Original subtitles

- [Narrator] Toronto a city of the past and the future

and at it's heart a museum with secrets dark and strange.

Tales of mummified babies, brutal massacres,

forgotten weapons of war, and a disappearing dinosaur.

Secrets hidden in plain sight

inside the Royal Ontario Museum.

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

It's an eye popping Canadian landmark.

A national treasure chest and a place of mystery.

This is the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

The ROM.

For every object on display thousands more

lie hidden in backrooms far from public view.

Enter the hall of ancient Egypt

and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

You feel the presence of the ghosts.

How did they live, and how did they die?

If only the mummies could speak.

In a darkened room deep below

the public galleries it's as if they do.

- Here you can all the bone.

- [Narrator] Down here they seem to whisper their stories

to epileptologist Gail Gibson

and bioarcheologist Andrew Nelson.

Telling them they weren't all pharaohs and princes.

- People often think that mummies were only elite people,

that they were only the rich could afford mummification.

That's not quite true.

In fact people would try to do their best for their friends

and relatives at whatever social level they were.

I think it's nice to find out what life

is really like for ordinary people in the past,

there were a lot more of us

than there were of kings and queens.

- [Narrator] Pharaoh or farmer there

is one kind of mummy no one expects to see.

Babies.

Everything about these tiny bundles in a mystery.

- Alas we have no idea how

these two baby mummies arrived at the ROM

they could have been given to us by someone,

they could have been found in somebodies basement.

I suspect they came back

as part of a cabinet of curiosities.

People could bring them back almost

as souvenirs in the 1820s, 30s, 40s, 50s.

It was the thing to do, it was fashionable.

My friend bought a mummy, I'll buy a mummy as well.

- [Narrator] It was a mummy craze.

At it's peak more than a century ago collectors

would display newly acquired mummies in their homes

and invite friends to ghoulish unwrapping parties.

(eerie music)

Today archeologists and egyptologists show more respect

when probing the secrets of the ancient dead.

Especially the mummies of children.

- I Think we need to care because this is a human baby.

I think it's a question of human sympathy,

I think it's a question of trying

to understand what it is to be human.

These are us at another time period.

- [Narrator] Using the tools

of modern forensic archeology Andrew

and Gail hope to learn more about these children.

The mummified remains of infant number one

are in poor condition.

Andrew suspects the tiny body

was pulled apart during a grave robbery.

- My bet would be that that's a quick grab out of the tomb.

- Astonishing.

- [Narrator] Infant number two appears

to be in better shape.

- [Andrew] We can use the calcification

of teeth to establish the age of this individual.

This ones about nine months old.

- [Narrator] But Andrew sees something else on the scan

something strange that shouldn't be there.

- Do you see this?

This is something long and rectangular

that is not bone all right, that does not belong there.

And it goes right,

it's been jammed into the thoracic cavity

and right up into the cranial base.

- [Narrator] At first glance

it suggests the child met a violent end.

Killing unwanted children was accepted

practice in many ancient societies.

(gentle music) (babies crying)

But not in Egypt.

- The ancient Egyptians realized how vulnerable babies were

and they were most anxious to protect mothers

and babies in anyway they could.

Their world was full of dangers, ours is to.

We call those dangers germs and viruses, and diseases.

They call them evil spirits, they call them the evil eye.

- [Narrator] To protect children

and mothers ancient Egyptians carried amulets.

Charms against the forces of darkness.

- For and ancient Egyptian if your baby could have

something like this in his cradle

or a mother could be wearing some of

these around her neck

that gave them a little bit of extra confidence.

- [Narrator] Even after death parents took steps

to ensure the gods would protect their children.

This is evident on the shroud

in which the first infant was wrapped.

- [Andrew] So what am I looking at, tell me about this.

- It's a really nice little thing,

these people couldn't afford anything fancy.

- Right.

- So this maybe has a little bit of folk art

and you can see this is very,

very rough woven piece of linen.

- [Andrew] Right, what?

- [Gail] There is the child himself.

- [Andrew] Okay.

- [Gail] Shown as a mummy.

- [Andrew] Right.

- [Gail] And this is the God Anubis.

- [Andrew] Okay.

- Behind him and this is probably

one of his parents making offerings,

giving him pure water and food

and this is the goddess Isis one of

the most important goddesses

and even she is mourning for the loss of this little baby.

So this is a nice little image

of the baby now safe in the arms of the God.

- [Narrator] If the Egyptians took such great

care to preserve the bodies

of their children why does this infant

have a stake in it's skull?

Andrew doesn't suspect foul play.

He believes it was inserted after the child died.

- And they used this piece of wood to make the head stay

in the proper relationship with the rest of the body.

So that's really interesting to see that.

- [Narrator] The wood kept the body in tact

during the mummification process.

Making it a final loving act by grief stricken parents.

So what really killed the child?

Can the secret be revealed?

- [Andrew] Whatever it was that killed him

was probably something acute,

something from drinking bad water, or some E. coli

from infected meat or some infected fruit.

There was some superalimentation of goat milk

and honey after about six months.

So if the goats milk was carrying infection

that may well have been the sort

of thing that would do them in quickly.

- Oh my poor little fellow.

- [Narrator] The verdict,

these tiny mummies may have been loved to death.

Killed not my violence or neglect but by milk

and honey fed to them by caring, affectionate parents.

Next a medieval mystery solved with a bang.

(booms)

(dramatic chord)

A museums treasures seem all

the more special when they're one of a kind.

But hidden away at the Royal Ontario Museum

are tens of thousands of treasures.

Most of them are precisely measured and cataloged.

But some objects and their purpose remain a secret.

- So these objects are one of the mysteries

of archeology the middle east in the medieval period.

They're found in archeological sight in Egypt, Syria,

and Iran from about the 12th or the 13th century.

- [Narrator] Experts at the world greatest museums

don't know what to make of the mystery objects.

They're another museum secret.

- [Rob] This was not just an ordinary vessel,

it was made for some enigmatic purpose

that we just do not really know at this moment.

- [Narrator] Rob Mason hopes to find out once and for all.

- Now to do that it would be in appropriate

to go messing around with an 800 year old artifact

like this so what we've done is made replicas of them.

There are two hypothesis we can test,

one it was used as the base of a water pipe,

an (speaking foreign language)

used for smoking probably hashish at the time.

- [Narrator] It's a theory to be tested

not at the museum but here at the Hot Box Cafe

and Roach Rama.

- So I was thinking given your expertise could

you see how this could work for a smoking purpose

but I would rather you use not one made in about 12,

but the one made last week.

(water splashing)

(water bubbling)

- [Narrator] So is it an ancient bong?

It seems to work but Rob's not convinced.

- I still have one major problem with that.

How comfortable is that in your hand?

- Not terribly, it's a little bit heavy.

- [Rob] It's rather heavy isn't it?

- [Man] Yeah.

- [Rob] When we see these illustrated

they were having relatively light vessels

like this so if you can have a light vessel

why would you have such a heavy vessel?

And so I think there's possibly a more likely hypothesis.

Which I'd now like to test.

- [Narrator] This test needs plenty of open space

because Rob thinks the objects are designed to explode.

- One of the interesting things about these is

when we find them they tend to be whole or really broken.

This looks like the impact came from the inside.

(booms)

There's no doubt that in the 12th

and 13th century they knew of

the component materials of black powder or gun powder.

And really there's no reason to assume

it was not known in the middle east.

And many people have said oh it's decorated

so there for it can't be a bomb.

I spoke to ammunition's expert

about whether these might be hand grenades

and before I'd even mentioned the decoration

he said are there Amy lines incised

in it and so we was saying

like a modern hand grenade this will enable

it to break into small pieces for shrapnel.

- [Narrator] If the mystery object is a grenade

it should explode into blast patterns

roughly matching those on the fragments.

So Robs going to blow up one of his replicas

and do some post explosion detective work.

- Another thing we'll try we'll see

the effect on a watermelon.

- All right so we've got a victim.

- Our victim.

So this will show what the effects of the shrapnel

would be on an innocent bystander

or not so innocent bystander.

- [Jeff] So this will be you're guys safe distance here.

Ready to light, let it go.

- [Rob] Go let it go.

(suspenseful music)

- [Jeff] Kay, lighting.

(suspenseful music)

(booms)

- Well one of those watermelons is definitely regretting

the day it was purchased by this group.

- Yeah well that's for sure.

And it was a nice orange, kinda fiery flash.

(booms)

Had quite the range.

- [Rob] Look at that watermelon.

(laughs)

- [Jeff] And you've got some big chunks.

- Watermelon blood all over it.

- What's amazing is there's actually a piece of shrapnel

that was a few feet away

that actually has bits of watermelon on it.

- [Rob] Nasty.

See if that were a human being

that would have been covered with blood.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- And these other pieces would have been embedded in him.

- Definitely was designed to kill.

- Imagine with tightly packed men

as well, they're besieging a fortress

or something like that and you just drop it amongst the

and that explosion in tightly packed men must have been

completely devastating.

- Oh yeah.

- Id have to say this experiments

actually been really quite conclusive.

If you look at the ones we blew up you can see

how the pressures come from inside and spored outwards.

(booms)

And when we look at the old one,

this one which has been broken apart

you can see it's broken outwards.

So this was a bomb.

- [Narrator] The mystery is solved,

the secret revealed with a satisfying bang.

(booms)

(dramatic music)

Next a museum secret that

is the ultimate skeleton in the closet

(eerie music)

(dramatic chord)

the dinosaur gallery.

When it comes to the stars of this show size matters.

Here monsters from more than 150,000,000

years ago come in three sizes.

Big, bigger, and humongous.

(roars)

You wouldn't think any museum could

ever lose a dinosaur but the Royal Ontario Museum did.

One of the biggest was here and then it was gone.

What happened?

It's the summer of 2007.

The museum is close to completing

a quarter billion dollar transformation called the crystal.

(dramatic music)

The buildings main attraction

will be the new dinosaur gallery.

But just ten weeks from the grand opening it's empty.

Curator David Evens is assigned the task of filling it.

- They wanted a real show stopping piece.

We didn't have one of these giant dinosaurs called sauropods

and it was clear that's

what we needed to anchor the exhibit.

- [Narrator] sauropods are among

the most gigantic creatures ever to walk the earth.

100 metric ton vegetarian monsters more

than 30 meters long from tail to tiny head.

150,000,000 years ago they roamed

what is now western North America.

With the clock ticking David boards

a flight to Wyoming's bad lands.

A well known dinosaur dig sight

and his best shot at finding a sauropod skeleton.

He finds one before he lands.

- I happened to pick up a very recent publication

by renowned sauropod expert Jack Macintosh.

- [Narrator] A few pages in David's jaw drops.

Macintosh describes an almost complete sauropod

skeleton that was given to the ROM in 1962.

there's even a specimen number, ROM 3670.

- And as soon as I realize that,

as soon as I saw that number

I just wanted to turn the plane around right there.

- [Narrator] David rushes back to the museum.

Could it be true?

Could there really have been a sauropod here all this time?

- And I started pulling an end of an arm bone

out of a drawer, 30 feet away another end

of an arm bone and realized hey these are

both from the same side, they're both from the same bone.

Maybe they go together.

And sure enough I put the two together

and they fit perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle.

And over the course of about an hour

I'd assembled over half the major limb bones.

At that point I was getting pretty excited.

- [Narrator] David suspects

this is the skeleton of the sauropod diplodocus.

It's a huge find.

The bones in the museum for more

than 40 years were scattered during

various moves of the ROM's collections.

Will these pieces fit together into a complete skeleton?

And if they do will the go together in time?

It's a job for Peter May and his display team.

He's racing the clock,

the new galleries will open in just eight weeks.

- Well we picked the false material up after all.

It was in probably ten drawers.

And I'd say 2,500 pieces.

We sort of went from a custom work

process into a full scale assembly line.

Where we have the forging going on, the armatures,

we had other people doing the welding,

we had the grinding going on so one person was involved with

every aspect of the armature, we had a gang working on it.

- [Narrator] As the skeleton takes shape

David realizes these are not the bones

of a sauropod diplodiocus as he first thought.

But something better than that, much better.

This is a barosaurus, one of the rarest of all dinosaurs.

- Barosaurus is known form only a few specimens

and most of them are really scrappy.

There's about five specimens that are known

and it turns out that the ROM specimen

that we had right here under our noses

for so long turns out to be the second

most complete specimen of a barosaurus ever found.

- [Narrator] But even so only 40 percent

of the skeleton has been found.

For the other 60 percent they improvise with casts.

- If we made an educated guess based on parts

of the skeleton that we do have

and filled in the missing bits with barosaurus

closets known relative which is diplodocus.

One of the major part that is missing is the head.

A head of barosaurus has never been found.

And so on our mounted skeleton we have a diplodocus

skull as a stand in for the unknown skull of barosaurus.

- [Narrator] David now has a crucial decision to make.

- How the necks were oriented is still a mystery.

And it's argued about with quite fervent in paleontology.

- [Narrator] Else where at other museums the barosaurus

is posed with it's head held dramatically high.

But David suspects that even the mightiest dinosaur heart

couldn't pump blood ten meters straight up.

And so in the final hours before

the Crystal opens David poses

his barosaurus with it's neck stretched horizontally.

- I'd say if Guinness had a world record

for mounting dinosaurs that would have been it.

- [Narrator] The new gallery draws

one of the biggest crowds in the museums history.

With the magnificent barosaurus at the center of it all.

And David is still finding this dinosaurs bones

in the basement rooms of the ROM.

- It just keeps coming out of the wood work

you know it seems like a never ends dinosaur.

- If you find that skull in there.

- That would be a real find.

- [Narrator] The ROMs barosaurus may yet

turn out to be the most complete specimen in the world.

(roars)

Coming up we take our best shot

at revealing a secret from the middle ages.

(suspenseful music) (booms)

(dramatic chord)

(dramatic music)

The medieval galleries of the Royal Ontario Museum

in Toronto bristle with weapons of war.

Objects both beautiful and deadly.

In the middle ages the weapon you brought to battle

could mean the difference between glorious victory

or bloody defeat.

What was the one you could count

on to do the job every time?

(laughs)

- Good question the crossbow,

certainly the European crossbow.

- [Narrator] Curator Corey Keeble

is a specialist in arms and armor.

- One of the fascinating things about the crossbow

is it's, it was ubiquitous, it was used everywhere.

There was hardly a castle, there was hardly a town,

a city, anywhere in Europe that did

not have an arsenal or an armory filled with crossbows.

- [Narrator] By the end of the 15th century

the crossbow was the last word in high tech weaponry.

Hands down the most important killing device

on the battle fields of Europe.

But it's days were numbered.

Within just a few years the crossbow all but disappeared.

Replaced my a lethal new weapon.

The gun.

Today it seems obvious that the fire arm

would replace the bow, changing the face of war forever.

But 500 years ago when they were new and unproven

why were warriors so quick to throw down their crossbows

and pick up fire arms?

- [Corey] This is a match lock mechanism.

- [Narrator] Corey is going to unravel

this museum secret on a firing range.

Marksmen Andre Reed is ready with a gun.

(gun fires)

All we need now is a crossbow.

Like the one kept under wraps

by ROM conservator Susan Stock.

- This is really exciting,

it's like opening a bottle of vintage champagne

only I think it's a little bit better.

(chuckles)

Let's put it this way, no vintage champagne is this old.

It was bought in 1909 so it's one of the earliest

acquisitions in our European arms and armor collection.

- [Narrator] It's from the late 15th century

and among the last used in battle before firearms took over.

Making it ideal for Corey's test.

The plan is to recreate this crossbow.

That means finding out how it was made.

- It's never been X-rayed and it would really

be great if we could get an x-ray of the side

so that we could actually see the inside workings

with the trigger mechanism here

and also if we could x-ray and somewhere cranequin.

- [Woman] So you stabilize that.

- [Corey] Oh whoa.

- [Woman] The level of detail.

- The level of detail is just amazing.

- [Narrator] And there it is, plain as day.

The inner working of the cranequin.

It's a kind of winch allowing the archer

to draw the bow stings smoothly and easily.

Without it he'd need to pull back

the equivalent of 158 kilograms of weight to load the bow.

The cranequin reduces that weight

to three and a half kilograms.

- Who would have imagined that after 530 odd years

somebody would actually see the inside

of a gearbox that has never been analyzed before?

- [Narrator] Corey's next step

a visit with weapons builder Chris Waralow.

- This is the only way practically

that you can get any kind of comparison

with the actual power of a real crossbow.

- Yes, yes.

- It's as simple as that.

- I am looking forward to this project

cause I have never built a crossbow

that is as powerful as this one will be.

- [Corey] Oh really?

- [Chris] So I'm looking forward to the challenge.

- The real principle is to follow

the basic methodology as it were,

the actual spanning of a bow,

the functioning of a bow

and if we make a few adjustments in terms

of the third millennium

then we shouldn't be doing too badly.

It's the principal of the thing as they say.

- Exactly, exactly.

- Okay great.

(dramatic music)

- [Chris] Good morning gentlemen.

- [Corey] Whoa good morning, this is absolutely fabulous.

- Excellent, I'm glad you approve.

- Oh very much so.

The bow is wonderful, and it's nice to see the bridle,

all of this is, it's as good as a 15th century original.

- [Chris] I did my best.

- What about the bolts?

- The bolts.

- Do you want me to hold it.

- Please sir.

- The bolts are period as well,

they're made out of hard wood with.

- Oh my gosh you know we actually have some 16th century

originals in the museum

and these are as close to the originals

as anything that I could possibly imagine.

This is again, this is what makes an exercise like this fun.

If it's not fun it's not worth doing, this is a treat.

- [Chris] I am very much looking forward

to see weather to not this crossbow

will put that bolt through our suit of armor.

- [Narrator] 500 years ago the battle field

was dominated by armored knights

on horseback defending heavily fortified castles.

But in the late 15th century gun powder

came to the battle fields of Europe and everything changed.

Canons destroyed castle walls

and could kill several armored men at once.

Warfare rapidly changed from the realm

of the armored few to formations of unarmored thousands.

And the well armed infantry

became the dominant force on the battle field.

As armies grew in size so did the need to arm more

and more men.

Some historians speculate that cost

may have been a factor in the rise of the fire arm.

- By the 1400s, late 1400s early 1500s

we find that fire arms have developed

to the degree where they are useful as weapons of war.

They're cheap and easy to make.

(gun clicks)

- [Narrator] But Corey cost alone brought down the crossbow.

He suspects the secret will be revealed

by comparing two important aspects of any weapon.

Rate of fire, and killing power.

- I'll demonstrate loading this

and we'll see weather we can send an arrow down range.

- Oh whoa.

- Crank it back.

- [Narrator] Chris uses a windlass instead of a cranequin.

A safer option when building replicas.

Otherwise this bow is a match

to the original and will perform the same.

- [Chris] Back off the windlass a bit.

- Using a crossbow in war would be a very tense,

very dramatic action.

- [Chris] Make certain the crossbow bolt is set

right up against the string otherwise it will miss fire.

Nestle up against the shoulder, point, and shoot.

- [Narrator] The time to load, aim, and fire 57 second.

- This is a matchlock smoothbore.

It's a mussel loader.

- [Narrator] Andre's musket if from the

same period as the crossbow.

- You load down the powder.

This is 69 caliber ball, lead ball with a cloth patch.

(bangs)

You drive the ball home.

Use a priming powder to load the pen.

Close the safety, now you introduce the ignition source.

- In battle would have you scared out of your wits,

how fast could you load without panicking

and running for your life?

- Open the safety and we're ready to go.

(gun fires)

- [Narrator] The time to load,

aim and fire the gun 54 seconds.

- [Andre] Took the top off, we did it.

- [Narrator] So the gun doesn't

have a significant advantage over the bow.

Next a test of fire power against armor.

(clicks)

(whooshes) (tings)

- Whoa, amazing.

(grin fires)

(tings)

- [Narrator] The verdict?

Both do some damage, it's a draw.

- [Corey] This is better than getting

this stuff out of books isn't it?

- [Narrator] As fewer and fewer knights

appeared on the battle field

the ability to pierce armor became less important.

So the next test will be on the unprotected solider.

- [Man] That's the consistency of a human head.

(clicks) (whooshes)

(cheers)

(gun fires)

(splashing)

(chuckling)

- Unbelievable, absolutely fantastic.

- [Narrator] While the gun does the most damage both it

and the crossbow are lethal to the unprotected.

So if it wasn't killing power some other factor

must have dealt the final blow to the crossbow.

the answer lies in the soldiers themselves.

- This is a little more effective.

- [Narrator] like a recruit of the 15th century

Corey Keeble is not a trained warrior.

(whooshes)

- Well yes, I think we hit the shed.

(laughs)

What a wonderful feeling.

- [Andre] Just reach around and.

- [Narrator] He misses with

the crossbow but with the fire arm.

(gun fires)

(cheers)

- [Andre] Hey look at that.

- [Chris] There you go.

(cheers)

- [Andre] There's one melon that's

not gonna live to see another day all right.

- Thank you so much.

(laughing)

- One melon that's not gonna lose a day.

- Well what I found absolutely fascinating

was it is often said that you can just take any shmuck

and train him to use a musket.

(laughs)

- [Narrator] And that's why the gun

became the weapon of choice,

the shmuck factor could make killers out of anybody.

(gun fires)

(splashing)

Next sometimes museum secrets

are whispered to us from beyond the grave.

You just have to know how to listen.

(dramatic chord)

(dramatic music)

Be patent, be persistent

and one by one the museum will reveal it's mysteries.

But some can't be solved with logic.

Like the mystery of the Sioux headdress.

- You know the difficulty with this headdress

and it's case is that it has an X number

which tells me that all documentation

if there was any has been lost.

- [Narrator] The dreaded X number.

That means no providence,

no rational way of telling it's real story.

All curator Arnie Brownstone knows for sure

is that it's a Sioux headdress form the late 19th century.

But he wants to know if it belonged

to the greatest Sioux chief of them all,

the warrior Sitting Bull.

In 1875 he lead the Sioux

and Cheyenne from their reservations

to battle settlers who were moving

and growing numbers into their

sacred lands in the Black Hills.

The army sent colonel George Custer

and the seventh calvary to force Sitting Bull

and his people to return to their reservations.

On June 25, 1876 Custer lead his men

in an attack on the Sioux.

The Sioux warriors overwhelmed

the calvary with a hail of gunfire and arrows.

In less than an hour Custer and all of his men were killed.

The only survivor was one of the cavalry's horses.

A shocked nation demanded retribution.

Now a wanted man Sitting Bull

lead his men south to safety in Canada.

- They had a connection with Canada dating back to 1812

when they fought with the Canadians against the Americans

they were told that if they were ever in need

of help from the crown that they would have it.

- [Narrator] The US demanded

their return and Canada compromised.

Sitting Bull could stay

but there'd be no food or other support

for him and his people.

- The governments policy would be to starve them out.

- [Narrator] James Walsh of the North West

mounted police sent to watch

over the Sioux became a friend of Sitting Bull.

- Major Walsh kinda understood

that Sitting Bull wasn't the kind of beast

that they were portraying him as in America.

So he kinda got to understand him, got to know him

so he really did his best to try to keep him in Canada.

- [Narrator] But Walsh didn't succeed.

Sitting Bull had no choice

but to lead his starving people back

to their reservations in the United States.

Before leaving he gave his friend Walsh

his most precious possession.

His headdress.

But was it this headdress?

Nobody knows for sure.

Arnie is going to try something different.

Hoping to get closer to revealing

the secret with help from Ernie LaPointe.

Sitting Bull's last living descendant.

- I think that his genes or that his DNA

whatever you wanna say is in me

and I have that certain special understanding,

or recognizing things that are his.

- [Narrator] Ernie never knew his great grandfather

and he's never seen the headdress.

But he'll try to bring the two together

by invoking the Sioux belief that the spirit of the dead

can be felt in things that once belonged to them.

- [Arnie] Hi.

- Hey Arnie, how ya doing there?

- Good how are you?

- Good.

- [Arnie] Here we are, finally.

- Yeah finally I'm looking at this.

I rub my hand over it real slowly

and I can feel the energy come out of it.

If it doesn't belong to my grandfather,

I don't feel nothing.

It's like just nothing

and when I ran my hand over

this headdress I can feel the heat.

You can feel the energy.

- You can?

- I can yeah.

- Yeah.

- You don't have to touch it,

you know it's just about that far it's really warm.

Here, feel my hand.

- Yeah.

- It emits this heat

and it really is an honor to see this

and feel it because it really was on his head one time.

- Yeah?

- I can feel it as time.

- How he perceived that headdress through his sight,

how he perceives the whole context of our museum

and the way that we are treating these object,

all of these things may have come together

and given him a complete sense,

a gut feeling that this object is what it's reputed to be.

- [Ernie] Maybe Major really wanted it preserved like this.

- [Arnie] Mm hm.

- [Ernie] Because it was gift from a friend

and maybe they're friends in the spirit world yet you know?

Who knows.

- Maybe.

- Yeah, maybe Sitting Bull welcomed him in the spirit world.

(chuckles)

- [Narrator] Next a museum secret

that takes us on a walk through time.

With mans best friend.

(dramatic chord)

The museum galleries bring the past to life.

But down here in the dark corners

of the museums zoology department

it's a graveyard.

Rare and exotic creatures through the ages

long dead are now stuffed and mounted.

And here rubbing shoulder with them

is Bungie the British bulldog.

In his day he was a canine celebrity.

- [Announcer] It's not all beer and kibbles being a top dog.

They had to be spruced up like film stars.

But these animals are big business.

In exports they earn a yearly

total of half a million pounds.

- [Narrator] Curator Mark Engstrom knows Bungie well.

- He may have been the most famous dog period in the 1930s.

He'd won all the champions,

he'd won a large show in England

where there were 4,000 other bulldogs competing against him,

he was the champion on show.

- [Narrator] The champ came to Canada

in the summer of 1936 to compete in a Toronto dog show.

Big mistake.

- Unfortunately there was a heatwave in Toronto one evening

and Bungie died of heatstroke despite

heroic efforts to try to save him.

- [Narrator] A champion bulldog, symbol of tenacity

and strength done in by a hot summers day?

How could this be?

It's a museum secret but there are clues

in the turbulent history of the breed.

The bulldog of the 1800s was taller with a longer face.

They got the name because

they were originally bred to bait bulls.

Butchers believed bulls produced more tender meat

if they were frightened when slaughtered.

So bull baiting became a blood sport.

Bulldogs were bred for short legs

so a bull couldn't pick it up and throw it.

And a short upper jaw so the dogs

could clamp onto the bulls snout

and bring them down through suffocation.

When bull baiting was outlawed aggressive

bulldogs made way for more cuddly creatures.

Breeders again transformed the bulldog,

producing a gentler animal with the familiar face

that wins hearts and championships.

To show how much the breed has changed Mark

compares Bungie with the bulldog of today.

- In the last 70 years actually the face of your dogs

been rotated up a bit but that's just

because the face is a bit shorter

and so the nostrils are actually pointing

up a bit more relative to this dog.

- Why do you think the dog can change so much in 70 years?

- Through intense selective breeding.

It's like natural selection

but it's called artificial selection.

Well I don't think nature plays a role in it at all.

It's interesting because

the traits that you see in specific breeds are really

and wholly and artificial construct produced by humans.

- [Narrator] Bulldogs are notorious for their bad health.

Skin problems, eye problems, poor digestion,

weak hips, and short lives.

Most don't make it past the age of eight.

It's the bulldogs distinctive pushed

in face that poses the greatest threat.

Over the decades the face had become flatter

leaving the dog with a short airway.

On hot days the air they breath has less time to cool

making them susceptible to over heating,

heat stroke, and death.

So a Toronto heat wave was all it took to bring down

the curtain on Bungie the British bulldog.

But things are looking better for the bulldogs of tomorrow.

- The American Kennel club has been very interested

in our collection because they can actually monitor

the changes that have occurred in dog breeds overtime.

In the case of the bulldog which has been bred

to the point where ts almost an impractical dog

they actually are now interested in bringing

it back to a more, it's past form

when it was actually a healthier dog to begin with.

- [Narrator] Bungie is a story

from the past that's changing the future.

Many more wonders lie here in these halls and galleries.

Asking us to see beyond the glass.

Challenging us to take a second, closer look.

And if we're patient or just lucky discover

another extraordinary museum secret.

(dramatic music)

(dramatic chord)