Bone Wars

"This one has a more historical flavour. He goes back to the late 19th century, looking at the early discoveries of some really spectacular dinosaur specimens in the American West. So, in particular, up until this point all we knew about dinosaurs were a few pieces from Europe and some other far-flung parts of the world, but we hadn’t found any complete skeletons of dinosaurs. Then suddenly, in the 1870s and 1880s, they were recovered in large numbers, in Colorado, Wyoming and around there. Until then people had been looking in places where it is quite hard to find them, because, although they’re there in western Europe, it’s built over, farmed, urbanised, such that there were relatively few chances to look for dinosaur fossils. As pioneers started heading out to the American West, following the railroads and trying to make their way to the gold fields in California, they are going to very desolate country where it’s much easier to find fossils because the rocks are at the surface and exposed. The rocks were the right age and type to have lots of dinosaur fossils in. So, as people were heading for gold, a lot of those people were actually involved in some of these very early dinosaur discoveries. A lot of the iconic dinosaurs that we see in exhibitions and museums today. Some very good examples of the gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs, like Diplodocus, those things with very long giraffe-like necks, big fat barrel-shaped bodies and very long tails. Lots of examples of these were found complete – so, Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus, and some of the really big carnivorous dinosaurs too like Allosaurus who would have been preying on these things. Dinosaurs were around from about 225 million years ago to 65 million years ago, at which point they all became extinct apart from their direct descendants – birds. They were around for a very long time and during that time we get lots of different sorts of dinosaurs appearing and disappearing, so the sorts of dinosaurs we see early on are very different to those we see 50 million and 100 million years later. To start with, dinosaurs were pretty small animals, then through time they get much bigger, their body shapes change, some go back down on to all fours and you get a very wide variety of shapes and sizes and all sorts of different diets and behaviours. We start off from very simple beginnings and get much more complicated through time. So, in fact, Tyrannosaurus rex would have been around much, much later than the earliest dinosaurs. In fact, the distance in time between us and T. rex is smaller than that between T. rex and the earliest dinosaur, so they were around a really long time and underwent a huge amount of evolution."