The Dinosaur Detectives of Real-Life Jurassic Parks | Martin Lockley | TED

I'm a paleontologist,

which means I have what I'm told is every seven-year-old's dream job.

(Laughter)

But I don't spend my time digging up the remains of dead animals.

Instead, I'm on the trail of clues left by dinosaurs

and other extinct animals

when they were active and very much alive.

If I were to share with you some tracking tips,

could you also become master trackers and find these same clues?

Why not?

Fifty years ago, most paleontologists thought that fossil footprints,

which we also call trace fossils,

were rare and unimportant.

In fact, some scientific journals actually rejected papers on fossil footprints

without even sending them out for review.

And this was because at that time, it was mostly all about bones.

And you can see this by just looking at how many dinosaur skeletons there are

in museums around the world.

But sometimes these bones don't tell us quite as much as we might think.

Take a look at your own body.

You've got one skeleton, right?

But how much could we really learn about you

and all your day-to-day activities

just by looking at your bones alone?

Not much, perhaps.

Fossil footprints, therefore, help us to bring these bones alive.

They are the nearest thing we really have to motion pictures

or movies of extinct animals.

So there's a big difference between the study of fossil footprints

or trace fossils and bones.

For example, imagine a dinosaur track site the size of a football field

with 5,000 or maybe even 10,000 fossil footprints.

This is direct evidence of the activity of dozens,

possibly hundreds of dinosaurs going about their daily activity.

Sites like this give us dinosaur detectives

the ultimate CSI challenge.

And so it's no wonder

that the famous Sherlock Holmes once said,

“There’s no branch of detective science so important and so much neglected

as the art of tracing footsteps.”

He understood.

He fully understood the importance of fossil footprints

in reconstructing the activity and behavior

of track makers

that had left the scene of the crime.

Fossil footprints bring animals back to life, then.

Today, I'm on the trail of a T-Rex,

tomorrow I'm tracking a Stegosaurus.

The living animal can walk, run, hop, skip, jump,

dig a burrow, excavate a nest.

Tracks will tell us the direction an animal's going in,

whether it was small or large, a juvenile or an adult.

Tracks of fast-moving dinosaurs can even tell us

that they could out-sprint Usain Bolt at 30 miles per hour.

Tracks may also tell us

if an animal was limping or injured

or whether it was traveling alone or in a group.

Tracks, therefore played a pivotal role

in what we call the dinosaur renaissance of recent years.

This is when dinosaurs got a sophisticated makeover

and they were no longer regarded as stupid, defunct failures.

Instead, they were transformed into dynamic, athletic,

intelligent movie stars.

I've probably found and studied

a few hundred fossil footprint sites over the years.

So let me take you on a little field trip to one of my favorite locations,

South Korea.

Here, on the shores of South Korea, we see these rocky steps

and each one represents a mini landscape

a hundred million years old.

If we look at this first surface,

we'll see one of those fast-moving theropods

heading off to the north at high speed.

On the next level,

we see a series of parallel trackways

representing the dinosaurs we call Brontosaurus.

They were probably subadults, not fully grown,

but they were still larger than baby elephants.

On the next level,

we see the tracks of thousands of birds.

These are only one inch long.

But they're indistinguishable from the tracks of a modern sandpiper

or a plover on a lake shore.

Up on the next level,

we see another trackway of a giant.

This is an animal with a footprint three feet in diameter.

It must have weighed 10 tons and been 100 feet long.

On the next level,

we find the extraordinary trackway of a bipedal crocodile.

These are extremely rare,

and they probably looked like the carnivorous dinosaurs

and were just as ferocious at 15 feet long.

Lastly, we step up one more level and we have the tiny tracks of a lizard,

and next to it the tracks of a heron-like bird.

This heron might have been a lizard-eater.

Well, we haven't walked that far along the shoreline,

but we still stepped up through 1,000 years,

represented by five or six layers of strata.

Each surface is a mini landscape.

Each surface is a time-lapse frame

in a documentary about life

along a 100-million-year-old Korean lakeshore.

When we go around this next headland,

we run into a group of schoolchildren with clipboards and tape measures,

and they're busy estimating the size and speed

of a dozen different dinosaurs from their tracks.

Their young teacher is a paleontologist.

She studied fossil footprints for her master's degree,

and since she graduated,

this area has become a national natural monument.

And so above us,

we see a huge new dinosaur museum

and arching up the huge neck of a stainless steel sauropod

or Brontosaurus,

looming over a courtyard studded with dinosaur tracks.

This area has also been designated the Korean Cretaceous Dinosaur Coast,

or the KCDC.

Let's take another field trip

and we'll find ourselves in Colorado.

Meet my friends Ken and Jason.

They're not paleontologists,

but they know the difference between a bobcat track

or a coyote track if they see one.

These two lads have actually found more fossil footprints sites

than most professional paleontologists,

and that's because they've learned how and where to look.

As they say, just observe and you'll see a lot.

We're looking at these extraordinary traces.

They're very puzzling.

What are they?

They looked like they might be digging traces.

Long story short, we figure out that these are the traces

left by dinosaurs excavating what are called pseudo nests.

It turns out that these particular dinosaurs

are the ancestors of modern birds,

and they liked to show off their prowess as nest builders

during the breeding season.

This is an extraordinary discovery

because it’s practically a dinosaurian lover’s lane.

It's a rendezvous for dinosaurian trysts,

a rendezvous for lovebirds.

What's also interesting is that paleontologists,

once they learned that these particular dinosaurs

were the ancestors of modern birds,

they wrote hundreds of scientific papers speculating, and I say speculating,

on whether they used their colored crests and colored feathers to show off

during the breeding season.

They probably did show off.

But here at our feet,

we actually have the first physical evidence

of dinosaur courtship.

And what's more, it tells us

that this behavior went back for a hundred million years.

So males showing off to females

or partners showing off to one another,

it's nothing new.

My dad was actually an ornithologist

and he studied the behavior of modern birds

during their frenzied, energetic activity in the breeding season.

He'd be absolutely astonished by this kind of evidence

of fossil behavior among dinosaurs.

Imagine for a minute these little birds scratching in the sand

and how different it would be to see a giant,

2,000-pound carnivorous dinosaur gouging huge scoops in the substrate.

Imagine the hormonal cries and the frenzied roars.

This seems newsworthy.

We predict that it will be more than just another report

of a dinosaur discovery.

And sure enough,

we make the lead on the "Nature" journal website

and we get into the monologues of the late night talk show comedians.

(Laughter)

I'd be rich if I had a dollar for every person

who told me that they really wish they'd been a paleontologist

when they grew up.

I'd also do OK if I had a dollar for every fossil footprint I found.

But knowing that the Earth's bedrock is full of these treasures,

my motto is quite simple:

Just keep on tracking, keep on exploring.

But the real satisfaction comes from the thrill

of knowing that I can find these sites,

that my friends and colleagues can find these sites,

that people like you can find these sites

and that they have become valued

and protected institutions or destinations.

It's very important that these landscapes,

these ancient landscapes are preserved because they are actual Jurassic parks.

They are places where dinosaurs and extinct animals lived and loved

and fought for survival.

Just as we protect sites like Stonehenge or Pompeii

or the Grand Canyon,

we need to protect these sites for the future.

This is what we call our geoheritage.

It is a memory,

and it's vitally important that we preserve it

for the next seven generations of seven-year-old dinosaur trackers.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)