Badlands Transcript Table Format

David Suzuki	Heidi	Amanda	Michael	Ashley
	It’s amazing how the landforms here really look like other things other than rocks. Do you notice that sometimes?
		Yeah
				Yeah
			Yeah
	It’s funny
As long as you’ve got a good imagination
	Well, we’ve noticed that maybe, yeah, maybe let’s go down this way. We noticed that the longer you’re out in the badlands, and the hotter it is, the more things look like things
Yeah-ha-ha-ha. You’re imagination gets looser, huh?
	Well, it does. Some people claim it might be a kind of hallucination – now watch out for the cactus. When we get around here, you want to take a look around and see if there’s any landforms that look like something that would be familiar to you, not just like a rock.
	So what do you think that landform over there is? Does this one look, look like anything to you?
		Hmm. Oh! That rock right there looks like a camel
	Oh…no…..that’s it! We actually have a name for this guy. We call him Fred the camel….see the hump….see the big droopy lips pointing to the left. And if you look off in the back can you see anything else?
		?
			No.
I’ll give you a clue. Where are camels found?
				Egypt.
Very good!
		A pyramid
		A camel and then a pyramid
Very good!
Has Fred changed that much while you’ve been here Heidi?
	Not that much although he did get a bit of a facelift, he’s lost his double-chin. But, uh, we’re really concerned that the caprock on the hump of Fred may fall off. That ironstone. And if that falls off the hump could erode away very quickly.
But erosion is natural, it’s going to fade away over time.
David seems to direct conversation	Fred is naturally going to erode away. But if he ever lost his hump, all we’d do is change his name to Humphrey the camel.
Awwwwwwooooooo
	Ha ha Ha Ha HA Ha
		Ha ha	Ha ha	Huh ha
Child directs convo	Sometimes it takes a while. Hmmm Hmmm Hmmm
		How are these gullies formed?
	Well, because there there’s not much plants or because there’re not too many plants growing from them, we don’t get a nice protective layer and all this very soft sedimentary rock is exposed every time it rains the outer surface weathers. Do you know how that happens? Have you, do you have any idea how the weathered surface of a rock
		By erosion?
	Well, how does erosion happen though?
		By wind or water or ice when it hits against the stuff it will fall	By wind or water
	Water is the key word here. The rain hits the slopes, it makes the clay that’s in the in the sedimentary rock here expand. And clay’s a neat little mineral and nice and flat and forms nice layers and when they rain, when it rains they absorb the water and they expand and they disorient themselves and when it stops raining they sort of try to get back into those nice layers, but they don’t. And they crumble and crack. And with the next rainstorm all that loose crumbled material washes down and washes into a dry stream channel and washed down in to the Red Deer River and ends up somewhere in Saskatchewan. And that’s how these badlands form. You can see all them a stream that’s working their way down the hills and that’s where all the rain carries all of that material away
And?….it leaves?
			Bones and fossils
Right!	So we have that to thank for finding all the wonderful dinosaur fossils and all the other fossils here.
	When people come to dinosaur provincial park they look around and they see all these hoodoos and badlands and cactus and grass and they wonder: Gee, what did those dinosaurs eat? There’s hardly anything around here to eat! And then you have to say that 75 million years ago things were a lot different. Here, we had rivers, we had forests from mosses and cattails, very lush, very sub-tropical
			Look at the ironstones there
	Isn’t that neat?
			Yeah! They have different *** you can see
		Hey look at this!
				Oh my gosh, Amada found a bone!
	Hey that’s great!
Good fossil!
		Looks like a leg bone
	You’re absolutely right Michael. That is a tibia, which is this part of the leg, of a duck-billed dinosaur. And if you add that to the foot, maybe give a foot for the foot, add the tibia, which is a metre long because half of that one’s eroded away, and then add the femur, our thigh bone
		Look at that
		What is it?
Oh, what’s that?
	I think we made a discovery here.
Hey, that’s very good Amanda. That looks like a vertebra is it?
	Mmm hmm. You can see how round it is. It’s a vertebrae from the backbone of a dinosaur. And if you look on that side, you can even see where his spinal column went through
So that could have been the tail of the animal.
	It could have been the caudal vertebrae, the vertebrae from the tail end. You can’t see where the ribs were fused.
			What kind of dinosaur do you think it could be from?
	Well I know for sure it’s from uh uh a plant eater or herbivore.
How do you know that?
	Well you you can take a look at the structure on the inside.
Mmm Hmm
	And actually if you look in there and around this side it almost looks bubbly.
Umm
	Like an Aero bar and that is the bone marrow. The texture is really fine and bubbly in plant eaters and it’s much coarser in
Oh really?
	Carnivore dinosaurs and well, I would say duck billed dinosaur and I have about a 50% chance of being right because half of the dinosaur fossils found here are from duck billed or the hadrosaurs.
How big would that animal be?
Well, it’s pretty long about 25 feet.
You’ve made a great discovery Amanda. Huh?
	I, that’s fantastic, it’s so beautiful, look how shiny it is.
	David.
Hey, what’s there to see? Hmm?
	Look at this. Beautiful Alberta sword tooth. You can see the ridges. Run your finger down there.
				It’s like a steak knife.
	Exactly.
Wow.
	It’s exactly like a steak knife. Well he was the largest uh meat eating dinosaur around this area 75 million years ago. And what would happen when his teeth grew too dull and you can see a wear mark on the tip he would shed then and would constantly regrow his teeth throughout his life.
			Wow
Well you know how you had baby teeth that fell out well I guess they had just baby teeth that kept falling out all the time.
	All the time. It’s not fair
			They don’t they don’t just get two sets of teeth like we do right.
	That’s right they just continuously regrow and we find a lot of shedded Alberta sword teeth here. The thing when you are looking for fossils you have to look really closely and sometimes they look just like the rest of the rock but the closer you get the more of a chance you have of finding a fossil so let’s let’s take a look close up. Oh look at that for example oh that’s that’s quite obvious what do you guys think that is?
			A jaw.	A jaw.
	This is a hadrosaur jaw and you can see where the roots of the teeth were growing.
		What’s this?
	Let’s see if we can see what one are we looking at?
		This one
	There you’ve got a hadrosaur tooth no root but you can see the wear surface where actually the grinding surface where it was in his mouth and you’d have 700 or more of these teeth in the hadrosaur’s mouth at one time. Remember the hadrosaur was the duck billed dinosaur? But you notice that there no serrations like the steak knife so this is definitely a plant eater and you can see the wear mark where it was that was where it was grinding all the plant matter. They used to think duck billed dinosaurs were creatures that could only eat mushy swamp food but if you imagine there were 700 teeth like this.
Ha ha
	In one jaw and 3 layers of grinding surfaces you could uh you could imagine the swath they would cut through the subtropical forest here when they were grazing through.
			Is this…
Now is this a rock or is this a bone?
	That’s a bone. It could have been from a from a duck billed dinosaur or maybe a horned dinosaur, the the ceratopsian. Oh and here’s a claw. Can see.
A claw?
	Yep.
		A claw?	A claw?	A claw?
	Yep. This is a really nice claw.
			Where’s it from?
	This is probably the front ungule we call it this part of the toe of the front foot of ornithomimot (sp?)
			What’s that?
	He was omnivorous he ate everything type dinosaur probably a little bit probably stood as high as we did and he had quite long front claws but you can see where it was joined to the phalange in the front foot and may have fit like this on the front hand of the ornithomimot