Transcriber: David Michiels Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you everybody for coming, it's wonderful to be home.
So, what good are dinosaurs anyway?
Have any of you guys ever asked that question?
Why should my tax sellers go to pay
to study an animal that no human being has ever seen?
Aren't there more important things to study?
How can dinosaurs possibly be relevant to the massive problems we face today?
These are legitimate, valid questions that I've heard often
in my twenty-plus-years as a palaeontologist.
They've caused me to think long and hard about how the big beast that fascinates me
can shed light on issues that we face in our human dominated world.
So why study the distant past?
Because it's an experiment that has already been run.
The data are there just waiting for us to collect them.
If we want to make predictions or model the future,
all we have is the past.
And except for this tiny little bit of period of time,
that humans have been on the surface of the planet,
all of the data are locked in the rock record.
If we want to study climate change, all we have is the past.
And when we look to the past, what we see is changed,
is the norm on our planet, not the exception.
When we look at the values in the past,
they dwarf our current values and our current concerns.
But is there a human overprint?
We can't know that unless we study the rocks and the past
before there was a time when humans existed.
By comparing the two, maybe, we can tell if that is different.
If we want to know how organisms change over time,
all we have are their fossils.
How they are related to each other and how they are related to us.
All records are based on the fossils.
After all, almost all of the organisms that ever lived on earth are extinct.
Without their fossils we wouldn't know of their existence.
How did life begin?
How did it change?
How did it increase in complexity and what were the triggers for this?
Only the fossils can tell us.
When we look at the past on our planet,
we see five major extinction events
that wiped out almost all the life at that time.
When we look at the rocks, in which the fossils are interred,
we see the reasons why organisms died out.
They existed up to a point in time, then they vanished globally.
Volcanism, plate tectonics and extraterrestrial impacts,
the rocks record this.
This is pretty important because some data suggest
we're entering into a sixth global extinction event.
But is this event truly different from what we have seen in the past?
Or is it only seeming to be different because we're here to watch, to recognize?
Only the rocks will tell.
But why study dinosaurs in particular?
By any stretch of the imagination, dinosaurs are enormously successful.
More widely distributed than mammals, they still dominate the planet.
There are over 10,000 species of birds that are recognized currently,
and only 5,000 of mammals.
Longevity...
Dinosaurs have ruled the world as a dominant terrestrial organism
for over 200 million years.
Mammals have only dominated for the last 50 million years,
and humans just 200,000 years.
Dinosaurs have us beaten.
They represent the extremes that are possible
for terrestrial organisms.
Some of the biggest organisms to ever walk the surface of the planet? Dinosaurs.
And also some of the smallest.
Dinosaurs achieve things mammals have never attained.
They have the best food-processing abilities ever.
This dinosaur had up to 2,000 teeth in its mouth at any one period of time.
Those teeth continually replaced each other as they wore out,
so there was no need for dinosaur dentists.
Dinosaurs embedded feathers.
Which bakes the question: "Why feathers? Why not hair?"
Hair works really good for mammals and feathers are metabolically expensive.
Dinosaurs tried out other things too.
We found fossils of this little flying dinosaur,
that had not just two feathered wings but four.
We still don't know how it flew,
but we would not know of its existence without the fossils.
I would argue there's another, equally important reason,
to study dinosaurs and it's this:
we are becoming increasingly dependant on science and technology,
but seeing fewer and fewer young people
opt for the scientific disciplines as a career.
But dinosaurs are a gateway drug.
(Laughter)
They illustrate the possibilities and process of science.
You observe, you predict, you gather data and you test.
What we learn from studying dinosaurs, can be applied to other sciences as well.
It's pretty important.
It worked for me.
When I was five years old,
my big brother left for college on the East Coast,
but not before teaching me how to read.
To continue this habit that he started in me,
he used to send me books from the Biggie's coast museums.
My favourite book to this day is "The Enormous Egg".
It tells the story that I related to so well
about this little farm kid and his favourite chicken.
He walked in one morning and this little chicken was trying
to brood an egg that was three times its size.
And when that egg finally hatched, out popped the Triceratops.
Trust me, I've gathered eggs for my aunt,
and I'd much rather walk into a dinosaur than some of those chickens.
But what about my own speciality?
Why study ancient molecules?
It's risky, very expensive and there is a lot of people who say
we'll never get molecules out of a dinosaur.
But we have.
Not only molecules,
but we've gotten tissues and cells for more than one fossil organism.
So what can those molecules tell us?
With further study, they can tell us more about evolutionary relationships,
so we can ever learn from the bones themselves.
But more importantly,
we can learn how these animals adapted, at the molecular level,
to their own problems, changes in the environment,
varying CO2-levels, introduction of new diseases.
The dinosaurs faced all these too, and they succeeded.
So we have a lot to learn from them.
As a matter of fact, some organisms alive today are in danger of extinction
because in the past they went through a bottle-neck event,
greatly reducing their genetic diversity and the ability to adapt to change.
If we could find molecules in the fossils of these organisms,
before they went through this bottle-neck event,
we would get an idea of the original genetic diversity in those populations,
and we might be able to use this information in conservation efforts,
and also learn what made them vulnerable,
while other organisms aren't.
Looking for molecules and fossils has already resulted in advancements
in comparative databases, technology and increasing sensitivity.
Just the process of it has resulted in this.
I can suggest that we have a transparent flexible polymer.
It has to be a use for that in biomaterial science,
when it lasts 80 million years.
Even when we study the interactions between molecules and their environments,
we can learn information about human diseases
which in many cases are the result of modified molecules.
Even bioterrorism.
What I do is look for small, low concentration molecules
that are heavily modified in a sedimentary environment.
And it requires really sensitive instrumentation to do so.
That's what we need when we look for bioterrorist agents.
They're highly modified, low in concentration,
and they cause a lot of problems.
The same skill set is required.
So I can make all roads lead to dinosaurs.
For me it all began with a children's book.
This professor is talking to the little boy
when he comes to study that Triceratops
and he says: "a scientist doesn't know all the answers, nobody does.
Not even teachers."
- They used to think highly of teachers back then. -
But a scientist keeps on trying to find the answers.
And just remember when you're talking about frontiers:
maybe the next frontier lies in the past.
Thank you.
(Applause)