Scott Sampson lecture @ Academy of Natural Sciences Paleopalooza 2012

February 19, 2012

Lecture
Thank you all very much for being here, it’s really a pleasure. It’s fun being involved in Paleopalooza; this is one of the great paleo events in the country, and this is my second year coming here. And this museum in particular – many of you who live locally may not know that this museum has such a distinguished history. Two hundred years old. It’s phenomenal. It’s the oldest natural history museum in this part of the world, with some of the most famous collections out there.

So, I want to talk to you about the dinosaurs today; not surprisingly, being Dr. Scott the Paleontologist. What I really want to focus on today for you guys is a little bit more of a grown-up theme, but I’m still going to try to make this kid-friendly as I do it. And my focus is going to be in three parts. In the first part, I’m going to tell you a little bit about how our ideas about dinosaurs have changed radically since I was five years old and into dinosaurs. And in the second part, which’ll be the major part of my presentation, I’ll discuss many of the new discoveries – some of which are weeks old, some of which are months old, and usually most within the past decade. And then at the very end, I want to take a few minutes to talk about why we should care. I mean after all, these things have been dead for millions of years, right? Why should we care? Yes, it’s something that kids love, maybe because they’re big and monstrous and extinct, but should we really care about them at this particular juncture in history? And my argument is that yes, dinosaurs have a whole lot to teach us, if only we care to listen. I’ll be trying to make that point as well.

But we all know dinosaurs are everywhere, and they have been for a long time. [slide^^^] This is an image imbedded in my brain that influenced me as a kid. At five years old I remember staring at this picture in a wonderful book with very large images. And this particular image shows an animal called Brachiosaurus, one of the biggest animals that ever lived on land. And it shows it living in a lake. It was thought that Brachiosaurus and all of its kin had to live in lakes, because they were simply too heavy to walk around on land, and therefore they must have fed on plants at the bottom of these lakes. In addition to that, there were animals like Stegosaurus, which was my favorite as a kid, with the plates running down its back and the spikes at the end of its tail, but check out this one. Very drab, kind of brown, the tail dragging on the ground, the feet are all sprawled to the side – this is not an animal going anywhere quickly. And this is an animal that looks like it’s not going to go anywhere, period – this is a duckbilled dinosaur, and you can see that great duck bill, the tail dragging on the ground - we thought that they must have lived like ducks, dabbling along the edges of ponds, eating water plants, etcetera. And even the tyrant king, Tyrannosaurus rex, was thought of as more like Godzilla, [Scott jumps into his best stompy Godzilla impression] kind of lumbering around the landscape, not going very fast, dragging its tail on the ground, with its body held upright.

Well, all of a sudden things changed, dramatically. Dinosaurs were reinvented. When they were reinvented, they were supercharged. [slide] This is T. rex. Note the different body posture – the body’s now horizontal, the tail’s straight off the back acting as a counterbalance for the front end of the body, and instead of lumbering around, T. rex is now sprinting

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