Fossil of Dinosaur Heart Discovered; Museum Exhibit Has Dinosaurs Adorned with Feathers; Another Dinosaur Flick is on the Block
ANN KELLAN, HOST: Digging to the heart of a considerable matter -- were dinosaurs warm-blooded or cold-blooded. Go behind the scenes of a prehistoric blockbuster.</s>KELLAN: Do you with dinosaurs were around today?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.</s>KELLAN: Would you like to have one as a pet?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No.</s>KELLAN: Why not.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Because they get too big.</s>KELLAN: And why in the world do we love dinosaurs? Out of the mouths of babes come some surprising answers. These stories and more just ahead on a special</s>SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY WEEK: ANCIENT FOOTPRINTS. Hello and welcome to a very special edition of SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Week: ANCIENT FOOTPRINTS. And do you know what it's about?</s>UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: Dinosaurs.</s>KELLAN: That's right. I'm with second-graders from Columbus, Georgia here at the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta. And you're going to learn all about dinosaurs today. Isn't that exciting?</s>UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: Yes.</s>KELLAN: Yes, that's pretty fun. And this is a great time to be learning about dinosaurs. There have been amazing discoveries in the past decade, one of which scientists think that they have uncovered the fossil of a heart, a dinosaur heart, and it's changing the way we're thinking about dinosaurs. Once thought to be these ruthless killers, well, it turns out they may not be as cold-blooded as we once thought.</s>ANN KELLAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Inside this clump of dirt, in the chest cavity of this dinosaur, is what's believed to be the world's first fossilized remains of a dinosaur's heart. Even the researchers had trouble believing their find.</s>DALE RUSSELL, PALEONTOLOGIST, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV.: This came as a shock, and also, because we didn't believe we'd find a heart. No one in his right mind could find a dinosaur heart from 66 million years ago.</s>KELLAN: And there's more, cat scan images suggest the heart had four highly developed chambers.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the heart, and right ventricle will, left ventricle.</s>KELLAN: Which means the dinosaur may have been warm blooded, more like a bird than a reptile. The dinosaur, nicknamed "Willow" was discovered in 1993 in South Dakota, embedded in sandstone. It's a thescelosaurus, a hog-like plant eater the size of a pony. (on camera): The two researchers from Oregon who first discovered Willow brought the entire fossil to a local hospital, put it on a cat scan machine like this to have it imaged. Those images were sent to North Carolina State University, where special computer software converted the images into 3-</s>D. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A heart here, as it rotates around, you'll be able to see the aorta coming up.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We see the two chambers. We assume the other two chambers were there and collapsed.</s>RUSSELL: Most people feel that birds evolved from one kind of dinosaur. But our bad luck was to find the other kind of dinosaur. And unfortunately, it has a birdlike heart too, so this that means birdlike hearts may be typical of highly evolved, late-in-the-era dinosaurs. They were going somewhere. They were evolving. They were changing.</s>KELLAN (voice-over): The researchers theorized that not all dinosaur hearts would be the same.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think all the dinosaurs were different, that there's a lot of diversity that we're going to find different systems and different dinosaurs as we look for them.</s>KELLAN: Now researchers who are skeptical of the link between dinosaurs and birds will have a chance to study this heart, further fueling the debate over the origins and evolution of the dinosaurs.</s>KELLAN: The idea that dinosaurs share some connection with birds is a concept that researchers at New York City's Museum of Natural History are embracing. In their new exhibit, "Fighting Dinosaurs," the dinosaur models have feathers. Now before the public got a look, our own CNN's Jeanne Moos got a sneak peek of the feathering process. And she says, even though Steven Spielberg may be a great filmmaker, but has a thing or two to learn about dino design.</s>JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We are about to unveil the cutting edge in dinosaur research.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And then I get a little punk thing happening here.</s>MOOS: Remember the fearsome velociraptor in "Jurassic Park?" Somehow he seems less ferocious with feathers.</s>MARK NORELL, CURATOR, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: People refer it as "dino-fuzz," you but nevertheless...</s>MOOS (on camera): Dino-fuzz?</s>NORELL: Dino-fuzz.</s>MOOS (voice-over): The dino-fuzz is flying here at the American Museum of Natural History. (on camera): They kind of look like skunks. (voice-over): The oviraptor babies are likewise being feathered. The feathering reflects new thinking on the dermatology of certain dinosaurs. Forget the scaly velociraptor.</s>NORELL: In "Jurassic Park," it looked pretty much like a big lizard, but times have changed.</s>MOOS: What changed the minds of paleontologists? Fossils.</s>NORELL: Impressions of feathers and impressions of these long strand-like things.</s>MOOS: As a result the velociraptor is being portrayed using rooster feathers on his head, bristly peacock feathers on his body. And on his yet-to-be feathered legs?</s>NORELL: I'm waiting for the vultures.</s>MOOS: The dinosaurs are getting a makeover in preparation for a new exhibit called "Fighting Dinosaurs." The highlight is a fossil found in Mongolia of a velociraptor locked in combat with a protoceratops. Experts treat it like a the Mona Lisa of fossils. As for the protoceratops... (on camera): No feathers for this guy.</s>NORELL: No feathers for this guy. (voice-over): Vivian Stillwell in the feather earrings has been feathering the velociraptor.</s>VIVIAN STILLWELL, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: I've gotten accustomed to is his face. He's been in my cubical for over a more a month now, and he no longer frightens me.</s>MOOS: Of course in "Jurassic Park" the velociraptor gets munched on by a T-rex. If it had been the new velociraptor, the T-rex would have gotten a mouthful of feathers. Like Cher in a Bob Mackie gown, but though Cher may be a bit of a dinosaur, she's sure not extinct. Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York. For SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY WEEK, I'm Jeanne Moos.</s>KELLAN: A little later in the show, we'll show you another brand new dinosaur exhibit, this one featuring the largest tyrannasaurus rex skeleton ever unearthed. All time well, move offer, there is another dinosaur flick on the block.</s>KELLAN: When "Jurassic Park" first hit the theaters in 1993, it was considered the greatest dinosaur movie of all time. Well, move over "Jurassic Park," there is another dinosaur flick on the block. This one called "Dinosaur." It's cited as a technological wonder for movie fans of all ages. Dennis Michael has the story of Disney's foray into this prehistoric realm.</s>DENNIS MICHAEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): "Dinosaur's" impact on the box office this weekend was a long time coming, not just the millions of years that have passed since the Cretaceous period, but the years that have past since Disney's digital animation unit began testing the techniques used in "Dinosaur" back in 1994.</s>ERIC LEIGHTON, CO-DIRECTOR, "DINOSAUR": What we were trying to do on this film was not only create dinosaurs, but create their world. We wanted to bring the viewer back in time and create a whole new world that nobody has ever seen before.</s>MICHAEL: Creating the world of the dinosaurs involved using a great deal a great deal of our world. Camera crews shot plates, basic location shots, all over the world. Back in Burbank, animators designed digital dinosaur action based on the location plates, and crews went back to shoot final backgrounds for the finished product. It was expensive, but it made the difference.</s>LEIGHTON: We really wanted to have a degree of reality, that overall you bought this entire world, that you could really not only accept the dinosaurs but the world. Everything was real -- stylized yes, a little bit, because we wanted to bring you to a different world. But it really had to feel real.</s>MICHAEL: In this one shot the meteor trails are computer- generated against a real background with real explosions. The light from the explosions is digitally generated and casts shadows from the digital dinosaur. The dinosaur crew used every trick in every book.</s>NEIL ESKURI, DIGITAL EFFECT SUPERVISOR: We looked throughout every sequence and decided, this one's going to be a practical, this one's going to be a CG, and I have no idea how we're going to do this one. The whole plan for the effects of the film was: Whatever works, let's use it.</s>MICHAEL: "Dinosaur" was a gamble for Disney and the digital animation team, but producer Pam Marsden says she's known for some time that gamble would pay off.</s>PAM MARSDEN, PRODUCER, "DINOSAUR": Watching some of the first shots come together for the first time. And that was probably three and a half years into my experience with "Dinosaur." And I sat in the back and got all teary because it was so beautiful and looked just the way we'd imagined it.</s>MICHAEL: "Dinosaurs": another giant step in freeing the imagination to run wild on the big screen.</s>ESKURI: Whatever the imagination can come up, we'll sit down and figure out a way to do it. For SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY WEEK, I am Dennis Michael.</s>KELLAN: Coming up, the debut of Sue.