Armin Schmitt
Appearances
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
That is right. All dinosaurs share the same last common ancestor.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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...
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
And so we can say that some dinosaurs were actually smarter than others. And we can say that some dinosaurs had a cerebration coefficient, which means the size of the brain relative to their body mass, that is comparable to modern birds and maybe even small mammals. So they were pretty smart.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
I cannot say this for sure, but some dinosaurs were able to vocalize. And we know a very good example, for example, is Parasaurolophus, which is a herbivorous dinosaur with a long crest on its back of its head. And these crests, they were
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
hollow and they were connected to the nasal region so they could actually create sounds like it like blowing a horn or something like that so they could vocalize and other dinosaurs probably did the same so if you look at jurassic park they sound like lions or wolves or things like that but in reality they probably made noises more closely to ostriches or crows or things like that
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
That is correct. So the last non-avian dinosaurs, all the dinosaurs that are not birds, died out about 66 million years ago when this very large asteroid struck Earth close to the Yucatan Peninsula. And the first humanoid dinosaurs,
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
ancestors of humans they showed up in the fossil record maybe 300 000 years ago so there's a a gap of 65 million years in between those two events and so what happened what what what brought the end of dinosaurs Yeah, so 66 million years ago, there was an asteroid that struck Earth. And this asteroid was so massive that it created a huge earthquake. And it actually was so powerful and so large.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
It's about the size of Manhattan. and this this big huge rock from space crashed into earth and it actually penetrated the crust so and it was so massive that it created tsunamis with a height of 3 000 feet and they traveled the entire globe and there were wildfires that were incredibly hot like a pizza oven and and they caused the
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
rocks to melt in the vicinity of the impact and actually rain glass for a couple of hours and maybe even days. And then because of the debris, there was ash in the atmosphere and that caused the atmosphere to go dark. And then a lot of the plants died and then there was a food shortage. And also the temperatures dropped massively because there was no sunshine, no sunlight. And then
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
in the following month or maybe in the following years all the dinosaurs went extinct because they could not recover and they could not create enough offspring to compensate for this massive loss of life so i would imagine a lot of other species went away as well That is true. Yeah.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
So I think what would help the mammals, our ancestors, to survive was that they were much more caring for their offspring. And they put a lot more effort in protecting the offspring. And dinosaurs, because of their massive size and because they all laid eggs, they could not care for their young.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
Yeah, so we find fossils from dinosaurs all over the world. We actually found fossils of dinosaurs in Antarctica and in very remote places such as the Gobi Desert or even in the Sahara Desert in Africa. but we can only find dinosaur fossils in sediments and only in sediments from the Mesozoic age, that is like from 252 million years to 66 million years.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
We don't find any dinosaurs before that and we don't find any dinosaurs after that except birds.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
That depends where you live. So if the backyard that you're describing is of Mesozoic age, so if the sediments in your backyard the age of the sediment is between 66 and 252, or maybe 235 million years old, then there is a chance that you actually might find something.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
And especially in North America, we see a lot of regions, especially in the Midwest, they are actually on ground that is as old as the dinosaurs. But the hunt goes on, yes? That is very true. 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.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
If I want to look for dinosaur fossils, then I would, in the North American continent, I would probably go to places such as South Dakota or Montana or Wyoming or Colorado or Utah. These are very fossiliferous regions where we find dinosaurs.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
So nowadays, you know, there was a couple, an odd couple, if I may say so, of two scientists, American scientists, and they were looking for... dinosaur fossils in the 1870s when the midwest was still the wild west and Over time, they became rivals and they were actually fighting each other and they were trying to out-compete each other and they were trying to find more fossils than their rival.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
But nowadays, it's not about finding new fossils and new dinosaurs and creating new records. That is also nice. It's a side effect. But today, we want to understand how did they live? How did they eat? How did they procreate?
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
um how did they uh survive certain catastrophes and were they able to to breathe actively did they have a metabolic rate that's comparable to to birds today or more like crocodiles because dinosaurs are closely related to both birds and crocodiles so we want to know are they more like crocodiles or are they more like birds and then we find dinosaurs with feathers and then we want to know okay so who is the first
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
dinosaur to evolve feathers and and which group of dinosaurs evolve these feathers and are these feathers capable of powered flight like we have in in most birds today or were they just uh for display for sexual display to to attract mates so so feathers have a lot of functions and it's not only for flight
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
so for me um i always want to find a dinosaur fossil that will help us explain a certain aspect of the dinosaur anatomy or the dinosaur biology we want to understand for example why
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
the birds were able to survive this mass extinction event and all the others died out there was actually a group of of dinosaurs that was very similar to to the birds and we call them the an antonythines and that means In English, that translates to something like the opposite birds. So they were very much like birds. They could fly. They had feathers. They lived in trees. They laid eggs.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
And they were about the same size as modern birds. But they did not survive. And the ancestors of today's birds, they were able to survive. And we cannot really understand why that is. And this is something that is really fascinating. And this is something that keeps me up at night.
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The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
Well, thank you very much, Mike, for having me. It was a pleasure showing up.
Something You Should Know
The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?
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.