Armin Schmitt
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Armin Schmitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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We find fossils today more than ever. Even this year is a very important year for fossils because we have already described 46 new species of dinosaurs only this year.
their beginnings were very humble they were very small the first dinosaurs that we know from the fossil records that are about 230 to 235 million years old they were tiny by comparison they were about the size of a cat or maybe the size of a dog and only later they became increasingly large and at the very beginning they were still competing against the crocodile ancestors and against synapsids which are the mammal ancestors and only
after a large mass extinction at the end of the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago, they out-competed all the other species and then became the rulers. And by that, I mean they conquered all... territory or terrestrial land. We find dinosaurs in the fossil record from all continents, even Antarctica or Australia.
They have conquered regions that were inaccessible for other animals because they had an elevated metabolic rate, so they were more active. They could run fast.
and also most of them at the beginning were bipedal and they carried their arms and legs under their body so they had straight arms and straight legs which made it easier for them to run and also the arms did not press against the lungs so they could breathe easily
While lizards, for example, they cannot run and breathe at the same time, so they have to hold their breath for a little while and then they run very fast, but then they have to catch their breath and only then they can continue to run. But dinosaurs like mammals today could run continuously.
So in nature, it's always better to be bigger because then you're less likely to become the source for other animals' food. And if you're big, then you're less likely to be hunted down, less likely to be killed, less likely to be eaten. And the dinosaurs had very special body shapes that enabled them to grow bigger than mammals today.
Yeah, so the largest of them all were the long-necked dinosaurs, and they could grow up to 100 feet in length, maybe even larger. Just because we find one that is about 100 feet long doesn't mean that that was the biggest. biggest specimen of this particular species. Chances are there might have been some specimens that were even larger and we just haven't found them yet.
But we know for sure that some of the long neck dinosaurs could grow up to about 100 feet long and maybe up to 100 tons in body mass. So that is quite enormous. And the largest predators like Tyrannosaurus, for example, they could grow up to 45 feet in length. and they could weigh as much as two elephants, African elephants.
The first dinosaurs, they started out as meat eaters and only later some of them became herbivorous. So they started eating plant matter. And that is true for the sauropods. No sauropod ever ate anything else but plants. So they were all vegetarians. But the so-called theropods to which Tyrannosaurs and Allosaurs belong, they were carnivorous. They were meat eaters.
yeah so that is a very good question and the short answer would be that in some cases we do actually find tissue we find skin impre skin impressions on rocks so we know that they had scales and some of the smaller theropods they actually had feathers and later on they they all become feathered like all the theropods the meat eaters and some of the um
herbivores they had so-called proto feathers so they look like hair but but um biologically they are more closely to feathers than hair but like the long neck dinosaurs a very big dinosaurs they had scales and tyrannosaurs they had scales so they didn't have feathers so we know that and then in some cases we actually can reconstruct uh the color but this is very limited to very few species
That is right. All dinosaurs share the same last common ancestor.
All birds are also. So birds are basically a very special kind of dinosaur. And they're the only surviving dinosaurs after the end Cretaceous mass extinction event when the asteroid struck Earth.
Yeah, surprisingly, like the rannids or lizards that look a lot like dinosaurs, or at least what we think dinosaurs look like, they are actually not as closely related to dinosaurs as chicken or eagles or ravens or things like that.
So they were very abundant because dinosaurs were egg laying animals and they reproduced very rapidly so they could lay eggs two or maybe even three times per year. And they had clutch sizes of up to 30 eggs, maybe thousands of offspring. But the mortality rate of babies was extremely high as well because there were a lot of small raptors that were like hunting for baby dinosaurs.
So actually, that is also a very exciting story because we now have proof that Tyrannosaurus, for example, in fact, did hunt animals such as Triceratops. And we have scars on bones of Triceratops from Tyrannosaurus teeth. And we know that in the same region where we find Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, there's also a duck-billed dinosaur that's called Edmontosaurus. And that was also a very...
good food source for the for the meat-eating tyrannosaurus and we know from scratch marks from from bones from from long-necked dinosaurs that actually those were hunted by allosaurus which is a is an old ancestor to tyrannosaurus but did they fight for territory were they territorial like some animals are or or was it just we we can all get along here but when i'm hungry i might just eat you
Yeah, so we do have some proof that some dinosaurs, we cannot say this for sure for all the dinosaurs, but we know that some dinosaurs actually had interspecies fights about territories or mates during mating season. They were fighting each other like rams or even elephants or giraffes, the male ones. And whoever won the fight, they got to procreate with the female.
Yeah, so what we can do is we can nowadays we have modern technology, we can look at the inside of skulls of dinosaurs with CT or synchrotron scanning devices, and then we can measure the cavity inside of the skull where once the brain was and we can actually locate different areas that were dedicated for sense of smell or sense of hearing, things like that.
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