Original subtitles

(suspenseful music)

(roaring)

(suspenseful music)

Tyrannosaurus Rex, the tyrant lizard king,

ruled the Earth for barely a million years,

a blink in the geological eye.

Then, in a blinding flash, the sovereign and his subjects

were no more.

It's hard to overstate the significance of this day.

It's really the day that set into motion the events

that make the modern world as we know it.

(impactful music)

(roaring)

(cheerful music)

Today, T-Rex reigns as a pop culture icon,

his toothy grin and animal magnetism seduce amateurs

and experts alike.

(cheerful music)

My favorite creature in the history of the planet

is Tyrannosaurus Rex.

When I was a little kid, I wanted to grow up

to be Tyrannosaurus.

When I was told I couldn't do that, I decided I would

study them.

It's a cliche that people say,

"Oh, it's the coolest dinosaur," whatever,

but it really is the coolest.

Before his glory days,

T-Rex overcame an unfortunate birth name.

There were fragments of Tyrannosaurus that had

in the 1890s that were given the name Manospondylus gigas

which is the gigantic sponge vertebra.

Thankfully, that name didn't stick.

The first fossil to bear his royal title

was unearthed in Hell Creek, Montana, in 1905.

Discoverer Barnum Brown called the charismatic creature,

"My favorite child."

After 65 million years in a pauper's grave,

T-Rex was an overnight sensation.

The New York Times hailed him as the king of all kings

and the absolute warlord of the earth.

When it was first found, during those days,

it just got so much attention.

The name Tyrannosaurus Rex, too, was a product of genius.

It's the only dinosaur where people actually know

the species name of a dinosaur.

Ask them about triceratops and other sort of kid favorites,

they couldn't tell you what species they are,

but Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king of the tyrant lizards.

Museums around the world raced to acquire

and mount their own T-Rex.

His fearsome pose was so upright that nothing

could stop him, except the ceiling.

His early appearance has made a lasting impression.

Chicago's 1933 World's Fair promoted radio

and a lumbering T-Rex.

The New York World's Fair presents

the grandest spectacle on Earth for 1964 and 1965.

New York's 1964 pageant featured

color television and the same old T-Rex.

Decades of cheesy movies cemented his status

as a mindless robotic villain.

(piano playing)

By the 1980s, the king was clamoring for a makeover.

Beneath his regal bearing lay the heart of a dandy.

(piano playing)

When you look at the group of dinosaurs that T-Rex

fits into, on one side we have dinosaurs with feathers,

on the other side we have birds.

It's simplest to think that T-Rex probably had some type

of feathers or quills covering its body, which is different

than how we think of it, right?

And so, T-Rex was both terrifying and fancy (laughs).

Bio-mechanical studies showed his big tail

acted as a counterweight.

And museums finally brought their skeletons

down to earth.

(impactful music)

The new T-Rex was swifter, smarter,

and deadlier than ever.

What mighty force could have possibly ended his reign?

The mystery of his death became the ultimate cold case.

50 or 60 years ago, people really had no idea

why the dinosaurs disappeared, and there were all

these wild ideas, the planet was too hot or too cold,

they had parasites, mammals ate all their eggs.

And, you know, this is something that you see in science.

When you're on the wrong track, your explanations

tend to get really complicated.

And then, when you figure something out,

your explanation becomes very, very simple.

One explanation created a stir.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez

joined forces with his son, geologist Walter Alvarez.

They zeroed in on numerous dig sites,

all with signs of two simultaneous events:

the end of the cretaceous era

and abnormally high levels of the element iridium.

Iridium, extremely rare on Earth, is plentiful on comets

and asteroids.

According to the Alvarezes, a massive extra-planetary

impact had ended the reign of T-Rex.

Scientists greeted the Alvarez hypothesis

with widespread ridicule.

Paleontologists didn't want this great riddle

of our discipline solved by a couple of outsiders.

And so, there was a tremendous amount of resistance

to this idea.

Paleontologists knew one thing for sure:

whatever befell the dinosaurs happened gradually,

over millions of years.

Sudden extinction smacked of a biblical miracle,

an outrageous notion.

And as naysayers pointed out, a cataclysmic impact

would have left a sizable crater,

and none could be found.

Luis Alvarez died in 1988, convinced he was right

but unable to prove it.

(impactful music)

In 1993, the release of Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs

roaring back to life.

Its intriguing premise, recreating the reptiles

from ancient DNA.

But no DNA has been known to survive more than

100,000 years, and transforming DNA fragments

into an entire creature is like turning the words

"to be or not to be" into the play Hamlet.

Modern science and popular legend do converge

on a central fact: T-Rex was the baddest of the bad.

(roaring)

Tyrannosaurus is the largest of the meat-eating dinosaurs.

It had the largest brain of the big meat-eating dinosaurs.

It had the most powerful bite we've calculated so far

among dinosaurs.

It ate the other creatures in its environment.

And nothing but it ate it.

And, indeed, we do find Tyrannosaurus bite marks

on Tyrannosaurus.

We now have fossilized feces of the T-Rex

from western Canada.

It's a large mass.

It was about a foot and a half in length,

and it mostly consists of flesh

and the rest of it is bone, and that bone was crunched up.

So, clearly, T-Rex just went up to prey,

took out big chunks, and swalled them whole,

and digested what it could.

As T-Rex took his star turn at the multiplex,

the investigation into his demise accelerated.

Over a hundred sites worldwide contained spikes

of iridium, but one was different.

The Brazos River in Texas also showed signs

of an ancient tsunami.

Further analysis detected shocked quarts,

rock compressed by an enormously powerful impact.

Core samples in nearby Yucatan, Mexico

indicated gravity anomalies.

The inquest rushed to the tiny village of Chicxulub.

There, ground-penetrating radar exposed a massive

underground crater.

Now we had this giant crater, 110 miles across.

We had the smoking gun, the timing lined up.

Everything that you would expect to find in that crater

was there, and I think that, you know,

for most, me included, really clinched the deal.

The Alvarezes were vindicated.

In 1994, telescopes across Earth recorded a haunting

reenactment of the dinosaur apocalypse

when the comet Shoemaker-Levi 9 blasted

into Jupiter.

(loud explosion)

Nature had carried out an experiment we never could

and confirmed the devastating power

of extraterrestrial impacts.

Investigators have gone from crime theory

to smoking gun, and the body

may soon follow.

Currently, I'm working in a layer in southern New Jersey

that's right at the end of the time of the dinosaurs.

So, it's really hard in geology to say that you have any day

that occurred 65 million years ago.

But in the last few years, we've started to pick up

some proxies for meteor impact in the quarry.

It's a really interesting idea to think that the one place

in the world where you can put your finger

on a fossil individual and say,

"Hey, that turtle or that crocodile died in that

"pivotal calamitous day that wipes out the dinosaurs

"and makes the modern world as we know it"

is in a pit behind a shopping mall in Southern New Jersey.

(suspenseful music)

Tyrannosaurus Rex is among the very last giant dinosaurs.

There would have been individual Tyrannosaurus Rex

that may have seen the glow coming over the horizon

from Mexico.

The asteroid was six miles across,

as big as Mount Everest.

It zoomed 80,000 miles an hour, 50 times faster

than a bullet.

(impactful music)

When it struck, the Earth shook with a billion times

more force than the nuclear blast at Hiroshima.

There was a tsunami wave that was probably

a mile high.

If you're a T-Rex living in Texas when that meteor hits,

you might see that coming towards you.

(roaring)

Further north, in Montana, in Alberta,

places like that, the heat is what is going to get you.

And so for a couple of hours that day, the temperature

all across the planet heated up well past

the temperature of the broiler in your oven,

maybe twice that hot.

So, if you're living on the surface of the Earth that day,

you're cooked.

All of this stuff from the impact, both the asteroid

and the rock around it, were molten,

and a lot of that material was sent up not just

into the atmosphere but into outer space,

and then rained back down.

Imagine sitting out there and you have showers,

dense showers of molten bits coming down on you.

There would be very little that would have survived that.

It's really interesting when you look at who survives

that impact and who doesn't.

If you have a place to hide that day, it probably

didn't take that much sediment, maybe only six inches

of sediment might have been enough to forestall

the worst of that heat blast.

But if you can't get underground, then you're doomed.

(impactful music)

(kids chatting)

From out of the ashes, a new creature arose

to rule the planet.

Dinosaurs and mammals evolved at about the same time,

and for the whole 160 million year reign of the dinosaurs,

our ancestors, the mammals, were basically trying to stay

out of the way of the dinosaurs during all that time.

So, if that asteroid doesn't hit, why wouldn't we just

still be these little mammals trying to stay out of the way

of dinosaurs.

That's probably what would have happened.

So, a really bad day for the dinosaurs.

Fabulous day for mammals.

The king was dead,

and the meek had inherited the earth.

(music playing)