- If you find me a cat skeleton,
you'll be my best friend forever.
- Oh, you hear that? (Pete laughs)
Maybe we could trade that for T. rex tooth?
- Uh, no. (laughs) - Ah!
You see what I did there, though?
Man, if he was like, "We'll see," I'd be like,
"Oh, I'm gonna find the biggest cat skeleton ever."
(egg cracks) (ominous music)
(pterodactyl screeches) (ominous music)
Dinosaurs disappeared from the planet 65 million years ago,
and when the first fossilized remains
of these prehistoric creatures were discovered in the 1800s,
they sparked an endless world of fascination
for all of mankind.
For Pete Larson, the art of digging up fossils
began when he was four years old,
and transcended into what became a lifetime
dedicated to unearthing these ancient behemoths.
In 1974, he founded the Black Hills Institute
of Geological Research.
Specializing in the discovery,
excavation, and preservation of fossils,
this has become the perfect vehicle
for Pete to share his love of dinosaurs with the world.
Like me, his favorite dinosaur
is the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex,
and to date, he has probably dug up more T. rex skeletons
than any one person in the world.
These incredible finds include the world-famous Sue,
who resides at the Chicago Field Mueesum,
and Stan, who towers as the centerpiece
of the Black Hills Museum of Natural History.
Today we are teaming up with Pete
to bring you the journey that most fossils travel
once they have been discovered
and safely extracted from the field.
Hey, Pete! - Hey, Coyote.
- How are ya? - I'm fine, how are you?
- I'm doing good, good to see you.
Wow, this, uh, looks like a mound of white dirt.
- (laughs) Well, it's covered with dust,
but if you look closely, right over
by where the glue bottles are,
that depression is actually the orbit.
There was an eyeball that was in there 66 million years ago.
- Oh, so we're looking at a skull?
- We're looking at a skull.
In fact, this is the nose, and if you look carefully,
you can see that you have a beak here.
- Okay.
- We have a nasal horn right up the naris.
- I'm following you. - There's the eye.
There's a horn, we took the horn off there,
and we took the horn off on the other side too,
but so, what do you think it is?
- I'm guessing we are looking at a Triceratops skull.
- And you would be correct.
So you're actually, you're looking at it like this.
- [Coyote] Okay.
- [Pete] That's the actual orientation,
but if you turn it like this, it becomes pretty obvious.
Here's the beak I was explaining.
This nasal horn here tells us that it's Triceratops prorsus.
- Okay, like the quintessential, classic Triceratops.
Correct? - Right, right.
Triceratops prorsus and Triceratops horridus,
those are the two that we think of
when we think of Triceratops.
- [Coyote] Okay.
- And they're only North American animals.
- When you guys bring these in from the field,
this plaster on the outside is called a jacket, right?
- Right, right, it's called field jacket.
- Field jacket, and all of this stone,
or all this rock that's around the outside of the skull,
is called the matrix, correct?
- Right, correct.
- So when you bring it in from the field,
it's wrapped in the plaster,
it's still encased in the matrix,
and for the most part, it looks like a giant rock
until you guys begin to get in there.
All right, so you do have some fossils
that are more exposed at this point,
projects you've been working on
that we can look at, get the cameras up close,
and see a little bit further along the process.
- So we're gonna look at a skeleton now
that has been partially prepared.
One of the jackets has been turned over,
and one of them has not. - Okay.
- But you can see, so you can see
kind of the way it was in the ground,
and these are actually two skeletons
that were found in a lake deposit, and they're awesome.
- Okay, great. Well, let's go take a look at those.
- All right.
- When a fossil arrives from the field, it appears to be
nothing more than matrix wrapped in a plaster jacket,
yet once it's mapped, the real excavation begins.
All right, guys, so now we're gonna look at the next step,
once these fossils come into this room.
Cool, check this out.
The matrix is much more peeled back, if you will,
and the bone is starting to be exposed.
What if I kinda swing around this side here?
- Sure.
So what we have here is preserved, two very nice skeletons.
One is not very complete.
We have two femurs and a tibia,
a couple of sternal plates from
a dinosaur called Anzu wyliei,
I just recently described about three years ago.
- [Coyote] Okay.
- But what we also have is another dinosaur
of the same group, the group called
caenagnathids or oviraptorids.
- Oh, okay, yeah, I know oviraptorids.
- So they have, they're weird, they're, quote, theropods,
meat-eating dinosaurs without teeth,
so they're more like modern birds.
This is as much like a modern bird
as any of these ancient dinosaurs were,
the things we normally think of as non-avian theropods.
- Okay.
- This is all skull right in here.
This we think is a brain case,
at least part of the brain case, right here.
This right here is the scapula,
so part of the shoulder blade.
This, I think, is a vomer, which, one of the palate bones,
is the back of the lower jaw, is very clearly.
And there's probably a bunch more skull bones
underneath all of this.
- This is pretty well exposed at this point.
- [Pete] Right.
- Obviously pretty far away from presentation,
but what are some of the tools that you use to get in here,
to get these bones out of the rock?
Because eventually, all of this bone comes out of there.
- So here, because these are really fragile bones and stuff,
so I'll wanna use, you know, basically something
that enhances my vision, but if I put this on,
I can see really closely what's going on.
And these little picks here, you'll see they're,
actually have two different tips.
There's one very pointed, and this one is kind of like
a screwdriver that's been rounded.
- [Coyote] I see that.
- So we don't actually poke the bone.
We actually pull the matrix from the bone.
So if I'm gonna clean bone here,
I'll actually work very carefully here.
- [Coyote] Wow.
- And this is really the only way
to clean a skull like this.
So there's a lot of glue on here,
and a lot of polyvinyl acetate,
which helps protect the bone and keep it together.
And I gotta work through that glue.
You'll notice we wrote numbers on the bones,
because as we're doing this, we also map them,
like we did that Triceratops.
And so, when we take these off,
we'll still have a record of where they were,
and that's really super important
in trying to understand the series of events
that led this to be preserved in this manner.
- What I've learned, Pete, is that
paleontology truly is a profession of patience,
not only to find the specimens in the field,
but when you look at something like this,
how many man-hours have gone into peeling back the matrix
to reveal even where you're at right now?
- So there's actually a couple of hundred hours,
two or three hundred hours, in it so far.
(Coyote whistles) Not counting collecting.
But it's gonna have, you know,
probably well over a thousand hours yet,
and just in this block.
There's another block of the dinosaur
that you can look at as well,
but before you shift your attention to that,
I want you to look very closely right here.
- [Coyote] Mm-hmm, it looks like a dark mass in the rock.
Is that maybe skin?
- [Pete] Well, you're very close.
- [Coyote] Okay.
- [Pete] This looks to be a rakus,
and another rakus here, and another rakus here.
- [Coyote] As in pieces of feathers?
- [Pete] Yes, as in feathers.
- Wow, okay. (Pete laughs)
So that has to be incredibly important, then,
finding what may be evidence of feathers on this raptor.
- [Pete] It's one of the very few examples
of dinosaur feathers from North America.
- Wow.
Now, this is cool to see this level of exposure,
but can we head down into
the catacombs of the Black Hills Institute
and see some of these fossils
that you have fully pulled from the matrix?
- [Pete] Oh, absolutely, yeah.
- [Coyote] Okay.
- No problem, we can go back into the belly of the beast.
- All right, sounds good. (Pete laughs)
All right, guys, the next step in the journey of a fossil
is once it is removed from the matrix,
it gets ready for its ultimate presentation state,
and we're gonna get you guys
up close with those fossils in just a minute.
Like Pete said, it can literally take hundreds of man-hours
to fully extract bones
from their entrapped state in the matrix.
And while we would've loved to help
bring this raptor skeleton to presentation status,
we decided it would be more fun
to see some of the already-processed specimens.
So with Pete leading the way, we followed along
into the Black Hills off-display archive of fossils.
- This is one of the more common fossils,
in fact, the most common mammal that we see out there.
- [Coyote] Oh, wow.
- That's these guys.
So they're, and this, there's, you know,
virtually no restoration at all.
These teeth are original and stuff.
So you can get some really beautiful, beautiful skulls.
- [Coyote] And this is an oreodont?
- That's an oreodont.
There's a distant relative of the camel.
There's really nothing like them living today.
That whole family has been extinct.
- [Coyote] Yeah.
- [Pete] So it's interesting.
- And this, just, you found this like this,
with the mouth open. - Right, right, right.
And just kinda cleaned away the stuff
that was covering the bone, but left the matrix in the skull
to hold everything together
and keep it in its natural state.
- [Coyote] That's cool.
- And that is a 35-million-year-old preserved scream.
(Pete laughs) - More Oreos! (screetches)
Very cool.
- One of the more common things,
you'll find oreodonts, like you just saw.
- Yeah.
- But one of the more common things we'll find
will be turtles.
- [Off Camera] Yes, he said the T-word!
- My favorite.
- So here we have some reptiles,
and you'll be surprised how nice some of these are.
- [Coyote] Yeah, these are just perfectly preserved.
Look at that.
- And sometimes with the turtles
you can find their skulls even.
- [Coyote] Whoa!
- [Pete] Sometimes just coming out of the little skill.
- [Coyote] Can I see that?
- [Pete] We found a number of 'em from there.
- [Coyote] Wow.
- [Pete] So that's from a turtle that's about this big.
So it's about a 24-inch turtle.
- That's incredible.
- [Pete] It's true.
- [Coyote] Very cool.
- So when you take 'em out of blocks,
or perhaps you're collecting like, little pieces of bone.
Like, so this was exposed like this.
You could see this when it was found.
- [Coyote] Yeah.
- And there were lots of little pieces
that we picked up on the ground,
and then we dumped this out in a balk,
and then cleaned it, and look what it turns out to be.
- Wow!
- So it's a little saber-tooth cat.
- [Coyote] That's right, you guys can see
on the shelves here, it says "cats."
- [Pete] And so this is the back of the skull,
part of the back of the skull.
And unfortunately, it's not complete, but it's still cool,
because it's got a really, really nice saber.
- That's amazing.
So as compared to the matrix upstairs,
these things are getting closer to being presentation-ready,
where now you're really into the fine details
of removing that last bit of matrix.
- Right, and in fact, here's a nice cat skeleton,
that you can see up here. - Oh yeah!
- And there it's all been cleaned, being put together.
- [Coyote] Oh yeah, I see the shoulder blade, right?
- Shoulder blade, right.
And here's the other one, which is much more complete,
but still missing a little bit.
- And that's a foot. - That's a foot, yep.
In fact, a wrist or a hand.
- Now, here's something important to note, guys.
Upstairs we were looking at dinosaur fossils.
These are cats.
This is the age of mammals.
This is well beyond the time of the dinosaurs.
Why are we looking at cat fossils,
as compared to dinosaur fossils, right now?
- Well, because tomorrow we're gonna go
on a little expedition, and if you find me a cat skeleton,
you'll be my best friend forever.
- Oh, you hear that? (Pete laughs)
Maybe we could trade that for T. rex tooth?
- Uh, no. (laughs) - Ah!
You see what I did there, though?
Man, if he was like, "We'll see," I'd be like,
"Oh, I'm gonna find the biggest cat skeleton ever."
Well, this is really exciting, guys,
because I know you've been waiting
for us to get out there in the field
to search for some fossils ourselves.
And tomorrow we're gonna head out into the wild,
to a spot you picked out, that you think is perfect
for us to find some fossils like this.
- And if you do find a cat skeleton,
I will give you a cast of Stan's best tooth.
- Hey, there you go. (Pete laughs)
I will take that.
All right, stay tuned, guys.
Our epic dinosaur adventure continues on the next episode.
I'm Coyote Peterson.
Be brave, stay wild.
We'll see you on the next prehistoric adventure.
Paleontology is an art form unlike any other,
and the patience it requires to not only find
but also release these fossils from the hold of time
is truly something to admire.
For someone like Pete, who has dedicated his life
to unearthing dinosaurs, nothing is more enjoyable
than teaching and sharing with the world
this fascinating process.
I have always loved prehistoric creatures, and as the crew
and I left the Black Hills Institute for the day,
our inner childlike spirits were filled with excitement,
because we were just a night's rest away
from going on our very first fossil dig.
Stay tuned for an epic adventure,
as we follow Pete Larson into the badlands
to search for the remains of ancient animals.
Hey Coyote Pack, in case you missed it,
make sure to go back and watch
the first episode of Beyond Dinosaurs, where the crew and I
got to hold a gigantic tooth of a Tyrannosaurus rex.
And don't forget, subscribe, so you can join me and the crew
on our next prehistoric adventure.
(leaves rustling) (birds chirping)