that this is the site this is exactly where we want to be if tanky map is right it'll lead the Analisa team to a quarry that hasn't been seen for a 100 years and in BC the hadrosaur team hopes they can get their heavyweight Dyno

off the ground without broken bones I've never left the dinosaur so that's another one for the books in a secret British Columbia dig site the hadrosaur team is waiting for a lift they're hoping the helicopter company will be able to get their complete skeleton out of the ground and into the air we need a fairly substantial helicopter and in the Alberta Badlands Victoria Arbor and the ankylosaur team are willing to risk hostile terrain if it leads them to a lost sight that was last seen a century ago if they find the legendary Cutler's cave they

could recover the missing skull and tailbone of a rare ankylosaur it went missing before it was shipped out to London about a century ago William Cutler did keep some field notes and so hopefully we'll be able to find the Quarry all they have to go on is a faded photograph showing what might be the skeleton being lifted out of the Quarry uh you can see they're inclined like this yeah something large came out of here H something quite large but uh what we found bits of burlap bits of plaster bits of wood so we know

something was taken out of here the rock looks generally like the rock around the the specimen which is on display in London I just can't see anyone going through all the effort to dig something out of that horrendous spot and it not be something incredibly significant but do you think is this big enough for well I've got Cutler's article where he talks about how big the block was yeah in feet see I got 10 ft so that's where I thought maybe the tail was in there that's this one right I don't there's nothing that looks

like vertebrae and cross-section there's no there's no bone at all nothing no no I feel like it it needs to be a somewhat bigger Quarry because the specimen is quite huge it's disappointing but Darren's hunch was wrong the Quarry is too small to have been Cutler's cave I know it's a real it's a real conundrum for me I'm really troubled by by what's going on here right now it's too bad because Darren was pretty confident about this one so so that's kind of a a bit of a nail in the cofin I think this might

be an example of a Corey that's just completely and utterly lost for all time it's it's just eroded away and it's gone until we find the skull or some other evidence that this is definitely the Cory we're going to keep looking because I think that the mystery has not been solved yet across the Red Deer River Scott psons is having a better afternoon the hadrosaur bone with the Tyrannosaur bite marks is almost ready to dig up so the function of paper for towels is just to protect the bone the plaster protects the fragile fossils but

even after they're coated there's always a chance they'll break [Music] apart this is always the most dangerous part of pulling a fossil out and if all goes well the jacket will hold just tends to be unpredictable so cross your fingers okay beautiful all right all right time to pack up go have a steak [Music] dinner in Tumblr Ridge British Columbia hadrosaur team Rich McCrae and Lisa Buckley are waiting for an expert opinion can a 4,000 kilo hadrosaur skeleton be airlifted to safety any more strength we can put in it won't hurt right now there's no

guarantee as the lift team Ponders their payload they survey the area for the oncoming Chopper when the helicopter comes in is same as a hurricane 100 mph winds some of those winds could push those trees over fairly easy might not see them they'll come down real fast you break your neck I'm more or less doing this for myself not the dinosaur yeah he's already dead after all this waiting there's still plenty to worry about this is the first complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in British Colombia and even if it clears the tree line it could

still break apart mid-flight under the pressure of its own weight like we got one here another one here right it'll be a very highrisk time where it's not on the ground and not stable so if something were to happen to it you can't help but feel attached to it and I'll put a net over top of this just so it doesn't spin the net will break the wind the dinosaur will be airborne for one harrowing colomet then lower gently onto a flatbed truck the helicopter can handle a payload of 5,000 kg McCrae figures the fossil

weighs about 4,400 a little more than a fully grown elephant but that's just an educated guess well I've got lots of experience you know I've never lefted a dinosaur so that's another one for the books right the team rigs a cradle to lift the hyur out of the Gully and into the Limelight as the star attraction at their Tumblr Ridge Museum there is a whole lot riding on this going right [Music] it's a new day in Dinosaur Provincial Park Victoria may not have found Cutler's cave or her pet ankylosaur but if you just keep digging

the bad lands might offer up a consolation prize when we're in the field it's very seldom that we're going to find exactly what we're working on or exactly what we're hoping to find an hour later persistence pays off what you got Victoria oh it looks like we've got some sort of long bone going into the ground here we're just going to keep picking along and see what we can get this rock is really soft around it so it's not too hard to excavate around all right it's nice to find a nice complete bone I'm always

looking for ankylosaurs but really I'm happy just to find anything that's cool so I was really happy about that the dark clouds gathering over the bad lands aren't going to dampen Victoria's spirits she's on to something big no it's huge that's awesome yeah it looks pretty good though looks great I'm pretty happy we think it's probably the shinbone or tibia of a meat eating dinosaur called Gorgosaurus who's like a smaller relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex which everybody knows and loves it's the same kind of dinosaur that left the two Scot found and that chewed into the

hadrosaur bone 74 million years ago Gorgosaurus prowled the these swamps in search of slower moving plant eaters and hadrosaur was definitely on the menu while unlikely is it possible that they hold in their hands traces of this actual Gorgosaurus predator and prey [Music] [Music] Victoria's made a great find but now she's in a race with Mother Nature basically we have about half an hour all of these reels you see fill up with water and we have big waterfalls and all of these channels become completely full of water then it becomes impossible to move it's a

little bit frustrating luckily though we had Victoria's great find would been nice to have gotten that bone trenched out a little bit more uh maybe put up a little bit more rain safety on it Victoria's new fossil has been exposed to the elements for the first time in millions of years whether it will be there tomorrow as anyone's guess in BC a copter is coming to pick up a dinosaur but if the hyur team guessed its weight wrong it's not going to make it home there's been times where these things have been cut loose 200

ft above the ground nothing survived in Tumblr Ridge BC a chopper is on the way it's the same as a hurricane 100 mph wind if they can pull it off the First full dinosaur skeleton ever found here will be heading to its new home and in Alberta dinosaur park is underwater Victoria Arbor found a prize fossil but right now the Dig is called on account of rain and if it continues days worth of hard work could simply drift away well today is a a rain day whether you like it or not because the bad lands

become so slippery it's impossible to go out there right now we just have to sit and wait but Victoria has found a fun way to pass the time Dino Hunter style well I brought my Sketchbook along and the game is that you have to draw a dinosaur or whatever and I like to see what everybody can draw in Camp okay there he [Laughter] is as the rain continues to fall at least the crew can stay warm and well fed it's frustrating because I think all of us want to get out there and go prospecting but

we just can't when it's this wet and muddy for now the team has no choice but to hunker down and hope that the weather clears [Music] in Tumblr Ridge it's D-Day dinosaur day a helicopter is on its way to airlift British Columbia's first articulated dinosaur skeleton I always go ahead and assess all the landing spots the hadrosaur team Buckley and McCrae have been waiting 5 years for this day and they are worried sick literally I've been better little bug just a flesh wound Rich has been better feeling ill sore throat dehydrated No Sleep hadn't eaten

was just a recipe for disaster [Music] this is Andy and this is Kirk we a pilot so we'll be I suppose the risks are we could have an engine failure and we might have to to drop the load I don't even really want to talk about it because it's not going to happen but uh yeah yeah it's uh obviously it's uh it's not like a boulder I assume it's a little more delicate than a a lot more delicate yeah with the chopper ready Lisa and Rich rush back to the dig [Music] site you hear it

coming pretty good Moment of Truth yeah it'll be interesting to see this guy Airborne yeah 75 74 million years it hasn't budged so it's going to have quite a shift today the big question now is did they get the weight right if the fossils heavier than 5,000 kg the airlift could end in disaster there's been times where these things have been cut loose 200 ft above the ground and hit with such force that they reliquify the plaster and nothing survives now it's time to see if British Columbia's First full dinosaur will make it to its

destination in one piece they're not out of the woods yet in the AL of bad lands the ankylosaur team waits for the rain to clear so Victoria Arbor can retrieve her prized Gorgosaurus bone it's frustrating because I think all of us want to get out there but we just can't when it's this wet and muddy and in Tumblr Ridge the hadrosaur team watches anxiously as a chopper attempts to lift BC's First Complete dinosaur skeleton out of the ground and into the air if it makes it it'll become their Museum's first homegrown exhibit [Music] [Music] [Music]

guessing its weight is a dangerous game when you're flying dinos Rich calculated that it's about 4,400 kg close to this Chopper's maximum if he's wrong the pilot will have to dump the fossil [Music] after several nerve-wracking minutes they finally hear from the chopper pilot we just confirmed how much the jacket actually weighed and the total came out to 44 4400 nice nice well calculated yes yes bump it bump it it's a close call the fossil weighs just 600 kilos under the limit can you let us know when it touches down on the trailer please [Music]

it's on the deck nice and smooth it landed it's down well done yes I'll sleep very well tonight I was very elated to see this thing successfully on the trailer perfectly placed it was fantastic like better than 10 [Music] [Music] Christmases in Alberta the rain stopped falling and it's safe for the ankylosaur team to return to the bad lands this is Victoria's last day and she's hoping her fossils survived the [Music] rain the bone is intact still safely lodged in the Sandstone the other day I put a little bit of a protective bandage on this

bone you have to bail out the water go down a little bit further and then jacket it Victoria will go home with the bone from Gorgosaurus the Park's most terrifying Predator the same type of dinosaur that nod on the bone of the hadrosaur that Scott found it's an incredible link to a world that vanished millions of years ago those are the consolation prices and it means by being open to these things we always get a price I think we'll actually put the branch into this one with the bone ready for transport it's time for Victoria

to say goodbye to the bad lands she may not have found Cutler's cave or her prized ankylosaur but every dig has its own rewards really paleontology is something where you um you have to work long and hard and if you find anything at all you're doing pretty good well I'm extremely happy that I had a chance to go to look at some of the potential sites and even though we didn't find it I'm very happy with what we did find out so I would say that this fieldwork has been its success for [Music] me in

Tumblr Ridge the hadrosaur finally arrives at its new home so we do want to take the entire skeleton clean them up make them presentable and turn them into the uh Central main exhibit for our galleries it'll take time to get it ready for display but for Rich and Lisa it's a labor of love this is a frontier one of the few remaining in North America there's a chance for you to make a difference to go into an area that nobody's been in before and find things nobody's seen before Rich McCrae and Lisa Buckley of proven

dinosaur skeletons can be found in BC they'll continue to scour the rock face and search The Creeks on the hunt for their next big find it's the season of the dinosaur the world's top paleontologists dig into Canada's prehistoric past to unearth a living world buried in timeo got dinosaurs they'll battle heat and floods and the ticking clock as they track the footsteps of dinosaurs and the most incredible creatures ever to walk the earth to live again on Dino Hunt this week on Dino Hunt two teams race against the rising tides in the Bay of funi

Nova Scotia in search of the dawn of the dinosaur on the shores of the minus Basin the tracker team is hunting for signs of the first dinosaurs to walk this Earth before the fossils get washed away it is an absolute shame I can't take this back with with me and at wasson's bluff if the borod team can get to the bones before they're swept into the sea we cannot stop the tide they might uncover a new species of dinosaur that outlived a global catastrophe these animals are the [Music] survivors the search for Canada's oldest dinosaurs

begins in Nova scotia's Bay of funi the cliffs looking out on the Atlantic are hundreds of millions of years old coastal tides are the biggest in the world and for Dino Hunters they're both a curse and a blessing it causes some challenge in navigating around the beach but it also causes all this erosion that's really good for the paleontology Dr Tim fedak specializes in hunting for the world's earliest dinosaur fossils he's leading a team that'll be digging deep into the red Sandstone at wasson's block [Music] you guys are hired by the way fedo team will

need to work quickly the site is underwater for most of the year but over the next 10 days the tides will be low shovels brakes Implements of Destruction we don't want to get too carried away digging a big hole if we can't collect it within the time period we have the Tide's going to come up and wash it away we cannot stop the tide fedak and his team are searching for the ancestors of the famous long neck dinosaurs the prorap pods these creatures were among the first dinosaurs to evolve in the Triassic period over 200

million years ago T rex is closer to us in time than the prorap pods Tyrannosaurus Rex lived 66 million years ago but to get back to the time of the prorap Pod we have to go back an additional 134 million years and fedak may have discovered a new species of one of the world's oldest dinosaurs for the past 17 years we've been doing collection work at the site and have identified more and more specimens and it does appear that this is a new species of pro sorod dinosaur there are at least 12 species of prorap

pod but paleontologists suspect the number could be much higher a new genus in the Bay of funi could add to the growing list since fedak was last here tons of rubble have buried the site there you go perfect and if they want to find the bones they may have to dodge the Rocks this is a dangerous site everyone needs to know that and I don't want anyone hurt but the team is willing to take the risk if it means finding a key to the past finding a nesting site or skulls would be very exciting we

always hope for for once in a lifetime find if fedak hopes to find evidence of a new species of prorap pod he'd better hurry he's racing against a rising tide across the bay Tyler Shaw is heading even further back in time looking for dinosaurs even older than the prorap pods I always say that paleontologists are just little kids that never grew up Tyler Shaw is a paleontologist with the local funy geological Muse Museum he's scouting the shores of the minus Basin looking for traces of the world's first dinosaurs but unlike most of his colleagues he's

more interested in stone than bone his first stop Patty's Island a site that hasn't been Dino hunted in over 20 years so this area is Triassic in age well this is just excellently exciting that's got to be what was Patty's Island but we're going to be in lock I think all that low ridge running through there should be nice and flat Tyler and his colleague Nevan da will be searching an area that's underwater for most of the year but as the world's highest tide es it exposes a Dino Hunter's Paradise there are only a few

places in the world that have evidence of the first dinosaurs and Nova Scotia is one of them the tracker team isn't looking for bones but something else when you see nice Flat Rocks that's the place to look for uh dinosaur prints one of the things I love with tracks is you can look at them and if you've got two in a row you've got movement if you think of them as frames from a movie each footprint is a single frame and as you stick them together you can start to playback that animal's life an animal

can leave multiple prints during their lifetime they can only leave one skeleton uh skeletons are really the byproduct of a dead creature these are the byproduct of life unfortunately as the tide comes in and out it does eat away at these rocks no dinosaur yet if Tyler finds any tracks here they'll belong to some of the oldest terrestrial creatures that ever lived and they lived here fossils found along the shores of the Bay of fundi come from an important period in the Earth's history 200 million years ago the Earth's continents were concentrated in one land

mass called pan today's Nova Scotia was at its steamy Center the world was hot and reptiles ruled but the humid home of the first dinosaurs wasn't to last it was shattered by a geological catastrophe that remade the world Clues to understanding this Earth shattering event can be found in the cliffs on the Bay of fun and no one understands it better than Dr Paul Olen who made the first major dinosaur find at this site in 1976 standing in front of a cliff of ancient Basalt Basalt is a hardened form of lava similar to what forms

in Iceland today and in this area it comprises of evidence of one of the largest mass extinctions in Earth's history two Extinction events defined the age of the dinosaurs one at the beginning of their Rule and one that ended it the Triassic mass extinction started with the breakup of panga triggered by volcanic eruptions which likely began in Morocco back then a neighbor of Nova Scotia but they were of enormous magnitude larger than anything we are familiar with today at all larger than humankind has ever seen the eruptions lasted for thousands of years lava covered an

area as big as the United States Nova Scotia was buried in molten rock huge amounts of lava like these Cliffs poured out over the landscape obliterating all the life in its path and yielding huge amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur ultimately resulting in the extinction of maybe 50 to 75% of all animal and plant life on Earth the prorap pods that survived the Triassic Mass Extinction faced a desolate World Scavenging a burnt out landscape subsisting on whatever meager plant Supply remained the prorap Pod team is looking for Clues to their survival in the bones at

wasson's Bluff this is a very unique site in Canada in North America and in the world because of the specific time period this is immediately after the end Triassic mass extinction so these animals are the survivors this is the dawn of the Dinosaurs but if the bones aren't recovered in time the Bay of funy will reclaim the ancient specimens the team has spent 2 days removing the top layer of erosional debris and with only a few days left to identify a new species of parapod they need some heavy duty help Bingo got Ito nice think

you just discovered our Bone Bed there Jack thank you very much so this is a prur pod dinosaur vertebra that's just the back part it's been buried for 200 million years and this is the first time it's seeing the air again is this important to you what feels pretty important to me he's found his first fossil it belongs to a creature that lived and died 134 million years before T-Rex and Triceratops and 200 million years before human beings this is a 3 to 4 M long animal and we're at the tip of the tail we've

got to expose quite a bit if it's isolated there's going to be more isolated bits around so right now it's just get all this erosional debris off and start figuring out how we're going to do some collecting fedax found the tip of the tail and if he lucky there's a skull at the other end two teams face off against the rising tides in the Bay of fundi at wasson's Bluff the prorap Pod team has days to identify a new species of dinosaur fingers are crossed that we'll we'll see a skull that's the ultimate thing we

want to see and in the minus Basin Tyler Shaw is climbing the walls to track some of the world's earliest dinosaurs it means that these are the grandfather of all terrestrial life on the beaches of minus Basin in the Bay of fundi Nova Scotia the tracker team is hunting for evidence of some of the world's oldest dinosaurs oh this is just excellently exciting and at wasson's Bluff Tim fedak borod team has hit P Bingo got it but they're racing against a rising tide looking to claim their prize for FedEx's team the fastest way to the

dig site is straight downhill [Music] 200 million years ago this area was a desolate Wasteland a volcanic catastrophe that killed off the majority of all life on Earth and yet here the prolap Pod survived everything that we see at wasson's Bluff is found above the North Mountain basal so we know we're in the early Jurassic time frame the prorap Pod team hopes the bones here will Prov IDE them with Clues as to how these dinosaurs beat the overwhelming odds and if they actually belong to a new species they've found the tip of a tail but

have only days to see if there's a skull buried at the other end the skull is really the the prize and most important piece in a in a research question about trying to identify what type of dinosaurs these are well the first couple days it was a lot of shoveling and and not much finding so now we're going in a pretty good rate so while collecting this bone there was a small plate element part of the lower jaw now we don't have any teeth that would really confirm that it was lower jaw but the shape

is Right spotting 200 million year old Bones is like finding a needle in a hay stack but feda started his career as a sculptor and medical illustrator and he can tell what bones look like in 3D no matter how well they're hidden so maybe you want to come down around and I'll show you what this bone looks like you just got to get get your eye used to seeing that to imagine that something was here and had died here 200 million years ago it's incredible it's like I'm holding a piece of history and the right

piece of History could mean the discovery of a new species of prorap pod dinosaur in the Bay of funy I think I found something there not sure it kind of looks looks like a little bit of bone fragment might be a bit of tooth 200 million years ago food was scarce mass extinction had killed off most plant life so to survive these early dinosaurs needed to be able to digest even the toughest vegetation they would bite off ferns or coner for trees they didn't chew it like a cow does they had U gastrolith stomach stones

that ground up the plant material just like birds do today the discovery of a tooth means fedak is one step closer to finding what he came here for a skull we do prioritize what we'd really want to find is a skull the prorap Pod team knows exactly what they're looking for but the Bay of fundy's first fossils were discovered by accident in the 19th century geologists came to joggin cliffs in search of coal they found 315 milliony old fossilized trees and what was inside them would change science forever this site was visited by Sir Charles

Lyall and his accomplice Sir William Dawson native Nova scotian in the mid 1800s and they made one of the most important paleontological discoveries uh of all time and really is a starting point for the story of dinosaurs this is the exact spot that ly and Dawson made their Discovery in the exact same way where a tree had tumbled down they were investigating it and lo and behold in this tree they found bones that pushed the fossil record of tetr PODS reptiles amphibians farther back in geological time than it had been known up to that point

the bones were those of a small lizard-like creature that lived 300 million years ago 70 million years before the first dinosaurs and 234 million years before T-Rex Charles Darwin used the discovery as evidence for his theory of evolution and they Remain the earliest signs of terrestrial life ever found so what's especially significant about these reptiles at joggin is that these are the ancestors of the dinosaurs and All Reptiles alive today long before mammals birds and dinosaur has roam the Earth the first four-legged creatures tetrapods took their first steps onto land their fossilized Footprints give us

information about how these terrestrial vertebrates lived and because they often moved in shallow water these tracks aren't easy to find it takes experts like Tyler Shaw who know where and when to look uh the reason we've come out at night is tracks are really dependent on the light angle you can't control the angle of the sun we can control the angle of our nice lanterns here this rock here it's there a lot of water to it because of all the Ripple marks and if we hold the light at low angles to it we can start

to see them today it's Solid Rock but millions of years ago long before the dinosaurs this was a Sandy Seashore over time tectonic plate movement pushed up the Rocks hiding the fact that this ancient Beach was far from deserted the animal we're looking at was moving through a shallow amount of water pushing itself up up and dragging its body along so you're looking at an animal with a distance of 70 or 80 cm between one foot and the subsequent next footfall at least the size of a German Shepherd it means that these are the grandfather

of all terrestrial life all the animals that walk about this animal would then give rise to our early amphibians they in turn give rise to the early repti Iles which Dawson and lyel found at joggin and finally into our dinosaurs after trailing their ancestors by Lamplight Tyler Shaw's tracker team is hoping to find some of the first dinosaur prints of all time before time runs out and the prorap Pod team races to find evidence of a new species in a tricky dig site there is perhaps no more complicated place to be before the tide comes

in at wasson's fluff the prorap Pod team has just 4 days left to find the bones they need in order to identify a new species of dinosaur what we'd really want to find is a skull and in the minus Basin the tracker team is on the hunt waiting for their big break a week ago Patty's Island Nova Scotia was covered in water and 220 million years ago it was inhabited by dinosaurs this is actually a really good spot for the boat Tyler Shaw and Nan da have been waiting patiently to walk the same path as

these ancient animals it might just pay off usually I carry a pile of chicken bones for good luck I figure it's a sympathetic magic but we haven't had uh chicken dinner in a while so looks like it's not his lucky day at a distance it looked footprint is but close up it was not oh jeez [Music] crabs hey got it there is the trus there is the footprint there is toe toe and toe there's the handprint there's a bigger one we got dinosaurs awesome but what kind of dinosaur left these tracks one clue comes from

time stamping the rocks that hold the print they're 220 million years old that means whatever left this track was among the first dinosaurs to appear on Earth I think this is the brake line for that yeah sh that there's my dinosaur footprint there so it's walking up there there yeah there we go we have here at least one two three or more of these Plante eating dinosaurs the size and shape of these tracks suggest that they were made by a dinosaur called at tropus a Triassic dinosaur that lived 220 million years ago a tropus was

quadrapedal and had bird-like hips this is a small fellow he's standing probably about this tall um he's going to be young this is a bit older um not fully grown adult yet so this is somewhere in the mid this is juvenile the disruptive teen years basically how cute are you like there they're just so almost fresh you almost expect to just see him just standing over there looking back at me wondering what the heck I'm doing you just want to reach out and kind of stroke underneath its chin but it's been dead for over 200

million years a tropus is known only from its fossilized track no bones have ever been found so track Hunters like Tyler Shaw have provided all the information we know about one of the world's first dinosaurs they don't have fingers like we have they're more closely closer knit together they walk on all four feet but most of the time they pop their arms up and just run along on 2 feet the early dinosaurs nimble helped them survive in a world of nasty Predators but 2011 million years ago their world turned against them at the start of

the Triassic period the Bay of fundi area was situated at the equator landlocked in Pena as the supercontinent broke apart earthquakes rocked the region they hammered at the cliffs cracking them open 200 million years later these fractures and crevices are still still chiseled into the rock face posing serious challenges to Tim fedak and his crew there is perhaps no more complicated place to be in terms of structure I refer to these as the earthquake dinosaurs because the the dinosaur bones have been faulted and and and chopped up by Major earthquakes during the time these bones

were buried and another earthquake happened and cut through the bones that makes this site fairly frustrating to work the highest tides in the world also mean that the fossils found along these Shores are saturated with sea waterer and extremely fragile when the bones are in the Bedrock here at the site they're mush they basically have the consistency of cream cheese so you do have to be very careful with them the bones are so fragile they need glue to keep them together the preservation of even one bone in the fossil record I think is like winning

the lottery having your whole skeleton preserved is like winning two lotteries one week after the other digging for 200 million year old dinosaurs is painstaking and frustrating work but fedak and his team know the prize is worth the effort Lee has found a nice rib Kimo found a smaller rib called a gastralia both of those are very small while looking for a skull they've Unearthed what could be another big find in the past uh 15 years we've been collecting articulated material from here adults sub adults but we have been always looking and keeping our eye

out for very very young hatchlings or or egg material so there's always the chance that we're going to stumble upon a breeding site the team will keep searching for a skull but now there's also the possibility of uncovering a breeding site and that's a reason to celebrate Bay of funy style they're ready guys how about for wedge dogs and clams are not not a good idea I've Ted that Che cheers can't do this Alberta that's right clam bakes over prorap pod team digs in with renewed Vigor they're hunting a new species of prorap pod and

maybe they'll find the nursery oh ideally we would like to find a nest site that that would be perfect and on Patty's Island the tracker team is close to finding the footprints of the world's oldest dinosaurs if they don't lose them to the ocean floor it is an absolute shame I can't take this back with me at wasson's Bluff time is running out just as the pror Pod team finds itself on the verge of a breakthrough there's always the chance that we're going to stumble upon a breeding site and in the Bay of funy the

tracker team is desperate to get their 220 milliony old d dinosaur prints off Patty's Island before the incoming tide returns them to the ocean the tracks are stamped into heavy slabs of rock that have been broken up by the force of the Waves I'm really am trying to figure out how we can cut weight down but our boat driver would probably freak right out if I brought it back it is an absolute shame I can't take this back with me no bones from the atreus dinosaur have ever been found so tracks like these are extremely

valuable in determining how one of the world's first dinosaurs behaved flip it back over so that it hopefully protects it so I'm going to try to convince someone come back in a boat with nobody else in it and bring this out but if they wait too long the powerful undertoe could carry these rocks and the prince on them out to sea or smash them against the ocean floor so Tyler's using every second he has to figure out as much as possible about the elus of a tropus if you take four times the length of the

footprint so the distance from the tip of the toe to the back of the heel and times that by four so we go one 2 3 four his hips sit about here and that's the distance from its hips to its shoulder so then you tack on you know probably that same length for a tail so about to here a little bit for a head and You' got the length of an animal so from just just this little information even a set of three Footprints as long as they're uh sequential we're able to start to fill

in what this animal looks like it's starting to become a living breathing creature fossilized prints show Dinosaurs on the move and a moving picture of their behavior Dino prints can be found all over the world usually in areas near streams and rivers this makes Tumblr Ridge BC the perfect hunting ground for West Coast track star Dr Richard McCrae a skeleton is just a pile of bones I mean there's a lot you can get from it but tracks are made by living animals the closest that we're going to get to looking at dinosaurs other than a

time machine McCrae works with his wife paleontologist Lisa Buckman a few weeks ago they found a new set of mysterious dinosaur tracks but getting to them is dangerous work did you bring a radio with you NOP we're going into a new discovery it's in a place that we call dinosaur Gorge what we have is a uh a near vertical track face the uh tracks would have been formed near a coastal plane3 140 million years ago until mountain building began in this uh in this area so the North American Plate ran into other plates and it's

kind of like running a car into a brick wall and the hood crumples so you have tracks that are you know horizontal but with the mountain building they go vertical sometimes to get to the tracks Rich has to scale 6 ft of crumbling rock face and he needs to work fast or he'll be climbing in the dark you know the light's only good for about an hour because it's such a narrow Canyon judging by the age of the rock face the prints were likely fossilized 140 million years ago but it will take a closer look

to determine who made them we don't know yet what else is up there uh about 40% of the footprints are visible from the ground so we're getting up on ropes this kind of dinosaur hunting requires a paleontologist with rock climbing skills and a willingness to take risks any kind of danger that you have working on a regular site multiply it by 10 or even 100 when you're working on a vertical face I cannot take my eyes off of what the rope in the webbing are doing for a second because if I do that might be

the uh moment that something comes loose and uh screams down at Rich the risk pays off it's a good siiz print perfectly embossed in the mountain side the question is who made it so I'm looking at a a track here three toed question is is this a a plant eater or a meat eater well for meat eaters the footprints are usually longer than they are wide and this one's little bit longer than it is wide the other clue is the meat eating uh digits they have very sharp claws and these digits look like they have

rounded uh terminations but the uh the real clue here uh is that there is a handprint in front of it and this is definitely a Plante eating dinosaur uh print 140 million years ago Plante eating dinosaurs walked on all fours but meat eaters were therapods bads who hunted on 2 feet so I'm just going to go down so we can see very large track and there's the outline of the back of the one of the outer digits tapers off to a fine tipped claw there's the length of this and that's uh I think 62 or

63 cm long and it's nowhere near as wide this is certainly a uh a large meat eating dinosaur we only have a couple of specimens that are from that time period so having a exposure of rock like this that has a large amount of tracks on it it's giving it's going to give us a lot of information about what kinds of animals were're roaming around this part of BC the tracks were laid down at the end of the Jurassic era aside from the fossils in Nova Scotia these are the oldest traces of dinosaurs anywhere in

[Music] Canada in the Bay of funi Tim fedak prorap pod team might have a new lead on the dawn of the dinosaur the skull contains the most information but animals change considerably through their growth from Young hatchling to fully grown adult and that change is really important to understand evolutionarily they're still hoping for a skull but they've added another fine to their wish list a prorap pod Nest we're keeping an eye out for bones that are from much smaller animals that might suggest breeding area where there might be preserved eggs or uh smaller skeletons oh

ideally we would like to find a nest site that that would be perfect if the team uncovers hatchlings with the same features as the adults they found here they'll have the proof they need to name a new species of proroot we want to be very cautious about naming a new species on a single isolated growth stage whether that's adult or young it's good to complete that picture and try to identify to link the adult skeleton with younger individuals a prorap pod nesting site in the Bay of funi would be the first of its kind in

North America but if fedak and his prorap pod team don't find it fast it will be swept away forever and the tracker team has to get their Prin off the island before they sink like stones on Patty's island in the Bay of funy Tyler Shaw's tracker team has identified some incredible Footprints but if they slip back into the sea he'll lose hard evidence of the world's first dinosaurs and at wasson's Bluff the clock is running out on a potential new discovery time's ticking we have about a day and a half Tim fedak parapod team is

working fast to see if they found a major Discovery a site of prorap pods which would be the first of its kind in North America we have some great sites in South Africa where full nests have been collected embryos still still in the eggs and they've been fully prepared out in 2005 a 190 milliony Old nesting site was uncovered in South Africa it predated previously known sites by 100 million years the discovery revealed evidence of complex nesting behaviors like group nesting and the repeated use of nesting sites by a single species the highly organized nature

of the nests suggests that the mother may have arranged the eggs after she laid them the sites also revealed surprising changes in prorap pod growth sequences there's different aspects of the skeleton that grow faster than the others the skull actually had a slower growth rate whereas the neck had a much much faster growth rate the animal teams had changed its posture from walking on all fours to adults that walked mainly on their back legs linking a hatchling to an adult could provide the prorap Pod team with all the information they need to declare a new

species of pror pod but time is running out we had bone very close by so if I go in and there's more articula material it should show up fairly quickly vok needs to work faster and dig harder if he's going to beat the tide he's turned to power tools to speed things up but the Jackhammer might not respond well to this this rock face so we just have to see fortunately fedak catches a break so we're just uh lifted this up and just found another bone fragment here there's bone exposed here and on this other

piece and they just go together like that before fedak can figure out exactly what kind of bone found he discovers he's got an audience a local tour group led by Young colleague Tyler Shaw everywhere you see the little bags with orange flagging tape tied to them are pieces of bone they have found somewhere in my little handy dandy book uh they're they're creatures that kind of look like this um probably not exactly this fellow but uh close enough so the star of this uh excavation is Dr Tim fedi how are you today good what we're

good this is a bone that we just collected today and it's a little bit of rib bone it's been buried in this stone for 200 million years thanks to the work of fedak Shaw and local dinosaur hunters this area of Nova Scotia is becoming a mecca for Dino fans who flock to the little town of paroro to check out the museum and just a few streets away is another kind of Museum run by amateur bone Digger Elden George I see that's my pet Elden George is a local Legend and a rockar among geologists he's been

combing the beaches collecting rare fossils and minerals since he was 8 years old I found these on March the 31st 1983 what Elden found that day made history it happened to come ac across this in 3 in of water I thought there was bird tracks and then I I realized that I was looking at something very rare he was right these tiny tracks were made 205 Million Years Ago by a baby celop fisis they're among the smallest dinosaur tracks ever discovered over 200 million years ago this baby caisis shared its Homeland with the atropus dastur

they roamed and fed in a world of warm fertile jungles but when that world disappeared they disappeared with it but the dinosaurs Tim fedak is uncovering somehow survived they managed to eek out an existence in a harsh post Extinction world fak's mission to prove that a new species of prorap pod once lived here and lived through the cataclysm is coming down to the wire he needs definitive evidence of skull or nesting site and he's getting close we have 10 elements that's that's not too bad but what we really want to do is make sure that

there's uh no articulated material here that's in danger of being eroded so we need to collect that if it's here time's ticking we have about a day and a half the rest of the bones might be within reach but for the prorap Pod team The Tide is coming in and time is running out and in the Bay of Fundy the tracker team races against the tide to carry out the evidence of Canada's oldest dinosaurs this is absolutely amazing in the minus Basin tracker team is on a search and rescue mission for ancient atropus tracks before

the tides wash them away at wasson's Bluff the prorap Pod team has only hours to collect Vital Information about what might be a new species of Dinosaur Before The Bone Bed becomes a seabed the crew makes one last perilous Journey down to recover what they can from the site before the ocean reclaims the beach hear the tide lapping and it's it's going to be burying this sight and to protect their 200 million year old fossils they turn to a centuries old technique the plasure and burlaps been used for hundreds of years the prorap Pod team

suspects they have the evidence they need to name a new species of one of the world's oldest dinosaurs but they can't be sure until they get the bones back to the lab one thing they are sure of these Tiny Treasures help tell an epic story these dinosaurs witnessed one of the worst extinctions our world has ever known they survived what most other life on Earth could not the prorap pods got their Cosmic reprieve when panga broke apart 200 million years years ago landlocked deserts became Lush new coastlines jungles returned and over time the prorap pods

evolved into Giants proor pods are the ancestors of what would become the Sor poods the largest animals ever to walk on the Earth [Music] 200 million years ago these little dinosaurs had an amazing Destiny and left an extraordinary Legacy and now FedEx's team is preserving what remains before they're lost at sea across the bay Tyler Shaw has managed another boat trip solo this time to retrieve the atropus tracks I just going to try to swing the boat around here it's almost hard to believe that you know this site hasn't been looked at in 20 years

or more the dinosaur tracks are still fresh and coming out and it's well worth a trip back this is absolutely amazing for Tyler a summer of tracking dinosaurs is ending with a win today I definitely feel like a three-year-old with a new toy even just coming out today the view alone was worth the price of admission and on top of that dinosaur tracks you can't have much better day unless it started raining gold from the sky I I'm as happy as a pig in [Music] mud back at wasson's Bluff feda fossils are finally ready to

be transported to safety good good success the team packs up but they're already setting their sights on next year I will come back as often as I'm asked experience has been really great for me I found some bones and I was really excited about it cuz I never thought I'd ever find something like that I was actually um thinking before starting this dig that this might be the the last time in quite a long time I'd be coming down here but these beds are actually starting to show some promise even though fedak has been working

the site for nearly two decades surprising discoveries are made every year while the ancient bones are carefully loaded for transport nature begins to reclaim these sh all right let's go we got to get back to the museum before the tide comes up bye and now the hard work begins it'll take several months of meticulous analysis to determine the exact results of the Dig these are the oldest dinosaur bones in Canada so it does take a long time to expose them but after 9 months now we can see uh features in some of the elements that

do suggest that this is a new species the team's dedication has resulted in a significant discovery but fedak knows that their work in the Bay of Fundy is far from over in the months to come the tides will expose more ancient secrets in these Cliffs and he'll be back again digging through the past in search of some of the earliest dinosaurs next time on Dino Hunt two teams will try to solve one of the earth's greatest Mysteries what killed the dinosaurs was it an asteroid or were they already in trouble when it slammed into the

planet it's the season of the dinosaur the world's top paleontologists dig into Canada's prehistoric past to unearth a living world buried in time bingo we got dinosaurs they'll battle heat and floods and the ticking clock as they track the footsteps of dinosaurs and the most incredible creatures ever to walk the earth will live again on Dino Hunt 66 million years ago an asteroid slammed into the Earth a cosmic Collision that ended the age of the dinosaurs or did it today on Dino Hunt two teams are digging for Clues to the 66 milliony Old question what

killed the dinosaurs in the grasslands of Saskatchewan the mill team traces a Titan's last steps and in drumer Alberta the chal team is searching for a rare horn dinosaur if the teams can find more bones they'll know how the Giants lived and die in Montreal a team of McGill University paleontology students is gearing up and heading west they're prepping for a 3- weekl long expedition in Saskatchewan there's dead things in here yeah they'll be working under paleontologist Hans Larson of McGill's red path Museum I love dinosaurs I think most people love dinosaurs and putting more

dinosaurs on display uh I think will be a very great thing for this Museum Larson has been on dinosaur hunts from Nuna to Africa pursuing a particular interest in how dinosaurs evolved tracing their story until their Extinction and Beyond understanding what took these Titans down gives a vivid picture of the world 66 million years ago the mass extinction event is uh filled with lots of controversy I mean we know that all non-bird dinosaurs went extinct at that time how they went extinct is a big question though was it a slow event or fast event which

things were going first what are the Dynamics [Music] to get to where the answers are buried takes a 3500 km road trip to the Prairies welcome to Saskatchewan they're heading for a dig site in grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan's bad lands the main reason for going out is that we have a beautiful set of rocks uh which are right around the ous mass extinction they're filled with the bones of some of the last dinosaurs to walk the earth we're going to a site uh where we found a partial uh duck B dinosaur osaurus huge Edmontosaurus

was a massive plant eater that disappeared 66 million years ago we have one of the last dinosaurs out there and we have this now potential to explore some questions like like were dinosaurs still evolving just before the mass extinction that would be phenomenal most of the team is made up of rookies and city kids who have no idea what's in store for them but it's not going to be summer camp I bring students with me who have often never been to western Canada before it's often the first times they're sleeping intense with the camp set

up the serious work begins to find the answer to one of the contentious questions of all time what killed the dinosaurs dinosaurs first evolved 230 million years ago ruling until their Extinction 66 million years [Music] ago they disappeared the same time that an asteroid slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula with the force of 10 billion nuclear bombs but did the asteroid Kill the Dinosaurs or were their numbers already shrinking 600 km West another team of bone diggers is asking the same question 70 million years ago in what is now drumer Alberta dinosaurs may have already been

affected by environmental changes long before the asteroid hit and evidence of their final footsteps might be embedded in these rocks that's what paleontologist franois terier wants to find fossils have been known here in Southern Alberta for probably Millennia they were known by the first nations in those days they just didn't know what the the fossils belong to tera's Expeditions take him to locations across Europe and North America studying the bone shapes and habitats of dinosaurs and collecting Clues to create a picture of what this lost world might have looked like and he thinks some of

the best evidence is right here in the Rocks near the Red Deer River so the question I'm asking is are climatic and environmental changes responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs or was the meteorite impact 66 million years ago the sole cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs CH works for the Royal Turell Museum in Drumheller Alberta which is home to Canada's largest bone collection and it's filled with fossils from the last days of the dinosaurs this summer ten is looking to add a unique prize and AR dinos ceratops it lived 70 million years ago just

as he believes the climate started to change skulls are the only fossilized evidence of this species and they've only been found in Drumheller what's really exciting about arenos ceratops is it's probably the rarest horn dinosaur ever discovered in Alberta but arenos ceratops was only known based on two skulls and that was it and there was no remains of the rest of the body a skeleton would help terier understand how the dinosaur fit into its changing world and whether it was already vulnerable to environmental changes in the time leading up to the asteroids [Music] impact terier

enlists the help of his Museum team there's been a few times that we've come down to the site and flying uh the river is been a bald eagle you don't get that in an office it's not even like a job it's like y I get to go do my hobby today the team started working on this dig after a local stumbled on some bones here last [Music] year so you just have to gently pick away keeping an eye out for everything Donna McLoud has spent 10 years mining fossils in Drumheller and recreating dinosaurs for the

Museum's exhibits her trained eye spots us 70 milliony old Jawbone and it looks like it comes from the dinosaur they're searching for I have a dent of a ceratopsian we believe it's a a Reno catops this is the back of the jaw the team is panning for gold hoping for the big win and Donna has just found the first nugget a complete arinos seratopical world and the changes they had to contend [Music] with in Saskatchewan the mill crew is on the move to where they uncovered the adasaurus last year with no roads to the dig

site they're starting their workday with a 6 km height we're heading now to an outcrop of the Frenchman formation that preserves the boundary of the end Cretaceous the the boundary that actually signifies the total Extinction of all dinosaurs and about 75% of all life as was known back then on the planet the Trek through 40° heat is worth the sweat proof of the mass extinction is right under fooot let's have at it awesome oh yeah look at that and a swing of the pickaxe reveals the line between the present and the prehistoric past this is

is often called the KT boundary and KT stands for Cretaceous tery this line is dated at 66 million years ago and what's really cool is that it's so simple everything below here has dinosaurs everything above has no dinosaurs that's the extinction of all dinosaurs as we knew it the boundary marks the moment a 10 km wide asteroid smashed into what is now Mexico triggering a hell storm of fire and ice billions of tons of debris were launched into the sky blocking the Sun and ushering in a Perpetual winter some of the debris fell here and

Hans has found a simple way to identify it it's pure clay that's the uh that's the boundary if you taste it it has no grit at all so it's sort like toothpaste and it's filled with shock quartz and aridum from The Fallout and that that's a a taste of death these rocks hold some of the last dinosaurs to walk the earth 66 million years ago now the team just has to find [Music] them was it a single cataclysmic event that took the dinosaurs down or was climate change the architect of their Extinction two teams search

for Clues to the same mystery what killed the dinosaurs in Alberta the churel team is on the hunt for a first ever rhinoceratops skeleton is that a new one it's new oh yeah and in Saskatchewan the mill crew unearths a 5ton giant could hold the answer to the end of dinosaurs where El the skeleton leads us will be the mystery in western Canada two teams are searching for the answer to the age-old question what killed the dinosaurs in drumer Alberta the tyal team is looking for the first Bones from an Aros ceratops body and in

Saskatchewan's grassland National Park the mill crew is digging for the truth about the end of the dinosaurs they're so close to the answer they can taste it that's a a taste of death these rocks were formed 66 million years AO go some of these animals um are obviously extinct some of the other animals we find here are still around today the turtle that this came from still have been uh rivers and lakes if some animals survived the asteroid impact then why didn't the dinosaurs lson thinks that a huge plant eater called adasaurus May hold the

answer to this mystery there's only one giant hydrosaurus and if we can get enough of it we can test is this Edmontosaurus different than the Edmontosaurus that that are found below it those differences could provide clues as to what was going on in the ecosystem right before the mass extinction we want to know what is the extinction pattern out there and if we can figure out the pattern maybe we can get a little bit closer to the even the process was the impact the process was it the gun that actually took out the planet he

found some of the 5ton creature last year and he's back to find the rest there's two lower back or sort of back of the- back vertebrae from a large duck bu [Music] dinosaur we've excavated here uh last year uh just to explore see see what's here um and we found a bunch of ribs and and then we buried it because we didn't have a collecting permit for it at the time and this year we have a collecting permit so we're going to expose it back up and collect as much of this as we can and

so where else the skeleton leads us will be the mystery for the next few days Let's Dance The Hunt for the Edmontosaurus is underway but this isn't the first one found in the bad lands of [Music] Saskatchewan in the 1870s Ottawa sent a team of surveyors here to map the new border with the United States and a member of that crew became Canada's first dinosaur hunter George Mercer Dawson was part of the Geological Survey of Canada that mapped the 49th parallel from Lake Superior to the Rocky Mountains he was the son of the principal of

McGill University William Dawson a childhood illness had bent his spine but his spirit and curiosity were unbreakable 1874 he passed through here horse and wagon collected the very first dinosaur fossil in Canada ever he shipped the fossils back to migil to his dad and they were identified as a duck bill dinosaur 150 years later it's kind of a nice full circle feeling and story like for Mill to come back [Music] here and now the students have uncovered a rib bone from the same gigantic species and monaural dinosaur in North America uh it was a giant

it had skulls greater than 5 ft long Edmontosaurus huge head extended into a rounded toothless beak which is why they're known as duck build [Music] dinosaurs I'm digging out around this vertebrae right here so that we can trench all the way around it Andrews found more evidence showing just how big this Edmontosaurus was each vertebrae was half a meter tall ad monasa was 10 m long the length of a railroad car and at 5500 kilos outweighed an elephant this was one of the biggest vegetarians of its time an adulted murus needed to consume at least

100 kilos of vegetation every day because of the replaceable teeth in the back of its skull it could actually include wood in its high fiber diet in fact these cows of the Cretaceous Era could chew through just about anything which probably gave them a survival Advantage if the food source got scarce until they became the food source for the meat eaters the duck bill was probably scared because the only large Predator from this whole unit is T-Rex this one was discovered nearby his name's Scotty and he's the heaviest T-Rex they've ever found he's as long

as the Edmontosaurus but broader in the [Music] middle despite its size Edmontosaurus was surprisingly fast and in dense forest it had a good chance of outmaneuvering its bigger bulkier stalker T-Rex and admont asaurus were among the last of the dinosaurs Larson and his students hope the bones will help crack the code and explain why these Giants fell while other species like crocodiles and turtles lived [Music] on in drumer Alberta Fran terrian's tiell team continues their search for a rare horn dinosaur is that a new one or is it the one you had before it's new

oh yeah the team's hunting in a rhinoceratops only two skulls have ever been found and very little is known about the body a skeleton would give them more than the size of the animal it would help them understand its role in the world in which it lived and died 70 million years ago a vast land sea wound through North America it created a warm humid ecosystem but 4 million years before the asteroid struck conditions began to change so if we look at the out crop in front of us there we can see that it's composed

of different layers of uh different rocks and each of those layers tells us a different story of changing environments so if we look at the black layer there it's all a coal bed so it represents an ancient swamp environment just underneath that black line you have a thick white Horizon that represents an ancient river that flowed through there the Rocks show that like us the last dinosaurs had to contend with environmental change their Inland Sea shrank the jungles died replaced by Cooler drier forests we know that Aros ceratops was able to live in this new

environment but did it have to adapt in any way anym the only way to know is to find fossils from its body and just 10 M from the main dig site team member Mark Mitchell has Unearthed a remarkable Discovery what you're looking at right now is a a shoulder blade or a scapula of a horn dinosaur and over here is part of the hip or the ilium of a horn dinosaur these appear to be larger bones there might be more of a more mature animal more of an adult animal it's notable find these are the

first bones ever found from the body of an rhinoceratops finally a picture of this long lost creature is starting to [Music] form with the hunt for the rare Dino underway the tyell team hopes to make another historic Discovery first feathered dinosaurs in the Western Hemisphere how great is that and as the mill crew looks for the truth about the end of dinosaurs they also unearth a winged surprise two teams investigate the end of the dinosaurs in Alberta the tyal team has found exhibit a in the intricate mystery but they need more information and in Saskatchewan

Professor Hans larsson's McGill crew is uncovering a 5ton Edmontosaurus but are keeping their eyes out for other Secrets buried in The Bone Bed [Music] everything we do is looking for uh more pieces of the puzzle this place is is awesome because um we have all this kind of rock we have the mass extinction boundary we have all the fossils it's the last 300 to 500,000 years of the existence of dinosaurs the team knows that some animals like turtles and lizards survived the killer asteroid why didn't the dinosaurs lson needs to find more fossils to answer

this question we found a partial Edmontosaurus sitting below a fantastically Rich site which has hundreds and hundreds of fossils that we're going to use to estimate the Paleo biodiversity of that whole region just before the mass extinction of dinosaurs today the students have found one of those fossils a dinosaur posing as an ostrich ornithomimids have a lot in common with with birds their major limb bones are Hollow and their legs hang directly below their bodies even their skulls are similar and they were the fastest dinos on 2 feet or amids are ostrich mimic dinosaurs there

speed demons but they have no teeth in their jaws uh and they were probably feeding on plants and maybe omnivorous the mill team has uncovered a bird-like creature in Saskatchewan's bad lands but it's not the first ornithoid found in Canada in 2008 franois terier made an historic Discovery it changed his life and it changed everything we know about our niths so this is a spot all we knew is that we had part of a skeleton of an ostrich mimic dinosaur when I was chipping wet rocks that had a lucky break and on one of the

pieces that were actually the black striation IND getting uh feathers at first yeah we didn't really believe it [Music] it was the first time feathered dinosaurs had ever been found in North America now we can actually postulate that uh Wings evolved not in flying animals but in ground dwelling animals the body was covered with a silky hairlike down and the wings had large quilled feathers like a modern flightless bird so it gave us an alternate hypothesis for the origin of wings why would Wings evolve in the first place it wasn't for flight it was probably

for display and courtship Donna McLoud worked on the fossils of The Feathered onits it was one of the toughest specimens I've ever prepared but it turned out phenomenal first feathered dinosaurs in the Western Hemisphere like how great is that I actually celebrated by having a tattooed on myself so that's the feathered orn theid I've nicknamed the male Kirk Patrick cuz that's where it was found and the baby I nicknamed Tweety in Saskatchewan H Larson and his students continue to dig out the ornithoid that lived 665 million years ago and as work continues they uncover one

of its smaller feathered cousins this is the bone of a bird it has a little it has really really dense uh outside and it has a hole in the center and this is a really good indication that it's a it's a bird bone it look like the birds that we see um walking around to day scientists now believe that all birds are descended from dinosaurs while the dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago they left a genetic Legacy you can see in the skies today both teams need more answers the mill crew has just 3 days

to figure out which dinosaurs outlived Armageddon and why and in Alberta the tyal team have found the body of an arinos ceratops now they need to find its friends and enemies it was a a death area they came by and took what they could have in the bad lands of Saskatchewan the mill crew has uncovered evidence suggesting that some animals survived the killer asteroid but why didn't the dinosaurs and in Alberta the tial teams found bones that confirm the rare horn dinosaur lived in a period of climatic turbulence but need more fossils to paint a

picture of the pre-extinction world here 70 million years ago climate change transformed ancient Alberta hot wet jungles dried up and gave way to cooler sparer forests even as the environment changed the arinos ceratops adapted to it they endured the new drier environment this animal will actually play a central piece in our understanding of how animals changed over time and how they responded to climatic and environmental changes but did other types of dinosaurs survive as well their first clue is Tiny this is a little Tron tooth trodon is like a little velociraptor about this size with

teeth like this they definitely would need to be meat eaters yeah Tru addons were small Predators whose feathers might have acted as insulation keeping them warm as the world cooled off but what did tradon do for dinner so obviously it was a a death area where there was different parts of animals here and they came by and took what they could have opportunity as hunters and scavengers trons may have been able to feed off carcasses of the larger animals who couldn't cut it and because they weren't very big they didn't need much to survive would

that mean only smaller dinosaurs survived the colder climate while the bigger creatures died off even before the asteroid as work continues the team finds evidence that plus-sized Predators could hunt here too so this is a tooth of a dinosaur probably Albertosaurus uh which is a little bit smaller uh than a T-Rex but still pretty big this isn't the first sign of the big meat eater Alberto sorus came out of the ground near Drumheller over a century ago it was discovered by Joseph trell in 1884 when he passed through here working as a geologist for the

Canadian government today Canada's biggest dinosaur museum Museum Bears his name so he was rafting down the Red Deer River to look for this coal and in the process discovered something totally different discovered the first skull of an Albertosaurus at first no one knew what to make of his Fierce looking fossils and it wasn't until decades later in 1905 that the first paleontologist to describe T-Rex recognized that the Terell specimen was actually closely related to TX and actually gave it the name albertasaurus because Alberta had just been designated a new province that same year but what

was albertasaurus doing sidling up to an arinos ceratops 70 million years ago the albertasaurus probably Scavenging on the ceratops material and left their teeth behind as they broke off albertasaurus often left his loose teeth in his prey then like a shark new teeth would replace [Music] them the tooth points to an interesting possibility these large Predators needed a lot to eat so these drier forests had to be home to many types of dinosaurs not just a few smaller species if the team finds fossils in these Hills from a diverse dinosaur community it will tell them

exactly who is adapting to a changing world and who was already destined for extinction Alberta's dinosaurs lived 70 million years ago but the ones found here in Saskatchewan date from 4 million years later just before the killer asteroid hit the mill crew has uncovered a 5ton Edmontosaurus lying just below the extinction boundary so we can say that this particular species of dinosaur was alive at least up until then and so every time we find a dinosaur closer to the boundary is that much more information every single specimen counts in this period three main types of

dinosaurs dominated the landscape living up to the mass extinction the dinosaur community certainly is different than what it was 10 million years before there's only one really giant Duckville dinosaur there's one giant horn dinosaur there's only one giant carnivorous dinosaur so in terms of species numbers um some groups of dinosaurs went from many to one Lage so that that's a pretty big change so was climate change the culprit 70 million years ago the vast inland ocean that flowed through this area began to dry up many species of dinosaurs vanished with it but not everything suffered

in this new environment the interesting little twist to this story is that while the dinosaurs seem to have been decreasing in diversity all of the other vertebrate animals the animals that have backbones and teeth don't seem to have been decreasing in diversity in fact they seem to be increasing all the lizards the amphibians the crocodiles there just seem to be a more diverse assemblage closer to the boundary and it wasn't just animals evolving plants were diversifying too Emily we have a plant site oh my I'm here's a leaf blade and there's a complete stem this

is as exciting as a dinosaur out here I think and I love dinosaurs this is a complete plant leaf from an Angus sperm seix is a willow it wouldn't be as big as the modern weeping willow but something like a willow but just a little bit smaller and if we get enough of these a couple hundred we can tell you what the temperature is how much it rained and what the seasonality was right here the team finds even more leaves they're proof that just before the dinosaurs died out even plants were becoming more diverse adapting

and growing into their environment the forests were becoming home to Willows and Oaks flowering plants were spreading out across the forest floor it's temped to think that the dinosaurs lived in this sort of ecological void you hardly ever get to see the other amazing creatures that were around at the same time we're trying to to reconstruct the whole Community Based on the animals and plants that we're finding all that is is all part of the package the dinosaurs had survived 5 million years of climate change diminished in numbers but not defeated but there was another

change on the horizon a shakeup so powerful and devastating it would alter the face of the Earth for millions of years with the Dig coming to a close Larsson and the migil crew are on the verge of figuring out what killed the dinosaurs and in Alberta the tyal team needs more fossils to complete the picture of the rare rhinoceratops in the bad lands of Saskatchewan the mill crew needs an answer was it the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs or were they already doomed to Extinction and in drumer Alberta the tyal team has had encour

in signs that a little known dinosaur is lying in The Bone Bed the team came in search of a horn dinosaur called an arinos seratopical two heads attached which would be a really cool Discovery but I think it's most parsimonious to say that we have yet two individuals in this uh this layer making it a bone bed it's a major Discovery and it tells ter a great deal about how this mysterious creature lived it's telling us that these animals also probably lived in herds and this is thanks to this bone bed that we can make

that claim now as the weather fluctuated and food sources shifted arinos serat top was able to adjust to the changing landscape the fossils suggest that even after the climate changed there was enough food to sustain entire herds of rhinoceratops over the next 4 million years the climate bounced around sometimes warmer sometimes colder and during that time of thermal unrest the number of dinosaur species dropped but they never surrendered the throne but there was one catastrophic change that even they couldn't adapt to some scientists believe that when the asteroid hit it put a hole in the

earth 200 km around and 20 km deep everything within the blast radius was vaporized the impact caused a tsunami and fired a cloud of debris into the sky the heat probably incinerated everything within several hundreds of kilom so burn down everything uh causing massive forest fires make that sort of like a nuclear winter where where everything would just die because no sunlight temperatures plummeted warm weather vegetation withered and died leaving Plante eating dinosaurs without food so without the sun plants died without plants herbivores died and without herbivores carnivores died [Music] and eventually the Scavengers died

too because you can only eat rotten meat for so [Music] long so one of the main ideas surrounding the actual Extinction itself there seems to be what's called a size bias towards the survivors the food chain was inverted large dinosaurs with big appetites were [Music] doomed but it was a good time to be small and so whatever Turtles crocodiles mammals and some birds were doing they were doing it right not needing as much food they managed to hang on and in time to [Music] thrive with the Saskatchewan dig coming to a close Professor Larsson and

the team have one last job to do pump the remains of the world's last dinosaurs back to Camp as we pull it all three of us have to get all our six hands under it all the way all the way Beau these protective plaster jackets contain the bones of Edmontosaurus and a backbone from a small ornithoid [Music] perfect now they'll have to hand carry these Treasures 6 km Overland back to camp and with the largest ones tipping the scales at over 100 kilos they're in for a long Hall we're all set if you start sliding

just uh sit down there are no roads close to here so larsson's team is going old school 100 years ago fossils were carried out of the Badlands by hand even by [Music] sled lson is a bit more careful with his finds [Music] so put your hands on the opposite side yep so but now it's just uh smooth sailing and with their fossils safely stowed at Camp Larson prepares a special celebratory meal sprinkled with essence of Extinction dinner for tonight will be a a rice P which I'm making with a fresh cilantro that we found in

a field nearby and one thing we're going to add to it is is the KT boundary so this is the aridium Fallout Ash layer that killed out 75% of life on the planet 66 million years ago and we use it as seasoning for some of our dishes I mean where else can you eat p with the KT boundary in it so here you go guys here's the KT mass extinction in p ch's on thank you very much awesome great most of life is in there it might be crunchy yeah the bacon really compliments the uh

the flavor of roasted dinosaur it's case closed on the end of the dinosaurs Mill crew will move from dinosaur extinction to Dinosaur creation one goal is making a bigger tail another goal goal is making free fingers with claws and in Alberta the tyell team has reached its last day of digging but the surprises keep on coming now that we clearly have evidence of a skull after their time in the bad lands larsson's McGill crew has added new data to the extinction Theory and new insights into the 66 milliony Old question what killed the dinosaurs but

their work is far from over and and and drumer Alberta franois teren and his Chell team have reached the end of an incredible dig they've Unearthed a cach of rare fossils and uncovered some answers to a prehistoric question at first yeah when we didn't find any evidence of a skull we were kind of debating whether it would would be worth pursuing the excavation but now that we clearly have evidence of a skull I think it's definitely going to be worth pursuing it's definitely not something that's going to be completed this summer their bone bed will

be covered with tarps to protect it from the rain and snow do we have a little bit of tape orange tape up there he going to be warning going under there here and in Saskatchewan the dino Hunters have been grappling with the same issues were the dinosaurs doomed to Extinction before the asteroids sealed their fate over Millennia the number of dinosaurs was reduced by environmental forces but the strong survived and might have eventually returned to the height of their their great power until 135 million years of domination was finally obliterated when an asteroid collided with

the blue planet the Giants were gone but the small creatures lived on including the dinosaurs We Now call [Music] Birds When the Smoke and Ash cleared the Earth began to heal itself and make a new home for the survivors in time they too adapted rebuilding the animal kingdom and evolving into new Giants and one species of upright mammal came to dominate a world where brains beat brawn yeah the dinosaurs may be long gone but back in Montreal Larson thinks there may be a way to bring them back to [Music] life just about to start an

injection one of our directed projects in this lab uh has been termed the chickenosaurus project using chicken jeans they're trying to recreate some of the features of their dinosaur ancestors it's not Jurassic Park birds are dinosaurs so we're actually playing with dinosaur DNA and all we're doing is seeing if we can Tinker with the embryology to reveal some of these ancient anatomies one goal is making a bigger tail another goal is making free fingers with claws someday with a little nudge from the genetic Engineers millions of years of evolution will be unraveled and the dinosaurs

may live again we'll keep them very small there's no sense getting them big that dream is years into the Sci-Fi future for now dinosaurs live on in their fzed remains and they are everywhere the first ones were found 140 years ago in the west but now we know they can be found all across Canada from coast to coast Canada is sitting on an incredible natural resource a world that lived millions of years ago lying just beneath the surface waiting to be discovered who knows what prehistoric Marvels we'll uncover or what Stories the bones will tell

on Dino Hunt [Music] [Music]