1
00:00:00,160 --> 00:00:02,720
Speaker 1: Imagine you're taking a walk in a meadow and you

2
00:00:02,800 --> 00:00:06,800
Speaker 1: happen across a big I mean a really really big bone.

3
00:00:07,240 --> 00:00:10,039
Speaker 1: But in your world, there's no known animal that could

4
00:00:10,039 --> 00:00:14,480
Speaker 1: have come from I'm Patty Steele. Wow, dinosaurs, But where

5
00:00:14,480 --> 00:00:21,759
Speaker 1: did they go? That's next on the backstory. We're back

6
00:00:21,800 --> 00:00:24,840
Speaker 1: with the backstory. Okay, the Earth is about four and

7
00:00:24,880 --> 00:00:28,600
Speaker 1: a half billion years old. Dinosaurs ran the planet from

8
00:00:28,680 --> 00:00:31,720
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty two million to sixty six million

9
00:00:31,800 --> 00:00:36,280
Speaker 1: years ago. Our human ancestors appeared maybe seven million years ago,

10
00:00:36,560 --> 00:00:39,800
Speaker 1: with modern man showing up only about three hundred thousand

11
00:00:39,880 --> 00:00:43,000
Speaker 1: years ago. So, in the scheme of all that stuff,

12
00:00:43,120 --> 00:00:45,920
Speaker 1: two hundred years not even the blink of an eye. Right.

13
00:00:46,520 --> 00:00:50,839
Speaker 1: Despite people finding some really big bones previous to eighteen hundred,

14
00:00:51,240 --> 00:00:54,760
Speaker 1: they all thought the bones belonged to giant lizards, dragons

15
00:00:54,760 --> 00:00:57,480
Speaker 1: if you lived in Asia, or even a race of

16
00:00:57,600 --> 00:01:01,440
Speaker 1: giant humans that had disappeared. There was no such thing

17
00:01:01,480 --> 00:01:06,160
Speaker 1: as dinosaurs. Even the word didn't exist. Then. In eighteen nineteen,

18
00:01:06,480 --> 00:01:10,800
Speaker 1: William Buckland, a fossil hunter, finds an enormous bone. He

19
00:01:10,920 --> 00:01:14,560
Speaker 1: suspects it's some kind of lizard. The thing was probably

20
00:01:14,560 --> 00:01:17,280
Speaker 1: about forty feet long in real life, which, as you

21
00:01:17,360 --> 00:01:21,240
Speaker 1: might imagine, freaks everybody out. What is it? Are there

22
00:01:21,280 --> 00:01:25,000
Speaker 1: others like it still alive somewhere? I'll keep in mind

23
00:01:25,120 --> 00:01:28,560
Speaker 1: this was when pretty much everybody believed the Bible's creation

24
00:01:28,760 --> 00:01:33,399
Speaker 1: story that everything and everybody appeared about six thousand years ago,

25
00:01:33,800 --> 00:01:37,000
Speaker 1: and all those creatures still roam the earth. By eighteen

26
00:01:37,120 --> 00:01:41,479
Speaker 1: twenty four, Buckland gives his creature the first dinosaur like name.

27
00:01:42,000 --> 00:01:48,240
Speaker 1: He calls it a megalosaurus. By the early eighteen forties,

28
00:01:48,280 --> 00:01:52,520
Speaker 1: it's full on dinosaur fever. After another scientist, Robert Owen,

29
00:01:52,600 --> 00:01:56,800
Speaker 1: says these things are unlike anything still inhabiting the planet.

30
00:01:57,320 --> 00:02:01,240
Speaker 1: He compares them to other fossilized remains and says they

31
00:02:01,320 --> 00:02:06,000
Speaker 1: are their own classification. He gives them the name dinosauria,

32
00:02:06,440 --> 00:02:09,720
Speaker 1: later changed a dinosaur based on the Greek words for

33
00:02:10,120 --> 00:02:14,520
Speaker 1: terrible lizards. By the eighteen fifties there was full scale

34
00:02:14,600 --> 00:02:19,040
Speaker 1: dinosaur mania. London's Crystal Palace had basically the world's first

35
00:02:19,040 --> 00:02:23,360
Speaker 1: dinosaur park, with life sized models of the megalosaurus and others,

36
00:02:23,720 --> 00:02:26,359
Speaker 1: and there was even a dinner throne for some big shots,

37
00:02:26,639 --> 00:02:30,640
Speaker 1: with guests seated inside the model of another dinosaur called

38
00:02:30,639 --> 00:02:35,120
Speaker 1: an Iguanadon. Going back previous to the dinosaur craze in

39
00:02:35,160 --> 00:02:37,880
Speaker 1: Europe and then the US in the early eighteen hundreds,

40
00:02:38,240 --> 00:02:41,320
Speaker 1: there was already a fascination with the bones of animals

41
00:02:41,360 --> 00:02:45,120
Speaker 1: that were found or no living species were discovered near it.

42
00:02:45,560 --> 00:02:49,280
Speaker 1: In fact, one of our most vividly curious founding fathers,

43
00:02:49,280 --> 00:02:52,799
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson, was such a fan of what he called bones.

44
00:02:53,200 --> 00:02:57,760
Speaker 1: He collected the fossilized bones of a mastodon, not a dinosaur.

45
00:02:58,160 --> 00:03:01,160
Speaker 1: The mastodon was a mammal that was basically a huge

46
00:03:01,200 --> 00:03:04,880
Speaker 1: prehistoric elephant. He actually displayed them in the front hall

47
00:03:04,919 --> 00:03:08,280
Speaker 1: of his home in Virginia. And here's a fascinating tidbit

48
00:03:08,400 --> 00:03:11,400
Speaker 1: about his obsession. We've all heard of the Lewis and

49
00:03:11,440 --> 00:03:15,760
Speaker 1: Clark expedition, where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were asked

50
00:03:15,800 --> 00:03:20,520
Speaker 1: to go west and explore and map the vast western wilderness. Right. Well,

51
00:03:20,560 --> 00:03:23,160
Speaker 1: it turns out that wasn't the only reason they hit

52
00:03:23,200 --> 00:03:27,280
Speaker 1: the dirt highway. Thomas Jefferson was convinced, based on the

53
00:03:27,320 --> 00:03:30,680
Speaker 1: Biblical theory of creation, that all animals that had ever

54
00:03:30,760 --> 00:03:34,520
Speaker 1: lived on Earth still lived here, that somewhere there was

55
00:03:34,560 --> 00:03:38,000
Speaker 1: another one out there and he wanted one word, has it.

56
00:03:38,080 --> 00:03:41,880
Speaker 1: Jefferson believed the mastadons that had once lived in Virginia

57
00:03:42,120 --> 00:03:45,720
Speaker 1: had migrated west and were still out there. He wanted

58
00:03:45,800 --> 00:03:48,160
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark to search for one of these things

59
00:03:48,160 --> 00:03:51,040
Speaker 1: and bring it back, or at least bring back more

60
00:03:51,080 --> 00:03:55,720
Speaker 1: remnants of mastadons and other massive creatures. After the expedition

61
00:03:55,880 --> 00:03:59,080
Speaker 1: was over, Clark kept working for Jefferson and sent him

62
00:03:59,120 --> 00:04:02,360
Speaker 1: more mastodon bones that he'd found on his travels, but

63
00:04:02,520 --> 00:04:05,920
Speaker 1: clearly no live specimens. Kind of like the hunt for

64
00:04:06,080 --> 00:04:09,760
Speaker 1: King Kong. You know. Well, today we continue to uncover

65
00:04:09,920 --> 00:04:13,720
Speaker 1: new stories about dinosaurs. We know that the biggest dinosaur ever,

66
00:04:13,840 --> 00:04:16,680
Speaker 1: in fact, the biggest land animal ever, was a thing

67
00:04:16,720 --> 00:04:21,080
Speaker 1: called an Argentinosaurus. Palaeontologists say it was over one hundred

68
00:04:21,080 --> 00:04:23,960
Speaker 1: and thirty feet tall and weighed about two hundred and

69
00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:28,320
Speaker 1: thirty thousand pounds. Now, scientists now say that today's birds

70
00:04:28,360 --> 00:04:32,680
Speaker 1: actually evolved from some dinosaurs called theropods, which included the

71
00:04:32,760 --> 00:04:37,160
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park fan favorites, the t rex and velociraptors. They

72
00:04:37,160 --> 00:04:41,000
Speaker 1: say these dinosaurs were likely covered with bright colored feathers.

73
00:04:41,480 --> 00:04:45,320
Speaker 1: Imagine a bright blue or red, fuzzy t rex. What's

74
00:04:45,360 --> 00:04:48,800
Speaker 1: really interesting is the thought that while dinosaurs in various

75
00:04:48,839 --> 00:04:51,960
Speaker 1: forms roam the Earth for hundreds of millions of years,

76
00:04:52,400 --> 00:04:57,080
Speaker 1: they went completely extinct in one nine month period sixty

77
00:04:57,120 --> 00:05:00,240
Speaker 1: six million years ago. That's when a six month mile

78
00:05:00,279 --> 00:05:04,240
Speaker 1: wide asteroid bigger than Mount Everest hit the Earth off

79
00:05:04,279 --> 00:05:08,400
Speaker 1: the coast of what's now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The impact

80
00:05:08,480 --> 00:05:12,880
Speaker 1: from that collision released one hundred million megatons of energy.

81
00:05:13,480 --> 00:05:17,240
Speaker 1: It vaporized the asteroid and sent a massive cloud of ash,

82
00:05:17,520 --> 00:05:21,200
Speaker 1: dust and dirt into the atmosphere and across the globe,

83
00:05:21,480 --> 00:05:24,880
Speaker 1: blocking out the sun. That caused a global collapse of

84
00:05:24,920 --> 00:05:29,120
Speaker 1: the food chain. Meantime, molten glass rained down all over

85
00:05:29,160 --> 00:05:33,880
Speaker 1: the Earth, there were wildfires, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, the air

86
00:05:33,920 --> 00:05:38,320
Speaker 1: temperature was scalding hot and then freezing cold, and finally

87
00:05:38,760 --> 00:05:42,480
Speaker 1: there was the never ending darkness. All of that killed

88
00:05:42,520 --> 00:05:47,640
Speaker 1: off all land based dinosaurs in just nine months. So

89
00:05:47,839 --> 00:05:50,479
Speaker 1: when you think about the history of the world, it's

90
00:05:50,520 --> 00:05:54,000
Speaker 1: pretty amazing that we had no sense of the existence

91
00:05:54,040 --> 00:05:57,640
Speaker 1: of dinosaurs who lived for several hundred million years until

92
00:05:57,680 --> 00:06:01,960
Speaker 1: the last two hundred years, literally no time. You kind

93
00:06:01,960 --> 00:06:04,920
Speaker 1: of realize We're only at the very dawn of the

94
00:06:04,960 --> 00:06:19,000
Speaker 1: exploration of where we've been and where we're going. I'm

95
00:06:19,040 --> 00:06:23,600
Speaker 1: Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,

96
00:06:23,760 --> 00:06:27,640
Speaker 1: the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer

97
00:06:27,680 --> 00:06:31,000
Speaker 1: is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new

98
00:06:31,040 --> 00:06:34,520
Speaker 1: episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out

99
00:06:34,560 --> 00:06:38,200
Speaker 1: to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram

100
00:06:38,240 --> 00:06:41,280
Speaker 1: at Real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.

101
00:06:41,640 --> 00:06:44,599
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the

102
00:06:44,680 --> 00:06:47,640
Speaker 1: pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.