all right so with this zoom platform we are limited to about 40 minutes of chatting because we do not have the upgraded version running through there we will be limited to 40 minutes and a hundred participants if you didn't get a chance to log on don't worry we'll stick this up on YouTube so if you're not I see 47 people holy cow high 47 families and people sitting at home and I know my daughter's at home too ha ha ha I did this work I see people I see people awesome cool so have a chat window all you have to do is just move your your mouse if you're on a computer move your mouse down to the bottom and we have a little chat window that you can pop up Clint is going to be typing responses as I am chatting responses I believe yes he is nodding I guess we'll do a little a little intro hello good morning my name is Becky Barnes and I am a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geological Survey so my job is dealing with fossils anything from dinosaurs to clams and seashells sea monsters birds mammals you name it we deal with all kinds of dead critters that's the bad thing about being a fossil is you have to be dead kind of a prerequisite there today's topic what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a little Q&A session and talking about mosasaurs many of you have seen the movie Jurassic world or maybe Dinosaur Train or I'm seeing some hands cool if any of you have seen any of those movies we're gonna be dealing with a different kind of Oh a sea monster okay that's our friendly Moses or don't worry he doesn't bite usually we would normally be holding our prehistoric fishing trip as well but due to the current conditions sadly our prehistoric fishing trip has been canceled well maybe not careful hopefully just possible what is a Moses or a Moses or is a marine reptile that means it lives in water man it lived at the same time as dinosaurs but it is not a dinosaur so the same thing with a pterodactyl the flying reptiles they are also not dinosaurs but they lived at the same time as dinosaurs so the example that I'd like to give people using creatures that you may be more familiar with would be a mammal so a mammal or creatures like us creatures like your cats or dogs things with hair warm-blooded these are these are mammals now if you take a land mammal muscly use like a cat and you take a water mammal that would be like a whale or a dolphin and let's take a flying mammal now there aren't very many of those so that would be a bat so if we have a bat and a cat and a whale okay so we have something that flies something lives on land and something that's in the in the water now the same thing would be with the dinosaurs so dinosaurs are our land creature pterosaurs the flying reptiles have er flying creatures and mosasaurs would be an example of a marine reptile so they can all live at the same time but you wouldn't call a bat a flying cat right that's just kind of weird and you wouldn't call a whale a water cat it's also kind of weird so it's the same thing where you have different creatures that can live at the same time but they're doing different things here is an example great little toy mosasaur here this is like I said a marine reptile they are closely related or their closest living relative is a creature called a monitor lizard now different kinds of monitor lizards would be like Komodo dragons or if you've seen rescuers down under the villain Joanna would be some kind of a monitored lizard and instead of having feet they have flippers so their arms and their legs have been modified into flippers and their tail this one is an older model so it doesn't actually have a little tail fluke it should look like a shark tail coming up here with an extra a little flange should have a little little fluke up at the top of the tail here which this model doesn't and we used to think that these mosasaurs much like on this model were very Wiggly and that they would swim like a sea snake or they would wiggle their way through the water and we've discovered since then that that's not really true with the findings of the tail fluke in order to get that fluke to work like a shark or a tuna you have to have a very rigid body so that your tail is the only thing really that's moving and your body is being pulled against these mosasaurs swam like sharks kind of cool things that we're always discovering new stuff and that's one of the new things that we learned was that mosasaurs now swim like sharks we have other marine reptiles that lived at the same time as mosasaurs we have pls iya soars so if anybody likes the Loch Ness monster did you do there we have a plesiosaur please these stores are a little different than that they have a very small head a very long neck they still have the floor flippers that are modified and they were built a little bit more like a sea turtle then a shark maybe a little bit more ponderous slowly floating through the water column they were carnivores so carnivore means that they were meat eaters and they ate a variety of me some of them ate ammonites like this thing so that's an AM night come on focus camera so we'll ammonite in here some of them ate ammonites some of them ate other kinds of squid squid or are related to ammonites some of them ate fish some of them made other mosasaurs so they could have been cannibalistic kind of creepy but different food starts and we know they were carnivores because they have really pointy teeth donk donk donk donk donk Don here is a jaw that we collected from up in the Pembina Gorge you can see all those big pointy teeth on there right there and the neat because they would lose their teeth just like sharks and see these holes these holes of missing teeth in here and they would drop their teeth when they bit something hard or the tooth got all the tooth was broken and so they would lose their teeth and they would regrow new ones just like a shark dis dinosaurs do the exact same thing where they lose old broken teeth and they grow back no one's so kind of neat nice adaptation so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna share my screen with you and I'm gonna read through a little mostess or book that we just produced so this is our first book of the previous stories or pre histories haha mosasaur and this is talking a little bit about our creature the mosasaur devourer so it's a sit all around and I'll tell you a tale meet our friend mosasaur big as a whale now some of these mosasaurs were really really big some of them were not some of them were really small only I'm only about three feet long for the smallest ones and some were longer than a bus so we had all kinds of different signs of mosasaurs says don't call her dinosaur yes a reptile cousins at best don't be fooled by her smile so this is again a reptile it's a marine reptile it's related to to the other reptiles that are round can live at the same time as dinosaurs but it's not a dinosaur so if everybody has one takeaway today they forget everything else remember that mosasaurs are not dinosaurs all right she swam in the sea with big fish and small squid fish or mosasaur she ate them all so remember we said this creature could have been a carnivore well was a carnivore but it could have also been cannibalistic was not very picky t-rex was king of the land and the trees meanwhile our mosasaur queen of the Seas so fish come with gills to breathe underwater a mosasaur lung breathes air like an otter so they have lungs like all of the rest of us land breathers even though it's some living in the water is a reptile that breathes air which means it has to come back up to the surface to grab big gulps of air hold your breath now and count to 600 that's ten minutes long for those that wondered so but they estimate about the longest that these creatures could hold their breath underwater it was about ten minutes but we don't really know what could have been longer could have been shorter we don't know it's this the really tough part about paleontology is there's not a lot of soft tissue that's preserved I don't I don't suggest you try holding your breath over ten minutes that's a long time unlike her cousins the dinos and Crocs whose nests filled with eggs were watched round-the-clock she does not lay eggs her young are born live her babies precocial ready to dive so they go they gave birth to live young not eggs they found live young and the bones of little baby mosasaurs within the birth canals of these animals and they found little baby mosasaurs that were out swimming in the open sea along with you maybe their parents maybe they were so low it's kind of hard to tell again it's really tough when you when you when can't see behavior from fossils not a lot of behavior anyways some but not a lot precocial is a word that means babies are mature and they're mobile they're ready to get up and go it's creatures that are precocial would be like baby chicks or baby horses the foals things that are that are born and they're just ready to go they're ready to run the frolic and play and eat and do their thing versus all trishal is the other kind where babies are a little bit more fragile they take more care from their parents say like a baby Bluebird or baby humans kittens and puppies they need a lot of help from their parents because it takes a while for them to get up and go tiny diamond like scales covered her hide moving her tail like a shark side to side so they have found scales Formosa soars fossilized scales Formosa sorts and they're they're really cool little diamond-shaped scales some of them like on this picture here have ridges on the tops the ones on the back had ridges called keels and those help you move straight in the water the ones on the belly were a little bit more smooth so they did not have a keel to help her swim there's a fluke on her tail a long piece of fin that worked like a sail so this long little little fleshy part of skin there did not have any bone attached to it it was just like a shark tail or a tuna tail where they had that extra piece of fin coming up so it's also made out of cartilage which is the same thing that makes your nose nice and flexible and it makes your ears nice and flexible so if she lost a tooth fear not she's like you but her sets kept growing far more than two we only get two sets of teeth we get baby teeth and then adult teeth that's it remember when we're done we're done we run two dentures or something else so I don't suggest you lose your second set of teeth brush your teeth floss gotta take care of what you have most asuras pray if the egg lived on land would have probably had terrible breath I'm sure they wilted all the seaweed next to them because they never brushed their teeth and they would just keep losing their teeth over and over and over again so they didn't care her cousin Komodo walks with four feet flippers for water help her quest to eat that was when we talked about how mosasaurs have flippers instead of feet so any of their ver an adze and your monitor lizards still have feet the mosasaurs came in different sizes like fish in the sea each specializes clawed a steez was small 2 to 4 meter bust lung tylose or fearsome meat-eater slit a sneeze was pretty small very very delicate looking mosasaur and your average school bus is about 30 feet long but if you take the length of a school bus and then add another third on to it you're looking at about the length of a Tyla sword which is a really big beasty Globa tons crushed shells with big rounded teeth platta Karpis prefers fish from the different teeth specialize in eating different things platic carpus had big pointed teeth which are great for snagging slippery fish versus Globo dens which had these big round like it they look like Globes which is why it's called a globe again they would have these big round crushing teeth that were good for grabbing hard objects or crushing shells did they eat ammonites did they eat seashell other other seashells mollusks clams it's hard to hard to say they start 100 million years ago and last until the asteroid deathblow sadly they went extinct at the same time as dinosaurs today they're all gone what's left in the ground her bones are no rock a fossil renowned any of the imprints or any of the fossils any of those scales they're all turned to rock now their bones were discovered like dinosaur sea monsters invaded stories of folklore mosasaurs have been known to humans and have been written about since the late 1700s they make for the perfect sea monster as they've got teeth they're long they're sinuous they look like sea serpents if you were somebody who was wandering around in the 1700s and you saw one of these things weathering out of the cliffs what kind of a crazy beast was that they started invading maybe some of our folklore any of our stories paleontologists work with the past wrap up what's left in a thing called a cast when we dig in the field we can't just take these bones back with us we can't just pick them up out of the ground otherwise they fall apart sometimes they're very very fragile so we have to wrap them up like when you break a bone in a plaster jacket or a cast digging with picks tiny brushes and care soft gypsum pieces in need of repair the jaw that I held up and I'll hold up again afterwards was made out of gypsum gypsum is the same thing that makes a plaster or sheet rock and it's very very soft we have to be very careful with it because I can actually scratch it with my fingernails it's sad they're all gone but don't you dismay put back together there now on display we do our best to get these things back up on display and Show and Tell for people that way you can still see what they look like even though falling even though they're good yes I'm tripping over my own feet okay so I'm going to show you the jog in here so here we have that mosasaur jog and you can look at it a little see if I can get that camera to focus come on camera there we go you can see all the little cracks running through here it's a very very delicate piece it's very soft I still have to hold it very delicately because I can scratch this thing but not all of them are preserved with gypsum some of them are preserved with iron that's kind of one one end of the spectrum or the other they're either really really soft or they're really super hard and this is one backbone it's kind of bagel back up this is one backbone from one of the tylosaurus ice creatures to that bus sighs creature and it's very heavy it's preserved with iron and see all little details on there wah it is a big beastie it's very heavy and this thing was preserved in an iron concretion so it was like gobbed all together inside the rock can we had to chip it out of the rock but I meant the bone stayed nice and safe the tail is really cool on these mosasaurs because they're a chain of backbones so here we have a chain of tail bones chain of backbones all stuck together and these three are stuck together they're from one of our plaster jackets and these spines up at the top here are the same types of bumps that you can feel on the back of your neck so if you feel on the back of your neck you can feel these little bumps and those bumps are called the spinous process and that's what these are these are spinous process but they're in the tail and not in the neck and because it's a reptile it has an extra little special feature on the bottom side of the tail bone here it's something called the he Millar if I flip it upside down here it looks kind of like a slingshot it's a y-shaped bone that's hooked onto the bottom side of the tail like that and this thing is not only a muscle attachment but it helps tilt it this way you can see it's it's hollow in there there we go it's hollow just like the top is hollow that holds a lot of your blood vessels and nerves the top hole here holds your spinal cord so that's the the big bundle of nerves that comes down from your brain and goes all the way down through your backbone and it goes all the way into the tail so that top one holds the spinal cord and the bottom one is holding all of your blood vessels so everything stays nice and safely protected in bone all right so I have a little specimen here I'm gonna have to adjust my camera so that you can see it here so hold tight I'll show you it this way this is a mosasaur hand bone or a hand that we discovered oh here we go this is a hand that we pulled out last year up in the Pembina gorge we're very excited to see this you can you can see my thumb sitting here and you can see how small these little paddle bones are this is coming from a baby mosasaur not an adult what that's pretty cool we're all very excited put this back in here I want to leave the last little bit here for questions so if Clint has some questions that he's taken he's taking a lot of notes off to the side there because I can't read his fast and talk at the same time some of the questions were mosasaurs venomous where mosasaur is venomous what do you answer for that one No yeah not so much venom wouldn't do a lot of good in a water environment just because the waters gonna wash away everything so like the Komodo dragons which have a festering bacterial culture and nasty stuff that's all dripping and drooling in their mouths the water would just wash that away so you're not going to have that however really cool thing is that they do have a split on the roof of their mouth that's called a fenestrae which is also in the Brandon's and the monitor lizards which probably means that they did have a forked tongue and why do creatures have a forked tongue well it's forked because each side of the tongue can smell differently and so they're tasting the water and that tells you directions so if something over here gets tasted first and then over on this side of the fork the mostest or knows that it needs to go this way to find something so it's actually a directional cue on their tongues which is kind of cool what's my favorite dinosaur Triceratops you know how do we know that's a baby mosasaur paddle good question so part of it is because we do have a little bit more of the rest of the hand and the arm bones for that specimen too I just didn't have them for Show and Tell and the ends of the bones are not quite fused on adult animals the ends of the bones which are where you're growing fuse all together so that it's a nice solid piece and on that particular specimen the ends are still not quite fused so we know that it's a baby they walk on land could they walk on land probably not very if they did anything it'd be like a little galumphing belly flop type thing maybe maybe imagine like what a seal could do probably probably not very well at all they were heavily modified for ocean swimming what would feed on what would feed on mosasaurs other mosasaurs so cannibalistic again sharks would feed on them larger the pliosaurus were pretty much going extinct by that time so they were almost the top of the food chain so basically sharks for scavenging and and other mosasaurs bigger mosasaurs who's that cute buddy on the shelf behind me that's Treecko hi Treecko it's cuz I like Pokemon were they related to sharks were they related to sharks no sharks are in the fish family tree so they're related to skates and rays sharks are related to skates and rays and other cartilaginous creatures so their skeletons are made out of cartilage and the squishy stuff that makes up her nose or ears but they're they're not even related to to the bony fish like a tuna or a carp or anything like that so the mosasaurs on the reptile end of the tree other lizards and snakes what do you think what the Loch Ness monsters what do what do I think about the Loch Ness monster I want to believe okay know that it has the totally wrong habitat in order to actually support a big creature like that as much as I love monsters I love sea monsters I love dragons I love all kinds of mythological beasties that's why I got into paleo in the first place as I like monsters you know it's not a great habitat for a big lone sea monster have good eyesight did mosasaurs have good eyesight that is a good question we're not entirely sure but some of them had something called a sclerotic ring turbo pnes that help support your eye a lot of birds also have this other reptiles have this and it's good for pressure so it can resist any of the pressure in this case water pressure instead of air pressure so it's it's helping keep the ice stable but I don't know how well their eyesight was I know we know they had a good sense of smell but I don't know about eyesight good mosasaurs communicate underwater like whales and dolphins ooh could mosasaurs communicate underwater like whales and dolphins that is also a good question we don't know that's my favorite Pokemon an arrest an erisa is awesome anomalocaris even though I'm a vertebrate paleontologist I got I love my little invert an or if he's pretty cute it says where can we get a copy of your book the book is free online so you can get it through our website and you can also get a hard copy from the museum gift store over at the Heritage Center so both they are yes they are $2.99 for a hard copy printed version how long did mosasaur live I don't know if anybody's aged them that sounds like a future project is what that sounds like oh you got Clint excited now I have no idea I don't think anybody's ever done aging on mosasaurs how can they keep their eyes open underwater ooh how can they keep their eyes open underwater yeah well they would have had eyelids like your regular reptiles but they probably would have had something called a nictitating membrane so snakes you can see this a lot of times on snakes or like the sea snakes will have a separate membrane that can help cover their eyes in order to keep sand and grit and foreign objects out of there so it'll it'll help protect their eyes a little bit there's a moses or a type of whale mosasaur is not a type of whale so whales are mammals and they're very recent creatures and mosasaurs are reptiles so even though reptiles in general are cold-blooded looking at their body plan and how they're moving and how their bone structure is set up it's looking like mosasaurs would have been warm-blooded creature or at least something more like a tuna where their their metabolic rate is so high that they're essentially acting warm-blooded if you've ever gone to kina fishing this is kind of a cool thing I know I'm running out of time here a tuna fishing if you get them and don't immediately put them on ice they will cook themselves we went charter fishing and it was really fun we caught it oh they called it a baked tuna but it was like you know that big it was still a big fish and so we we actually to eat it right on the boat because it was so hot it was so warm blooded on a fish that it literally cooked itself it was the coolest thing ever I never thought that a fish was was hot and the tuna definitely was how much different was the climate in North Dakota when the mosasaurs were here how different was the climate in North Dakota when mosasaurs were here so we figured that the temperature was a little bit warmer a little bit more temperate but not like rainforest levels so we're not talking about like the Amazon basin or anything like that it would be more like Florida a little warmer maybe no snow if you find a tooth in your backyard could it be in mosasaur tooth hmm you find a tooth in your backyard yard could it be a mosasaur tooth it depends on where you live if you are in bismarck know if you are south of Bismarck maybe if you are up in the Pembina Gorge or down in the western corner by marma 3-man Bowman maybe so it depends on where you are and what rock layers are around to to find stuff in can they eat a person can they eat a person I suppose it depends on how big the most of stories and how big the person would be thankfully they're all dead so we don't have to worry about getting eaten by mosasaurs did they live in glacial Lake Agassiz that's a good question so a lot of people get mixed up with how old Lake Agassiz is and Lake Agassiz is actually very young so Lake Agassiz is only about 10,000 years old it's it was around with the last glaciation of North Dakota which was about 10,000 12,000 years ago so no mosasaurs in Lake Agassiz because they would have been all gone but they did used to live in something called the Western interior Seaway which was a big body of water that split North America into so it stretched all the way up north to the Arctic Ocean all the way down south to what is now the Gulf of Mexico and it basically split North America and if you live in Bismarck that is beachfront property right in the middle off to the east you would have ocean and to the West you would have Delta so the flatlands where with all of the the water runoff is coming from the Rocky Mountains it's coming down the mountains and across the the flat Delta into the Western interior Seaway and so the net finally dissipated around 155 million years ago or so somewhere around there so after the dinosaurs went extinct so we had that that water for a long time could you find fossils in the Red River could we find most of our fossils in the Red River probably not not unless they washed in from somewhere else there's a lot of glacial till all of the crushed up rocks and sediment that's just kind of washed across the Red River Valley and so it's not it's not the greatest fossil picking area believe me I know I grew up in Morehead and I dug in my backyard all the time I probably drove my mom crazy sorry mom same with Fargo same with Fargo yep same with Fargo yep the t-rex and a Moses are were to meet which was oh if a t-rex and a Moses are met who would win I would say it depends on who where they met if they met on the shore t-rex would win if they met in the water the most assort would win yeah so what would they do if they met a shark sharks are pretty speedy and and they're they're pretty self-sufficient I don't know how many shark remains have actually been found within the belly cavities of mosasaurs I do know gar have been found in mosasaurs so these guys it's a gar it's a kind of a kind of cool fish you can actually see them in pet stores too sometimes they are lazy fish they're really cool they just sit in the water column there they're predators so they just kind of float in the water and then they flick their heads to the side and snake a little minnow and down the hatch it goes but I know gars have been found in bellies of mosasaurs the biggest mosasaur would have been most asaurus hoffman i which is sitting at about 17 meters long it's a giant of an animal let's see did most of sorts travel in pods that's a really cool question I have no idea again that's a behavioral thing that we really don't have a lot of evidence to see but I would love to find out that would be really cool were they solo did they have families I don't know who would win most of sorry I know we're just about out of time if it cuts out everybody first of all I want to say thank you for joining us and tomorrow our topic is copra lights so tomorrow should be a fun topic of poo and droppings and whatnot so tune in again same time tomorrow ten o'clock will be on here same paleo times saved alien place yes yes who would win a Moses or or a Megalodon they would have never met because Megalodon is also a very very recent creature dying out to point whatever a million years ago yeah about two and a half million years ago they went extinct and by that point in time we were totally dry we didn't have any of our Western interior see what he'd left at all we didn't think that sharks necessarily went after the living mosasaurs but we do have evidence that they fed on dead ones will get mosasaur carcasses that are sitting on the ocean floor and the bones will be all jumbled and torn apart and then interspaced in them would be little tiny shark teeth so we do know that they fed on carcasses hey there's got to be a food chain for everything if nothing fed on the dead mosasaurs then then you would have a whole bunch of things filling up the bottom of the ocean so everywhere there is there's nature's cleanup crew yeah it's gonna kick me out in just a little bit here so thank you again for everybody for coming by that was awesome feel free to give us feedback on Facebook or Twitter let us know how we did if we want if you want us to keep doing this or if this likeness isn't too month this isn't cool this isn't fun or I don't talking about dead things talk about fossils but yeah tomorrow poop and send us ideas for future I just know what you want us to chat about so if you have ideas anything you ever wanted to know about paleo fossils t-rex Triceratops dromaeosaurs clams snails you name it I'm sure we can find something to chat about all right cool until tomorrow take care everyone we'll see you later .
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Our first Q&A session - with school out, we're trying to help with a little dose of science.
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