Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. What
are monsters? Scary,
unnatural things? Yes,
but they're more than that and we knew that back when we named them.
The word monster comes from the same root word
as demonstrate and demonstrative, monere,
meaning to teach, to instruct, to warn.
Monsters, like dinosaurs, and the stories we tell about them,
have a lot to tell us about ourselves,
about the past and about the future.
This Vsauce1 video is not an ordinary video,
it is a dinosaur-dnary
video, built not just out of me talking,
but also world-famous palaeontologist and technical adviser to
every Jurassic Park film, Jack Horner, and
the hilarious Chris Pratt. First things first,
scientists have so far broken Earth's history down into 22
periods. The Jurassic period has come and gone,
but the one we live in today is called the Quaternary.
Jurassic World is the movie that you're in. Yes. The thing that we're filming right now
Quaternary World. Quaternary World. We are organisms from the Quaternary.
Quaternary Park would be, well, basically like Universal Studios or something.
Exactly. Actually, literally any place on Earth right now.
Dinosaurs,
fossils. Yeah. Dinosaur, fossil.
Fossil, fossil fuel. Wow. Is it safe to say that
our cars run on the ghosts of dinosaurs?
That question sounds mind-blowing,
but is it true? Are we really fuelling our cars
with dinosaur remains? Well, I asked paleontologist Jack Horner
and his answer is worth beginning from the bottom or rather
from things that come out of bottoms.
You'll see what I mean. Okay, so this.
Let me guess what this. Okay. Yeah, it looks like coal almost. Well, they are, it's
actually a coprolite. What's a coprolite?
Fossilised dung. Dung?
Oh, so this is plant material that was eaten
Eaten. Turned into poop. Yes. And then preserved
so that I could hold it today. Yes, exactly.
That's a dinosaur poop. This is dinosaur poop.
Yes. It smells like a rock. Sometimes when we break open
somebody's things that are... that have a...
have a very high concentration plant material you actually can smell it.
Really? Uhm. What does it smell like?
Mmmh, rotting wood. After this long
it still has an odour of rotting? It can, yes.
So, we can probably learn a lot. We can learn more
about the dinosaur from that right there than we can from the bone from its
body. That is amazing. Because we can determine,
we can determine exactly what it was
eating and and and we can
look at how it's chopped up, so you can tell a lot about
exactly how they process the food. So, from the
scientific perspective of learning about dinosaurs, poop
is not crappy at all.
Yes.
Thanks for laughing at that. Now, at any point would that turn into
oil? No, oil does not come
from dinosaur poop. Does it come from dinosaurs at all?
It doesn't come from dinosaurs at all. They come from microorganisms and
oceans. If you took all of the dinosaurs that ever lived
and... and, you know, squished them up
in order to get the oil out of them,
we'd probably go through that oil in, you know, couple of days.
No kidding(!) I mean the microorganisms from the ocean,
from the oceans over these millions of years
produced... I mean, the biomass is just incredible.
Compared to the dinosaurs. So there could be a tiny
molecule of oil in every thousand gallons or more
that's from a dinosaur. No, you really not even gonna...
That's not even going to happen as well. Basically, all of the oil reserves we have
are in
in sedimentary rocks, produced in oceans.
So we don't put dinosaur ghosts into our cars,
but don't feel lonely. There are actual living dinosaurs
with us today. There are dinosaurs still around today. Dinosaurs
never went extinct.
What? Elaborate, alright, fine I will. So, dinosaurs...
Yeah, that's what I meant. Dinosaurs are not a species, that was called a clade.
They're from the clade dinosauria. And the clade is just some
organism and all of its descendants. Okay. Okay? Dinosaurs came in all different
types, right?
All of these things were called dinosauria
and then a huge extinction event happened, 65 million years ago.
Yup. Giant rock hit Earth and like
almost all of them, all the ones, died
except for
a few. And you know what this one was, this little branch? That's what clade means, by the
way - branch.
Aardvark. Aardvark. No? Uhh,
I do. I know what it was. What? Halibut.
Just for the halibut I will say
correct. That's a dumb joke, that's a joke that's been made a bunch.
I've never heard it before. Really? You just said "halibut" like
"hell of it." Yeah. Yeah. Classic. Now figure this trout.
Wow.
Dude.
The answer is birds.
Technically birds aren't just descended from dinosaurs, they literally
are dinosaur. Exactly. You know, to determine how things are related to one
another we look at the characteristics that they share
and when you think about birds and the characteristics that we think
of as being bird characteristics, they are feathers,
hollow bones, the wishbone,
you know, you can go on and on, but those are just a few of them
and it turns out dinosaurs have them as well, so
dinosaurs had these characteristics before birds.
The hypothesis is that birds
are the dinosaurs. The meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs
didn't kill off all of them. It killed off then
what we call the non-avian dinosaurs and
the avian dinosaurs we still have with us. In Jurassic World,
the park's decision-makers create dinosaurs
that have appearances that bring in
tourists, not appearances that are historically accurate.
For example, they didn't put feathers on any of their dinosaurs, although it is
believed that many dinosaurs
had
feathers. It's believed that the velociraptor probably
actually looked more like this.
And as far as the reality of creating a park like Jurassic World,
Horner had this to say.
Everything about it is fictional, we can't bring dinosaurs
back by cloning them.
If we make dinosaurs, which,
I hope we are able to do one of these days, it will be retro engineering from a
bird,
in other words going backwards from a bird. They're still going to be fictional
creatures because
they're not going to be historical dinosaurs. They'll be
things we made. They'll be things we make, yeah, that's right.
Why are we so thrilled by the idea of bringing back
un-extincting non-avian dinosaurs?
You know what? That actually brings up an even bigger question.
Why are dinosaurs so fascinating to kids? Dinosaurs
are terrifying and we love to be scared,
but Dracula and ghosts
and all this stuff, it's a little, it's a little not real.
But dinosaurs? We've got their fossils. Right. You know?
We've got the fact that, no, these really were on Earth, they really were walking
around right here.
Why is it so awesome when they flip out and start killing people?
Watching something flip out and kill people is thrilling.
It's morbid curiosity, but the more intense the
flip out, the more exciting it is to see the flip
undone, to see humans prevail
in the end. No matter how beastly
and huge dinosaurs were, the fact remains that they
went extinct. They are a reminder that
sooner or later the universe will beat
everything. A meteor impact, like the one that
killed off all the non-avian dinosaurs will happen again
in about the next 100 million years or so, but we might stand a fighting chance.
We have technology and we have the ability to predict,
and possibly even avoid, a similar fate involing us.
Outer space may seem distant
and sometimes irrelevant to pressing earthly concerns,
but let's not forget what Larry Niven said, "The dinosaurs
went extinct because they didn't have a space program."
And as always,
thanks for watching.