(soft whistling)
(soft music)
- Dinosaurs. These gigantic beasts
have captured our imagination
ever since the first fossils were found.
Over 66 million years ago,
they ruled the Earth.
But a mass extinction event
wiped them from the face of the planet.
Until now.
Welcome to Jurassic Park.
(distorted speech)
(rain clattering)
(dramatic music)
- Uh. Oh, hey! I'm Jake and I'm just on vacation
with my dad and my friend, Harris Heller,
at an amusement park with real, live dinosaurs!
I decided to have a little alone time
and take this guided tour by myself,
but then, the power went out and everything has gone wrong.
I don't know where my dad and my friend are anymore,
and I also... (distant roar)
Did you hear that?
Don't worry. I got these cool night-vision goggles.
Let's see what's out there.
Uh!
I didn't... see anything, but maybe I'll try
with the flashlight, have some better luck.
(yells)
(growling)
Okay, this is happening!
Before I was being hunted by a prehistoric beast...
(roaring)
(yells)
...I had two loves in my life,
science and movies, so I decided to put myself
in one of my favourite films, Jurassic Park,
to find out if you can survive
the destructive bite force of a T-Rex,
being hunted by a pteranodon.
And inversely, could dinosaurs survive in our world today,
given the changes in the habitat and environment?
Could you survive Jurassic Park?
(roar)
(dramatic music)
(Jurassic Park theme song)
(insects chirping)
(suspenseful music)
(sighs) I don't know how we survived
that T-Rex attack, but we managed to get inside
somewhere safe, so that's good.
What is happening?
- Someone sabotaged the park. All the dinosaurs are loose.
There's a boat on the other side of the island
that's leaving in the morning or something.
And I guess we're gonna die if we don't get on it.
- Where exactly is this boat?
Well, that was some expedited plot
and a conveniently located map.
Thank you, I think I'm all caught up, then.
- Okay, cool. I'm gonna go to the boat.
(screams) - Oh, jello!
Oh, yeah!
(dinosaur growling)
Clever girl.
Hide!
(sighs) Okay.
I don't know the raptors saw us hide back here.
So, we should be safe.
(growling)
Okay, they did, but the good news is
they can't open doors.
(growling)
And they can open doors, so I was very wrong.
- You know what else is wrong? - Oh, hey, Justine!
- Hey, Jake, how's it going?
(rhythmic music)
- It's going very well, thank you.
- The raptors are actually
portrayed kind of unrealistic, because in real life,
raptors are smaller, feathery, kind of turkey-like.
Not that intimidating at all.
- Right. Our understanding of dinosaurs
has evolved drastically since Jurassic Park's
release in 1993, in large part
because of that film inspiring a lot of people
to get into the study of paleontology.
(roar)
(growling)
(chuckles)
Hey, cutie! Hi there.
- Don't worry. I got this. - Are you sure?
You don't need a little help with this guy?
- Nah. - Alright. Good luck.
- Hold on to your butts!
(growling)
(roar)
- Those raptors are a great reminder
that there is still so much to learn about dinosaurs.
Like, did you know that some of the dinosaurs
that populate this park actually lived
hundreds of millions of years apart?
For example...
(groans)
There is more time between a stegosaurus and a T-Rex
then us and a T-Rex.
(ground shaking)
(roar)
- Okay! Time to go.
(car starting)
(roar)
Also, similar to the raptors' portrayal,
a T-Rex doesn't exactly look like its movie counterpart.
It actually had colourful feathers and...
(roar)
Alright, you know what? We're gonna stick
with the movie T-Rex, cause the thing is terrifying!
(roar)
Oh, no, okay. Must go... faster!
And speaking of going faster, after the movies were released,
it turned out that we learned something,
and that is that a T-Rex really isn't that fast.
It has a max speed of about 12 miles per hour, so...
Alright!
Protected from the water, protected from that T-Rex,
I think we're pretty...
(yells)
Harris?
- Oh, hi Jake!
- Dude!
Are you okay, man? Get in the Jeep!
- I had to pee,
but also wanted to get this souvenir for my wife,
she's crazy into fossilized mosquitoes.
It's really cute.
- Uh, cool. Actually...
Speaking of which, in the movie,
they extract the dinosaur DNA
from the blood of mosquitoes
encased in amber.
The biggest problem with that is something called half-life.
- DNA's half-life is 521 years, meaning every 521 years,
its nucleotide bonds are cut by half.
- Because of that, it's only possible to recover
useful DNA from the last 6.8 million years,
putting us well short of the dinosaurs,
who lived 66 million years ago.
So, this... useless!
(yells)
- Jake, that was for my wife!
- Yeah, right,
but we really have to get to the boat.
- I hear you, but I gotta pee again,
so I'll be right back.
- No, dude!
Harris, do not go pee in a Jurassic Park movie!
Jake, you wrote the script, I'm gonna be fine.
Also, you're 100 % still wearing your shorts,
I don't know how that works. (roar)
(ground shaking) Oh, Harris...
Harris!
(roar)
- Oh, shit!
- No! Harris, no!
Oh, I really liked Harris. He has great content.
But what would actually happen if a giant T-Rex were
to eat your body?
I just happen to have a machine to test just that.
(flesh squelching)
When it comes to being eaten by a T-Rex,
there are two important factors at work:
pressure and tension.
Now, with a T-Rex with a 1.2-metre jaw,
equipped with 60 teeth, that's a bite force
of around 35 600 newtons that is exerting
pressure anywhere between 690 million
to 2.75 billion pascals at the tip of each tooth.
And understand just how powerful that is,
the amount of pressure needed
to puncture concrete is 34.5 million pascals.
Puncturing steel takes 345 million
to 690 million pascals.
Still les powerful than a T-Rex. (roar)
Which begs the obvious question:
what does it look like on a human?
And also, how does tension factor in?
Well, good news! We happen to have this machine
here that is a replica of a T-Rex's jaw
to find out. Let's do it!
Utilizing recent research by paleontologists,
our T-Rex stand-in is driven by a customized motor
generating roughly the same power
as a T-Rex's jaw, allowing us to replicate
the speed and force
of a dino bite.
- Three, two,
one, fire!
(dramatic music)
(Jake): Scientists have recently discovered that the T-Rex
crushed its prey with the teeth in the front of its mouth,
unlike modern carnivores.
So, when the teeth came together...
...they stretched their prey's bones,
which places the bones under tension,
weakening the internal structure of said bones
and making them easier to snap
from the jaw's pressure.
(dramatic music)
Yeah, okay,
so that's pretty not survivable.
But using modern technology, is there a way
you could survive that bite?
Well, this Kevlar vest should withstand
3.45 billion pascals, that is almost
700 million more than exerted by a T-Rex's bite.
So, you should be safe, because in theory,
the vest would stop the teeth, which in turn would
mitigate the tension on your bones.
But would it mitigate the pressure exerted
by the T-Rex's bite?
(sighs)
(dramatic music)
In short,
no.
While the teeth couldn't fully puncture the Kevlar vest,
that didn't stop the bones
from snapping under the immense pressure.
This was shot at 10 000 frames per second,
meaning the skeleton was subjected to that
nearly 2.75 billion pascals of pressure
in only 40 milliseconds. Just for fun,
what would it do to your head?
That's no good.
Okay. It is daylight, we have not much time
to get to the boat, or else we're gonna end up
like Harris. Come on! Oh...
(dramatic music)
That is a big boy fence.
Ooh! It's an electric fence. You know, in Jurassic Park,
the character of Tim is blown off a fence
that looks very much like this one
when the electricity is turned back on.
But as we learned in our Back to the Future episode,
electricity is always looking
for the quickest path to the ground.
So, in Tim's case, he'd be totally fine.
That is of course, unless his feet were on the ground
and his hands were touching the wires,
then he'd be electrocuted.
Like this.
(yells in pain)
(laughs)
I'm just joking with you, I can't die.
- What are you doing?
- Ooh! I was just doing a little movie science explainer.
- I figured as much,
but you're supposed to be on the boat
which is on the other side of the island.
It's pretty unrealistic that you're gonna make I back
to the boat on time. I guess, unless you can fly.
(roar, scream)
- Oh no! Uh...
You know, Justine should be fine.
(screaming) I think.
It's a common movie trope.
You know, when a lead character's death is implied
off screen, generally, they are still alive.
(dramatic music)
She's dead. I mean, that's pretty obvious.
But I do have a question: could a pterosaur,
that is a flying dinosaur, actually pick a human up
and fly away with them?
- That's a good question, Jake.
- Hey, Doctor Habib!
What brings you here?
- I work here.
I'm a paleontologist.
And I happen to be a specialist in pterosaurs.
Pterosaurs didn't have talons like birds do.
Some of them had sharp claws,
but they could not grip anything with them.
Their feet were more like that
of a crocodile. - And like birds,
these flying reptiles could only lift half
their body weight if that, so our movie pterosaurs
could maybe fly off with a baby at best,
but what about bigger pterosaurs?
Could those fly off with you?
- Oh, you mean the big four?
Although they were bigger, they're still not capable
of carrying you off with their talons.
- Well, Doctor Habib...
life finds a way.
(Jurassic Park theme song)
- No.
- Okay, well, good news is since they can't lift us up,
fly away with us, we're totally safe.
- Well...
Even though they couldn't lift you off the ground
and fly away with you, they could still
horribly kill you.
- Uh, what? - It was actually
their wings that you had to watch out for,
specifically what I like to call the...
- Pterosaur smash! Coined and researched
by a paleontologist like Doctor Habib,
cryodrakons walked with their wings,
using some of the largest muscles ever to evolve
on any animal.
Pterosaurs would smash into you with a knuckle
on their wing, basically a mid-wing fist.
Kind of like this. Our fist is
one third the size of a pterosaur's knuckle.
So, we adjusted the amount of force needed
proportionally to equal the scale of the pterosaurs,
which gives us...
this.
(classical music)
(bones crackling)
Ooh...
The fist drove through the bones
and deep into the chest cavity,
only stopping at the spine.
And that's just
one pterosaur smash, imagine this happening
over and over and over again, which they were believed to do.
You would not be okay.
(dramatic music)
(panting)
Man, I'm back at the centre of the park,
which is nowhere near the boat and that boat leaves...
right now. (leaves rustling)
(roar)
Yikes!
You know, you might be thinking that standing still
is the best chance of survival when facing a giant
carnivorous dinosaur, but as it turns out,
a lot of dinosaurs, for example the T-Rex,
actually had really great vision,
so standing still... wouldn't really help you,
but all of that might be a moot point,
because I wonder if when they created this park,
they even considered if dinosaurs could survive
in our current climate and with today's agriculture.
Allow me to explain.
Scientists consider the 165-million-year run
of dinosaurs the greatest ever
for a dominant group in history.
That is until their environment
changed so rapidly they couldn't evolve
fast enough to handle it.
And in the 66 million years since they roamed the earth,
the ecosystem continued to evolve, while they...
didn't.
So, the question is:
could these incredible beasts live in our environment?
(roar)
Current research says:
no, and that's partly thanks to a lack of appropriate food
as well as a lot of diseases that there is no immunity for.
Oh... that is a huge pile of poop.
Actually, I can show you what I'm talking about.
(insects buzzing) Oh...
(groans)
Oh, that's disgusting.
(groans)
This berry is from an angiosperm,
AKA a flowering plant.
They make up 90 % of the plants on Earth today,
but didn't even exist in the Jurassic period.
So, there's no reason to think that they would be able to get
nutrients from it or that it would even be considered food
by dinosaurs from that time.
And then, there are the changes to atmosphere.
Paleoclimatologists have modelled the ancient atmosphere
to reveal that the air in the cretaceous period
had at least 26 % oxygen in it, and maybe as much as 34 %.
Now, by comparison, the air we breathe
has only 21 %, but what does that mean?
Well, for a dinosaur from the Cretaceous period,
say a T-Rex, this represents
a 23 % decrease in atmospheric oxygen.
Let me demonstrate how that affects the body.
I'm going to run on this treadmill
for five minutes, with a level of oxygen I'm accustomed to.
(rhythmic music)
Then, after a 10-minute break to get back to my baseline,
I will run again, but this time
wearing an oxygen limiter, which will decrease
my available oxygen by 23 %
to experience what it would be like
for a cretaceous dinosaur today.
I forgot how monotonous running is,
but I feel great.
I feel alive.
(sighs)
Call me Usain Bolt.
Cause I am fast, you know!
(muffled): This is gonna suck.
(upbeat music)
(dramatic music)
It was not fun at all. It was really hard to breathe,
it felt like I was suffocating.
I can't imagine a large dinosaur like a T-Rex or some weird
hybrid dinosaur being able to maintain
that kind of energy and speed
with a 23 % decrease of oxygen.
It was... terrible.
So, if this was the real world, we'd be safe,
but it's not, so...
Guess this is where my journey ends.
And as always...
(Jurassic Park theme ringtone)
Sorry, this is a little embarrassing.
Uh...
Dad! Dad, where are you? We gotta get off the island!
- I caught a ride home with the InGen folks last night
and I'm here having a cocktail.
Cheers!
- Uh, okay, but...
Why'd you run away?
- I had to get off the island.
And you're such a Jurassic Park nerd,
I figured you were gonna stick around
and do one of those science videos.
- Ouch, but I mean, you're not wrong,
I was just hoping we would be in this episode together...
- I promised the InGen guys
that you'd make a video with them
if they sent a helicopter to the island to rescue you.
- Oh, well, first thing is thank you,
but also, you can't really promise
that I'm gonna make videos for people...
- Jeez, Jake, just shut up and get on the helicopter,
we'll talk about it when you get home.
- Yes, sir. I love...
Dad? I love you.
(chuckles)
He got disconnected, I think. Well, that helicopter
is very convenient and as always,
thanks for watching.
(Jurassic Park theme song)
(low growling)
(roar)
This season on CYSTM.
(roar)
(dramatic music)
(yells)
Oh, no!
Come get some!
(♪)
Let's make me hypothermic.
Tear this body apart.
Oh...
(both): The need for speed!
(♪)
I don't think you're gonna survive this one.