"People have been finding dinosaur fossils for hundreds of years, probably thousand of years." "Today, dinosaur fossils always stand in lifelike poses." "But when the first one went on display in 1868, it caused a sensation, suddenly people were fascinated by the secrets contained in the rocks, and they still are." "This time, the team is revealing the secrets of the fossils behind the scenes." "Someone called it a comet of pre-history." "'And discovering new ones in South Africa.'" "So it seems to be if you like caught in the act." "'We join the museum's palaeontologists.'" "We're entering the world of fossils and bones hoping to find out how people are using them to read the past and predict the future for all of us, right here in the Natural History Museum..." "The Museum of Life." "ROARS" "Once, museum dinosaurs were scattered fossils in wooden drawers but 1868, the curator of the Natural History Museum in Philadelphia had a revolutionary idea." "He wanted to dust off the bones, put a dinosaur back together and find a way to stand it back upright." "He wanted to give the creature scale, ferocity and drama, so he turned to Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins." "Hawkins was a British artist who'd made a name for himself building life-size model dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace." "He came up with an elaborate metal frame and reconstructed his first real prehistoric animal." "It was an instant sensation." "Visitor numbers to the Philadelphia Museum doubled overnight." "Suddenly, no museum of natural history could be without a standing dinosaur." "Today, with over two million people a year passing through this gallery, not much has changed." "But this isn't just an exhibition, it's a growing scientific resource with new dinosaurs adding to our understanding all the time." "Liz Bonnin joined the museum team on a dig near Johannesburg," "South Africa in search of the holy grail of dinosaur exploration -- a missing link." "This may not be Jurassic Park, but South Africa is one of the best places in the world to find dinosaur remains." "About 200 million years ago, some of the biggest creatures to ever walk the earth appeared here." "Sauropods such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus walked on four legs, had small heads and long necks and could way over 100 tonnes." "Paul Barratt from the Natural History Museum is joining teams from Johannesburg and Munich to work out how these vast creatures came into existence." "to work out how these vast creatures came into existence." "Well, we just walk around with our eyes to the ground basically." "We're looking out for something that's slightly different to the majority of the rock." "Little chips of bone or if we're really lucky, a small part of bone poking out of a side of a cliff or a side of a hill that will give us some indication of where we might actually find part of a skeleton or some bones." "Is it pretty difficult, because to me there's different textures, lots of different colours here already?" "It is difficult, you need to get your eye in, walk around quite a lot, pick up some small bits and pieces and check out what's bone and what isn't." "Actually walking around here, you can already see some evidence of bone..." "Where?" "Just in this fallen block here, there's a little bit of bone just peeking out of the side here." "See, I would never have known that was bone." "What's giving it away is it's a slightly different colour to the rest of the rock, and also I can recognise it, it's a part of a limb bone, actually, that's been cut in section." "So you can see it's hollow inside and then it has this thick layer of bone around the outer part of it, so it's a very characteristic shape." "It seems amazing that in the 21st century, cutting-edge palaeontology still begins with a long walk and your eyes to the ground." "What dinosaur hunters have done for two hundred years, but it gets results." "Throughout the area the team are uncovering dinosaur fossils, but Paul wanted to take me to a site where they'd found something quite extraordinary." "But just as we got to the location and started to get some shots of the area, something else caught our attention." "Just as we've been filming, the guys have found another fossil." "Check this out." "It's very small, guys, what is that?" "It seems to be a Prosauropod tooth." "While the Sauropods were huge lumbering beasts up to 30 metres long, the Prosauropods that came earlier were much smaller animals that primarily walked on two legs." "But little is known about how one evolved into the other." "That's a teeny tooth, so how big were these Prosauropods?" "So this will be similar size to some of the other ones we're finding, so maybe sort of like a six metre-long animal." "Yeah." "The tooth is missing quite a bit of the root down here at the bottom." "OK, so we'd have it maybe about this length in total?" "Yeah." "I was already impressed with the Prosauropod tooth but Paul wanted to show me why he'd really bought me to this barren hillside." "A leg and rib bone from an entirely different dinosaur." "This particular dinosaur is what we think is a new species of large plant eating dinosaur, and one that's actually a close relative of the Sauropod dinosaurs." "This animal is quite important because it comes from near the time when the Sauropods started to get very large and actually went down onto all fours." "So this animal is walking around on its hind limbs, like most Prosauropods but it has a number of features that are a bit more like Sauropods." "It seems to be, if you like, caught in the act just before it goes down on all fours and becomes a true Sauropod, this seems to be something in the transition between those two grades of dinosaur." "This discovery looks like the missing link between the Prosauropods and the four-legged giants that came later, and Paul seems very sure about what has been found." "How can you tell?" "By looking at various features of the hip bones and hind limb bones, and also the arms, the arms in this animal are still very short." "Whereas the animals walk on all fours, the forearm seem to get much longer and nearly the same length as the hind legs." "Excellent." "So this is a new species discovered at this quarry?" "That's right." "And what kind of information does it give with regards to the evolution of these dinosaurs?" "It tells us more about the locomotion in these animals evolved, how they walked, a bit more potentially about how they may have increased in body size because larger animals tend to walk on all fours." "So it gives us a nice window on the evolution of this group and the origin of these gigantic Sauropods." "So this is it, a new species of dinosaur discovered here in South Africa, it's been named Aardonyx Celestae." "This species helps to fill in another gap in our understanding of how dinosaurs that walked on two legs eventually became the four-legged goliaths that are icons of the Jurassic." "We all love the idea of a missing link, this is something I'm really looking forward to." "In May of 2009 an extraordinary fossil hit the headlines." "They called it Ida." "You must be Dr Hooker." "Hello, Jimmy how are you?" "Nice to meet you." "The original fossil has now returned to Oslo, but Dr Jerry Hooker has a cast perfect in every detail for display in pride of place at the Natural History Museum." "The press hailed it as the long-lost missing link in human evolution." "So this is the specimen?" "It is, yes." "Now, what is Ida?" "Ida is a primitive primate about 47 million years old, so quite early in the history of primates." "So she's right at the beginning, I mean she's down here, isn't she?" "She's down there, that's right." "It's the beginning as we know them, fifty five." "And we're up here." "We're up here, yes." "So she's a long way down." "Yes." "Would I be right in calling this a missing link?" "No, not really, it's a very misleading term." "For a start, it's not missing, this one." "And more or less any fossil is a link of some sort because it's a... it takes us back in time, but it's a term that was conjured up for ape men and really it's not appropriate." "This is just another piece in a much bigger puzzle?" "Yes, but it's a big piece." "So if this fossil isn't a missing link, what makes it so important?" "Really, its completeness." "Usually the sorts of material we have to deal with are... are bits and pieces, so like a jaw bone like this or a... or a piece of leg bone like this." "And often it's very difficult to know which jaw goes with which leg bone." "Right." "What we have here is something that's absolutely complete, and not only can we see that all the various bits are there, but we can then start to interpret the more fragmentary specimens that we have." "You've got a puzzle with all the pieces already." "Exactly." "On top of that, in this case we also have an impression of the fur." "Wow, yeah, look at that." "And in this area, in the stomach and gut area, we have the remains of its last meal." "So there are small leaf fragments and a fruit, piece of a fruit, and from that we know it was eating a mixture of leaves and fruit." "So this is really like a snapshot in time." "You can see its fur, what it had for breakfast, what it had for dinner." "Not sure we can separate breakfast from dinner but..." "Yeah, could be a cornflake in there." "Ida may not be the missing link as the world's media claimed." "However it isn't the first time that our craving for a missing link has prevented us from seeing the truth." "The most famous case happened almost a hundred years ago, and Mark Carwardine went to unearth the evidence from the bowels of the museum." "For 40 years, this fossil skull was hailed as one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever unearthed in Britain." "It was given the name Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown Man as it's more commonly known today, and it was believed to be the missing link between apes and humans." "But then in 1953, it was exposed as a malicious hoax, news that rocked the scientific establishment and prompted a scandal that still rumbles on today." "So I'm keen to find out who fooled the scientific community for over 40 years and how they did it." "Museum palaeontologist Andy Currant knows Piltdown Man better than most." "Hello, Andy." "Hi there." "How are you?" "I'm pretty good, pretty good." "I've bought an old friend to see you." "The saga began in 1912 when a fragment of human skull was unearthed in the village of Piltdown in East Sussex." "It was found, famously, like bits of a smashed coconut, and this is quite thick for human skull." "How old did they reckon that was at the time?" "Maybe half a million years old." "This was potentially one of the earliest examples of human remains ever found, older even than the recent discoveries of Neanderthal man in Germany, and the excitement only grew when this jaw bone appeared." "Now you have to believe me here, that is an ape-like jaw." "Right." "But with rather worn flat, slightly human-shaped teeth, and it was put together as our little friend over there." "The man behind the thrilling discovery was local solicitor and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson." "He wrote to his friend and eminent museum palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward, unable to hide his patriotic pride." "Now I'm paraphrasing, but basically what Dawson is saying in this letter is," ""Yippee, I've found a human skull that rivals the one in Germany."" "What's interesting is not so much about the science, it's about the competition, and I think what it really shows is that the English were absolutely desperate to find that missing link." "It was everything to do with Britain's position in the world." "We were an important nation, had an empire, we weren't going to have Johnny Foreigners turning up with interesting fossils and us not having any." "This was an important political as well as scientific find." "On December 18th 1912, Dawson and Woodward broke their story to the world." "They had found the missing link, and he was English." "Dubbed the earliest Englishman, for 40 years he reigned supreme, but in 1953, the sensational announcement came." "Piltdown Man was a fake." "The world had been deceived." "It was hugely embarrassing." "The scientific community had been completely taken in." "There were even questions in Parliament about it, weren't there?" "Yeah, nationally this is quite a big issue." "Chemical analysis carried out here at the museum revealed the true scale of the fraud." "All the finds had been planted at Piltdown, and most weren't even fossils." "The skull, allegedly 500,000 years old, was in reality closer to 500." "And the ape-like jaw was indeed ape- like -- it was an orang-utan's jaw doctored to look human." "Bits of this jaw had been broken away that would give you diagnostic features." "Really?" "And how about the teeth?" "The teeth, this flattened surface which is a rather human characteristic, seems to have been caused by filing." "It's not even very sophisticated." "It's been done quite crudely." "It was an audacious act of forgery, but the question remained, who was the hoaxer?" "Over the years many have been implicated, but for Andy there is only one man who is ultimately responsible for the fraud." "Dawson, we've got to nail him." "We now know he was an infamous hoaxer." "He actually perpetrated a very large number of faked discoveries of all kinds." "If there's an afterlife, he must be a very happy man." "There's no denying that Dawson and his Piltdown Man made monkeys out of many eminent scientists, but Andy is convinced that the lessons of the past have been learnt." "I really don't think anything like this could happen today." "This is very much a hoax of its time." "So many people wanted this to be real, it became real." "And do you think it's made scientists a bit more suspicious?" "Yes." "I hope it has." "It's certainly made me a lot more suspicious." "Would you have been taken in?" "I hope not." "Ever since the first standing dinosaur went on display in 1868, we've obsessed about recreating the great beasts." "But when the film Jurassic Park exploded onto our cinema screens in 1993, we were offered the tantalising prospect of someday recreating a living, breathing dinosaur." "The film suggested that scientists could recreate dinosaurs from DNA taken from dinosaur blood found inside mosquitoes trapped inside prehistoric amber." "Now at the risk of sounding silly, for me that sounds just about reasonable, doesn't it?" "The key could lie here." "Inside fire-proof safes, there are 4,500 pieces of fossilised tree resin with tiny creatures trapped inside." "Some of these insects date as back as far as 130 million years, the time of the dinosaurs." "The thing with specimens found in amber is that they're beautifully preserved." "It's a sort of window on an ancient world." "A lot of interest was generated in our amber collections by the film Jurassic Park." "But specimens from the time of the dinosaurs are rare." "Rarer still are insects that might have been able to bite through dinosaur skin and feed on its blood." "There is one candidate possibly for something that might have fed on dinosaurs, and that's a sandfly." "It's a 120 million- year-old insect from Burma." "Before anyone could test such a rare specimen, one question needed answering." "Could you even get insect DNA out of amber, let alone dinosaur DNA?" "The hunt was on." "The candidate they chose was a bee from Dominican amber because we had a lot of that, because obviously you don't want to destroy some of your best specimens and come up with nothing because it involves cutting the insect out of its amber tomb, grinding it up and doing the DNA analysis." "But sadly nothing was found." "We ground up a lot of bees in amber, which was a bit of a shame!" "Only broken DNA fragments have been recovered from amber, and none from a dinosaur." "Even so, the museum's amber collection gives us a uniquely intimate picture of ancient life." "Amber is the perfect time capsule, and you see things caught like on a camera, which you don't see with other fossils." "Insects, you can actually see their death struggles inside by the flow lines in the amber, its last desperate attempts to get out." "These midges are caught in the act of mating 43 million years ago." "You can see through into it." "You can see the animal trapped there." "You can see details of hairs on the legs of insects." "You can see the eye facets." "An enormous amount of information can be got from specimens trapped in amber." "While dinosaur DNA proves elusive, there are disputed claims that prehistoric bacteria found inside amber has been isolated and brought back to life." "There could be many more discoveries yet locked away inside nature's time capsules." "The thousands of fossils held here at the Natural History Museum don't just tell us about the history of life on earth." "They also hint at the lives of those who collected them." "Mary Anning may now be largely passed by, but in her home town her contribution to fossil collecting is very much remembered." "Each year, Lyme Regis is transformed into a carnival of fossils." "Central to this festival is local hero Mary Anning and how she helped transformed fossil hunting from a hobby -- collecting curiosities -- into a journey of scientific discovery." "By the time she died at the age of 47, Mary Anning was both famous and celebrated as the greatest fossilist the world ever knew." "Mary was born in 1799 but at the age of ten her father died, leaving the family without income." "Mary discovered she could earn money by clambering along the fragile cliff to find fossils and sell them to passers by." "It was a poor existence that would eventually challenge one of the most fundamental beliefs of the time." "Back then people believed the Old Testament story that the earth was created in six days and that it was only 6,000 years old." "Mary and her fossils would help change all that." "She happened to be in just the right place, living on what's known as the Jurassic Coast." "This is a 155 kilometre stretch of rugged, treacherous cliff from Dorset to Devon." "Martyn Mount from the Natural History Museum is going to show me why these rocks became a life's work for Mary." "This is really spectacular and I can't believe the amount of fossils I'm looking at here." "What it is is just the natural accumulation of these fossils over a long period of time." "So you've got lots of different ammonites living in the waters above, dying and ending up on the sea floor." "We now know that an ammonite is a spiral shelled relative of a modern squid, the most common Jurassic fossil on the Lyme Regis coast." "Can you paint me a picture of what the seas would have been like during that time?" "OK." "The sea may have been fairly warm." "It was close to the equator at the time." "If you just look around you, you know, we've got all these ammonites." "It must have been swarming with ammonites." "Sure." "But when at the age of 12, Mary Anning discovered something out of the ordinary, and her fortunes began to change." "One day in 1811, Mary's brother found a skull protruding from the cliff and it took her months to painstakingly uncover the rest of the bones." "She discovered the first complete skeleton of a fish lizard, or Ichthyosaur." "The Ichthyosaur was sold for the small fortune of £23, and with collectors, museums and even European noblemen vying to buy further discoveries, Mary dedicated her time to combing the cliffs, eventually finding other species unknown to science." "Mary Anning and her dog became a familiar sight along these beaches." "Visitors began pouring into Lyme Regis, and 200 years later they still come, to head out across the rocks and try their luck at fossil hunting." "And what we see here is the tooth perhaps of quite a large shark, you know, a three-metre beast that was hunting around looking for fish to eat." "This is a fish-eating tooth." "It's come from the crustaceous rocks so this is probably going to be about 100, 105 million years old." "It may have come from clay or the upper green sand that's overlying these rocks, so that's a really interesting find, and one that's taken me a bit by surprise." "So well done!" "Thank you." "Keep it safe." "So do you think it would have been easy for Mary to find fossils along this coastline back in the early 1800s?" "OK, yeah, I think it would have been fairly easy because there would have been more fossils about, because there was less collectors." "What would have been the difficulty of course is the interpretation and understanding what they were." "But while to visitors the fossils were confusing and mysterious, Mary Anning had taught herself to recognise and understand what she was finding." "And in the years to follow, the scientific community would rewrite the history of the world based in no small part on the findings of Mary Anning." "But all this was really troubling to the Victorian mindset because fossils undermined faith in the Bible and the story of creation." "They seemed to show that life had evolved slowly over a really long time." "It all pointed to a world that was much, much older than 6,000 years." "In her finals months, though women were not allowed to join the Esteemed" "Geological Society, Mary Anning was nevertheless made a honorary member." "Today she is recognised as the first female palaeontologist and one of the people who provided evidence that changed our thinking on the age of the planet and the story of life on earth." "In Mary Anning's day any new find was cleaned up with the use of brushes and the careful use of chisels." "But inevitably, on occasion things would get broken." "Nowadays there's a whole department dedicated to teasing the secrets out from the rocks." "Scott Moore-Fay is part of the Paleontological Conservation Unit." "He grinds stone away from fossils with tools you might be more used to seeing at the dentist." "I'm preparing a 400 million-year-old fossil." "On the other side I have a specimen that I prepared earlier." "Probably taken about 40 hours to prepare." "Now that sounds horrendous, but when you're working under the microscope, two hours can disappear literally in the blink of an eye." "The most frustrating thing is that you can spend two hours working under the microscope to find that you've only actually cleared an area about five millimetres square." "Under the microscope it looks enormous!" "Another mission for the unit is to keep the museum's specimens in tip-top condition." "Lorraine Cornish is the museum's longest-serving conservator." "We like to all think of the conservation unit as a bit of a hospital, really, where people will bring their sick specimens to be treated." "With millions of specimens to care for, the work ranges from treating everyday wear and tear to more serious problems." "Sometimes someone comes in and they've dropped a specimen and it's in pieces, and you see the look on their faces, and so you never know what's going to come in, really." "One problem though is a constant battle." "Head of Conservation Chris Collins needs to save thousands of specimens from being blown apart by an affliction known as pyrite decay." "The yellow, the yellowish green colour powders are where the pyrite has oxidised and deteriorated." "This specimen is defined by the ribs and already we're losing some of the rib structure in it, so this has to be treated as soon as possible." "Chris has pioneered his own technique to stop these fossils from being turned into dust." "So in this fume cupboard we have an ammonia gas environment, and we're going to put this specimen to the ammonia gas." "This is a specimen that I did earlier on, and you can see the deterioration has now been stopped in this, so now we have to take this specimen and put it straight away in an oxygen free environment." "The conservation unit are leading the way in how museums around the world care for their fossils." "You tend to bond with certain specimens if you've actually, if they've come into the Conservation Unit and you start to care for them." "We're very passionate about what we do." "I've come to meet Lorraine Cornish to see the latest weapon in the armoury of the Paleontological Conservation Unit." "Hi, Jim." "So we keep the laser in this room." "It's quite a dangerous bit of equipment to use so we have to come in and shut the door and make sure no one else is going to come in." "'This may be technology of the future, but I'm less sure about the accessories that go with it.' 70s, right." "OK." "So this is a real-life laser gun?" "This is a real-life laser gun." "Do you know how much I've dreamt of this as a kid after watching Star Wars?" "What we do is, we have a little bit of black photography paper here." "We can just test the laser is going to work by doing this." "See how it's removing that for us?" "Good Lord, that is incredible!" "Lorraine is planning to let me loose with the laser on an extinct, 3,000-year-old dwarf hippopotamus skull." "I'm going to let you loose on it." "Can you see that light?" "That red light shows you where you're going to be cleaning." "Do you want to have a go on the tooth?" "Yeah." "Sure." "Let's bring it round so you can see more easily." "That one in here." "Have a look in there." "So you see the side of the tooth?" "Start from here and press, and then as you hear the sound, and then you can go in a little bit." "That's it, that's it." "That's right, you're a natural." "It is really satisfying because you think, "Right, clean it all up."" "Exactly, exactly." "It's a really satisfying thing to do." "You're the first person to see that clean surface as well, and that's very satisfying as well." "That is true." "I'm the very first person on Earth to see that." "Oh." "Wow." "This works well on large skulls, doesn't it?" "So things like hippos, elephants..." "Any size thing." "I've cleaned things that are really, really tiny as well, so it works on all sorts of things." "And not just fossils - you can clean butterfly wings and leaves of plants." "No!" "All sort of things with it." "A butterfly's wings?" "And it's very moreish, isn't it?" "You want to just do it, don't you?" "And then you feel you want to clean all of it." "After this I want to move onto something else." "Yes!" "I've got my eye on that big dinosaur as you walk into the museum." "Yes, absolutely." "The latest technology is being used in all sorts of ways to unlock the secrets of the past." "Suddenly, with new techniques, fossils are telling tales not just of individual organisms but of the entire world they lived in." "We all know that for millions of years, dinosaurs ruled the Earth." "But what did their world actually look like?" "Filled with plants and trees so different from today it's difficult to imagine, even for the experts." "But now, with the aid of cutting edge technology, a 145-million-year-old fossil found here in the Wiltshire countryside is set to shed new light on that lost world." "And, no, it's not a dinosaur - it's a tree." "Discovered in the summer of 2008, it's taken over a year for all 137 sections of the fossil tree to make their way from Wiltshire to the museum in London." "It's heavy." "It's heavy, yeah." "That's not surprising." "It is made of stone!" "Once reassembled, it will make up the most complete fossil tree ever unearthed in the UK, and one of the museum's largest specimens." "What sort of a wedge do we need under there - sandbags?" "Palaeontologist Paul Kennrick is in charge of assembling this prehistoric jigsaw." "I've never had to deal with anything anywhere near this size, no!" "One of the astonishing things about this tree is it's so complete because most of the time fossil wood is dug out in little bits and pieces, and people give up after digging out a small block." "Does that look a good fit?" "It's not bad." "The man who Paul has to thank for single handedly unearthing this entire tree is amateur fossil hunter, John Needham." "You remember every single piece." "Yes, the whole lot." "John discovered the tree while out walking with his daughter Izzie." "He then spent two months excavating, cleaning and numbering each section." "For John, getting every piece required dedication verging on obsession." "Oh, wow." "I think one or two people who saw me while I was doing it probably thought I was mad, but..." "Izzie obviously thinks I'm mad!" "But I couldn't stop." "It's like if you found a dinosaur and you got the skull, the neck and the front part of the body, you can't think, "I can't be bothered with the tail."" "You have to go on and dig it all up." "With previous fossil tree finds being little more than stumps, what's really exciting Paul is that this complete find will finally reveal the size and shape of these prehistoric trees, providing a real picture of the world dinosaurs inhabited." "Here we can actually see how the tree actually did branch, so we have tangible factual evidence of this particular thing, so we know that the trunk was unbranched for five metres, and then at five metres, you get this major first branching happening in the trunk." "But to really see the shape of the living tree," "Paul needs to complete his vast jigsaw in three dimensions." "To do this, he's using the very latest in computer technology." "It's all coming together very nicely." "I love it, we've got a tree there that's 145 million years old, and then we've got a laser scanner which has got all the knobs and whistles, which is totally current and up to date." "Gently sweep across the surface, I can see it appearing." "Wow!" "But the technology quickly throws up a surprise." "The vast fossil tree has a section missing, meaning it was even bigger than Paul had previously thought." "When we thought we were laying out the whole trunk, actually the bottom part's the trunk and then it's a branch and there's something bigger that's still out there." "Exactly." "The whole tree would've been much bigger and we've lost a large fragment of it already." "Even bigger!" "Paul has had time to do more analysis of the tree and has invited me and John to meet him in Wiltshire, close to the place John spent so long digging the tree from the ground." "Paul has promised to finally tell us what the tree and the landscape it stood in looked like." "I'm really looking forward to seeing this." "You can see how these little chains, these little circles here are actually the cells all lined up inside the wood, and that tells us that we've got a conifer, probably related to the sort of cypress-type conifers." "Determining the species is a major step, but the cross sections also reveal what the climate at the time was like." "It was growing in a seasonal environment." "We can tell that because of the growth ring structures in the wood, sort of hot, dry summer season and a wet winter season." "All Paul has to do now is put the pieces together and finally conjure up the world of John's tree." "Firstly, the whole environment was warmer and much more arid." "We wouldn't have had any grasses like we've got today and the forest that we've come out of, the woodland that we've come out of, is quite a dense woodland." "If you went back to the Jurassic of Wiltshire it would have been a much sparser, more open woodlands." "It took John two months to pull the tree out of the ground, and it took Paul a further three months to piece it back together." "This is the prehistoric piece of Wiltshire it has revealed." "Well, here, looking across east towards London, as far as the eye can see is a lagoon, a broad expanse of water." "Fringing that lagoon going north and south would have been this forest." "This is how Paul believes the world of John's tree looked." "It's about 15, 20 metres in height, and it's got this broad, expanding crown of branches." "But Paul's also been able to unravel the extraordinary events that caused the tree to be fossilised in the first place." "And how did our tree die?" "The tree died by the waters from the lagoon flooding the forest, probably due to a landslip caused by a small earthquake." "The trees were literally killed by poisoning, pickling." "It probably remained upright for maybe 10, 20 or 30 years, rotting slowly and then fallen over into the waters of the lagoon and be fossilised in that way." "So we've found out what happened to your tree." "What do you think?" "Well, I think after all the hours of work spent digging it up, putting it together, the work at the museum, it's absolutely incredible to see how it was when it was alive and what happened to it when it died." "While newly discovered fossils are undoubtedly key to building a picture of the past, sometimes a new look at something already in the collection causes a major rethink on some of the facts that we hold most dear." "I bet if I were to ask anyone in the museum, especially some of these kids, to pick their favourite dinosaur, there's one name that's going to crop up time and time again." "Tyrannosaurus Rex." "The T Rex." "Tyrannosaurus." "T Rex." "The T Rex." "Definitely the T Rex." "Is it?" "And why's that?" "Because it's fast and it's big and it, like, kills dinosaurs." "Now I know my survey wasn't exactly scientific, but you get the point, because there's no doubt at all about which of all the dinosaurs is the real superstar." "He's a rock star, a legend, a six-tonne, 40-foot, flesh-eating Elvis of the dinosaur world." "And even his name, Tyrannosaurus Rex, which means "tyrant lizard king"" "recognises and celebrates his lofty status." "But exactly how did T Rex become king, and more to the point does he really deserve such an accolade?" "Oh, shush." "But complain he might, because despite his imposing size, rows of dagger-like teeth and a bite several times more powerful than that of an African lion, not to mention his outstanding eyesight, some people have dared to suggest that T Rex was not a fearless predator after all..." "..but rather a lumbering scavenger." "This theory has polarised the world of palaeontology, and I must admit, it's severely dented the image I've held most dear since I was a small boy." "So I'm heading to the bowels of the building to get to the bottom of the controversy." "Hello, Paul." "Hi, Mark." "'And the man I'm pinning my hopes on is palaeontologist Paul Barratt." "'He's promised me a rare glimpse of one of the museum's most important fossils.'" "Ah!" "I've wanted to see this for years." "Can I touch it?" "Yep, sure." "'This is the left lower jaw of an actual T Rex.'" "This was found in 1900 in Wyoming, and actually it used to have a different name - Dynamosaurus Imperiosus - which I actually think is quite a good name." "Later on it was realised it was just another T Rex." "Just another T Rex?" "That's outrageous!" "I'm sorry, I think the crown is starting to slip slightly from this animal now." "So why the change in theory?" "One idea comes from looking at those teeth." "They're designed for crunching through bone, but if we compare that with another meat-eating dinosaur tooth, a dinosaur called Megalosaurus, this is much more like an actual steak knife, whereas these things are like railroad spikes." "This suggests that the T Rex was a specialist bone crushing dinosaur, so maybe it was bone crushing because it was hunting... but it might have been bone crushing because it was eating carcasses." "What about the pathetic front arms?" "Are they giving any clues?" "They're not there for feeding because they couldn't even reach the mouth of the animal." "The best idea we have is either they're something called a vestigial structure, a structure that's been disappearing through evolution..." "So they're on their way out?" "Exactly." "Or maybe they're something to do with mating, and actually they're used for holding on." "They're the only ideas we have to do with that so they're definitely nothing to do with grappling heroically with another dinosaur that it's going to eat." "But that's not really enough evidence to knock it down from its pedestal, is it?" "You're quite right to be sceptical." "But some colleagues have looked at the bit of the brain associated with the sense of smell, and they've shown that it's enormous." "It could be that this incredibly advanced sense of smell is there to detect the smell of rotting carcasses, like a hyena." "That really does destroy everyone's image of T Rex, wandering around and looking for dead animals." "There's a lot of resistance to the idea that the T Rex is anything other than the kind of big mega predator that it's made out to be in all sort of films and documentaries and so on, but this is an idea that's out there." "Feeling a little depressed, I seek solace in a bit of retail therapy." "While I may have to accept my hero wasn't such a fearless hunter," "I can't help feeling there's more to T Rex than bones in the basement." "Roar!" "Roar!" "Given the doubts, I need to know why the museum still gives him iconic status." "And for that, I'm off to meet a man who knows him better than most." "Hello, John." "Hello, Mark." "Engineer John Phillips is in charge of the museum's very own T Rex." "If you can put a bump hat on for health and safety." "Dangerous, is it?" "This state-of-the-art animatronics model gets up to 50,000 visitors a week, easily making it the most popular exhibit in the museum." "So you can actually see what he's looking at." "Presumably it's programmed to look for the most frightened poor little child, is it?" "And probably the plumpest one as well." "Any tasty morsel will do!" "Mind your head." "But even a mighty T Rex needs a bit of TLC, and long after the last frightened child has gone home, it's John's chance to do a bit of first aid." "It looks like he's been in a bad fight." "It's not too bad, though, we can patch it up." "But it's three o'clock in the morning and freezing cold," "I do wonder what I'm doing this for, but it's worth it..." "But then seeing everyone's faces must make it worth it?" "Oh, yes." "Why do you think that T Rex has captured everyone's imagination so?" "It's one of the largest dinosaurs, especially the teeth and blood and the guts, and something the children can identify with." "And that's the point, because it doesn't really matter what the experts say, to kids everywhere - me included" " T Rex perfectly fulfils all our expectations of what a true monster should be." "The fossil record not only challenges our view of the past, it's also giving us stark warnings for the future." "Professor Adrian Lister is a world expert on woolly mammoths and he has a theory on what it was that wiped out Britain's ancient giants." "I mean this, for example, is some real hair of a woolly mammoth from Siberia." "Look at that!" "Piece of mammoth skin with its hair on." "This is very unusual." "Wow." "But it shows very graphically the cold adaptation of the animal." "We also know that it ate mostly grass." "This is another remarkable piece." "This, believe it or not, is part of a mammoth's stomach." "This is the stomach wall, and here is the compressed food of this animal's last meal." "I think you'll find it smells rather like the elephant house at the zoo, and that's about 30,000 years old." "That is unreal." "The scientific value of this is that we can reconstruct what the animal was eating, and so then we go to look at what the habitat was doing through time, and of course if this animal's preferred food, in this case grass, started to disappear," "then we've got a potential reason for why its range shrank and it eventually went extinct." "So the climate changed and basically the mammoth's world changed?" "Yeah, precisely, yeah." "It couldn't adapt fast enough to that?" "That's right." "It had evolved over millions of years to become this very specialised creature for living in the cold environment, feeding on grass." "Then the climate warmed dramatically at the end of the last ice age, quite naturally, of course, unlike the present day warming, and that caused the forests to spread right over that grassland habitat and so the mammoth's habitat disappeared and its own range shrank and eventually went extinct." "This is relevant to today's situation because we've got further climate warming happening now caused by human influence, which goes way beyond the natural changes, and so we have an example here of what happens." "Species actually die out, their habitats disappear, they go extinct." "That's very germane to what's happening to many species today." "What the species like the mammoth is, it is a lesson from history." "Perhaps the most relevant lesson that history could teach us would be how the great shifts in climate have affected the people of the past." "One museum project is trying to work out exactly that." "Chris Van Tulleken met museum palaeontologist" "Professor Chris Stringer at Haisborough on the coast of Norfolk." "Is it still fun for you to get your hands dirty?" "Is it still exciting for you to do this?" "Yes, it's fantastic to dig, and of course there's always the expectation that you're going to find something exciting." "I mean, to uncover a stone tool and you're actually holding that, and the last time someone held that was a human who lived 700,000 years ago, that is just so exciting." "This dig is revealing the secrets of how climate affected the lives of the earliest inhabitants of Britain." "We're getting much more out of the sediments." "We're getting beetle remains." "We're getting evidence of wood and pollen." "That environmental information is really important to flesh out the story of what it was like when humans were living here." "On another part of the site, a new find provides proof of a significantly warmer climate than Norfolk enjoys today." "So what have you found, Nigel?" "What we've just found here is a fragment of bone in the sands just above the gravels." "Nothing you're describing looks like bone." "Can you point it out?" "It's all these tiny black fragments and dark brown fragments in here." "There's a small fragment of bone there, yep." "We often find fragments of bone." "Hyenas chew them." "They're the only animals that consume bone in its entirety." "But that would have been the wildlife of this time, would it?" "Absolutely." "If you step back in time 700,000 years ago, 600,000 years ago and came to Norfolk, you'd think you were in Africa." "They do leave us other clues as to their presence - their droppings" "Because they consumed bone and there's a lot of mineral content in bone, they survive very well once they're rolling around in the gravels." "We think we've just found one in this section." "We only just found this a few minutes ago, but I'm fairly sure that's what it is." "It's a characteristic shape and size, and we've got three others of these droppings elsewhere in the site already, so this will make a fourth one." "Amazing - hyena poo." "I didn't think I was going to be looking at that on the beach in Norfolk!" "Over the past year, Chris has discovered artefacts at this site that, when pieced together, reveal that hyenas were about to become the very least of early man's problems." "We've got a beautiful example of one of the fantastically preserved remains that we've got from here." "This is a fir cone that was... washed in this river system 700,000 or 800,000 years ago, and it's beautifully preserved." "Can you see?" "Oh, wow!" "The evidence seems to suggest that the humans were living here at a time when it was actually, the interglacier was turning down, it was getting cooler, and we're beginning to get things like fir and pine trees, indicating the climate is cooling down." "But the people are still here, so that's a very interesting part of the story." "So this is from a time when the early humans living here are coming out of the sort of Mediterranean weather they've been having and starting to face colder winters?" "That's right." "Must be very frightening for them." "It would have been a challenge for them to cope with because these people of course did not have what we called cultural buffering, so we don't think they had sophisticated dwellings." "We don't even know if they had fire to help them in the cold." "There's no evidence of fire in Britain this far back." "So these people were exposed to the elements in a much more severe way than we ever are." "But the real question remains." "Many human-like species have populated Britain in the last 700,000 years." "How have THEY coped with ice ages?" "And 600,000... and here we are at 700,000." "So this first line is the level we've been digging at today?" "That's right." "This is about 700,000 years." "Present day is back there." "Chris and his team have collected evidence of human occupation from sites right across Britain." "This is a leg bone about 500,000 years ago." "400,000 years ago we've got one human fossil from that period from Swanscombe in Kent." "We know the Neanderthals were back here in Britain about 60,000 years ago." "That brings us nicely up to the present day with a modern human, so there we are." "But the periods without any people at all coincide with something rather chilling - ice ages." "So when were those ice ages that you were talking about?" "There's a whole series of them." "Here, about 13,000 years ago, you've got the peak of the last ice age." "Then we've got a major cold stage here, another one here." "So I can count seven major ice ages over the 700,000 years?" "Yep, and at least seven extinction events of the people." "It's only us that are the last survivors." "All the rest of these species, of course, died out, and they died out successively in Britain and" "Britain had to be repopulated about every 100,000 years." "What do you think this tells us about the future?" "The message is that if we don't adapt to the changing conditions, we're probably as doomed as any of these earlier species were." "Back at the museum Chris Stringer's work with human remains has culminated in another theory, one which could change the way we think of ourselves completely." "For many years, the accepted theory was that ancient people in different parts of the world emerged to modern people in those same places, hence our racial differences." "This would mean that people of different ethnicity could be from completely different evolutionary lines." "Chris has another reading of the past, one that suggests we may be more closely related than was previously thought." "When I looked at the evidence for these sequences in each region, I couldn't find the evidence." "I started in Europe, with the Neanderthals, where we had the best dated evidence." "Looking at this evolution, was there a clear pattern of Neanderthals being if you like half way to being modern humans?" "Did they make a nice intermediate?" "The fact was they didn't on my data." "Certainly as far as I could see, in Australia and this region, there was not a good sequence here, from Java man leading to modern Australians." "In China, there was not a good sequence leading from Peking man to modern oriental peoples, and there was only one region where there seemed to be a sequence leading to modern humans, and that was in Africa." "The pattern seemed to be that there was an evolution in Africa to modern humans, then modern humans spread out from Africa in the last 100,000 years and developed into the modern humans we know today in each region." "And that also means of course that the regional so-called racial features must have evolved after the shared features." "So first of all, we get the shared features on humans, then superimposed more recently we've got the regional so-called racial differences." "So everyone in the world today can trace their ancestry back to people who lived in Africa 150,000 years ago." "These amazing fossils..." "Incredible." "Some are replicas, some are real, but what have we got in here?" "Well, there we have got a real fossil." "This is one of the best preserved of all human fossils." "It's in our collection here." "It was found in 1921." "It's got to be something special if you keep it locked up like this!" "Absolutely." "No, it is a beautiful fossil." "Darwin, of course, had predicted that evidence would show that we had originated in Africa, but it wasn't until this fossil turned up in 1921 that the evidence started to emerge." "Wow, that's incredible." "So this is the fossil from Broken Hill in what's now Zambia, and it's fantastically well preserved." "I mean, how important is that fossil to science and understanding our origins?" "Well, when it was found in 1921, it was an absolute bombshell because nothing else had turned up from Africa like it." "Someone called it a comet of prehistory because it was just like out of nowhere, something to be amazed by." "Now we would place it in a species called Homo Heidelbergensis, which might be the common ancestor of us and Neanderthals." "So it could be 300,000 or 400,000 years old, we're still working on dating it." "As you can see it's got this massive brow ridge, which many of these early humans have got." "The bottom of the skull looks a bit more modern, but what's extraordinary also is this tooth decay." "Most of these early humans have got pretty good..." "Their teeth may be heavily worn or damaged, but they don't suffer bad decay." "But this individual had a number of infections in the skull and in the teeth, which may have killed him." "Isn't it incredible, looking at a fossil like that, and you're looking at your own history, aren't you?" "That's right." "This could be an ancestor of our species from Africa." "Of all the fossils in the museum's extraordinary collection, it's somehow humbling to be in the presence of a skull that is such an important piece of human history." "For me, these strange and haunting remains are part of the fossil collection that will always stay with me." "Fossils tell the story of life on Earth, but more than that, they fire the imagination." "140 years after Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins erected the very first dinosaur in a metal frame, they show no sign of losing their appeal." "Next time, we're taking part in a life-saving trip to Uganda..." "That's a little bit swollen." "..encountering a nine-foot sturgeon..." "That really is the ultimate fishy tail." "..and finding out why scientists are ending up in the dock." "I would suggest that you are biased in this." "We're entering zoology, and the worlds of some of the smallest and largest creatures on Earth." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"