>> All right, we'll introduce the panel.

You might recognize this guy from the show, Eric Lund, a paleontologist with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Robert Anemone is a paleontologist from UNC Greensboro, and then Cynthia Crane is the director of the Aurora Fossil Museum.

So, let's give a hand for our panelists for coming out.

Thank you all very, very much.

You got to start off first, Eric, with you.

What's the update on Clover?

What can you tell us?

>> The update on Clover.

So, Clover, the elements that we collected, we collected over 56 bones from Clover skeletons.

So, not the whole thing, but we got quite a bit.

All that material is sitting at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

So, I brought some of the already prepared fossils out on the table as you walked in here.

But we've just started opening up other jackets from this quarry and started to prepare that material.

So, throughout the show, we were saying it's a very young individual of Triceratops.

We don't know exactly know how old.

So, one of the things we want to do is try to figure out how old Clover was when he or she died.

In the show, Clover is a she, so we'll go with that.

But we want to do long bone histology.

So, just like trees grow rings, if you've ever cut open a tree, cut down a tree, seen a tree cut down, it's got growth lines.

Well, bones have the same thing.

We have them, all animals have them.

So, we need to take a thin slice of Clover's bone and count up those rings to figure out how old she was when she died.

So, the research is ongoing.

But Clover is very safe at the museum now.

Unfortunately, she died fairly young, but yeah, the research is ongoing.

>> And I think something that you want to think we're kind of in an instant gratification society, if you will, you can figure out these things like that.

It takes a long time to analyze.

>> Well, it takes a very, very long time.

So, the site where we collected Clover's bone was initially found in 2021.

And then we didn't finish collecting all the elements from that site until 2024.

So, took multiple years, lots of rock removed, lots of jackets removed from that quarry.

And then now, we're just getting around to processing some of those jackets and getting that material prepared.

And just starting the research which is going to take another four or five years for us to get that done.

>> You're all paleontologists.

So, I guess to both of you, as you're looking at this, I'm thinking, and I've done a couple of stories on paleontology through the years.

And researcher says, "Look at that bone."

I'm thinking, "That's a rock."

How do you know when you're finding rock, bone, what's your experience?

Go ahead, Ron.

>> Well, in my case, I mean, what it really takes for a good field paleontologist is a knowledge of the anatomy of the animals you're finding.

So, we go to the field with a mental image of what the kind of things that we're looking for.

So, we're not just blindly looking for things that somehow are different than the rocks.

It's not about the color or the texture of bone.

It's about really knowing what teeth look like, what bones look like, what the articular ends look like.

You can identify an arm bone from a leg bone, things of that sort.

So, it really requires a knowledge of anatomy.

And then, a lot of walking, a lot of, in our case, we're looking for small things.

So, the dinosaurs, you can probably stand fully erect and walk around and prospect.

But for my team looking for early mammals, we are sort of bent over at the waist.

And if we find scatters of things, then we're immediately on all fours crawling over the surface.

And sometimes, it takes people a few days to develop that search image.

We call it a search image for mostly teeth or jaws that we're hoping to find.

But once you have it, it's not really that much of a trick to determine whether what you're finding is a bone or a rock.

>> And forgive me, I thought you just said, where have you worked?

We know where you've been working with Clover.

Where have you been doing a lot of your work?

>> My main research area is in southwestern Wyoming, where I'm looking for Paleocene and Eocene fossil mammals.

60 to 50 million years ago or so, things we're looking at.

I've also worked in Africa.

I work in Mozambique right now.

I worked in Kenya and South Africa too.

Mostly, they're looking for more recent material related to human evolution.

>> And Cynthia, I know the museum is awesome.

We've been there.

It's fascinating for people to work.

Where have you worked and what are you doing now with the museum?

>> So, well, years ago, we were talking about this earlier.

I went out to Ekalaka, eastern Montana, to help with a hadrosaur that was brought back named Nancy.

I don't know if she's on display or if she's in the collections at the Museum of Natural Sciences.

And my research area is in southeastern North Carolina in the Campanian, the Cretaceous of North Carolina.

And then now I run a fossil museum which has the giant Megalodon shark and the difference sea life from 18 to 8 million years ago.

>> Great, please, anybody, any questions?

Yes.

>> Who owns the land where the [INAUDIBLE] >> Who owns the land?

>> These are all lands that are federal lands, so the BLM, Bureau of Land Management.

>> And I'm assuming you need to, I guess, apply to the BLM or- >> Yeah, go through a real rigorous permitting process, so we have a general survey permit which allows us to go out to these lands and look for these fossils.

And then if we find anything that's worth collecting, then we have to go through another permitting process and get an excavation permit which actually allows us to dig, and so there's quite a few things that we need to go through to be able to work where we work.

Could I add one thing about being able to identify a fossil from a rock in the field?

So a fun thing that we do, well, I do, maybe other vertebrate paleontologists do, to be able to distinguish a rock from a bone is sometimes we'll lick it.

So bone is porous, right?

So oftentimes you find something that's covered in matrix or rock, and it's really hard to tell because we can't really use color.

Maybe the pores are clogged, but one thing we can do is we can lick it, and that bone will stick to your tongue.

Well, actually, capillary action will cause that bone to stick to your tongue, whereas a rock won't.

So that's another way we use to be able to figure out what a bone is from a rock.

>> Fun paleontology fact there, I love that.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> Very good.

>> You've gotta be careful, though, if you use that approach.

We had someone in my crew pick up a sheep turd and taste it, thinking it was a fossil.

>> Yeah.

>> [LAUGH] >> I won't go any more than that.

That's good.

>> [LAUGH] >> Any questions?

Yes, go ahead.

Is it fun looking for fossils?

Anybody?

>> My goodness, yes.

It's fun to look for fossils.

>> It's really fun to find them.

>> [LAUGH] >> It's really one of the best parts of the job is discovery, right?

Seeing something that no other human being has ever seen and being able to find it and collect it.

That's one of my favorite parts of the job.

>> Very good.

Yes, sir?

>> Okay, so in your discovery of toad, bacteria, are you able to put a number of man hours that were involved in reclaiming the bones?

Not necessarily to clean them and bring them back or have them in the museum, but to actually excavate them?

>> Yeah, so we collected Clover over four field seasons.

That's working not 365 days a year.

But man hours, I've had teams as small as three out there with me, all the way up to 10 or 12 folks.

So we're really talking about tens of thousands of man hours to excavate this site and make sure that we collected everything.

>> Yes, ma'am?

>> Do you know how much of the skeleton you have found so far?

>> Yeah, so of her head, I have about 2%, unfortunately.

And then, so most of the elements of those 56 that I found were all post cranial, so everything behind the head.

So I don't have a lot.

But the things that we do have, I would say, we maybe have about 30% of her skeleton.

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yes?

>> How did you determine that Clover was female and did that take a lot?

>> So- >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah, so the question was how did we determine that Clover was a girl?

The answer to that is we don't know.

That collection of fossils just got that name.

And I'll tell you really quick how we named it.

So early on, a couple years before finding the fossils of Clover, we found another full-size triceratops skull, which we collected.

And we named that site Lucky Trike.

And so we had Lucky Trike, and now we have Four Leaf Clover.

And so when the BBC came out and was filming us, they really liked that name Clover.

And so that's how it got that name.

And we just have always referred to these collections of fossils as a she.

But we don't actually know, and we might not ever know.

It's really hard to sex a dinosaur.

There's only a few times.

One, if it's found on a clutch of eggs, but that's not always the case as well, because there are some birds where the males sit on the eggs.

And so maybe eggs inside.

But also, there's an extra layer of tissue that gets deposited inside the bones when a female is getting ready to lay eggs.

That's called medullary bone.

So as we're doing that process of histology and looking for those growth lines, if we find this extra tissue, then that will tell us that it was female.

But obviously, Clover, being a very young individual, is not going to be sexually mature yet and won't have that tissue.

So we might probably never be able to tell.

But we've always just referred to Clover as a girl.

Love it.

One of the interesting parts of the show, and the whole show was interesting, but was your use of a drone to, I guess, make it a little easier or kind of narrow down where you look.

And Robert, you've done some research in that as well, not with drones, but satellites.

How is that kind of technology, if not revolutionizing, making paleontology easier or more precise?

Yeah, I've been working with remote sensing specialists for about 10 years now, geography people who use satellite imagery.

And what we've done is we've developed some artificial intelligence approaches to try to predict where fossils might be most likely to be found in an area like the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming, which is my main research area.

So it's a basin of several thousand square kilometers, lots of places to look for fossils.

And the real problem we have is, where should we look?

We can't look everywhere in a short three to four week summer field season.

So what we've done is we've developed these predictive models that point us to certain areas of the basin that are most similar to the places we've found fossils in the past.

And with this technology and these new geospatial methods, we've had great success at finding more places that we hadn't been to before with fossils.

But we talk about the luck involved in finding fossil sites.

What turned me on to using these predictive models is, in 2009, we stumbled upon by far the best locality probably in this time period in all of Wyoming.

And we found it by taking a wrong turn on a two track road that sort of disappeared.

And I noticed some sandstones near there.

I said, well, we're not going to where we wanted to go, but let's check these sandstones out.

And before you know it, we found over the next four or five years about 5,000 teeth and jaws, the most beautiful material we'd found anyplace in 20 years of working in this basin.

So I thought to myself, there's got to be a better way than just the sort of old school approaches.

Let's try to predict where fossils are most likely to be found.

And it involved basically working with remote sensing specialists, satellite imagery, land side imagery, which is kind of free but kind of medium resolution, and then commercial imagery that is really high res.

And we've sort of kind of pioneered that approach in vertebrate paleontology.

And more and more people are using it now.

People are using it to find dinosaurs.

There was a study in the Petrified Forest in Arizona where they're using drones and things of this sort.

So I think it's a real up and coming area in paleontology and one that's been really fun to work in.

You mentioned sandstone, things like that.

Cynthia, what-- how do I put this?

What was North Carolina back-- or like-- you know, it's changed through the years, obviously.

What has it looked like in the past?

Oh, goodness.

I know it's a big question.

It is a big question.

So I mean, North Carolina's changed over the years.

In the Cretaceous, it was arid and dry and hot.

And then it turned into a lush delta, tropical, kind of tropical, warm climate.

And then it went into an ocean climate.

So there's all these different environments that occur during the Cretaceous in North Carolina.

And I would imagine with those, there are different kinds of-- Oh, different kinds of animals.

--dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs and mosasaurs and all the different types of animals that fit into those different environments.

So once those environments change, animals are going to either adapt or die.

And so they will adapt and improvise and become useful of the land and the different environments that they inhabit.

Questions?

Anybody else?

If you have a question, let me know.

And I'll come to you with a mic.

Oh, yes.

So would de-extincting dinosaurs be a good idea?

Or would it end our existence?

So de-extincting dinosaurs.

Well, I certainly would love to have a little Clover running around my house.

And in fact, my little dog that I have at home reminds me very much of Clover.

When I got to see the finished product of Clover, I was like, that's Raya.

That's totally my dog.

So there are certain dinosaurs that I think would be fine.

But there are probably others that we should not bring back.

There was one person here whose favorite dinosaur was Velociraptor.

I would not want to bring back a Velociraptor.

We were both commenting back there as we were watching your dog did the same thing that-- my dog is Fluffy.

And Fluffy does the same thing.

Just kind of looks around like that.

Anybody else?

OK.

Thanks, Joy.

Hey, could Clover have succumbed to the events that were caused by the asteroid strike?

Or do you think her death predated that?

Based off of where we found the fossils stratigraphically, so within the rock column, Clover's fossils occur well before that final, that layer.

So in the show, you saw me walking along that K-Pg boundary.

Used to be called the K-T boundary, Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.

Since geologists have updated that to be the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.

And so her fossils, we found, they're around 60 feet below that line.

So my guess is long, quite a few, quite a lot of time before the Cretaceous extinction.

Since you've all done field work and still are doing field work and everything, the pictures of you holding the bone and looking at the bone and studying it, what is it like to hold something, look at something, uncover something that no one has-- hasn't been seen for tens of millions of years?

It's got to be incredibly time consuming, and you've got to have patience to look for it.

But what's it like?

That had to be why you got in the field.

Yeah, I mean, it's very exciting.

And I mean, most of us have identified and named new species, which is a really exciting thing to think about.

The first people to really find and study the anatomy of and maybe understand a bit of the way of life of an animal that lived 50 or 66 million years ago, it's a pretty amazing sort of field of science to be in, I think.

Now the real work begins of studying it.

But that moment of triumph, if you will, has got to be pretty cool.

We had an amazing moment.

We found what looked like the back of a skull pointed into a sandstone cliff.

And we didn't really know how much of the skull was there, but we did kind of the approach that the dinosaur people do.

We put a plaster jacket around it and brought back this big block back to the museum.

And we had no idea what was there.

It could have just been the back of the skull with nothing in front.

When the preparators cleared all the sandstone out, the whole skull was there.

Every tooth was represented.

There was a break in the cheekbone on one side.

Other than that, it was completely present.

It was a very old individual.

The teeth were worn almost down to the roots.

We CT scanned it.

We could reconstruct the size of the brain, some of the sensory organs, and try to understand the way of life of this skull that had been in the rock for about 55 million years.

It's a pretty amazing opportunity, really a lot of fun.

Not bad.

So to the audience, how many of you collect something?

And so when you find a new one of those, how do you feel?

Exactly.

That's the feeling.

That's the feeling to me.

And I'm sure you see that a lot at the museum because people-- Oh, yes.

Yeah.

The eureka moment, yes.

And everybody gets excited when they find something that you're looking for and you're holding it in your hand.

It's like just an amazing feeling.

That's great.

Yeah, it's absolutely one of my favorite parts of being a paleontologist is, again, discovering something that no one has ever seen before.

And then being able to learn something about what that piece you've just found, what animal that came from, what does that tell me about the environment, what does that tell me about so many different things.

That's really one of my favorite parts.

I get so giddy when I find a fossil in the field.

And it's just really great.

Questions?

Yes, ma'am.

Starting here, Frank.

Oh, sorry.

I want to talk about the storytelling because the science is amazing.

But then the storytelling that goes on to make it accessible to all of us also, I want to know two things.

One, your reaction when you saw the finished piece of this, and also your involvement in the production of the storytelling of it.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So as far as my involvement with the production, for my episode specifically-- so there's six episodes of this new Walking with Dinosaurs.

So my episode, I consulted heavily on how the animals looked, how the animals sounded, the size of the animals.

But beyond that, that was all of the BBC's CGI, people who worked on that.

And then the storytelling part, when the BBC first approached me, they're like, we want to remake Walking with Dinosaurs, which is great.

I'm like, yeah, that's awesome.

That really got me into paleontology, or one of the things that got me into paleontology.

They're like, but we want to do something different.

We want to go from a set of fossils, and we want to tell the story about those fossils.

And so they asked us lots of questions about, how old was this dinosaur?

What do you think about this?

What do you think about that?

So in that sense, I helped with the storytelling.

But otherwise, they did all of that.

What's your reaction to the-- Oh, right.

So overall, I think it's great.

I fell in love with Clover, like I think many of you did.

So watching it, I think they did a really good job.

And I think the finished product is really quite nice.

Just wondering if we have a sense of what may have caused Clover's death.

At the beginning, the T-Rex tooth was nearby, and I had a curiosity if that had anything to do with it or what your thoughts were.

So so far, no evidence of what caused Clover's demise.

The assemblage itself-- so where we found Clover, she didn't die right there.

So what I mean by that is her skeleton sat on the surface not very far away.

Her body decomposed, and the bones started to scatter.

And then they were washed into the place that we found them.

So there's some transport of those fossils to where we found them.

But so far, I only have a handful of these fossils prepared so I can actually look at them and hold them.

And so far, I haven't seen any signs of predation.

There's no tooth marks.

There's not really any marks on the bones that tell me how far she was transported either.

But I know it wasn't very far because I have lots of the bones together, and it was kind of a jumble pickup stick.

So things weren't scattered very far.

But no, unfortunately, right now, I don't know what caused Clover's death.

How are the sounds for the dinosaurs created?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So what I supplied to the BBC was a whole bunch of sound files of modern animals.

So we know through the-- I'm going to use some big terms here-- stent phylogenetic bracket, which allows us to know that modern birds and crocodiles are the living relatives of dinosaurs today.

So when you see a bird outside, that's a dinosaur.

So I sent the BBC a whole bunch of sound files of different birds that I thought that's how dinosaurs sounded.

And then they had their foley artists, their sound artists, put all those together and create the sounds that you hear in the show.

I was just curious, if a creature as big as a T-Rex made it to adulthood, how long could they live?

Great question.

So we unfortunately don't have a lot of data for how long a dinosaur could live.

So again, we can do that process of histology.

But it's a destructive sampling, where we actually have to cut the bone and take a slice of it.

And there's not many museums that will let you cut their dinosaur bones, especially when a species of dinosaur is named off of a single animal.

They have one, and then you're asking to cut it, and they're like, no.

So technology is getting better.

I think soon, as technology such as CT scanning gets better, we can start getting these answers without having to cut the bones.

But right now, we don't.

There's only been a few dinosaurs that-- lots of dinosaurs have had this happen to it.

But one of the oldest dinosaurs is a meat-eating dinosaur, a chirokinodontosaur, that was shown to live to be 60 years old.

So that's 60 years at time of death.

That doesn't mean that dinosaur lived to 60 and was dead.

Could have lived longer, but at least for that sample, 60 years old.

It's amazing what you can learn from the small amount of fossils you might have from Clover.

I mean, about not just the dinosaur, the animal itself, but its environment and everything else.

It's fascinating.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's part of what I like to do is-- I love dinosaurs.

I think they're great.

But I want to know about dinosaurs.

You can't really know about something unless you reconstruct everything about that animal.

So that's another thing that I like to do.

There was another-- yes, and right in front here also.

I just wanted to ask about the technology you guys were using.

You did use a UV light to scan.

You were talking about Landsat.

Is LiDAR something that's going to be used, or can it not differentiate between the fossil and the surrounding stone?

So currently, right now, that technology doesn't really give us a strong signal.

So one of the things-- a lot of those technologies, ground penetrating radar, they work off of density contrast.

And because the bones are fossilized in the rocks we find them in, that density contrast can be pretty much the same.

And so things like that, we don't use.

So with the use of the drone, that was fossils sitting on the surface that had already eroded out of the rock.

And not every bone will fluoresce.

And so it doesn't always work.

But we're trying to figure out ways, predictive modeling, or using these technologies where we can try to do a little bit of legwork before we actually do the legwork and have to walk miles to a basin to try to get there.

So.

Yes.

Thank you.

This might be a really general kind of question, but what would you say is the biggest unknown or biggest unanswered question in your field or in your specialty within the field?

It's a great question.

But I mean, I guess you don't know what you don't know yet, right?

So again, on this whole idea of technology, we're starting to be able to ask and answer questions that we've never thought before.

So in the show, you saw the triceratops sort of flash these eye spots in its skull.

We don't really know if it could do that.

That's a hypothesis as to one reason that the skull of triceratops is covered in vascular channels.

And so we just don't know what we don't know yet.

But I think as we get new eyes and new ways of thinking about these collections of fossils, we can start going back to old assemblages of fossils sitting in museum drawers and think about them in a new way and start asking and answering questions we never thought before.

So Eric, are those vascular channels potentially thermoregulatory also?

Yeah, absolutely.

That's another idea, right?

You're a giant.

You're 25 feet long.

You have a head that's approaching 7 feet long.

You're living in the Cretaceous, which is a hot-how environment.

Just because you're so large, you have trouble losing body heat.

And so another hypothesis is that you got to protect your brain.

You don't want to overheat.

So build a radiator into your body.

So not only can you shunt that blood up into that big frill and wave it around and flash eye spots, but maybe you're dumping heat as well.

So yeah, that's another hypothesis.

I was just wondering about the kind of-- do you know anything about the diseases and things like that that they might have died from?

I mean-- Yeah, absolutely.

And so we can do paleopathology.

So look at the bones.

And we can see bone disease in these things.

So osteomyelitis, cancers, other cancers in these bones, injuries, broken bones, healed bones, abscesses.

So yeah, we can see all these things in the fossil record, which is pretty really interesting.

Yes, over there.

When you find different pieces of bone from a skeleton, how do you determine if it's from the same dinosaur or from other dinosaurs of the same species nearby?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, sometimes you find things and the bones are still articulated.

So you see an upper arm bone and lower arm bones and hand bones.

And in that case, it's easy.

Often, there's a jumble of bones where you find three left humeri.

And you know you have at least three individuals then.

So it's a combination of things.

And it really depends on the particular context.

Personally, I've done paleontology for like 30 years.

And I've never really found an articulated skeleton or half a skeleton.

Almost everything I find, every fossil seems to be a unique individual.

But other people, different experiences in different field settings can find more articulated or semi-articulated skeletons.

And I'm sure there's sometimes you'll find bones, fossils.

I don't know what this is.

You still got to figure it out yet.

I've got drawers and drawers of those kind of fossils in my lab.

Absolutely.

Go ahead, Cynthia.

So my research had to do with what is called a lag deposit, a bone bed.

So it's sort of like when you go to the beach and you have these shell beds.

They're just sort of really thick shells.

These are bones and rocks and pebbles.

So I would find one dinosaur tooth and another different kind of tooth.

So I couldn't discern if all the dinosaur teeth were from one individual because they're in this lag deposit.

But out west, when they're articulated, it's really nice to come across one of those.

Good.

Any other-- yes, yeah.

Do you know what dinosaur the skull you found came from?

The skull?

I'm asking the person sitting to the left of you.

Oh, the one where you saw the back of the skull and then-- Oh, the name of the animal.

Yeah, sure.

The group of animals to which it belongs is long extinct, so you may not have ever heard it.

The group is called the ptelodonts, the genus of animal that we found.

And we're pretty sure it's the best preserved skull of this genus in any museum.

I've never seen anything nearly as good.

It's called esthonics.

Again, it probably looked like maybe a small cow, but a weird, long extinct group of mammals that disappeared 50 million years ago.

Good question.

All right, anybody else?

You've all found so many different types of animals in so many different time periods.

Do you have favorites, ones you hope to find when you go looking, or maybe ones you have found that you'll always remember?

Yeah.

So I do most of my work in the late Cretaceous, so I'm about 100 million years ago until that 66 million year time frame.

And within that time frame, mostly about 80 million years to about 75 million years.

So one of my favorite fossils that I've ever found, which happens to be my favorite dinosaur, is a dinosaur called Nasutoceratops.

So related to Triceratops, it's a horned dinosaur, but predates Triceratops by 10 million years.

And it's my favorite because I found the very first one, and I got to name it that name.

And so the name translates to large-nosed horned face, because at the time when I was writing it up and doing the research on it, it had the largest nose region of any horned dinosaur.

So I named it that.

And then fossils that I hope to find.

So in my research of studying horned dinosaurs, there are two subfamilies.

There's a group called Centrosaurians, which Nasutoceratops belongs to.

And then there's another group called Chasmosaurians, which Triceratops belongs to.

We have a pretty good idea of the evolutionary origin of Centrosaurians, but we don't have a good idea of the evolutionary origin of Chasmosaurians.

So I got to keep looking for the very first Chasmosaur, and I hope to find that fossil at some point.

Eric, what about you?

Yeah, I don't know if I have a particularly favorite fossil.

Although I have spent a couple of field seasons working in Africa looking for early humans.

And I'm currently working in Mozambique, and I guess my favorite fossil is the first human ancestor that I find in Mozambique next field season.

Haven't found it yet.

There you go.

Suzy, what about you?

I know you're museuming, but if you got a chance to get out, what would you like?

Oh, what would I like to find?

I'd like to go out in the field with you.

Sounds interesting.

Go back to Montana.

So with my research in southeastern North Carolina, in that lag deposit I was talking about, there were some large hadrosaur teeth, duck-billed dinosaur teeth, which would represent more of an older adult.

And then it ranged down to little small shed teeth from a hadrosaur.

So you can infer a family structure or some kind of baby to old adult.

So I thought that suite of fossils was really nice to find in those deposits.

We're starting to get close to running out of time.

Any other questions?

Yes.

[INAUDIBLE] Hold on.

Why are we so fascinated with dinosaurs?

I think that was the question.

OK. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah.

Good question to wrap this up with.

Yeah, go ahead.

I think because they're larger than life.

And they came in so many different forms, from large T-rexes to three-horned triceratops to stegosaurus that had plates on its back to really tiny flying dinosaurs with feathers, microraptors, and things like that.

So just the diversity of this group and that some of them were the largest terrestrial vertebrates to ever walk the Earth.

Patagotitan, a large sauropod, long-necked dinosaur, 140 feet long.

And it's really hard to imagine animals that big existing on this planet.

So for me, I think that's what it is.

They're just larger than life.

Robert, what do you think?

Yeah, I think the size, the fact that they dominated the Earth's fauna for how many?

180 million years.

And if it wasn't for that asteroid, who knows?

Maybe the mammals would have never really spread and radiated the way we did.

I mean, the old thinking has always been that once dinosaurs became extinct, the world was open for mammals to really radiate and take over the world.

And we're talking about the age of reptiles followed by the age of the mammals.

And had it not been for that asteroid impact, the history of the Earth could have been so different.

So yeah, dinosaurs are absolutely fascinating, even to a mammal paleontologist like myself.

And you get a good perspective on this as a paleontologist and running a museum, I would think.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, just a variety of different fossils throughout geologic time, different organisms and animals that lived, just fascinating to be able-- and then, of course, the dinosaurs.

Everybody loves dinosaurs and so finds them fascinating.

All right.

Very good.

I think why don't we wrap it up.

That's a great way to wrap it up.

Thank you to everyone for coming out.

Thank you to our panel again.

And all right, have a good evening.

Drive safe.

Thank you.