Dave Hone

There's loads of... Like, we still never really explored India very much.

We're starting to find entirely new beds in places like Ecuador.

Argentina, we know, has a ton of stuff, but we've never excavated there very much.

Australia, we know, there's a ton of stuff we haven't excavated there very much.

So there's lots of places...

even now, to still go through.

The same way, more or less, that people did in the 1750s or whenever you first start getting them.

For dinosaurs in particular, but this is true of the vast majority of stuff, there's essentially two ways of doing it.

The simple one is...

Where you have quarries of particularly things like lithographic limestone, so the printing limestones, or stuff that's very similar to that, sometimes that's often volcanic, you get these super, super, super fine layers of sedimentation.

And that's where you get these places of exceptional preservation.

Whenever you see, like, the feathers or...

Almost always, whenever you see feathered dinosaurs, it's like, oh, we got the skin, we got the claws, and like the whole skeleton's laid out.

So Archaeopteryx being like the first bird in this absolute classic example, it's from these beds.

And there you find them by basically splitting limestone.

We don't usually dig for them.

It's because there are quarry workers and people who are already doing this because the stone is useful.

Because there might be one decent fossil for every, you know, few hundred tons of rock you shift.

In which case, you could get every paleontologist in the world there for a couple of years and you wouldn't find very much.

You rely on the fact that there's hundreds of guys doing this constantly.