The Backstory: Where did all the dinosaurs go?

Have we really only known about dinosaurs for less than 200 years? They roamed the earth for almost 200 million years and were wiped out in a matter of months. Where did they go and how did we find out about them?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Imagine you're taking a walk in a meadow and you
happen across a big I mean a really really big bone.
But in your world, there's no known animal that could
have come from I'm Patty Steele. Wow, dinosaurs, But where
did they go? That's next on the backstory. We're back

(00:21):
with the backstory. Okay, the Earth is about four and
a half billion years old. Dinosaurs ran the planet from
two hundred and fifty two million to sixty six million
years ago. Our human ancestors appeared maybe seven million years ago,
with modern man showing up only about three hundred thousand
years ago. So, in the scheme of all that stuff,

(00:43):
two hundred years not even the blink of an eye. Right.
Despite people finding some really big bones previous to eighteen hundred,
they all thought the bones belonged to giant lizards, dragons
if you lived in Asia, or even a race of
giant humans that had disappeared. There was no such thing
as dinosaurs. Even the word didn't exist. Then. In eighteen nineteen,

(01:06):
William Buckland, a fossil hunter, finds an enormous bone. He
suspects it's some kind of lizard. The thing was probably
about forty feet long in real life, which, as you
might imagine, freaks everybody out. What is it? Are there
others like it still alive somewhere? I'll keep in mind
this was when pretty much everybody believed the Bible's creation

(01:28):
story that everything and everybody appeared about six thousand years ago,
and all those creatures still roam the earth. By eighteen
twenty four, Buckland gives his creature the first dinosaur like name.
He calls it a megalosaurus. By the early eighteen forties,
it's full on dinosaur fever. After another scientist, Robert Owen,

(01:52):
says these things are unlike anything still inhabiting the planet.
He compares them to other fossilized remains and says they
are their own classification. He gives them the name dinosauria,
later changed a dinosaur based on the Greek words for
terrible lizards. By the eighteen fifties there was full scale

(02:14):
dinosaur mania. London's Crystal Palace had basically the world's first
dinosaur park, with life sized models of the megalosaurus and others,
and there was even a dinner throne for some big shots,
with guests seated inside the model of another dinosaur called
an Iguanadon. Going back previous to the dinosaur craze in

(02:35):
Europe and then the US in the early eighteen hundreds,
there was already a fascination with the bones of animals
that were found or no living species were discovered near it.
In fact, one of our most vividly curious founding fathers,
Thomas Jefferson, was such a fan of what he called bones.
He collected the fossilized bones of a mastodon, not a dinosaur.

(02:58):
The mastodon was a mammal that was basically a huge
prehistoric elephant. He actually displayed them in the front hall
of his home in Virginia. And here's a fascinating tidbit
about his obsession. We've all heard of the Lewis and
Clark expedition, where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were asked
to go west and explore and map the vast western wilderness. Right. Well,

(03:20):
it turns out that wasn't the only reason they hit
the dirt highway. Thomas Jefferson was convinced, based on the
Biblical theory of creation, that all animals that had ever
lived on Earth still lived here, that somewhere there was
another one out there and he wanted one word, has it.
Jefferson believed the mastadons that had once lived in Virginia

(03:42):
had migrated west and were still out there. He wanted
Lewis and Clark to search for one of these things
and bring it back, or at least bring back more
remnants of mastadons and other massive creatures. After the expedition
was over, Clark kept working for Jefferson and sent him
more mastodon bones that he'd found on his travels, but

(04:02):
clearly no live specimens. Kind of like the hunt for
King Kong. You know. Well, today we continue to uncover
new stories about dinosaurs. We know that the biggest dinosaur ever,
in fact, the biggest land animal ever, was a thing
called an Argentinosaurus. Palaeontologists say it was over one hundred
and thirty feet tall and weighed about two hundred and

(04:24):
thirty thousand pounds. Now, scientists now say that today's birds
actually evolved from some dinosaurs called theropods, which included the
Jurassic Park fan favorites, the t rex and velociraptors. They
say these dinosaurs were likely covered with bright colored feathers.
Imagine a bright blue or red, fuzzy t rex. What's

(04:45):
really interesting is the thought that while dinosaurs in various
forms roam the Earth for hundreds of millions of years,
they went completely extinct in one nine month period sixty
six million years ago. That's when a six month mile
wide asteroid bigger than Mount Everest hit the Earth off
the coast of what's now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The impact

(05:08):
from that collision released one hundred million megatons of energy.
It vaporized the asteroid and sent a massive cloud of ash,
dust and dirt into the atmosphere and across the globe,
blocking out the sun. That caused a global collapse of
the food chain. Meantime, molten glass rained down all over

(05:29):
the Earth, there were wildfires, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, the air
temperature was scalding hot and then freezing cold, and finally
there was the never ending darkness. All of that killed
off all land based dinosaurs in just nine months. So
when you think about the history of the world, it's

(05:50):
pretty amazing that we had no sense of the existence
of dinosaurs who lived for several hundred million years until
the last two hundred years, literally no time. You kind
of realize We're only at the very dawn of the
exploration of where we've been and where we're going. I'm

(06:19):
Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,
the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer
is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out
to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram
at Real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.

(06:41):
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.