Why Most Fossils Are Incomplete
Vložit
- čas přidán 31. 05. 2023
- In 1990, fossil collectors in South Dakota stumbled across a dinosaur that turned out to be a really big deal. Not just because it was a T. rex - basically the most popular dino out there - or because it ended up in Chicago’s famous Field Museum… but because of the number of bones it had.
LEARN MORE
**************
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Taphonomy: the branch of paleontology that deals with the processes of fossilization
- Debris flow: a moving mass of loose mud, sand, soil, rock, water and air that travels down a slope under the influence of gravity
SUPPORT MINUTEEARTH
**************************
If you like what we do, you can help us!:
- Become our patron: / minuteearth
- Our merch: dftba.com/minuteearth
- Our book: minuteearth.com/books
- Share this video with your friends and family
- Leave us a comment (we read them!)
CREDITS
*********
Kate Yoshida | Script Writer, Narrator and Director
Arcadi Garcia i Rius | Illustration, Video Editing and Animation
Nathaniel Schroeder | Music
MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC
neptunestudios.info
OUR STAFF
************
Lizah van der Aart • Sarah Berman • Cameron Duke
Arcadi Garcia i Rius • David Goldenberg • Melissa Hayes
Alex Reich • Henry Reich • Peter Reich
Ever Salazar • Leonardo Souza • Kate Yoshida
OUR LINKS
************
CZcams | / minuteearth
TikTok | / minuteearth
Twitter | / minuteearth
Instagram | / minute_earth
Facebook | / minuteearth
Website | minuteearth.com
Apple Podcasts| podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
REFERENCES
**************
David A. (2013). Evidence for taphonomic size bias in the Dinosaur Park Formation (Campanian, Alberta), a model Mesozoic terrestrial alluvial‐paralic system. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 372(), 108-122. doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2012.06.027
Cashmore, D. D., & Butler, R. J. (2019). Skeletal completeness of the non‐avian theropod dinosaur fossil record. Palaeontology, 62(6), 951-981. doi.org/10.1111/pala.12436
Cashmore, D. D., Mannion, P. D., Upchurch, P., & Butler, R. J. (2020). Ten more years of discovery: revisiting the quality of the sauropodomorph dinosaur fossil record. Palaeontology, 63(6), 951-978. doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6hdr7sqxb
Dean, C. D., Mannion, P. D., & Butler, R. J. (2016). Preservational bias controls the fossil record of pterosaurs. Palaeontology, 59(2), 225-247. doi.org/10.1111/pala.12225
Mannion, P. D., & Upchurch, P. (2010). Completeness metrics and the quality of the sauropodomorph fossil record through geological and historical time. Paleobiology, 36(2), 283-302. dx.doi.org/10.2307/40792289 - Věda a technologie
In one of his humorous essays Mark Twain described how he helped assemble the largest Brontosaurus ever found. It was 57 feet long and 16 feet tall. He then says "We had nine bones and the rest was Plaster of Paris."
how did they know it was the largest
@@Time_Rat "... ever found ..."
@@MarcColten73 Hopefully when I become a Paleontologist I can find 10 brachiosaurus Bones
to add to that, brontosaurus never actually existed in the first place
@@aerozord As of 2015 they are considered as a different genus from Apatosaurus according to some researchers.
Openly explaining the limitations of paleontology and other areas of science instead of pretending like we have all the answers goes a long way towards building trust and scientific literacy. Thank you!
So true. It's frustrating when you hear people make arguments that the _"missing link"_ (as if it's some kind of singularity) proves that evolution is incorrect. The more people know and understand about how data is collected, the more reasonable they become.
Exactly
Honestly sounds like a point I just thought of, that we don’t know everything that existed in the past, and we certainly can’t claim to know what *didn’t* exist, we can only know what little we’ve discovered so far, and while more discoveries are still being made many more will probably remain undiscovered forever
@@DemPilafian missing bone means theres a man in the sky controlling everything. evolutionists owned. creationist: 1 evolutonist: 0
@@critiqueofthegothgf You're mistaken -- it's actually a giant ball of spaghetti.🍝
You probably confuse scientists with religious leaders and books.
One of the first digs I was on was a large hadrosaur that had likely been burred in a flash flood since it was roughly 80% complete and was preserved so well there were skin impressions and other soft tissue impressions that would have otherwise been lost. I think the only thing missing from the skeleton was most of the tail and some toe bones but just about every other bone was accounted for. There was also a ton of plant material like well preserved pine cones and also turtle shells and fish bones. For something that died ~80 million years ago (Older than Sue) it was in great condition.
Another time I also found a baby rex tooth that was from an individual that wasn't even half grown. It was just the tip and was only about the size of my pinky nail but it had the same kind of serrations that you would see on an adult's tooth. Also interesting comparison, it would have been smaller than a Nanotyrannus' tooth if it was compleate and nanos have different serrations on their teeth.
Did the hadrosaur end up in a museum or something?
@@user-Aaron- yeah I was digging with a college that also was a public repository and museum so the hadrosaur stayed with the college and I got to also help prep it out for another geology class and much of it is on display in the museum.
The rex tooth was also with a museum and it's somewhere in storage right now (there was a change of hands of the museum and apparently the original people didn't organize well so it's a bit of a mess, and the building is old and the second story that was being used as storage ended up being compromised since the ceiling fell in, having no funding is "fun")
The crazy shit is that when Sue was walking around your Hadrosaur was already a fossil
@@arcosprey4811 I know time is wild! Like the college I worked for had collections from the Triassic to the Cretaceous all found in roughly the same area and it was surreal to just stand in the lab and think about the time between the fossils.
The 150 million years that dinosaurs have been around also make it hard to figure out what they looked like since you can find a Hadrosaur that's 80myo and 66myo and they can look very similar but chances are they aren't the same species.
Is it on display in a museum?
Makes me think of the 30 something iguanodons found in a Belgium coal mine.
Most of the skeletons we complete, which makes the iguanodon by far one of the most studied and well understood species, as no other Dino species has that many complete skeletons
I was living in South Dakota when it was found and when it "ended up" at the Field Museum. The story in between those two events is also fascinating (and a little infuriating). Not sure if you want to tackle the legal ramifications that can come from fossil hunting, but it might make an interesting video.
While the situation around sue specifically was ridiculous and handled very poorly, fossils should belong to the government by default. If you really want to have fossils make casts of them. These are valuable pieces of our natural history and their value is in being studied, once they become private property they’re locked away from science, they’re useless, and even may be lost forever since these people probably don’t know how to maintain them or they may just end up lost after some time. It’s ridiculous how bad the situation is in the states, there are many new genuses waiting to be discovered for millions of years only to be lost to some random guy who bid the most money. Even if they are handled well private ownership is still an issue as it overinflates the prices of these specimens making it harder for museums to collect material to study and restricts the research of the animal, one of the fundamental principles of science is reproducibility, if the owner restricts who can study that fossil it makes it very difficult to verify the results, a prime example being Dakotaraptor, the fossils are being well maintained but because they’re private property we don’t even know if the genus is even valid since we don’t know what exactly the material is.
This is almost a century after the bone wars of Marsh & Cope. I wonder what happened.
Happy to see a fellow South Dakotan, and as the son of one of Pete Larson's lawyers, it makes my heart sing to hear somebody cares about this subject
@@pierrecurie The short and oversimplified version is that it was a dispute over ownership of Sue. The gory details involve allegations of federal crimes, soldiers pressed into service to seize fossils, and a court case to define (some of) the limits of Native American trust land.
@@seamusduffy983 The most infuriating thing to me was that, once again, the big city wins out over Rural America. Imagine if all those people who went to Chicago to see Sue had come to the Black Hills instead.
This means that 100% fossilization would only be possible if there was a natural version of Han Solo's carbon freeze.
There have been some creatures that were discovered intact, typically frozen entirely in ice, but I don't think any of them were as old as dinosaurs.
Honestly the rarity of fossilization makes me wonder, it’s entirely possible for entire species to leave no record of their existence
I remember hearing on Kurzgesagt video that tropical jungles, where the majority of terrestrial species exist, it’s pretty difficult if not impossible for fossils to form, and considering much of the world had a similar environment for most of history… there’s no telling what all might’ve been lost to the sands of time
I hear people say there’s no record of something having existed in the fossil record, but that doesn’t mean it never existed, just that there’s no evidence to say it *does* exist
Not to mention jellyfishes and other organisms that have nothing to fossilize.
@@pierrecurie true, but jellyfish can leave behind imprints, and lagerstätte fossils do exist of them.
There's probably thousands if not millions of dinosaurs species that never been fossilized, and billions of other extinct animals.
There’s a dinosaur footprint fossil museum in Connecticut, USA. The vast majority of footprints in this large preserved piece of land are quite similar to Dilophosaurus, but there are slight variations to the footprint, as well as the fact that it was unlikely Dilophosaurus lived there. This museum of footprints is the only record of this mysterious dinosaur (to my knowledge) and we may never know more about it than this. And the fact that so many footprints were preserved is truly insane.
@@ADudeNamedLucky Fascinating!
Also reminds me. Just like with fossils, we’re more likely to find footprints of animals that were very common, and I’d imagine animals that were big enough (and heavy enough) to leave noticeable footprints that were able to last through the ages
Many smaller and rarer animals are likely to vanish without a trace, their existence never known to science
As a fossil myself, I can confirm that this video is 100% correct
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Hey Mozart, you haven't done anything new for over 200 years, has something happened to you?
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I'm disappointed. I was expecting a fossil of Robespierre.
When u droppin ur next album?
A great, thorough explanation of an important but often misunderstood area of science - thank you! Glad I'm a supporter of such great work
I never thought about it, but addressing survivorship bias must be pretty huge in paleontology
How many times when you are out hiking in the wilderness do you come across a complete skeleton? Usually is a few bones, maybe a skull. It’s even worse in some environments like dry aired ones where there is little chance of being buried and fossilized.
That sounds scary. If you do, then 🏃♀️
Is it true the fossils they display at museums are actually replicas, and the real bones are kept stored away to prevent them from being damaged?
I wouldn't blame the archaeologists if they do
@C-Rex
First of all, understand that the fossils are NOT BONE! They are ROCK! The organic bone has been mineralized. And that makes them VERY HEAVY!
So light weight materials are used to model the total skeleton and to fill in where it is missing.
You CAN see some actual fossils, but don't expect the giant dinosaurs that are displayed to be the actual fossilized bones!
Generally, but they do show real fossils too, usually behind glass.
Museums use fibreglass resin and plaster moulds for most of the displayed dinosaurs
I did see a displayed ankylosaur fossil in the natural history museum in London it was a giant slab of rock with the animal splattered on it completely mineralised
Depends. Most dinosaurs on display are replicas. Some especially older specimens are the real deal.
The Yale Peabody Museum for example has real mounted skeletons and you can see the visible difference between the real bones and the fillers.
Another one worth the visit is Cliff a real triceratops skeleton located at Boston's museum of science.
Well mostly. Cliff's head is not mounted but instead is located some ways away and his tail includes bones we now know were actually a Hadrosaur's.
A wild Archen appeared. 2:25
2:33 I've never heard the term gantlet used instead of gauntlet, but apparently they're both technically correct in this example. I'm curious about the particular reasoning behind this choice.
Maybe it wasn't so much a conscious choice as a regional variation? "Gantlet" might be more common in some places than others.
That's nothing. I've been listening to a lot of BBC podcasts recently, and those Brits screw up the pronunciation of countless words. It's amazing they can even complete a sentence!
For the longest time, I thought Dalek had an R in it.
@@DemPilafian Actually Brits are the original native English speakers and you Americans are the one who had been screwing up the language.
@@kane2742 In upstate New York, we call them "steamed gantlets"
At 1:59: Yoshi, a character from the Mario franchise is featured in this video.
At 2:08: Dry Bones, an enemy from the Mario franchise, is featured in this video.
At 2:24: Archen, the First Bird Pokémon from the Pokémon franchise, is featured in this video.
I'm not sure they intended it to be a dry bones, which is a skeleton koopa, but rather a skeleton yoshi.
Cranidos is in the video too
@@PunishedFelix Correct, at 0:56
Lenora (normal gym leader from Black and White) is one of the characters watching Sue's skeleton near the end
@@joecab1 Thank you for pointing me out about Cranidos, the Head Butt Pokémon from the Pokémon franchise. I somehow didn’t see that coming, almost like Kecleon, the Color Swap Pokémon.
1:58 Nooo Not my poor boi Yoshi 😢
2:24 They also got Archen 😂😅
0:58 love the cranidos cameo, and the reference to how Gamefreak made the pachycephalosaurus pokemon a carnivore for some weird reason
It's not just dinos. The Denisovans found in Denisova Cave were recent enough to compare their DNA with other members of the genus Homo, but consisted of just teeth and bone fragments.
So that's the reason why we have never found a complete Yoshi skeleton?
2093: we find a complete yoshi skull, leg, and shell. Then 5 years later the rest of the skeleton is discovered.
I saw Sue at the Field Museum (and Maximo, my beloved) a few years back and I love her set up so much. Turning the corner to see her is so wonderfully set up. I’d go back to Chicago just to go again
I love watching your videos. They give a great understanding of a topic, it’s very well thought out, and the drawings make so much better to watch!
Great video, as always! Would love a video on the fossilization process itself, the chemistry involved, the events or environments that lead to it being more or less likely to occur, etc. 💚
The most common occurrence is ending-up in the estuaries at the end of a watershed/habitat where the object would sink into the anoxous muck which is akin to a salt marsh where the Halite would exchange electrons with gypsum, fluorite, and upon deeper burial with other minerals in the succession of the pseudo-morf process. No fossil book ever mentioned that Salt would be a factor. Go figure!
Love all the Pokemon references.
A great video as always!
She is Sue-per lucky to end up in a museum 😂
czcams.com/users/shorts3EnVO76vQUw?si=vC_YuD_3g8iqY_6y
You can rarely even find full skeletons of animals in the woods that died a year ago.
Look man if I can't recover all of the bones of a squirrel from a designated pot of sifted dirt after procrastinating for three years, I can only imagine how hard it is for those things to make it millions of years
I LOVE this daily life bubble
I remember seeing some theory that T Rex arms are so tiny because they could get bitten and infected by other T Rex, love seeing that little theory get some recognition here as well :D
Good content as always. I notice that the subtitles are done properly. Does one of your team do that? It makes a refreshing change from the usual software-generated stream-of-consciousness-style jumble.
Lol, great topic, and loved seeing all the random prehistoric Pokemon scattered throughout the video! 😄
Love the realistic dinosaur illustrations!
I love prehistory please make more that video
Great video!
Awesome! What a find!
In 1993, a 70% complete skeleton of a Giganotosaurus was discovered in Patagonia, Argentina. The Giganotosaurus may have been larger than the T-Rex (open discussion). The skeleton itself is laid on the ground, since fossilized bones are two heavy, but a replica of the skeleton can be seen in the Ernesto Bachmann Paleontological Museum, hanging just over the original.
Amazing video
So cool!
Kate's puns are best!
Yosho was a koopa all along :O You're blowing my mind
I like how they sneak a pokemon in the video. Very informative!
This video is amazing.
Really interesting.. I had not considered the last point where it could become uncovered say100,000 years ago and then get destroyed / washed away. REALLY RARE!
I love the Archen pun next to those maiasaura
Happy dino-month ❤
0:59 cranidos is based on the Pachycephalosaurus, wich is was an herbivore, not a scavanger. Its pokedex entry in ultra moon is
"Its hard skull is its distinguishing feature. It snapped trees by headbutting them, and then it fed on their ripe berries". However some scientists belive that Pachycephalosaurus may have eaten some meat.
Me: **Watches the video**
Yoshi: **dies**
Me, out loud: **gasp** "NOOOO!"
I blame Mario
0:46 Sonia?
How many individual animals would fossilized?
Take the current population of the US - about 330 million.
Now take ONE PERSON! And have their skeleton fossilize. NOW, minimally 65 million years later, only about 130 of that ONE PERSON'S fossilized bones remain... SOMEWHERE in the entire US. Go find that one fossilized person!
It's amazing that we have ANY fossils at all.
It is a very rare condition. There are a few small areas that are more likely to have fossils, and we have found many of them. But given how many animals there MUST HAVE been alive... what we find in very localized places is indeed rare.
I feel bad. Being (beyond)broke, i can only support your work by "liking" and subscribe. As for sharing, not many friends, of which none shares my passion for sciences :(
1:58
* insert a Yoshi death sound effect *
Yoshi no😱😭
Sueper cool!!
What I find even more amazing than this is the fact that scientists are still able to piece together the most likely real-life appearances and remaining skeletal structure of even very incomplete prehistoric animals, using phylogeny, precise measurements and more to piece the fossil record together like a puzzle. We can find a single leg bone and be like "Yup, this was a Sauropod and it was probably about as long and heavy as several city busses.
We owe palaeontology so much. Heck, the study of old fragmentary bones has given us an image of the past that make religious fables look tame and dull by comparison...
I loved the references to Yoshi and Pokémon 🎉
Poor Yoshi!
2:00 Noooo Yoshi!!!🥺
Pterosaur fossils look like they got whacked with a fly swatter and just left there. I’m shocked how complete those hollow boned dragons were when dug up.
Supporting y'all with a like and a comment, until I can do more.
1:58 NOOOOO YOSHI 😭
My father represented the paleontologists who found Sue in the subsequent litigation surrounding the ownership of the fossil. Really encourage anyone who is interested in Sue to watch the documentary Dinosaur 13
I'm curious about the position skeletons are found. Were the bone parts generally located where each appendage was supposed to be or was it a random pile they had to puzzle together?
There's a famous fossil of a velociraptor and protoceratops who died during some sort of interaction. (The proto is biting the raptor's hand). It's one of the most intact fossils ever found.
But yeah it's also common to find jumbled bones piled up by floodwater before they fossilized.
@@LimeyLassen So cool! Do you know if Sue was a jumble? It seemed like it might ahve been more intact.
@@confusingdot , the fossil was jumbled up when it was discovered. Reportedly, the hips were above the skull and the legs were mixed with the ribs.
They find both, and there's actually a term for it! A skeleton is "articulated" if all of the bones are still in position and "disarticiulated" if all of the bones are out of place.
Regardless if the bones were in a pile any paleontologists would know where each bone goes. Humans and most vertebrates share the same bones.
wow 😮
Wow 😮
We’re lucky we had the Psittacosaurus and Borealopelta to be perfectly preserved
When I finish building my time machine the first thing I'm gonna do (after visiting 30-year-old me with some _serious_ life advice) is pop back and see what happened to Sue.
1:58 R.I.P MY BOY YOSHI
2:51 is that like rose quartz at the top (around the head) from Steven Universe also maybe glyph from TOH
Paleontology, Is Honestly my favorite, Science Area...!!! 💯🦖🦴
love to see Cranidos at 0:57
Sue the T Rex reminds me the first boss of Minions on the land🤣
The Archen at 2:24 makes me
Unless you're looking in East Asia, where it seems each recovered specimen is a 70%+ complete articulated masterpiece.
1:58 NOO YOSHI
I wish they'd have altered the skull since it was the one major bit that didn't get well preserved.
Is Sue featured in the film National Treasure?
Honestly while this video is good I feel that little bit at the end isn’t an incredible conclusion, while I do definitely think that less popular dinosaurs and especially non-dinosaur prehistoric animals should get was more attention and research, you really can’t get much at all from just a tooth or fragements. For a tooth you could look at isotopes to figure out the internal temperature or what food it was taking in but because of how undiagnostic teeth are (for dinosaurs at least), the most we can really say is some carnivore/omnivore/herbivore lived here and *maybe* what family it belonged to and very rough size estimates. There’s a reason fragmentary fossils aren’t studied or celebrated, you just can’t figure out a lot of the biology and trying to just leads to problems, also I am referring to fragmentary as in VERY fragmentary, not as in the 30% complete that more popular sources would call fragmentary. Also while I am usually a fan of the visuals here it isn’t great in terms of education. The tyrannosaurus showing three fingered pronated hands at 2:59 and I don’t even know what is happening on the left but at the very least that is absolutely not how they stood in a neutral position.
WOOHOO!
Cool
Dino-sue-r
Lmao not poor yoshi 😂
And then you have sharks, which pretty much only leave teeth and skin denticles, but leave them in large numbers. We have Thousands of megalodon fossils. All of them are teeth.
Imagine becoming a fossil and being found by aliens in the farrr future who are so different and advanced from you but still came from the same planet. And their ancestor was your lunch.
surely there are so many dinosaurs that would just never have met those conditions and therefore so many we don't even know existed
Yes. Especially very small ones. Dinosaurs. Their fossils would crumble away sooner and more easily.
1:58 Yoshi and Dry Bones
The yoshi image was guuud.
Are you implying that dry koopas are former yoshis?
i feel like there was a missed opporutnity for the shel silverstein song, MY NAME IS SUE HOW DO YOU DO!? NOW YOU GONNA DIE!"
HEEHEE.
the cranidos at 0:59
2:51 is that ithkuil in the stained glass??
OMG I can't believe somebody noticed but yes it is!! It has some mistakes (I've only just begun to learn) but I'm glad this little nerdy bit has managed to find someone. Wämfá liöš!
-the illustrator of this video
@@ArcadiGarciaRius Neat! unfortunately i dont know any ithkuil myself, but its so cool that you put little details like that in the video!
Related conlang sidenote: have you heard of clong craft? its a minecraft server that simulates the natural development and evolution of languages! joined just a few days ago, been having a blast!
How common were some of the more well-known dinosaurs, such as T-Rex? Compared to animals living today, for example?
I would imagine that's a pretty hard question to answer, given all of the biases that shape our sample size of each organism, not to mention how much the individual samples are stretched across time.
Our best bet is probably to look at the prevalence of creatures of the modern day sorted by size, and assume that prehistoric creatures of a given location and era followed a similar pattern and make deductions according to that.
They didn't have to do Yoshi like that.
The final filter is to be dug up after the 19th century or whereabouts. Before that there isn't the understanding that these are incredibly old, and no impetus to try and find and preserve fossils intact. Humans have been around for millennia and all the easily found fossils would've been dug up, but we've been attributing them to dragons and giants instead. At worst they're ground up for "medicine".
well, not only SUE the T-REX is so well preserved also the Skeleton of "Big Al" the allosaur kept at the Museum of the Rockies, he had a BBC documentary, entirely dedicated to him, entitled "The Ballad of Big Al".
Yoshi became a dry bones. Now I have to question all the info in this video. Maybe Sue wasn't even called Sue back then but rather Susan.
wait, T. rex was a rare species? the amount of fossils we have made me think it was quite a common carnivore.
*relatively* rare. being a carnivore it is already more rare than it's pray.
Think about it: for each lion how many zebra/buffalo/gnu/whatever are?
hello Sue
Yea I’d Say This Is 100% Accurate
That vocal fry
I see your Cranidos animators
Not surprised why fossilization is hard to be complete, cuz at least one of them is a defeatist.
Dinosaur gerrrrrr