Reimagining Dinosaurs | National Geographic

Hello, um, thank you all, uh, so much for um watching this live stream. My name is Michael Greshko. I'm a science writer at National Geographic and the author of the October 2020 cover story, Reimagining Dinosaurs, uh, to talk with us about the latest advances in uh, dinosaur paleontology, uh, and the really exciting advances in the field. I have the distinct privilege of moderating a really terrific panel of researchers with a vast array of expertise on dinosaur paleontology.

Uh, briefly introduce our panel, then we'll get right into it. So Bart Engin-Bullar is an assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Yale. He's also the curator of paleontology and vertebrate zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Ryan Carney, National Geographic Explorer, he's a paleontologist and epidemiologist and the assistant professor of digital science at the University of South Florida.

Kimmy Chappelle is a postdoctoral fellow and paleo scientist grantee at the evolutionary studies institute at VITS University in South Africa. National Geographic Explorer Nizar Ibrahim is a paleontologist and comparative anatomist at the University of Detroit Mercy. And Jingmay O'Connor, a week ago today, became the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Her research focuses on Mesozoic birds and the dinosaur-bird transition.

Thank you all so much for being here. Um, my first question is for uh, Jing Mei. The entire framing of my story, uh, and this discussion we're having is that we've learned more about dinosaurs in the last couple of decades than in the previous couple of centuries. In part because of new fossil discoveries and in part because of uh, new methods in the science. Do you buy that? Is that a fair characterization of where the field is? And, um, for you, what do you think the biggest changes in paleontology have been in recent years?

I would say it's fair to say so. I mean, so much of what we think we know about dinosaurs has changed even just since I was a graduate student. And it's because, like you said, both due to new discoveries of amazing fossils that just change the way we view dinosaur evolution, but also because of new technologies that are, you know, being developed, or technologies that existed that are now being applied to paleontology. And, you know, not just technologies, also methods like chem—like methods of chemistry that are now being, uh, creating this developing paleochemistry field that are shedding new light on the evolution of just animals in general. So it's a really exciting time to be a paleontologist.

Thank you for that. Um, you know, with regards to uh, new fossil material, um, there's a lot we could talk about with feathered dinosaurs in the dinosaur-bird transition, which I hope to circle back to a bit later. But, um, with regards to new fossils, um, Nizar, um, you've done a lot of recent work on expeditions, particularly in Morocco, notably a new skeleton of the predatory dinosaur Spinosaurus, which has revealed a lot of new and interesting features of that animal's and dinosaur's behavior and ecology. For you, how do you see ongoing exploration for new fossils, not just in Morocco, not just in North Africa, but around the world, in informing the current state of the field?

Well, I think that it's true we are in a golden age of paleontology and we're learning so much more about dinosaurs. I agree with Ching Y on this. But I think it's also important to remember that some parts of the world are severely underexplored, right? And that's one of the reasons why I work in Africa. Um, and so I think, like the Spinosaurus skeleton reminds us that there's still a lot we don't know about dinosaurs. So yes, we are in a golden age and we're finding out all these amazing new things about dinosaurs, but, um, there's still many, many paleontological treasures left to uncover out there.

So, um, I think Africa, in particular, is kind of lagging behind. You know, much of what we know about dinosaurs, as you know from your story, is really based on discoveries from North America, Europe, with big contributions now from South America and China. But some parts of the world, in particular Africa, are still really lagging behind. So I think that in the next few decades, we're still going to see many significant new discoveries coming out of the ground in places like the Sahara, for example. So it's not just that we have all these new techniques and approaches to better understand dinosaurs. I do think there's also still a place for, you know, classical field paleontology, you know, that is going to yield many, many more incredible animals like Spinosaurus.

And on that point, I want to bring in Kimmy here, who is a specialist on the dinosaurs of South Africa, notably a really cool early sauropodamorph—this group of dinosaurs that yield sort of the classic long-neck dinosaurs called Massospondylus. So for you, Kimmy, how do you see, uh, in response to Nizar, you know, paleontology on the African continent, and what makes studying animals like Massospondylus, both in age and, you know, just in herbivores, how did those sort of factor into where the field is today?

So, I mean, when it comes to science from paleontology, um, as Nizar said, there's—there's still—I mean, every day, for example, today I got a message from my lab. They're in the field at the moment and they found new Massospondylus fossils. Um, and so we are finding things all the time. And not just, uh, skeletal fossils. There's also trackways and just all sorts of different types of things that we're learning about. Um, and these South African dinosaurs are particularly important, and Massospondylus—I mean, I'm slightly biased, but it's quite important because a lot of people love the really big sauropods and, you know, the giant guys, but those guys didn't start off that way. They started off as small bipedal animals, and South Africa is a great, great place to learn about that and how they evolved into these giants that everyone loves.

You bring up trackways, which is, I think, a great segue into talking about motion. Um, and Ryan, you've done a ton of work, uh, to understand the way that the feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx moved and flew under its own power. How do you see, you know, recent advances in technique informing the way that we know dinosaurs moved, and what does that tell us about how they lived and behaved?

Yeah, so to start off, I mean, there's so much that we don't know about living animals, and so that's kind of the first piece of the puzzle is, you know, discerning exactly how the joints are moving in like an alligator walking on a treadmill or a bird flying in a wind tunnel. We first have to appreciate and analyze what's going on in the living animals—the extant dinosaurs—before we can kind of back calculate and infer motion in the extinct dinosaurs.

And so, a lot of that work, for example, was done using X-ROM—x-ray reconstruction of moving morphology, which is a technique that combines X-ray—uh, basically two different X-ray systems and 3D computer modeling and animation, so software called Maya. And so with that, you can kind of peer underneath the skin and underneath the muscles to look at exactly how the bones are moving and driven by the muscles. And so, only after understanding that in living organisms can you then apply that to the fossil record. And so that's where, you know, 3D scanning methodologies come into play to then, you know, capture that data from the fossil material and then bring that in silico into the computer.

I'm so glad you brought up scanning. We're going to talk about that at death later. I think scanning is super cool. Um, and really, you can do it with your phone. We can talk about that later—photogrammetry, yeah. Um, but you bring up the importance of using living animals as reference, um, and I think, you know, among the world's paleontologists, I think Fuse, um, captured that more than Anjan. Um, and your work bridging the gap between the fossil record and studying the embryos of living animals. Um, how did you kind of arrive at using this—the studying embryos in the lab and the fossil record, and what do each tell you about the other?

Well, so the thing to remember about dinosaurs, right, is that although they're maybe the most spectacular productions that life has made on the Earth, they still sit in this vast tree that connects all living things, right? So the origin of dinosaurs, the origin of birds within dinosaurs, these are both transformations and transitions that are part of the story of evolution on Earth, and that means that they have a context, and we can study them the way we study any other evolutionary transition. In fact, Ryan mentioned, for instance, that they're—a living dinosaurs—in fact, they're more living dinosaurs today than probably there have been dinosaurs ever in the past, right? Birds. And then we've also got crocodiles and alligators, which are the sister group to the accent, the sister group to dinosaurs. In fact, the common ancestor of birds and alligators looked like nothing so much as a small, like dachshund-sized, dachshund-shaped terrestrial-like land-living dinosaur, right?

So for all of the common features between those groups, we can infer that have been present in the common, the dinosaur-like common ancestor. And because of that, we can study to learn about the progression of changes that led to the thing that is a dinosaur, the thing that is a bird. We can study the development of the embryos of the living dinosaurs and their relatives to be able to comprehend ways in which genes are acting on each individual embryo as it develops, right, to create these transformations. Because you have to remember that generation of form is two-fold. There's generation of form during evolution, where things gradually become something else, but also every single organism has to become what it is in every generation from a single cell. And it's at that level that evolution actually acts.

It's a remarkable line of research. In fact, I remember some months ago, I think, Ryan, you and I were talking, and Ryan jokingly—I want to emphasize—said that, like, if anybody could make a chicken-saurus, that engine, it'd be you.

Um, I do want to bring this up because it's a question from the audience. I mean, can we—should we bring back sort of that—bring back dinosaurs? Like, I mean, Jurassic Park has been such a touchstone for so many. I mean, is this something that we could do and that we should do?

Yeah, so a few years ago, my answer to the "could do" would have been probably a pretty resounding no. Gene editing, which, of course, has been big in the news recently with the awards of Nobel prizes, has changed that now, okay? My lab, right, we ride on the publicity of like the, you know, chicken-saurus or dino-chicken stuff, but what we do is we study evolutionary transitions. It's not just hormones and everything else, and sure, we're interested in individual changes that make this happen, and we do that at a cruder level than genome editing. We actually look at the proteins that are produced by the genes. Having said that, theoretically today, on this day, with infinite funding, it should be possible to infer the ancestral states of many crucial areas of the genome, uh, at least between alligators and chickens, and perhaps sort of bump that up toward the chicken side. This is all computational, right?

And then you get these little sequences, and the sequences that differ are actually very small—generally kind of control sequences that just tell genes when and where to turn on. And if you find the right ones and alter them, you can dramatically change the anatomy of the animal. Um, as we—not with genome editing, but sort of downstream as we did a little bit with some of our work, um, but if you were to do that and edit all of those regions, one by one by one, and we have the technology to do this, you could make something that resembled at least something like the common ancestor of alligators and birds, which would look rather like a dinosaur. That's very—that right. But whether we should or whether that's an appropriate use of resources is an entirely separate question. I would tend to stay out of that question because it's bound up in the many ways in which the world is changing because of genome editing and the ability to to transform biological systems as we never have.

For sure, to get back to, you know, the fact that birds are dinosaurs, Jing mei, you have done so much with, um, you know, your collaborators in China to really dig into the complicated and messy evolution of flight. Um, how has that story changed and how have these new fossils and new techniques refined that picture?

So, um, when I first started, you know, studying Mesozoic birds, we didn't really—we essentially thought that the evolution of birds and the evolution of flight in dinosaurs were basically the same question. And since then, within the past five years, in part due to—mostly due to really strange and fascinating discoveries, we've actually realized that flight has evolved in dinosaurs three times, at least. But, you know, maybe four times, five times even. And this, uh, you know, we really realize this with the discovery of a dinosaur named Ichi, and this group is, um, it's this taxon is a member of a group called Scansoriopterygidae—worst taxonomic name ever, so difficult to say—still my favorite group of dinosaurs.

And, um, you know, when the first Scansoriopterygidae were found, they were actually very young, so this goes on this talk. You know, this kind of ties into what Anjin was talking about, about how during ontogeny, the form does change. So because of these younger individuals, we didn't really understand what they were, but we were also, like Ryan was talking about, we were looking to modern animals to try to understand these Scansoriopterygidae. But it's just another story about how, you know, if you don't have a living analog, then it's really difficult to try to understand these extinct animals.

So, you know, the Scansoriopterygidae have this one digit, the third digit that's hyper elongated, and so in the original research they were like, "Well, maybe it's like an Iii because that's the only living animal with one single hyper elongated digit." And then with the discovery of Ichi, which was far more complete and also ontogenetically more mature, so like closer to adulthood than these earlier specimens, they actually discovered that that elongate digit was to support a membranous wing, kind of like bats or pterosaurs have. And they discovered that there also was this extra bone that stuck out of the wrist that would have supported this wing.

And so, you know, we had already discovered a dinosaur called Microraptor, which is, uh, you know, many people know as this four-wing dinosaur. But it was a dinosaur that flew with wings, so it seemed like it could be on the evolutionary path towards birds. But now with the discovery of Ichi, a dinosaur that's flying with a wing that has a completely different design, I think it strongly suggests at least that flight evolved multiple times. And based on the, you know, the family tree of these dinosaurs closely related to birds, the position of Microraptor also indicates that Microraptor is also an independent origin of flight. And then there's a couple others that we're less sure about, but I think, you know, with additional discoveries and with, um, you know, further research in the next few years, we're going to realize that there's a lot more flying dinosaurs than we previously recognized.

It's remarkable, and I think what's so interesting about this work is the degree to which some of these animals, like individual features, might kind of call back to living animals, but the whole package taken together doesn't really have a clean modern analog. Nizar, we've talked about this before in the context of Spinosaurus, and for those who aren't familiar, let me just travel to uh, Cretaceous Morocco. Spinosaurus was an animal that could get upwards of 50 feet long, 6-7 tons, and through the work that you all have done with the new remains out of Morocco have demonstrated that it, more than any other large dinosaur we know of, had adaptations for life in the water. So how do you interpret the fossils you find, in particular when there is no really good modern analog to the whole animal? Um, how do you grapple with that?

These are right, well it's an interesting question because I think even paleontologists sometimes make this mistake. I think we often try to look, um, or at least sometimes look at the past through the prism of the modern day, right? And so I think we're trying to find, uh, modern-day equivalents for extinct animals, and sometimes you can do that. If you look at, say, a mammoth, you know, you look at an elephant and you'll see that an elephant is a pretty good model to understand the basic biology of a mammoth, right? But with dinosaurs and many other extinct animals, the truth is that there is no modern-day equivalent, right? Which makes sense.

Um, you know, what we call the present is a tiny little slice of time, and so it would be very surprising if we found modern-day equivalents for all these, um, you know, extinct forms, which span, you know, many, many hundreds of millions of years. So when you look at a creature like, you know, Brachiosaurus, big long-neck dinosaur or Spinosaurus, it's really a lot like working on an extraterrestrial from outer space, right? It's like working on an alien because you're really starting from scratch in many ways.

Um, you know, I've got a pterosaur here in the background. You know those are, you know, they're not bats, they're not birds. And again, you kind of have to start from scratch. It's very tempting to try and fit them into a bird ecology or physiology or anatomy, whatever, and people have done that, but it usually doesn't end well. So we really have to make sure we always start with the fossils, and so with Spinosaurus, we were in a really interesting situation because this is a predatory dinosaur but it's unlike any other predatory dinosaur we know.

And as you said, there are individual parts of the skeleton that we can look at and compare with living animals. So the feet of Spinosaurus, for example, are very wide with flattened claws. Um, they may have been webbed and there's some ongoing research we're doing on the feet of Spinosaurus, and so to understand webbing and paddling in water, we looked at, you know, things like wading birds and, you know, aquatic birds. Um, then you look at the giant sail on the back of Spinosaurus. Um, we found, um, you know, at least in some ways, similar architecture in some chameleons that, you know, are still alive today. So completely different group of animals.

You know, the jaws of Spinosaurus are very slender and elongate, a little bit like the jaws of a croc. So we looked at fish-eating crocs to understand the jaws of Spinosaurus, including little openings that Spinosaurus may have used to detect movement of prey in the water. So again, completely different group of animals. And then the tail, um, looks like a giant paddle, right? If you just look at it, you go, like, "Well, this is, um, something that would have propelled this animal through the water," which makes a lot of sense for many different reasons.

Um, but that tail turns out looks a lot like what you see in a newt, for example, in some rocks. So you just have this weird kind of Frankenstein creature in some ways, right? Um, the bone density of Spinosaurus is another one, very dense bone, which is important for buoyancy. That's something we see in many water-loving animals. So you use comparative anatomy and comparisons with living animals are very important, but you also always have to keep in mind that there's nothing like Spinosaurus alive today. So in many ways you do kind of have to start from scratch, right?

So, um, for me, this was a great reminder that, you know, dinosaurs are more diverse, more adaptable than we often give them credit for and really more alien-looking and more bizarre. Um, I think if you travel back in time to the time of Spinosaurus, you would see all of these really, really bizarre creatures—pterosaurs, you know, Spinosaurus, and so on. It really would be like visiting an alien planet, right? Which brings me back to my analogy. It's, it really is like working on extraterrestrials sometimes.

That's awesome. Um, to circle back to a point Anjun made earlier about the importance of understanding development of these, uh, these amazing creatures. Kimmy, you've done some really fascinating work on understanding the development within Massospondylus, even like within the egg. Um, how important is it to really understand that, and how do you use living animals as a reference for something like that?

Yeah, so I mean, most of my research is not only focused on Massospondylus, but it's actually focused on how Massospondylus grew. And the reason for that is that, um, there are links between ontogeny, so development and sort of macroevolution. And one of, for example, is with locomotion. So there have been—there was this longstanding hypothesis that Massospondylus as a hatchling would run around on four legs and as an adult would move to a bipedal posture.

And, um, one of the hypotheses that came from that was that if we look at, um, basal plant-eating dinosaurs like Massospondylus, adults walk on two legs, and then the more derived guys, like the prosauropods, walk on four legs. And so it's one of the mechanisms through which that could evolve would be through what we call metamorphosis. So for those, um, watching at home, plutomorphosis is when derived taxa retain juvenile features of their ancestors—so in this case, the quadrupedal big like sauropods that we know would have retained that posture from the juveniles of their ancestors, in this case Massospondylus.

So that's why one of the reasons for which understanding how dinosaurs grow is actually really, really important. And when it came to the eggs, I really like the story about the eggs because it sort of fits well with this reimagining dinosaurs thing because those eggs were actually found in the 70s, and they've been published on a lot and every time a new paper comes out, we learn more about them. So in this case, we took them to the synchrotron scanner, which is this really powerful CT scanner, so we stuck them in a particle accelerator, and that allows us to basically look at them in great detail and look at which bones, um, in the skull specifically I looked at, had ossified.

Um, so we know that embryos in all vertebrates, they don't start off with bones. Those bones form slowly during development, and they actually form in a specific pattern. And so I looked at chickens and turtles and lizards and crocs, and I looked at embryos of all of those taxa, and you find the specific pattern. And to put it very basically, they also form from the front to the back. So there's the snouts and the pallate, and then the skull roof, and then the brain case forms last. And if we look at the Massospondylus embryos, the bones which are the most ossified track that pattern as well. So what it means is that this pattern in embryonic developments is basically at least 250 million years old, which is just—and what I think is so remarkable about that is not only the age of it, but the fact that knowing that can tell us something really concrete about these eggs, you know, more than 200 million years after the fact, right?

You found, if I'm remembering right, that they were like three-fifths of the way through development when those eggs—when the embryos within them died, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. So they were about—so originally it was thought that they were very close to hatching, but if we look at the number of bones which have ossified and also if we look at their teeth, so they have these teeny tiny teeth which to put—uh, to give people an idea of how small these embryos are, those teeth are less than like a millimeter wide, they're half a millimeter wide in fact. So they're really, really small. So it also shows you just the synchrotron scanner and these new technologies, they really allow us to look at these guys in such detail.

Um, teeth also help us to say, you know, how developed these embryos to that point. I want to turn back to Ryan, and this question other people can chime in, feel free because this is a— you'll see the theme here in a sec— but, uh, Ryan, you've been doing a lot of really fascinating work on Archaeopteryx, like we mentioned before, even fossils found, you know, 150 years ago. Um, how have new scanning technologies, these new X-ray techniques, in addition to, you know, photogrammetry, which you mentioned, which gets the outside of the bones, how do these new scanning techniques really enable like new discoveries on even fossils we've known about for years, if not centuries?

Yeah, so it, um, it's kind of like, uh, Moore's Law with computation where you know, over time you just have this exponential increase in computational power. It's, uh, somewhat similar in our ability now to kind of peer into the molecules and the microstructure of these fossils thanks to advances in technologies. And so, for example, with both the feather and the skeletal fossil that we scanned, in both cases, we actually had to try three different times with three different scanners to get data that we can then use for the various studies.

And so, for the feather, for example, it took a specialized type of SEM, so SEM is a scanning electron microscope. This was a field emission gun scanning electron microscope, so it's a much more precise beam of electrons, and so we're able to image the melanosomes, which are the pigment structures within the feather, without having to coat it in some sort of a metal. We actually tried aluminum foil wrapping it in that and placing it one of the previous scanners, um, but it really, you know, it was a story of perseverance and just kind of failure until you succeed, um, and trying different types of scanners until we got, uh, like I said, the data that we could then proceed with for the analyses.

It's awesome. Anybody, uh, beca—anybody else with thoughts on scanning?

Yeah, these are, go forward.

I would add one thing. I mean, CT scanning has become so important in paleontology. We do it all the time. Um, but, you know, as important as the scientific advances that come with this are, there's another aspect that is sometimes overlooked, but I think about it a lot. Uh, partly because I work on Spinosaurus, as you know, Spinosaurus has a pretty dramatic background story. The very first associated skeleton of Spinosaurus was destroyed in World War II, and so those bones were lost forever, and all we had were a few drawings and a couple of photographs.

So one of the really nice things about, um, you know our advances in CT scanning and photogrammetry and so on is that we're able to create digital copies of fossils, right? So we have copies of all the Spinosaurus bones, we can share them with colleagues all around the world, including some scientists in developing countries that otherwise would not have access to these fossils. And you know, sometimes bad things happen. You know, museum collections are destroyed. You know, remember the big fire in the Brazilian museum, which destroyed many, many specimens?

So, um, by having these digital copies of important fossils, at least we have some kind of record that we can share widely and, you know, a permanent record that is much better than, uh, you know, just a drawing or a photograph, right? So I think that's another really interesting aspect of this technology. It allows us to share our data more widely, and it also helps us, in some limited way at least, to preserve these fossils, um, for more or less eternity.

Yeah, it's great for education and outreach as well. For example, the teacher course called Digital Dinosaurs, where biology students are able to learn various scanning techniques, like laser scanning and structured light scanning, and there's a lab where they use their smartphones to take photos of a Velociraptor skull to create a 3D model with. So it's a great way to, you know, paleontology is a really good gateway science to get, you know, students interested in STEM fields, and you know, dinosaurs are obviously very charismatic characters themselves. And so it's a great way to, you know, really harness that childhood wonder and inspiration surrounding dinosaurs for, you know, the next generation of scientists.

For sure. Um, I have a question now for, uh, this is a—this is for the panel, but I want to make sure I hear from Jing Mei on this. We're getting questions from the audience about probably the one of the worst days, if not the worst single day for life on Earth—that day, 66 million years ago, when an asteroid struck Earth and precipitated what we now call the Cretaceous-Paleogene, uh, mass extinction. Um, how on Earth did birds make it out of that? Not—I mean, it's the only lineage of dinosaurs that made it, that we know of at least. Um, and so what is sort of the new science telling us about that extinction event and importantly about how birds made it?

Well, it's important to remember that not all birds made it. You know, we had, during the Cretaceous, we had this whole diversity of different lineages, and in fact, the dominant clade of Cretaceous birds, which was a group called Anseriformes, they went extinct. So it was only, you know, this lineage called Neornithines, or, you know, people have their different names, but I call them Neornithines, and, uh, you know, and so they were the only lineage that survived.

And a lot of people want to say it's because of, you know, it's because other birds lived in forests, and the forests, you know, burned down during the, uh, you know, during this impact event. And people want to say that it's just one thing. But I think one thing we really need to get away from is this looking for a single answer to problems like why did non-avian dinosaurs go extinct or why did non-Neornithine birds go extinct? It's always—it's very complex. It's always a combination of factors that led to the survival of this one particular group.

So we don't know exactly, but I would say it was a combination of physiological features that were only found entirely within this one group. Like some of these physiological modifications were present in other groups that did go extinct, but they didn't have this full suite of features that helped them to make it through this extremely difficult period of time that both, you know, both the impact day of the impact and the years that followed it. So it was differences in how Neornithines reproduced compared to other birds that went extinct, maybe differences in how they were—the efficiency of their respiratory apparatus. Um, they were probably—had better flight adaptations.

Another major factor was probably their digestive system—their ability to, um, eat foods like seeds that were, you know, that they could find buried in the rubble, something like this, you know? So it's a combination of all these different factors that work together to allow this one group to make it through this extinction.

Thank you for that, Anjun. I saw that you were nodding your head here.

Yeah, I want—I mean, just to bolster what Jingmei said. I mean, uh, you know, something about this, you know, clade of modern birds that's diversified really did allow them to pass through because it wasn't a sweepstakes thing. And people might be thinking, "Well, they're the ones that happened to survive," you know, as one lineage, like one species that then diversified. We have abundant evidence now that it was actually several lines that came through—and so there's actually something selecting for these particular kinds of animals and against the others over that boundary.

You know, I think that the physiological argument that Jing Mei has made is probably pretty spot on, you know? You need to be able to find food and to make a life yourself in a desolate world. I want to bring in, um, Kimmy here because Massospondylus is of an age where it's kind of right on the heels of another mass extinction event—one that happened at the end of the Triassic, about 205 million years ago. Hopefully, I got that right?

Yes? Is that a nod? Yes? Okay. Um, this is, you know—I want to hear from Kimmy first, but everyone, please, if you've got something to say, please chime in—but how do you see the broader pattern of extinction and a changing planet kind of informing kind of the big plot beats of dinosaurs?

Yeah, that's a complicated question. [Laughter] I mean, yeah, so Massospondylus is, I mean, it's—it's like you said, it's present in the late Triassic, and then it's not very dominant in the Electrolysis, but then as soon as we get to the early Jurassic, it's just everywhere. It's like the gazelle of the Jurassic.

How it does that is actually—I mean, something that we're still trying to understand. As Anjan and Jing Mei say, there's many, many, many, many things that allow these animals to cope and to actually thrive in a post-extinction environment. One of those might be in, in the way that it's, um, the way that they grow. So, um, for example, Massospondylus, we think, was able to restrict its growth when environments are already bad and then to sort of take advantage of all the resources when, when conditions are good. Um, and that's what, uh, plasticity, for example.

Um, so yeah, post-extinction diversity is, I think, it—yeah, there's many, many things that lead to how they cope with that.

Nice. Uh, to switch tactics, um, I'd love to know, and I think our audience would as well, would love to know how each of you got into paleontology, got into dinosaurs in the first place. Um, I mean, so many of us, myself included, grow up with a fascination for dinosaurs. Uh, we'll start with Nizar. I mean, how for you, how did you find your way into paleontology and to studying this big, beautiful alien behind me?

Well, um, it all started with a book on dinosaurs and other extinct animals. That's how it started for me. And there was just something about dinosaurs that really captured my imagination. You know, I always loved animals for as long as I can remember, but there was something about dinosaurs, um, that really stood out.

And it wasn't just their size; it was, um, you know, their bizarre features and the fact that they were extinct. Um, and you know the profession of, you know, paleontologist just appealed to me. It just combined all of the things I loved: you know, animal animals, traveling to far-flung corners of the world, that's something I always wanted to do. Um, and that's really how it began. And then, you know, museum visits followed and, you know, my passion for paleontology just kept growing.

Um, as I got older, so I had really made up my mind when I was about five years old that I was going to be a paleontologist. And it's interesting when you talk to other paleontologists. Some have similar stories where they say, "You know, my parents brought me to the National History Museum, and I was hooked." Others just kind of ended up working on dinosaurs almost by accident, right? So, um, I think it's an interesting thing about paleontologists—some of them had this lifelong passion since they were like four or five years old, and others kind of got into dinosaurs much later in their career. But in my case, it was, you know, all started with a book.

How does that resonate for the rest of the panel? Was it sort of a childhood love? Was it kind of this—

Absolutely. Ryan, yeah, how did it go?

Yeah, ever since I can remember, I've been, you know, obsessed with dinosaurs. I mean, I also loved all animals as Nizar said, but dinosaurs and birds in particular. And, you know, I remember going to the Science Museum of Minnesota and drawing the triceratops mount, you know, drawing dinosaurs all the time. And, you know, I still loved animation, and so when I went to undergrad, I did an art degree where I learned Maya. I took a year of that, and was able to combine that with my other degree, which is paleontology, and that was, you know, sort of what I've been doing since and now teach in my own course.

So I'm kind of—a—

And you went to business school, man. I met you when you were in school.

I'm using that a lot, aren't I?

Yeah, I would just—no, it was great. And, um, yeah, I like to do a lot of things, but you know, dinosaurs are really my passion.

It was funny because I would be in business class right across the street from the Peabody and it would just be like counting down the minutes. It's not like business classes.

That is very true. Across the street.

I was one of those who found paleo late in life, like Nizar was saying. I had absolutely no interest in paleontology until I started college, and then, from Nizar, it was a book for me. It was a really great teacher. So I went to Occidental College, and at the time there was a paleontologist working there named Donald Prothero, and he's just the most fantastic teacher I've ever had—super passionate about paleontology.

He's written tons of books, and, uh, yeah, I just—I took one of his classes and I fell in love with evolution—not necessarily dinosaurs. I also just stumbled onto and ended up working on them. And I told him I wanted to be a paleontologist, and he did his best to scare me off and tell me that it was a bad idea, but I persisted, and I’m glad that I did. And, um, yeah, and then just, you know, choices along the way led me to working on early birds.

It was mostly because I'm half Chinese, I'm very interested and passionate also about my Chinese culture—also my Irish culture—but, um, yeah, so at the time, you know, like I remember in college reading about Microraptor, the discovery of this four-wing dinosaur, and I told Prothero that I wanted to, you know, combine my love for paleontology with, you know, with China, so I wanted to study Chinese fossils. And that's what led me to work at the IVPP, which is in Beijing for almost 11 years before I finally made it back home just recently.

That's awesome. Um, I have a question for—to go back to Jing Mei, but I also want to make sure I hear from Nizar and Ryan on this one. Um, and this is a very sort of newsy question.

Um, so, uh, Jing Mei, you now are, um, curator at the Field Museum of Natural History. Um, the most famous dinosaur fossil is probably in the U.S. is, uh, this iconic T. rex, Sue, which very famously in 1997 was auctioned for more than eight million dollars at the time. Earlier this week, Christie's auctioned off another Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed Stan for almost 32 million dollars. And among many of your peers, um, within paleontology, this is, you know, raising all sorts of interesting questions about the fossil trade, the sale of fossils. Um, how do you see, um, sales like Stan specifically affecting paleontology? And more generally, what's your view on the overall trade in dinosaur fossils around the world?

Well, I mean, yeah, so one thing that's really unfortunate about this sale is that, you know, it went for this exorbitant amount of money. So, you know, when paleontologists go up to ranchers and say, "Hey, we want to prospect for fossils on your land," and then we, you know, we want to have collecting permits and bring them back to, say, the Field Museum, now they're going to, you know, maybe think twice and be like, "Well, actually, if you find something on my land, instead of letting it go to a, you know, a museum, maybe I can just have somebody else collect it and I can sell it and try to make 32 million dollars."

So that's really going to affect future, um, collecting in the United States. So that's very unfortunate. And then, of course, the other big problem is that now Stan has been lost to science. I'm not completely lost because there are a lot of casts of this specimen that are floating around, but a cast is not the same as the original specimen, and especially with something as complex as the skull, you're losing all that internal morphology. So, I mean, one thing that could be done if this—whoever bought it was generous enough is they could pay maybe for the skull to be high-resolution CT scanned so that then you would at least get more information that is then available for scientists.

But, um, you know, that's up to whoever bought it, and, you know, but this problem is something that if we want to deal with it, you have to—everybody who's outraged about the sales stand for so much money write your congressman, you know? Because right now it is legal to buy—to collect fossils on your land and to sell them if you want to in the United States. Now, in China, all fossils that are of any scientific value are technically property of the government. Now, this does not prevent the black market of sales of fossils, and you will see Chinese fossils ending up in the, um, Tucson International Gem and Mineral Show and things do get sold.

But at least it allows—there is a pathway to protect these fossils, and if you wanted to, you could go to someone who has this fossil and you could reclaim it—of course it's not as easy as that, but it's at least a step in the right direction.

Uh, oh no, please, please, please. Why not add on to that?

So, um, in South Africa we have a similar rule. Well, I guess, where—so I mean, 70% of South Africa bears fossils. Um, so it's not just dinosaurs. We have lots and lots of things, but all of those fossils belong also to the government. Um, and it's actually—I mean, it's great because for example, we've been working on this massive dinosaur graveyard bone bed in the Eastern Cape, and we're not actually the ones who found it. So it was found by local shepherds in the area, and I don't know if it's because there's no monetary value behind it, so I mean you can't sell, you can't do anything, but they end up contacting various universities in South Africa, and then that's how we find out about them, and then we go and we work with them, and we get to be, you know, part of these great excavation sites.

And it's—yeah, I mean, it's awesome.

Nizar, I know that you know we've traveled together in the Moroccan Sahara, and Morocco has— I mean, it is an epicenter for the global fossil trade, and it's a complex situation. Could you briefly sort of summarize this—the state of, uh, the situation in Morocco and kind of your thoughts on this issue?

Right, sure. Um, I mean, Morocco is, um, has a very, very rich paleontological heritage. Uh, there are Moroccan fossils in museums all around the world, but there's also a— you know, a very profitable black market, uh, in Morocco for fossils. And so, um, it is a big problem—many very important specimens disappear in private collections or in foreign museums.

Um, and Morocco does not right now have a proper natural history museum, with collections facilities and what have you. Um, so what I've been trying to do over the last 10 years or so is, um, I established a university research collection in Casablanca in Morocco. It's the largest of its kind now in the country, um, and it includes some truly amazing finds, including the Spinosaurus skeleton.

So we're trying to do some capacity building, um, in Morocco. We're trying to build up local collections and small-scale exhibits and so on, but it's a real problem. You know, and this can easily flourish in places where corruption in general is a big problem. Um, but, as you pointed out, it is a complex issue. And the people collecting the fossils out in the middle of nowhere in the Sahara depend on this trade, right?

So unless you can offer them a good alternative source of income, it's very difficult to tackle this problem in Morocco. There are over 50,000 people that are directly dependent on the fossil trade, right? Um, we should also remember that more generally speaking, in paleontology, many very important discoveries are made by amateur collectors, right? Going all the way back to Mary Anning and others collecting fossils, and it's really difficult to paint this in black and white as some paleontologists do because it's a little more complicated.

So you mentioned Morocco. One of the other countries that has a flourishing market in fossils is Brazil, right? And Brazil has some pretty draconian laws now that make it very difficult to collect fossils there unless you are a professional paleontologist. Um, and they're trying to—to make sure that all Brazilian fossils stay in Brazil. Um, but that approach also has some downsides.

Um, for example, uh, you know, there are mines in operation every day in Brazil, um, and if nobody's allowed to collect fossils in these mines where fossils are, you know, brought to the surface every day, um, they're just destroyed in the process, right? So you're also losing a lot of fossils that nobody's allowed to collect. Um, I mentioned the Brazilian museum that just burned down in a fire a couple of years ago.

After that fire, I think many paleontologists were actually glad that at least some Brazilian fossils are kept in collections all around the world, right? Um, so draconian laws are probably not the answer. Um, but it really depends on different countries have different laws and legal frameworks.

Um, in Germany, there are some, you know, federal states that basically have laws where if you find something, if it's important, it goes to a museum, and if it's not, uh, people can keep it or sell it or do whatever they want with it. But it's very difficult to come up with one law that would work in every country, you know?

So I think it's really something where you have to look at this on a case-by-case basis. Also, we have to remember some fossils are very rare. You know, fossils like Spinosaurus, you don't want that skeleton to end up in a private collection somewhere. But other fossils are very common, you know, shark teeth or in some places even dinosaur teeth. Um, and there's probably no scientific problem with, you know, having some people sell some isolated bits and pieces of teeth, right?

So I guess, you know, it's really, um, a gray area of paleontology, and it's difficult to come up with a, you know, one rule that fits all these different, uh, settings around the world. So, you know, in Morocco, we're trying to find, um, a good middle way, building up collections so that, you know, if we have stronger laws, we can actually make sure that fossils find a good home. Because there can also be a problem in some developing countries—they might have very strict laws, but, you know, if nobody's looking after the fossils, they just crumble to pieces, and this has happened in many places.

So it's not as straightforward as people like to think. Um, I want to pick up—I want to, sorry, I want to pick up on a theme that's in your comments, and I want to pose this to the panel. You know, as paleontology has really become a global science, not just in where fossils are coming from, but where researchers are based and doing their work, you know, how important is capacity building, you know, in countries, in regions, uh, where, as Nizar said, offered the example of Morocco, where there might not be the same traditions, um, or like academic communities or resources to curate and preserve these fossils for future generations?

Well, I mean, I can start if, uh, anybody else—anybody else going once, going twice?

So, you know, maybe the auction analogy is a terrible one here, actually.

Um, so right, uh, so Nizar, please, sure.

I think that this is, unfortunately, something that that has been neglected, um, but it's very difficult to address this. So typically, when paleontologists apply for funding, we're applying for funding to do field work, right? And so this covers our, you know, travel expenses, you know, getting field vehicles and accommodation and what have you. But we generally don't get a budget for things, like repatriating fossils or building up a small local exhibit or, you know, um, so whenever I go to the field, I make sure, you know, we work very closely with the North African scientists and students so we can kind of train the next generation of, um, guardians for this incredible ancient heritage.

Um, and I'm trying to scrape together funds to put together, you know, small-scale exhibits there, and, you know, I'm lobbying very hard for, uh, you know, the construction of a natural history museum in Morocco, but it's not easy. I mean, I think, yes, this unfortunately we have really neglected this capacity building component, um, but it's very difficult because the money just isn't there in many cases, especially in Africa.

So it's, uh, it's really something that I think we have to change in the future and make sure that we actually have at least some funds allocated to kind of giving back so the—so that these research projects we do are not kind of, you know, do not have a neo-colonial flavor where you just have a bunch of Westerners traveling to, for example, Africa, you know, digging up some dinosaurs and then taking them out and, you know, uh, that's not really a win-win situation, right? So we really have to change that and do some more local capacity building, but to do that we really have to rethink our funding, um, you know, and how this funding is allocated for different parts of our work.

Kimmy, I see you nodding here.

Um, can we—how does this resonate for you?

Yeah, I mean, it's such a tricky situation because it is—I mean, most of the fossils, for example, that we work on are in very rural areas. Um, they don't—uh—they're near big cities, so you do have to drive out quite far, and it is—we try and work very closely with the local community, so we'll go, and we will try and do some outreach and, you know, work with them on—to explain, you know, what are we doing and then what's going to happen to the fossil, etc.

Um, and we have been asked before if it's possible to, you know, build a museum in those areas, um, and one, not only is it a money issue, but it's also—I mean, if you build a museum in the middle of nowhere, no one's going to go there. Um, because it has to be on the way to somewhere for people to actually go there, at least in the areas where we work.

Um, so yeah, so it becomes—it's very difficult to to have a win-win situation, as Nizar calls it. And even if you have a place to store the fossils, like, you know, it can't just be a giant room. You know, like these fossils are very delicate, and so you have to have, you know, proper curation of these fossils, and you have to have people who know how to properly curate it.

So you know, China is rapidly developing and there are tons of dinosaur museums, but outside of Beijing, there really isn't anyone with the expertise to properly take care of these specimens—to, you know, to prepare them, which is like removing all the matrix and the dirt that surrounds the fossil or to make sure that they're kept in a temperature-controlled environment or humidity-controlled environment.

So, you know, capacity means so much. It means both a place for the museum, a place—a museum to hold the specimens, but also people with the knowledge, with the training to be able to take care of these specimens properly. And, and it's difficult to to get this, you know—it's difficult to find people who are willing to go outside of big cities who have this knowledge. A lot of this knowledge is very specialized.

So, um, yeah, it's a very complicated issue, but if people are aware of it and when we go out and look for fossils, we're aware of this issue and this need, we can start including in grants money to, you know, more than just find the fossils but also to take care of them afterward.

And China—China's very lucky in having the IVP, you know? That's the other part of it. There has to be an academic, a scholarly culture that encompasses paleontology, right? And paleontology is strange as you've heard—we draw from all these different disciplines—but in a way that means that we don't have a home in any particular one, and so it's been difficult in the past, including in the U.S., sometimes to get departments that might be focused on, you know, geology primarily or on the biology of living organisms primarily to become interested in people who study the history of life.

And without that kind of continued commitment to that area of scholarship, everything else sort of withers as well. So that's another kind of front of things. But, China actually with the IVPP is probably the most stable and successful, um, you know, place I've, I've I know of.

Yeah, the IVPP is a really unique place in the world because, you know, here at the Field Museum, we have like a handful of paleontologists, but at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, the IVPP, for those who don't know, has, you know, over—has about 60 full-time paleontologists under one roof, all working on different animals. And so it's a really a spectacular place to work.

Um, you know, it's the only—the only place I can think of in the world that has that many paleontologists working together. Speaking of places, funny, I just wanted to jump in with the plug for the National Geographic Society grants program. So these are perfect opportunities for like grad students if you're looking for, you know, money to fund your research project.

It doesn't have to be just paleo, but just great funding opportunities with much higher funding rates than other agencies. So they can—anyone at home interested can check that out at natgeo.org/grants.

Thank you very much for that for bringing that up. I do want to, um, ask a question of Ryan and Jing but this is, this is for the panel. Um, in the context of the IVPP, you know, one—as we talked about before, there's been so much work on these really exceptional, you know, feathered dinosaurs. We have a question from the audience about, uh, about plumage, about skin, and about coloration. I mean, this has been such an important theme of research in the last few years.

How—I mean, from your perspective, how important of a line of research is this work on, like coloration, and what can that tell us about the way that these animals looked and behaved?

I think, um, I mean the coloration thing, it does have some interesting points. Like, you can learn also about metabolism from the coloration. I know there's been some correlations there, but it's one of these things that's important because it helps us bring these animals to life, which—and it's so it's exciting to a really wide audience more than I think it is scientifically valuable. So actually, if you can see this reconstruction behind me, it's done by this wonderful artist named Michael Rothman, and you know, we were working and collab— you know, he was asking me like 100 million questions about how to like perfect his reconstruction of these birds, and he had them in all these beautiful colors like greens and blues and yellows, and I—and I kind of thought about this after he had actually finished because this was a few years back, and I was like, "Oh, actually, like all the research that we're doing now on melanosomes is telling us like black, black, shiny black, maybe some white," you know?

And, um, so then he had to go through and redo it and add this very drab coloring that you can see behind me, but one thing to remember is that melanosome-based coloration is only part of the like repertoire of like, of, I guess like of ways that birds have color. So there's also like pigment-based coloration or there's also structural color.

And these things are less likely to fossilize. Uh, you know, or to be preserved in the fossil record, so I think when we're looking at melanosome-based coloration, we're only looking at one part. So I think, you know, in the future with more exceptional discoveries and also new methods for refining—for example, probing the molecules that are preserved, and just the knowledge that they may exist, we may be able to, you know, go straight from the field, for example, into an instrument where we can then image them properly without any contamination and sort of like she said, add additional colors onto the palette of reconstructing ancient life.

All right, awesome. Ryan, how does that resonate for you? I mean, you recently even just published a paper about this feather associated with, uh, the feather dinosaur Archaeopteryx and presented—

Yeah, you really nailed the conversation right on the head!
Um, yeah, of course there is going to be a bias in that melanin fossilizes so well. I mean, it's kind of nature's super molecule that does all this crazy, you know, photochemical, electrical—there are a lot of properties that, uh, you know, it absorbs radiation, there's fungus that uses melanin to eat radiation at the Chernobyl site, for example.

So does melanin does a lot of crazy stuff—that's what allows it to survive in the fossil record for so long. And so that's why we do end up getting this bias, but you know, melanin-based coloration is the primary type of way that, you know, plumage, for example, is colored, but it's not the only one. So there are other types of, like, carotenoids, for example, or structural color, and these things are less likely to fossilize, uh, you know, or to be preserved in the fossil record. So I think when we're looking at melanosome-based coloration, we're only looking at one part.

So I think, you know, in the future with more exceptional discoveries and also new methods for refining—for example, probing the molecules that are preserved and just the knowledge that they may exist, we may be able to, you know, go straight from the field, for example, into an instrument where we can then image them properly without any contamination and sort of like she said, add additional colors onto the palette of reconstructing ancient life.

All right. Awesome! Can I cut in for example?

Yeah, yeah. So, I think I agree with with Jing Mei that, you know, there's—I mean, the coloration work obviously has a lot of significance for how we envision these animals. I'd add that it's part of organismal form, right, which is really important understanding organismal evolution. It's the external part, and it's a little hard sometimes to connect, you know, because we we know so little about the behaviors of these animals. Obviously, color has a lot to do with behavior and there's some things that we can expect to be able to know and some things that perhaps we can't, right?

And, uh, with color, maybe there are some dead ends in sort of figuring out more about, well, what's the, you know, is that to do with predation? Is that to do with, you know, something to do with sexual selection or something like that? Um, but it can be—there are ways in which to get to some aspects of organizational behavior through technology.

And, um, the internal scanning of things like the stuff I think all of us have been doing with CT and synchrotron offers that to complement, you know, the external stuff. Because the thing about bone is that it forms last, right? It's one of the last things forming an embryo, which means that it forms interstitially. It's connective tissue, and it forms around everything else.

So, with the internal scans, you can find casts—very accurate casts of nerves of the brain, of the ears, the nose, the sensory organs, of parts of the viscera, of all sorts of things that have direct bearing on the life of the animal, including its behavior, including its physiology, and so those things, you know, I would take the coloration as part of this entire series of, you know, pools of data that are now available to us—and I think the internal stuff is very rich also in particular.

Awesome! Um, I have a—I have an idea, and we're going to see how it goes. If it crashes and burns, that's fine. But I would love to try just a couple of fun lightning round questions as we can near the end of our discussion. Um, I'm going to—gosh, I don't know if the layout is here—I’m just gonna—I'm gonna call out. I'm gonna say a question. I'm gonna start going through names, and I want you to give me your quick answer here!

Okay, so start the question here is favorite dinosaur. Kimmy, go!

Um, I have two. It's Mononykus with its little one-digit hands and also Ichi, the membranous wing dinosaur.

Awesome. Next question: craziest moment in the field? Uh, Kimmy, in the field?

Well, you know what? We'll broaden it—field slash lab, craziest moment in your research.

I may or may not have accidentally pressed the emergency stop button at a very expensive CT scanning facility.

Was that the ESRF?

Yeah!

Okay, Ryan, go. Craziest?

All right, so because I don't really do field work, it would have to be scanning. So this is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where we scanned the Thermopolis specimen, um, right across the street literally from where they keep the weapons-grade plutonium—the guard towers and all this stuff—it was quite, quite a sight to see, so that would have been the craziest.

Nizar?

Uh, being stuck in a raging river in our field vehicle with water coming in through the doors at night.

Uh, Anjan, what about you?

Um, jeez. Well, we had a field site that was on top of this like just huge tower of rock that took forever to climb up, and so we were stuck up there—it's this little area. I mean, I won't mention how we had to deal with some other practical things, but when we uncovered this site that had been derelict for a long time, we found the largest nest of wasps I've like ever seen in here.

And so day by day by day, we had this like war of attrition with these things where they'd come in, and some of us would like, you know, get them with shovels or not get them and then, you know, run around. And eventually, eventually we won the battle—us versus nature. I think that's probably the most memorable field experience.

Uh, Jing Mei, what about you?

It could be field or lab!

Um, we were in somewhere deep in Mongolia, many, many days drive from any form of civilization, and, um, one of our field vehicles accidentally, like, rolled into a ditch, uh, which was both terrifying and also really hilarious. Luckily, I wasn't driving.

Did everyone get out okay?

Yeah, everybody survived, but I just, like, couldn't stop laughing. I don't know why!

So, well that's good. Um, here's a—that's a fan of a funny one from the audience. Um, how do we feel about Jurassic Park? Do we really need another one? Uh, Jurassic World Dominion, of course, bumped to 2022.

Um, let's start with you. I was going to say she started, Jing Mei. She seems like strongly about it.

All right, okay. We'll go—the opposite order. Jing Mei, go.

Oh, okay! I understand that Jurassic Park is great because it has stimulated so many people's interest in paleontology, and that's great, but, um, but I think that the recent Jurassic Park movies are not good. Sorry if anyone has offended, and it's mostly because, yeah, they take, you know, extinct animals are so fascinating in their own right. You don't have to genetically modify them in order to make them interesting, so I thought that was like a bit offensive to all the extinct animals that are so awesome.

What about you, Anjan?

I would say the first Jurassic Park movie is great. Um, and I think—do we need other ones? Um, if they're well made, uh, yes. I think there's a huge, you know, interest in dinosaurs, and I think as paleontologists, we should celebrate this. You know, people go and watch these movies not to see an actor or an actress, but to see these dinosaurs, right?

So, that's certainly something worth celebrating our discipline, but it should be a good one.

I was a little disappointed with the more recent installments, I would say.

We all agree, right, Ryan?

Yeah. What about you?

Well, first Jurassic Park movie, great. Um, and I think, do we need other ones? If they're well made, yes, I think there's a huge, uh, interest in dinosaurs and I think as paleontologists we should celebrate this.

You know, people go and watch these movies not to see an actor or actress but to see the dinosaurs, right? So that's certainly something worth celebrating our discipline, but it should be a good one.

I was a little disappointed with the more recent installments, I would say. What about you, Kimmy?

Um, well, I think it's great what other field—yeah, Ryan, what about you?

I just—one word: feathers. That's it. Put the feathers on the dinosaurs! Not all of them—not all dinosaurs in feathers but come on, it's all of them!

Ryan—oh, um, what about you?

Well, sir, obviously there’s a side of us that's like, “Oh, look at all of the things that aren't right,” and, you know, feathers and all that. But at the same time, you get to go and watch dinosaurs and geek out about dinosaurs for like two hours, and it's like—cool.

So, you know, for sure. Um, so I got two more questions, and then we'll conclude this terrific panel.

Um, question: more generally, why dinosaurs? Why is studying them important, particularly where we find ourselves today in 2020 with all of the other things that we could be researching? Why is the study of dinosaurs still important?

This is very quickly.

I mean, yeah, please. Dinosaurs are the most eaten by humans animal on Earth. You know when you think of chickens, it's dinosaurs that we consume more than any other animal. Most flu vaccines are created in the eggs of dinosaurs. You had a great line about the ghosts within the eggs of their, uh, avian descendants in the article, which I thought was a, you know, perfect way to describe that, you know, that ghost in the shell.

And so, um, you know, I think because birds are such a, you know, successful clade of press world vertebrates because they're around us and they, you know, are so involved in our lives with what we eat—and like I said, creation of vaccines and just appreciating these wonderful creatures around us. It still has relevance in our daily lives as well as understanding these really cool beasts from the past.

Well, I would say, um, even if birds had not survived, I think, you know, dinosaurs were just so incredibly successful for such a long time on a global scale. It's really difficult to find other groups that have had this level of success, you know, over such a long period of time.

So, I think to understand major patterns in paleobiogeography and what have you, dinosaurs are just super important, right? So I think, you know, and that's one thing that I think in the popular mind has to change is some people still have this idea of dinosaur—the word dinosaur is a synonym for, you know, failed creatures, right? You know, failures of evolution.

But of course, the truth is dinosaurs are incredibly successful, so you know, if you call a CEO or politician a dinosaur, it should be a compliment. It should be, you know, like saying you've been super adaptable and super successful—carry on! You know that exists.

Yeah! And just continue on with that. It's—I mean, we also—we all know a lot of people talk about the Cretaceous extinction and the fact that birds made it through. But, I mean, as you mentioned, there was also the Triassic extinction—so not only are they successful, but they actually make it through several extinction events, um, which is very interesting and I think quite important for the way we're going.

Yeah, so, I mean, I say, why study Rome? Why study Greece? Why study the Wars of the Roses, right? This is—it's history, and it's history writ large. I mean, all of human history is a tiny part of the history of life, and everything that exists today is a product of a series of random events and contingencies and patterns that's occurred over the long stretch of the existence of the planet.

And, you know, among organisms on land, dinosaurs are some of the great players—hundreds of millions of years of dominance on the Earth, right? And all that happened during that time contributes to—contributed to the shape of modern biodiversity, right?

And ultimately contributed to our being here—to who we are. The question of why study these things, why study these enormously important creatures is just the question of do we want to know about the true history of the Earth? Do we want to know what happened and get some actual answers as to why we're here or not?

That's it! That's a really beautiful summation of this, Anjun.

One last question for the panel, and then we'll conclude. We've spent a lot of time in the past hour talking about the advances that have brought us to here—to 2020. Uh, for each of you, where do you think and hope the field goes in the next 10 to 20 years? Jing Mei, let's start with you.

Um, well, I, you know, like Nizar was saying, there's a lot of places in the world that where we, uh, you know, haven't tapped the full potential of, you know, fossil deposits out there. So I hope people go out and discover new localities that are going to produce, yield completely new animals that are going to change everything that we think we know.

And I also hope that the established scientists can open their hearts and be more accepting to new technologies that are being developed, especially by younger paleontologists, because I think this is one thing that just holds back all fields is that the older people, the older scientists, you know, refuse to accept new innovations.

And so—and that just holds everything back. So I think we should all learn to be more open-minded about the new techniques that we're developing and then—and to continue to, uh, you know, I guess, you know, to expand, uh, the techniques—the repertoire techniques that we utilize and then and look for new things because paleontology is ultimately in the field discovery and awesome fossils.

Anjan, what about you?

Yeah, so, um, I'd certainly like to see, you know, more advances in, uh, our understanding of the way in which genes pattern morphology over evolution, right? And, as you've mentioned, as Ryan mentioned, we've found, for instance, that it's very late in embryonic development that birds actually kind of decide to become birds, and they follow a remarkably dinosaurian trajectory all the way until near hatching.

And so clearly, you know, all those things are still locked in the genome, right? There are fossils in the genome inside every chicken, every sparrow that we could understand and could access if we had the time and we had the means and the understanding. And then, you know, and so for people in those fields to be able to kind of work with people who are interested in evolution, I think, which is beginning to happen now, is really important.

I'm really excited by innovations in, uh, the evolution of motion of the sort that, that say, techniques like X-ROM are allowing. But fundamentally, I mean, I agree with Jing Mei. I like that. In these, I think Nizar and Kimmy, it's new stuff, right? You can theorize, you can build models, you can look at excellent things, but they can be falsified or supported in a moment by something that comes from the rock record that you pull from the Earth.

So you've got to do that. You've got to support that work, and you've got to train new generations of people not just in the new techniques which are, you know, popular and easy but in the hard work of describing the anatomy, right, which is a venerable field and sometimes seen as antiquated, which is absolutely wrong.

Right? Um, and of really understanding the ways in which, you know, form and function have evolved, and that's a specialized set of, uh, a set of areas of knowledge that really needs to be cultivated and really needs to be emphasized, and I think can drop off over and over again as like the fattish new techniques pop up.

Um, and displace kind of the old classical areas of learning. Nizar, what about you?

Well, I would—I would agree with everything that was just said.

Um, the way I would—I look at the future is sometimes, you know, I look at a map of my main kind of area of fieldwork—the Sahara, right? And the Sahara is about the size of the United States, and then you kind of pencil in the areas that we have actually explored, and it's, you know, nothing, right?

So, I think it's really hard to predict how exactly our understanding of dinosaurs is going to change in the future and what discoveries we're going to make, but I guess one thing that I would say especially to younger viewers, you know, and young people interested in a career in paleontology is that we are really just scratching the surface, you know?

And, you know, you can look at the, you know, the current issue of the National Graphic magazine and maybe get the impression that we’re kind of at peak dinosaur. You know, we're understanding them in a lot of detail, and you know, and that's true to a certain extent, but, you know, in the bigger picture, we are only just scratching the surface. There's so much more out there to be discovered.

So if you're worried that all the cool dinosaurs have already been found and that all the research has been done, um, do not despair! There are still many, many, um, undiscovered treasures out there just waiting to be uncovered. And so I think, you know, we're still just at the beginning in many, many ways.

Ryan?

Yeah, so again, I would agree with everything that everyone has said so far. Just to add to that, you know, really making these, especially the digital tools and the digital data available to anyone around the world, you know, so whether it's educational materials, whether it's the raw data, so that people who don't have the opportunity to visit a museum or go to one of these fossil field