Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong

The debate over what Pterosaurs and their relatives are covered in has been a very, very long one. Did they have hair? Is it feathers? Is it something completely different? Is it the same integument dinosaurs have? Steven goes over the history of the research and debate of just what is making up their fuzz, how we know, and what it means. See how x-ray, infrared, UV, etc. can be use to study fossils and help draw a better picture of what researchers are looking at. Or what crushing bird feathers can tell us. And just what Pterosaurs needed all that fuzz for.

Sauropods' sizes called for a lot of evolutionary changes to sustain it. Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, and even titanosaurs like Saltsaurus had to leverage several parts of their bodies to keep their bones from literally being too heavy to carry or move, like using air sacs around the bone for support! We've also found that their gigantic size may have had an effect on other parts of their bodies, like their breathing and osteoderms. They could only get so big if they breathed tidally, so instead they evolved a system of flow-through air sacs. It allowed them to overcome the 'dead space' problem even though their necks were incredibly long. We also have evidence that some species may have used their osteoderms to help give calcium to their eggs! This may have come about because their bones are already as light as could possibly be, so they couldn't sacrifice even MORE of the calcium from them. Ultimately this video is a collection of cool, kind of related, sauropod facts !

The show began its life on another channel several years ago. Now that we have a channel of our own, we're slowly bringing those episodes over to join our newer ones (with added corrections/updates). Next is Parasaurolophus!

We worked our way through another pile of mail from you lovely viewers!

Deinocheirus has been a mystery to paleontologists for decades since the discovery of a pair of giant fossil arms in the Gobi Desert. For the longest time, they were the only clue to what sort of creature it could possibly be. This led paleoartists and researchers alike to make some very interesting guesses over the years. Was it a giant tyrannosaur or other theropod? What about a ground sloth? Maybe a giant Deinonychus?! Imaginations ran wild until more material was discovered, and we really weren't ready for the mega goose that we got.