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Right now we are in the middle

of the river of Giants.

This was a big river system,

very tropical and refreshing,

and it was home to many different giant predato.

If we were just traveling back in time now to this place,

a hundred million years into the past,

we would see these giant crocs, flying reptiles,

big predatory fish,

huge predatory dinosaurs behind us.

So essentially what I'm saying is

there would be many different ways for us to die

in this ancient ecosystem, right?

Paleontology is the science of ancient life.

And dinosaurs play a very prominent role in this story.

Many of the things we worry about now,

like biodiversity loss, extinction events,

climate change, sea level rise, dinosaurs have seen it all.

Understanding the past is extremely important

for our understanding our future.

Almost certainly vertebral.

Did you take a picture of it? We'll match it later on.

There's something really amazing about holding a real fossil.

The sequence of events that has to occur

for an organism to become a fossil is pretty extraordinar,

especially when you talk about things like dinosaurs.

Fossils are like sacred objects in some ways.

No commercial diggers today.

They come in the back way.

I don't see any today.

A fossil in the rock

has a number of positions in time and spac.

It has a geographic position on our Earth now,

and it also, when the animal died,

had a geographic position on the Earth

that is actually different than it is now.

Sometimes, some commercial collectors find a specimen.

I don't know for sure that

they collect them where they say they did

because they don't have any reason to tell you.

And they don't keep particularly good scientific records of them.

And I don't really trust them to keep very good records

because they're only interested in money.

The commercialization of dinosaurs

is creating this whole thing.

One philosophy is, you're interested in the science.

And the other is that you're interested in money.

You know, there's people who have no scruples.

They're selling for millions of dollars worldwide, right?

Millions of dollars are millions of dollars.

What would you do for a million dollars?

In Morocco, fossils disappear all the time.

We're now on a mission, a race against time,

trying to see how many of these treasures

we can rescue for science.

I got pictures

of an amazing saw skate skeleton.

But there's this parallel world that exists here,

and that's of course the world

of fossil trade and fossil hunters.

If you don't figure out a way real fast,

then it's going to be offered to a range of middlemen

and big-time fossil dealers,

and they'll just snatch it away, and you'll never see it again.

So we're about halfway through

an underground tunnel that leads to the Onchopristis si.

It's about 15 meters in

and it's very, very narrow, as you can see.

I can barely fit through these openings.

But it's extremely narrow.

It just goes to show, when you see these specimens in museums,

or you know, collections,

you don't realize how much incredibly hard work

has gone into digging them up.

It's really mind-blowing. This is very dangerous work.

Some of these things, I can break them just with my hand.

And there's an enormous amount of rock on top of me.

Every now and then, these things collapse and bury people alive.

So we've got several people in here now

just to make sure we know

exactly where this specimen was found.

We now have the exact spot

and we've got the GPS coordinates.

So I think that's a wrap for today.

That's wild.

The amount of detail is just crazy

considering where this thing was found.

This one needs some really careful prep,

but when this thing is fully prepped,

it's going to be the Mona Lisa of sclerorhynchids.

The most important thing is: it's here.

It's not in someone's living room.

It is in someone's living room!

But just for the time being.

We have to remember that even today,

almost all big discoveries are made by amateurs,

not by PhD scientists.

And it's so easy to say,

I don't want anything to do with this.

It's usually still a good idea

to keep channels of communication.

There are people here all year long,

tens of thousands of them,

collecting fossils, you know, throughout the country.

They know that we care about these fossils

in a way that none of the commercial dealers do.

The Gobi hasn't changed much

since the time of dinosaurs.

Mongolian fossils are really well-preserved,

almost like the animal died just yesterday.

Our family has a long history with paleontology.

My father was a paleontologist, my brother is a paleontologist,

and I'm a paleontologist.

But also, our great uncle

worked on Roy Chapman Andrews's expedition

that was collecting fossils.

The American Museum of Natural History, back in 1920,

they sent out multiple large expeditions

to different continents.

One of them was an expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews.

He was a scientist at the museum.

At some point, he was the director of the museum too.

They were three years in Mongolia collecting dinosaurs.

They actually made quite a bit of collection.

They discovered the first dinosaur nest in the world.

It all came to New York.

It never went back to Mongolia.

I don't know, this institution probably thinks they own it.

But then, if you think about it,

it's basically the property of Mongolia.

Once a fossil leaves, knowledge leaves with it.

We are losing out.

All of these years, Mongolians have been losers.

And me.

My biggest dream is that all dinosaurs go back to Mongolia.

Hi. Well, thank you very much.

For letting us know.

Because we really welcome tourists to visit fossil sit,

but the fossils are too rich, anybody can find them.

At the same time, we have a poaching problem going on.

So you actually found a nest.

I see there's four or five more eggs in it.

Usually an egg nest has a little over 20 eggs.

The ranger in charge of this area, she can keep it.

Because we don't have a dinosaur museum.

- Oh. - Yeah, that's the problem.

This is the rock, this is the dirt sediment.

This is bone.

Bone is not really rock.

What happens over

the hundreds of thousands or millions of years

is that inside all that bone is marrow cavity.

There's space where blood vessels went through it.

As the soft tissues rot away,

those spaces are filled in with another mineral,

so it makes it heavy.

But the cool thing is that we can actually cut it open

and get information about how the animal grew.

And that's what we do here.

We have a past history, and it is extraordinary.

I mean, it's 4.5 billion years of just incredible stories.

It was the 90s.

A colleague of mine called me up and said,

"Jack, you're in a book.

"It's called Jurassic Park."

And I said, "I hope I didn't get eaten!"

Sometime later, Steven Spielberg called me up and said,

"I'm making Jurassic Park as a movie.

"Would you be interested in being the technical advisor?"

And he said, "By the way, you're in the movie."

He wanted me to spend some time with Sam Neill,

who would play my character,

so Sam could see what a paleontologist was like in life.

I went from having two or three students

to having 18 students after Jurassic Park.

Prior to Jurassic Park, I had maybe 25% female students.

And after Jurassic Park, it was and continues to be about 50/50.

That's an atlas-axis complex from an amphibian.

Oh, cool!

Good job!

You can see the double condyles

where it attaches to the occipital condyle.

So that is the occipital condyle!

- Hey, you have to catalog it. - I already did.

GPSed it and everything.

It's good luck to hold the bone until you find the next one.

Yeah, I love to do that.

I've just never seen anything like that before.

Obviously I don't know shit from Shinola about amphibians.

Not every fossil is scientifically valuable.

And there is not room in all the museums in the world

to house every fossil.

Being able to have the excitement of having

a trace of an animal that lived millions of years ago,

it's fascinating, it gets people excited

about the natural world, about science.

But I think it is really important

that we should protect scientifically valuable fossils.

Fucking hell!

So if you're just some rich guy who wants to have

a triceratops skull behind your desk in your office

to intimidate people or whatever,

I think we should create some kind of scientific committee

that every time somebody's like, "Hey, that fossil is important,

"it should not go into private hands,"

the committee could review it and be like "yes" or "no".

Dinosaur Provincial Park is a place in the middle of Alberta

known since the late 1800s

as being a good source for dinosaur bones.

Alberta has been very lucky in terms of our legislation.

In 1976, the Alberta government passed a law

that just said, all fossils in the province of Alberta

are Crown resources.

We'll allow you to pick up the ones on the surface

and take them home if you want,

but you don't own it, so you can't sell it.

You guys are so lucky, because in the States,

with all these crazy price tags

that are being put on these fossils like Stan

or that Deinonychus that just sold for $8 million for like...

I mean, you look at that...

- Is that what it went for? - Yes, can you believe that?

You look at it and it's probably not even that much real fossil.

It's just all been reconstructed.

These stupid collectors can't tell.

I think we should at least have laws in the States

that protect scientifically valuable specimens.

Just like, have it in place.

Sure, there'll still be scientifically valuable stuff

being sold on the black market.

But if you find out about it, at least that law is in place

to give you legislation to seize the specimen.

It's ridiculous in America that it's just a free for all.

But I guess it's also unsurprising

because nobody cares about science.

It used to be that the worth of a fossil,

nobody really thought about it.

Now, it's a different world

and the price has gone up so dramatically.

The most famous example was Sue, the T-Rex.

Sue is the largest, most complete

T-Rex skeleton ever found.

The Sue skeleton is an interesting piece.

We know where it came from.

It was collected by a commercial collector.

They got it out of the ground really quick.

They weren't interested in studying it in the ground.

It was a monetary decision, not a scientific decision.

I begin with a bid of $500,000.

That was the first dinosaur

to be sold for like millions of dollars.

I've got $2,700,000. 2.7.

3.4 standing.

$7,600,000 up here.

Prior to the Sue skeleton being sold,

ranchers were just fine with donating specimens

or letting us collect what we wanted.

But after they heard that specimen

was worth $8 million, they thought twice about it.

And a lot of people said, "No, I'm gonna sell mine.

"I wanna make millions of dollars."

Hailing from the Hell Creek formation in South Dakota,

Stan is one of the most seen and studied T-Rex of all time.

- Ten million, please. - Ten million dollars.

With the increase in prices in recent years,

Stan the T-Rex, which was collected legally,

sold for 32 million dollars.

And sold. Thank you very much.

It's staggering.

There's no way that institutions

can come up with that kind of money.

Sold!

Big John had been discovered in 2014 in South Dakota

by a commercial paleontologist.

So, somebody actively looking for dinosaurs to sell.

I immediately started to say, "Oh, it's very interesting.

"What are you going to do with such an amazing piece?

"Would you consider to consign for an auction?"

So we have this part that have been cast from other bones.

We have this one that has been 3D printed.

And we have the original bone, that is 60% of the skeleton

and 75% of the skull.

The skull is the most well-preserved part.

This is a fake.

This is one of the restored parts.

This is the real bone. Real bone doesn't sound at all.

We never have 100% of the whole skeleton.

The restoration process is something

that must be really completely understood by the final client.

Part of our job is to understand collectors.

A lot of my clients have told me,

"I really got deep into Jurassic Park

"when I was either a child or a young adult."

That's it: you tell the story and you sell the story.

I spoke with maybe ten people

that are actively going to bid on Big John.

We have art museums, a privately owned foundation,

we have a public science museum that are willing to purchase.

We have investments funds,

cryptocurrency traders

or very wealthy people that just say, "Ah!"

"I can really buy a dinosaur? This is this for real?"

That is a question that I'm always being asked.

And you say, "Yeah, of course."

And we always hope to have two clients

that know each other,

and that don't like so much each other.

When they are in the same sale,

they'll start to fight with each other.

Because it happens all the time.

It's a fight.

It's a fight about the will to purchase the piece.

It's something like an ego war.

When I was a student

studying in the early 90s,

that was a very messy time in Mongolia.

Everything got out of control.

We lost control of the fossil situation.

We had 70 years of communism.

The government was the only job provider.

When the government said,

"I'm not going to provide any more jobs.

"I want to privatize everything,"

50% of employed people were jobless immediately.

And they needed to survive somehow,

and they started selling things.

Scientists would give you maps

and the locations of fossil materials.

They gave away so many landmark details

that looters just can go and dig into those areas.

Jurassic Park comes out in '93.

That was the first year I went to Mongolia.

And by '97, we'd go to a fossil site

and locals and kids and everybody else

were walking up to us with fossils

and offering it for money.

There was the commercial trade.

You know that if you can sell a fossil skull

to a tourist,

there must be somebody out there that'll take a whole skeleton.

People were desperate to survive.

Almost every summer,

there's a load of containers of dinosaurs

leaving the country.

Around the year 2000,

we started noticing an acceleration

in the amount of poaching that went on in Mongolia.

We saw eight destroyed skeletons of Tarbosaurus in one day

and realized that this was really bad,

because it was a different level of poaching

than we'd seen up to that time.

From that time period,

the American Museum of Natural history asked me

if I was interested in studying in the States for paleontology.

So I landed right in New York when I left my country.

Then one morning I was sitting in the Upper West Side,

in a coffee shop.

There's a TV hanging from the ceiling.

On the screen comes a dinosaur.

A rare dinosaur skeleton is about to be sold.

Discovered eight years ago in the Gobi Desert,

the Tyrannosaurus Bataar will be auctioned off this weekend.

Experts say it's one of the most complete skeletons ever.

This is illegal! There used to be a black market,

now they think, "Who would do anything to us?"

I sent an email to Oyungerel,

who was an advisor to the president.

She said, "This is the Mongolian dinosaur!

"Claim it, please, as soon as possible."

So I called my president, and he said,

"Oyungerel's talking about dinosaurs?

"You're supposed to advise me on democracy and human rights!

"What dinosaur are you talking about?"

I asked the president,

"Could you please claim it?

"You're the first person who can claim anything for Mongolia.

"Please claim it."

Today we do something extraordinary.

We return to the people of Mongolia

a 70 million year old dinosaur

that was looted from the rocky sands of the Gobi Desert.

It is a Tyrannosaurus Bataar,

a large, two-footed predator

and cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And under Mongolian law,

never should have left the country.

How did a dinosaur skeleton from the Gobi Desert

end up in a New York auction house

where it sold for over a million dollars?

Theft, fraud and misrepresentation, that's how.

We can go back down this way.

You're going to find an easier way down.

No, I'm not going to find an easier way.

Unless I fall down.

In which case, I'll get down quicker than you.

The water cut quite a hole here many years ago.

You see it up on the higher hills up there.

That's our good stuff.

That's the prime meandering river

that produces nice skeletons.

When a person is collecting something,

especially an isolated bone like this,

the intuitive thing to do

is like everyone else has done for hundreds of years,

and that is to keep the bone intact as well as possible.

But the nice thing about it

is that when it's broken open,

you actually can get all kinds of more information

than you can if it was just all glued together.

I mean, just look out here.

This is beautiful terrain

and it tells just incredible numbers of stories.

Changing environments, changing faunas.

It's all here, all the information

for looking at this 78-million-year-old story.

It's all here. All you have to do is find it.

Ninety percent of the time,

the first question anybody ever asks us is:

"How much money do you make off a dinosaur bone?"

And I say, "I don't sell dinosaur bones."

It's not about the money.

Do people ever just come on your land

that you don't know about? - A lot!

And we have kept this ground

to where it's open for museums.

The bones that are collected go to museums

where everybody can see them

and not hidden in somebody's basement.

Long as I'm still walking up and down these coolies,

we're going to still put dinosaur bones in museums

and showcase them to the whole world.

Cultivating relationships with landowners is really important

because would you pass up $8 million

so a bunch of nerds can know maybe

how T-Rex maybe did such-and-such?

Like, who cares, right? Like, $8 million!

- Good morning! - Good morning.

So good to see you.

Let me come give you a hug.

We met in 2006,

and I was camping on your land...

And I found a partial jaw of a duckbill dinosaur.

But unfortunately, I found it with a pick.

So it is now in several pieces, but there's...

We get a good internal view of it that way.

Yeah, a good skilled preparator

will make it look like it never happened.

Yeah, we really thank you

for donating those fossils to the museum.

Oh, no problem.

I just didn't want them to go to private collectors.

These people out here are doing this for business.

In this museum, more people are going to see them

than if they're with a private collector's somewhere.

Now, if you came up with a T-Rex,

then we're going to have to start talking.

Fair enough.

Just the fact of bringing the dinosaurs

into Paris was a massive challenge.

The skull was able to enter the door

by, I think, one centimetre.

There's part of the world that would say

it's crazy that dinosaurs go to the auction block.

A lot of people don't understand how it's possible.

It's totally possible.

Like, everything in this world is for sale.

But I don't know how many millions

is going to be the result.

It can be two, can be five.

It depends on what kind of clients

stay up to the last second,

and how irrational they will become at one point.

Growing up, German was my mother tongue.

And I went to a French school, but I also learned

the North African Moroccan dialect of Arabic.

Much of what we know about dinosaurs is based

on discoveries from places like North America and Europe.

But there's this one big gaping hole in our knowledge,

our planet's second largest landmass, Africa.

How do we get people in places like Morocco

excited about paleontology

and interested in their ancient heritage?

Working with Moroccan scientists,

and most importantly, their students,

we are telling the story

of paleontology's forgotten continent.

Ready?

Come a little closer. It can't bite you anymore.

- Whoa. - Look at this thing.

When I think of Nizar, I think Spinosaurus.

Nizar is really the one who has this incredible story

of going back to Morocco and hunting down

where these fossils came from.

This is 41.

This is like the very tip of the tail.

Isn't that wild?

There's a couple of breaks here,

but it's pretty remarkable, right?

The Spinosaurus story was

basically the biggest Morocco-related story ever.

This thing is possibly bigger than T-Rex.

Giant sail on its back.

Really strange jaws, you know.

But you can't help think of it as almost...

I don't want to say it's like your pet, but you feel like,

"This is my dinosaur."

Because you spend years and years poring over the bones

and trying to flesh it out in your mind.

It looks so real and majestic.

And, um, it's everything I was hoping it would be

and a lot more.

This is the final resting place

of our Spinosaurus.

There were the leg bones and the foot bones, the hips.

So I suspect that since the back half was almost complete,

I'm pretty sure the front half is also almost complete.

That means there are still some things hidden in here.

We've got to take out this whole chunk here.

And I hope that we can get everything out

before these guys do.

Because this is the bad news.

When I just came up here a moment ago,

I was looking at everything, like, "Good, good."

And then I saw this.

Now we kind of have to play detective

and try to figure out what happened.

Well, let's think about this.

They missed the layer.

This does not look like a successful attempt.

It's worth so much more for us

because it's part of this amazing, unique skeleton.

But to someone else, it's just, you know...

If someone else had found it,

some commercial guy might have just decided

to sell it in chunks

and say, "I'm going to sell individual bones.

"Maybe I'll get more

"than if I sell the whole skeleton, right?"

That's their income.

That's everything they have.

I don't feel like I'm really in a position to tell them

what they can and can't do

unless I can offer them a viable economic alternative

to feed their families.

There's a certain sense of anger.

You feel a little powerless

because there's really not much you can do about it.

You're kind of doing everything you can

to bring as many fossils as you can

into the world of science.

But it's a moment where

you kind of lose your innocence to a certain extent.

One day, dinosaurs suddenly became

an obsession, really.

But it's almost like possession or something,

something that hijacks your brain in some ways.

But you're kind of growing up

and you realize that you'll have to fight

a little harder for your fossils.

We have a Triceratops horridus

from the upper Hell Creek Formation

found in 2014 in South Dakota, United States.

It's a remarkable Triceratops skeleton

complete at 60%

with a 75% complete skull

from the world-renowned deposit of the Hell Creek Formation.

That is really the last window

before the dinosaur's extinction.

This is going to a private collection.

How do you feel about that?

We still don't know its final destination.

And anyway, even if it is going to a private collection,

we cannot in any way limit the bids

from certain individuals or others.

We could have preferences, but, you know...

It's just personal.

We don't decide for the buyer.

KTCC, it's the morning commute.

We got your weather and news for Tucson all day, every day.

All right, here's that time of year again,

Get ready for the largest gem, mineral and fossils show

in the world right here in Tucson, Arizona.

They're saying this year they're expecting 65,000 people

from all over the world. Holy!

Watch yourselves on that morning commute.

It's spread out 15 miles wide.

And it's in motels, hotels stadiums.

There's people from all over the world her.

If I'm not here, people think I'm dead or in jail.

Oh no, no! Not you! Not the "ooh là là" man!

- You are not happy to see me? - I'm always happy to see you!

Hello again!

Hello George. How are you today?

- François, how are you? - Well.

- Good to see you again. - Yes, it's a pleasure.

The skull is 90-plus percent, all the cervical vertebrae.

- The cervical? - Perfect.

The vertebrae all the way back to the tail, perfect.

Oh, and the price?

- It's 150,000. - 150? Ooh!

And for you, François, I can bring the price down 20%

to 120,000, something like that.

You have the sketch, you can send me by email?

You mean the rest of it?

Or I'll come back later and you prepare the folder.

No problem.

I finish my tour of the show.

Okay François. See you later, buddy.

- Wonderful to see you. Bye. - Take care, François.

That's nice.

It's restored here, this part.

Yeah, there's a little bit of restoration there.

Nice pieces. Okay.

And how much is the price? - Forty thousand.

You know that we have some trouble because

some people in the state don't understand what we do.

Yeah, and I think through life,

if you never have any trouble, you haven't done anything.

Yes!

Okay, see you. - Nice to see you again.

Triceratops is always attractive.

It's a question of price. I don't know the price.

- Seven. - Seven for the pair?

That's correct. Really.

But it's up to you to make a good presentation,

maybe with iron steel,

maybe if you have artists who work with the iron.

You can make really amazing things.

What do we have here?

This is from Germany.

It's kind of this legendary, infamous place, right?

Because sometimes you read about the shipment of fossils

that has been intercepted on its way to Tucson

or someone tried to smuggle something into the United States

to sell it at Tucson.

What?

Did I read this right? I mean...

You know, there's a history of dodgy business.

But then at the same time, it's kind of an open secret,

all the big museums are sending someone there

and buying things.

I was wondering where the fish fossils are from.

- From Lebanon. - From Lebanon, okay.

From the Cenomanian Age.

Okay. Yeah. That's an amazing place for fish.

You are in Tucson for the conference this evening?

No, I'm doing a National Geographic show.

Yes, okay.

At the Fox Tucson Theater,

and it just so happened that

this was happening at the same time.

Nizar believes that the world

is still full of undiscovered, ancient treasures

and prehistoric wonders.

You just have to know where to look.

And tonight, he'll show us.

Please welcome Nizar Ibrahim.

So tonight, I'm going to take you

on a journey back in time,

100 million years into the past.

I always tell all my expedition team members

to collect every little fragment of fossil they find.

Because at the end of the day,

what we're really trying to do here

is we're trying to reconstruct and resurrect

an entire ancient ecosystem.

So every little fossil is an important piece.

Okay, wait a minute.

So we're finding little vertebrae like this

that are just very delicate little fossils,

very hard to find.

And the kind of things that people here in Hell Creek

haven't been looking for, you know?

Everybody wants a T-Rex or a Tric.

Triceratops goes extinct shortly after these deposits

that we are working in right now were formed.

This is the end Cretaceous.

This is what life was like

before it gets wiped out in the fifth mass extinction.

So looking at these smaller animals that do survive

can maybe also help us understand

why certain groups survived and others didn't.

And that's super important right now,

because we are living in a mass extinction

caused by us.

So we're going to not only understand

who is going to survive this mass extinction,

but also understand how we can minimize the impact.

This is why it's really important not only for us

to look at macro evolutionary patterns using paleontology,

but especially right now to look at mass extinction events

and how certain groups respond to them.

Okay. Your hands.

- What did you find? - A scale.

- A scale? - Yes, it's beautiful.

It's so nicely preserved too. Holy shit.

- Perfect. - That's so cool!

My brother is a paleontologist.

He would go with my dad for Russian expeditions.

But then when my dad was asked to make a geology map

by the American Museum of Natural History,

he asked if he could bring me for the expedition.

The Mongolian colleague said,

"If she is coming, she will be a cook."

I said, "I'm a paleontologist. I'm not a cook."

It changed so much, this place.

There's a lot of expectation that

because he was in the same profession,

people expect that I would continue what he was doing.

And I say, I can't do that.

Because I was doing a lot of things, also.

I have to finish what I'm doing.

I can't take another person's load on me

and do all that stuff, that's impossible.

I can't fill his space.

My great uncle really wanted

this collaboration to be equal.

Mongolia should benefit.

The more I learn about Andrews's expedition,

the more I realize that this is just not right.

I want those fossils to be back in Mongolia.

Have to!

What is the point spending all these years and effort

and sacrifice my family and myself and my profession.

Gosh, I can't just sit there. I have to do something.

Oh, hi!

Sorry, I'm late!

Hi, I'm Bolor.

Nice to meet you finally in person.

In our educational projects, especially based on dinosaurs,

we really need to teach our younger kids about paleontology.

They're all one hatching? I mean, one clutch?

They're probably from a couple of different clutches.

We think there might be a difference

in the spinal nerves

at the end of an alligator tail

as opposed to the spinal nerves at the end of a bird tail.

And I think that there's a developmental link

between the formation of spinal nerves

and the formation of this pica -style structure.

So we need the alligators to look at spinal nerves

because they're just like the ancestral condition

of a long-tailed reptile. - Yup.

Yes.

So maybe we could get a tail to grow.

If we can figure out the differences,

if we can figure out that link, I have an idea.

Birds are dinosaurs.

If we find these atavistic genes,

these ancestral genes,

and reverse them,

we should be able to make a dinosaur.

We had started the whole thing in 93, right?

Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton had come up with a pretty novel way

of bringing dinosaurs back.

And that was finding DNA in ancient blood

preserved in insects trapped in amber.

We didn't know whether we could find DNA.

We finally got to B. Rex, our Tyrannosaurus.

That's where we got most of the good soft tissues.

We still didn't get DNA.

It was right around that time that George Lucas visited

and came out in the field with us

and gave a $1,000,000 donation

for anything I wanted to do.

And so I told him I wanted to see

if we could make a dinosaur.

You can't bring back ancestral characters

unless the ancestors exist.

There's no better proof of evolution.

The general public generally says,

"Why would you want to do that?"

You know, my philosophy is:

we should know everything there is to know.

And the end goal?

To use all of our data

to get as much information about dinosaurs as living animals

as we possibly can.

And, you know,

have a little baby dinosaur running around!

Fossils are essentially like ghosts from deep time.

You use these ghosts to resurrect an entire world.

And so when I stand in the Sahara,

I don't just see rocks.

I see a vast river system.

I see a pair of Spinosaurus

patrolling these ancient waterways.

I see giant flying reptiles soaring in the skies.

The things you visualize in your mind,

they were really there.

That's when you understand the concept of deep time.

Astronomy shows us how small we are in space.

Paleontology shows us how small we are in time,

and the slice of time that we call the present

is really just this fleeting little thing, right?

If there's one thing we've learned from paleontology.

it's that no species lasts forever.