I miss seeing you at the library and I just want to remind all of you to enjoy this beautiful day and go out for a walk. And if you have a couple of friends to join you, that's even better. I look forward to seeing you soon. Bye!


Dw i wneud i ni o brif Silk不錯 fel hwn o'r CERIN network. Well done! This is a fantastic opportunity so enjoy it. C'rein students are amongst the brightest and the most talented in Wales. Over the next two years you'll have the opportunity to shape your future. The things you learn now will influence your next steps and Ceren will be a big part of that. Take advantage of every opportunity you're given as a CERIN student. Felly, efallai ydych yn ymwyfyrwyr, ymgyrch, o'r ffordd gyda'r cerfod yn ysgol. Mae cerfod yn ymgyrch yn ysgol yn ymgyrch, oedd yn ymgyrch, nes i'n ddod y byddai i'w ddweud ymgyrch, ac mae'n ddweud ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Caerfodd y Llywodraeth Cymru yn i y Lownshawd y Pligir. mae'n cyfnog i'r disgyblion dysgleirau mewn blynydd yndig 2 a yndig 3 i geisio'r prifysgolio yn blynydd llaw dros y dynas yn edig yn cynnwys i ddech yn achai'r grau. It's a fantastic programme, it gives children the opportunity to really explore subjects that they're interested in in depth and gets them ready for that university application or that interview. If you're a Seren student, you will get an opportunity to attend information and guidance sessions, you get opportunities to attend certain masterclasses in subjects specific areas. There's opportunities to take part in site visits at universities as well. We also have summer schemes on offer. There were 16 Seren students who went out to Yale, fully funded. It was just a great experience to be surrounded by overwild students in Yale in a different country and just learning about our passions. We attended lectures, seminars, capstone projects, simulations, there was something going on every day. It's given them another experience and another opportunity at living in different parts of the world. They've made lifelong friends from 100 or more countries around the world. It was amazing to join the first cohort of Welsh students who are taking part in the Yale Global Scholars programme. They were having a fantastic time, but working really, really hard. We really share my knowledge, we really share Bill at Hors Brafiad on this. Being part of the YWGS programme was awesome. It is incredible. This opportunity is the best. This summer, we've invited 75 young people from all over Wales. They get a truly authentic experience of life in Oxford, so they'll be having lectures and seminars and tutorials with us. They'll be living in our bedrooms, they'll be eating in our dining hall. It will be very close to what life is like as an Oxford undergraduate. You get to see so much more in a week here than you do one day and open day. So living in the college and eating in halls is just much more like an Oxford experience and you just get to learn so much while you're here. The aim is to demystify the place, try and strip away some of the myths they may have heard about the university and just show it as it is, which is as a friendly community where we share ideas and knowledge with each other. I think coming here and just seeing everyone and meeting the lecturers and the tutors and everything, they're all so lovely and I think all our preconceptions have completely disappeared now, so I think I'd be more than happy to apply here and give in the experience I've had. A work with state school students helping them if they decide to make an application to Oxford or Cambridge or any other top university, making sure they've got all the pieces together so to show that application off as best as they can. It doesn't matter where you come from, it doesn't matter what background you are, what race, religion, you know, what size your feet are, what colour your hair is, it doesn't matter at all. En o fyddi Tom Oswyd dwi'n dod o yn ysmon a dwi'n astudio perianneg yng nghyrgrant. Dwi'n rili fi o'ch garr am rhywbeth seren a rhywf. Diolch i nhw dwi yma, ges i'r arweiniad, nes i ddilyn ar arweiniad a rhywand rhywma. Mae'n bryser, yn y gyfathaf bod yn bryser, ond dyw i'n mynd higwr meins. Stam i li a chyddi wneud y beth, dim jyst gwai, yn gwybod i'n ddeithasol i'r cogemyn sylwyr. I'm Stephen Hoes, I'm studying geography at Churchill College. For me, looking back, what Seren really did was it built my confidence and it just made the whole applications process seem a lot more real. Seren is really good at just making you realise that you're capable of achieving something. Everybody I've met here, I've gone really well with and everybody is in the same boat. Everybody's got the same workload, so it doesn't really matter where you come from. Hanna Abbas dwi, a dwi'n ystudio'r gyfraith yn King's Cambridge. Be yma Seren wedi'i maen nhw'n gathol i chi gyfarfod pobl sydd efo rhywun disgyliadau chi er un, yn elu am yr un pethau chi. Mae hyn a maen nhw'n ffordd yn hybu chi i weith yn galetaeth a chi yn elu'n ywch. A dwi'n i'n cyfarfod bod lot o bopol drwy rydydd Seren sydd i bod yn hyn gyfnogaeth i'n help mawr i fi. I think Seren provides so many opportunities you cannot get anywhere else. I think any opportunity they give you, you need to just grab it by the hands and run with it. Mae rydydd wedi wneud hynny'n rhoi cyfleo'n arbennig i chi. Yn ychwanegol i beth ymlaen nhw'n ddospad. It's bringing together the brightest people in Wales, giving them the tools and the information that they need to make the best possible applications. So just dive in, feet first, head first, and just take everything in and every opportunity that's a part of it and really make the most out of what Seren can give you. Dwi mor fawr fawr hwnnw si'n gymud rhan yn Seren ac dwi ddim yn siŵr os byswn i wedi y pleo neu hydnod meddwl am wneud os bod ddim am Seren. Well, I believe that Seren will encourage those students to aim high and give them the skills that they need to make really successful college applications to best institutions, whether they be in Wales, in the UK or indeed across the globe.


Good morning everyone, and it is a beautiful morning. It was like 20 degrees cooler just about two hours ago So thank you son I'm Mira Zoshe. I have the honor of serving as Mayor Adams deputy mayor of operations and the privilege of overseeing our City's finest agencies. I'm not biased Several of them are with us this morning the Department of Sanitation the Department of Environmental Protection the Department of Transportation and The Department of Parks and Recreation. I want to thank each and every one of their commissioners as well as their staff for their Combined effort and focus on our mutual goals that got us to today But when it comes to judging cleanliness in our city none of these agency names or their specific Jurisdiction means anything to New Yorkers nor should they However decades of disparate decisions mean that the responsibility for our city's cleanliness is segmented and inefficient So I soar as a bound and that's not acceptable as our mayor Consistently reiterates we cannot work in silos and so today we are proud to announce unprecedented and smart agency Coordination combined with elbow grease and funding and that's how the Adams administration as one city will get stuff clean And now our mayor Eric Adams Thank you deputy mayor and really excited about the energy of bad commissioner tish Has brought to this initiative of Get stuff clean We hear it all the time and it's really the hallmark of our administration is going to be about How do we coordinate government to agencies the entire concept of operating in silos? being duplication of services no real alignment and we're going to continue to Dismantle the walls that prevent us from getting stuff done because we have too many Just territorial Interactions and fractions, and it's just not acceptable to use taxpayers pay as dollars in this way and from a day one Day one of this administration we have lived under constant theme of getting stuff Done and we're going to keep saying it every day because New Yorkers should expect that and part of this Getting stuff done is the cross Sections of bringing agencies together and operate in unisons and to delay today. We're delivering on what the deputy mayor of Mira Josie has indicated a getting stuff clean Our city needs to be clean. I hear it over and over again Overflowing waste baskets lack of pickup even as ball president you will walk to the corner In here in this community in borough Park and Sunset Park where residents Were actually walking to the trash bins Placing the trash in the bins, but they were overflowing. They were spilling over We were we were not having the right coordination and pickup times and so residents were doing their job We were not doing our job. And so when you have residents look around and say Why can't we get something done and clean in our city the American big cities? We're going forward. We're responding to that We are going to get it done America's biggest biggest city is going to be America's cleanest city We're investing more than 14 million dollars this fiscal year alone to Participate in a largest cleanup effort in Decades and we're working across agencies as I say over and over again to figure out how we can Deliver a cleaner city for New York is the Department of Sanitation Department of Parks Department of DOT Department of Health and Mental Hygiene DEP here we're talking about trash and garbage and Rarely do you see all the agencies that are involved are standing side by side We're wearing one jersey and that's team clean New York We are going to have our agency Collaborated or they have collaborated to identify a thousand areas in need of intensive cleanup Including right here in Brooklyn the residents of this community have been talking about this for a long time Trash on the sidewalk Equipment being discarded just no real conservative or proactive response to the trash to the trash The start of Monday, we're going directly into these areas to get them clean and keep them clean This is not a one and done This is a continuation of a project that is going to ensure our city and areas in our city are clean and the real tragedy Many of these areas that are dealing with the lack of cleanliness. They're city owned properties City owned properties. So we have to leave from the front. We're also hiring an additional 200 sanitation workers who help get the job done and this is something that Commissioner Tish has pushed for and I was very clear Are you telling me I'm going to have a cleaner city and she said yes And so we will have a cleaner city in addition to the high visibility effort We're start restoring funding to maintain maintain cleaning at hundreds of locations city-wide Including the ends of DOT bridges in along highways and off ramps our highways and our ramps particularly leading from our airports They are the welcoming mats for our city and it's a poor reflection when you get a Off-a-flight coming from abroad and you see a dirty highway entry and exit ramps We can do better and we will do better. We're going to create new evening shifts for hot-spot cleaning and Rat mitigation. It is no secret anywhere in the city or country that I hate rats And we want to get rid of rats. That is that is what we need to do We're going to kill rats and do a rat mitigation program in the city We're going to deepen our commitment to deal Department of Health and and and mental hygiene rat mitigation intensive initiative by adding 600 K this fiscal year and a million In the next and expanding new camera enforcement There are a small number of New Yorkers who continue to do illegal dumping And we're going to zero in on them and we're going to go after them And we're going to use this camera enforcement to carry it out This initiative is going to deliver results and New York is will be proud to see a cleaner streets We're going to hire more people more jobs and fewer rodents. That's the combination We're looking for and all of the above will continue to be part of improving our quality of life to have a prosperous city That is clean where we can welcome people back and we can raise healthy children and families This is an important initiative that we are taking seriously in every level of agencies that are responding To the issues that we're facing around cleanliness in this city. So again, I want to thank the entire team My commissioners who are behind me And the roles that they play in the coordination from ensuring we deal with rat mitigation cleaning our parks Our transportation facilities removing garbage off the streets This is the team work that is going to make new york city the cleanest city in america. Thank you, deputy mayor Thank you. I want to acknowledge Some members of and this is important partnerships of local bids mark caserta Of the brooklyn chamber of commerce and lauren collins of the flatbush avenue bid and the church avenue bid. Thank you I also I omitted the one agency that's not in the deputy mayor for operations portfolio department of health So thank you commissioner vasan for joining us today I want to take a quick step back because today's announcement builds on important work The adams administration has been doing since day one Though not always popular but always effective. We brought back Alternate side of the street parking We added more bike lane cleaning equipment to our fleet and we increased litter basket collection Popular but previously lacking standards. We launched the open restaurant task force to ensure that eyesore sheds Are removed from our roadways. We launched the nation's largest curbside organics program in october Pulling millions of pounds of our most rodent friendly refuse out of the regular trash stream And we're instituting the same at every public school creating a new and growing Generation of militant trash diverters Most recently we announced new set out times that will drastically reduce the amount of black the amount of time black bags Send sit on our city streets And today through the investment in hard work and working as one city We're able to bring life back to our forgotten public spaces We'll increase the litter bass collection litter basket collection around parks and our popular bridges We're adding an afternoon cleanup shift to over 60 parks focusing on 100 of the most used areas within each Including bathrooms. We're increasing the clearing of street sewers to prevent street corner garbage pile ups And stopping trash from traveling to our wastewater treatment plants and our harbors We're supplementing on and off ramp cleaning so they're not off ramps for trash We're investing in additional concentrated extermination in rat hot spots And we're adding additional cleaning to many of our smaller city oasis green places Pedestrian plazas scattered throughout the city whose benches are vital Social meeting points for many these outdoor living rooms deserve regular and reliable cleaning And as we come out of covet and our city springs back into action We need to ensure that every strip and corner of our city is clean vibrant and inviting for humans not rats And remember we can't do it alone New yorkers need to do their part too be the leader put trash in its place and tell a friend And I know someone who will echo that sentiment very strongly our dsn y commissioner jesse tish Thank you deputy mayor. Good morning everyone Almost 1 000 years ago medieval londoners routinely dumped their trash outside the walls of their growing city They came up with the term that we still use today to describe these places for which the city claimed no responsibility No man's land fast forward to the 1980s when new york city unwittingly created no man's lands of its very own Through an interagency agreement that was designed to create jurisdictional clarity for cleaning purposes But that ended up being used for decades to obfuscate responsibility A way for an agency to look at a dirty part of our neighborhood and say that's not my job That's not my problem Places like where we are standing right now became a modern day version of a no man's land This administration cannot and will not stand for that When I came on this job seven months ago Mayor adams and I discussed the filthy conditions that we saw most often Areas next to street steps greenways under and along overpasses Areas that residents and tourists see every single day Where an impartial observer could reasonably assume that no one gave a dam Well, this administration gives a dam Working with our sister agencies We identified over a thousand locations city-wide that have never received the money And the priority that they deserve for cleaning To be clear, this isn't a pandemic problem. It isn't even a 21st century problem It's been a crisis in the making for 40 years and the adams administration is tackling it head on Think about junction boulevard under the lye The area next to the brockner expressway the ocean parkway median Or along the allen street mall on the lower east side and the front street waterfront in satin island They are in every borough and every neighborhood Even this spot right here where you've got a curb line next to a park an area under a staircase and Rites of way all within view Under the old protocols you would need parks D o t and d s and y to each clean their small slices of the block Oh, and if you wanted the catch basins cleaned you'd need d e p2 Instead we are now working as one city Cutting the bureaucratic nonsense that has kept these places too dirty for too long And mayor adams is investing in d s and y and other agencies Giving us funding to finally do away with that's not my problem Beginning this coming monday, we will have hundreds of sanitation workers in a new targeted neighborhood task force Dedicated to cleaning these areas The unprecedented 7.1 million dollar investment in creating the tnt Will ensure that these corners of the city are cleaned on a regular schedule for the very first time And that's not all There's also 4.9 million dollars for d s and y to supplement service of litter baskets on bridges and along the perimeters of parks Building on work. We've already started in july. This administration secured the highest level of funding for litter basket service ever And since then complaints for overflowing litter baskets to 311 are down 55 The biggest year over year decrease in recorded history Now we are expanding that reliable effective service to more areas Another highly effective strategy that we're doubling Actually quintupling down on is using cameras to enforce against illegal dumping More than 200 new cameras are coming to neighborhoods across all five boroughs Illegal dumping is a theft of public space And dumpers among the stupidest criminals in the city Will continue to face $4,000 fines and vehicle impounds as part of a 1.4 million dollar expansion Of our highly successful and highly popular enforcement strategy And finally we are also announcing 1.1 million dollars for d s and y to supplement dot cleaning of highway on and off ramps Which like bridges and parks park edges are often one of the first places seen by visitors to our city They must be cleaned thoroughly and regularly But this d s and y function was defunded at the start of the kovat 19 pandemic It is now being fully restored We know what works Now we're announcing more funding and a major overhaul of cleanliness protocols And new yorkers will see a difference in those places that every new yorker knows But no one has known what to do about until now We are proud to make these historic investments because every patch of new york city is worth cleaning We're doing something that no administration has done before We are making the no man's land no more. Thank you New yorkers are already noticing an improvement in cleanliness in the city because we've Restored all of the basics right the curb lines look so much cleaner if you pay attention to them Now that we have the street sweeping out back in full effect The overflowing litter baskets you'd walk by on every corner those complaints are down to pre-pandemic levels, so we've come back to More normal baseline and what we're doing now is we're not solving pandemic problems We are solving decades old Problems this notion of the no man's land I said in my remarks there are no man's lands in every single neighborhood in the city You can see it on the map and when we hit those areas They they look much cleaner. I mean you can see the before and after photos photos here. So we are Um definitely encouraged by this and definitely confident that this will make a dent on the cleanliness of our city Yeah, okay Okay, uh because you know there's two things that uh the commissioner stated and that was part of our cleanup of encampments Uh, I mean the noticeable difference from removing encampments off our streets It was just a complete noticeable difference in the area But also the commissioner stated something that I think is very important And that is that is citizen participation I was on the train.   We sit next to garbage. We see garbage on our streets And instead of saying why don't one of these agencies do something? These are our blocks. These are our neighborhoods. So we need Um cleanup Participation from neighbors. We need to get garbage bags that we will help get we all must be engaging cleaning our city This is not The agency's issue. This is all about issues. And so if i'm willing to do it I'm sure that everyone is willing to do it, but no one has really asked in a real way. Hey, let's all clean our city How are you coordinating all the agencies and and who's in charge of that and I guess coming to Uh, will there be some sort of public service campaign asking people to pick up their trash This was done years ago in the city and I think it made a difference. I think parks actually had taken a look on that But is that something you're thinking about? So I'll start with the first question. Um, we are working very closely with the agency commissioners behind us as a great example The 1000 locations that we identified We identified it in partnership With the other agencies locations where There was a mandate to clean them, but that was an unfunded mandate So they brought them to our attention And um, that's how they got on the list and I want to also be clear that this list is just a starting point We fully expect to add to it as needed But though the work this is a coordinated effort among all the agency commissioners that you see behind us And as for the public service campaign, absolutely We do have money in our budget this year that was newly added for a public service campaign Around cleanliness and litter pickup. This is the first time in a long time that dsn y has Been given funding to create a public service campaign around litter and cleaning up the city Absolutely How how are you like a pain for the 200 new sanitation officers in the context of the november budget Modification and the pegs and also as part of the rat mitigation efforts. Will you be using that rat trap that you Tried out at borough hall. Julia. Julia hated that rat trap She still talks to me about it Um the of the We have to find the dollars and you know, that was part of our pegs And it's part of the continuation of better managing the city dollars And we we're going to have a series of other things we're doing that The chief of staff is looking at You know, we have a real financial crisis But a clean city is going to impact our recovery And new yorkers deserve to have a clean city And so we have to prioritize those things out on are important And this is one of the top things that new yorkers are saying we have to listen to what new yorkers are feeling And that is what we're responding to When it comes down to uh, we have a few tools and tricks That we're going to be rolling out around rats in the next couple of days. Uh, deputy mayor Mira joshi, um, is going to be doing with our other agencies We don't want to we don't want to let them know right away because the rats may be listening And we want to surprise them with some of the tricks that we're going to be doing But we're going to zero in on rodents and in the next few Weeks we're going to be rolling out some new initiatives that we're doing with testing some of them right now And we want to see the uh, the byproduct of those tests because we want to make sure That they're doing a better job in those little black boxes.   That's candy You know, we need to really use new methods to go after Of these rodents that have just really Frightened and traumatized the city and the reason we're able to do this is because of our model of team leaders The team leader borough city hall is the mothership And to navigate through agencies You need someone out of city hall that's going to tell all the agencies you're lining up to the mission, you know, so no more Um silos, you know this project. This is the team leader And she's coordinating with deputy mayor william ison because the department of health and mental hygiene is in another portfolio But that doesn't stop the team leader to be able to coordinate all of our agencies And so borough hall we are the team leaders We call the plays the agencies execute the plays that we call but it comes out of city hall That's the function and that is why we're going to be able to move these projects forward Great to a few off topics. Thank you. Thank you all Oh How are you So I want to talk a little bit about the election, uh, You know, brooklyn democrat looks like south brooklyn There's three seats maybe four So I have two questions on this one What do you think contributed to you know democrats having a rough showing in in brooklyn? And do you think the brooklyn democratic party did enough to support Uh, uh, yes, uh, I think that Right where I need to be shot has been an amazing leader there She has a a list of victories from last year in the borough of brooklyn The public advocate is from brooklyn the attorney generals from brooklyn of hakim jeffreys who's the Head of the democratic caucus is from brooklyn You know all these folks are from brooklyn. Oh the man's from brooklyn You know, so there's a list of success and there's a list of success. She's has done from this election. Listen, it's going to come down to You can't Talk over people. You have to talk to people New yorkers were saying crime is important They were saying this that you know, I can my acronym is ice, you know, uh Inflation crime economy. This is what new yorkers were saying And so when you see six out of ten Uh asian and hispanics in new york city voting republican when last year was seven or eight out of ten We better listen to the wake-up call every day people are looking for bread and butter issues They're not in all this intellectual Philosophical that's not what every day new yorkers when i'm on that Four train talking to every day new yorkers. They're very clear on what they want And if we don't start understanding that You're going to see the hemorrhaging of other communities. And so when you look at southern brooklyn, it's a high immigrant population And their concerns are those bread and butter issues and we got to talk to them and That's what i've been saying this over and over again. I will continue to say that we got to get back and talk to those issues Mr. Mayor, there have been some critics Including the head of the working families party that have questioned whether or not You in some part should take responsibility for what happened specifically in new york when you're seeing so many members of congress In the suburbs or whatever happened in southern brooklyn You're seeing democratic scenes split to the republican side in part because of the crime issue And the question is whether or not The working families party had said that you were fear-bongering and perhaps propped up leselden As a result of talking about I'm just waiting for ross sterling to come out because that's simply the twilight zone Come on. Let's get real here if everything about this one moment if every poll shows that New yorkers were concerned about crime And their mayor is responding to their concern Who should be at fault those who ignored the concern? You know, so to say, um, you know, what eric was talking about crime Duh, new yorkers were talking about crime, you know, and I was clear when I ran for office I didn't sugarcoat it. We needed to be saved. That's why i zeroed in on guns and shooters And that's why we have a double-digit decrease in guns and shooters because in spite of those same organizations that said don't put in place my Playing close anti-gun unit. I ignored them And so the problem was we ignored the concerns of everyday new yorkers and you can't do that And they are at fault for that so governor huckle did not Grant what you wanted during the campaign, which was to call a special session of the legislature to further address bail reform Now that she won reelection, what do you expect me to see from her? What do you hope to see from her? She's she's the governor the first woman governor elected in the state of new york I'm excited about that it follows suit to Of my unprecedented, uh, elevation of women in my administration Uh, even my one of my favorite press person kate You know, so, um She albany's going to do what albany, uh, is going to do I think they need to immediately take on You know the part of those reforms that allow and repeat offenders to return to our streets And i'm excited with going to albany and sit down with the governor. She has been an awesome partner I said this over and over again And, uh, you know the victories we were able to get around other reforms discovery Another area is is it's because of her and so i'm looking forward to going back to albany with her and Navigating these challenges. We have to get it right Thank you. Uh, mr. Mayer kind of continuing on the same If you said in the msnbc interview this morning, uh, that democrats are losing this election because I think your wording was catch and release Uh, bail laws and the state What are you referring to when you're talking about that because the state legislators specifically amended the bail laws this year to make repeat offenses bail out your bail eligible and secondly To kind of follow up on court needs questions. You've exaggerated That crime in the city was the worst you've ever seen over your professional career That's just not true if you're looking at data So i'm wondering don't you think that kind of plays into the hands of the republican candidates? So let's let's break about part your pieces of number one I stated that part of the reform that deals with catch release repeat parts of the reforms When you look at the number of increases in young people for example that are participating in shooting And I didn't say bail reform young people that participate in shootings and victims of shootings That's part of the reform that was put in place when you look at what crimes we can't charge bail on The repeated offenders for grand lanceny for burglary for robbery the numbers are just through the roof These guys are coming out Arrested they're doing it again That we must close the door on and so because of kathy huckle governor huckle We were able to look at to some of those problems. We were able to close the door But there's more we have to do we have to get a right for the small number of individuals who are Repeated offenders now to talk specifically about the climate that you said I created I'm recall reading the first few pages of your paper and you talk about the same crime that the publics were talking about You know, so I wasn't the only one in the city that realized We had a problem with the system that let dangerous people out You wrote many stories about crime because you were hearing it Yes, you because you were hearing it from the public also the public I was responding. I will continue to listen to the public The public was stating clearly That there was on many communities not every but many communities The crime was a real issue the Bronx I mean what was happening in the Bronx Before we started emphasizing on the Bronx a number of shootings innocent people bystanders being shot All of us realized that we had to do a better job on crime I don't see how other elected officials officials were not listening to the public So because i'm listening to the public. I didn't create the climate I responded to the climate climate and everyone else should have done that also Quickly on a different topic. If we have time we'll come back to you, but we're going to get to Kate don't play young on that It seems to me that today we're back to regularly scheduled Mayor Eric Adams But then over the last week to 10 days of the election either Governor Huckle or the Democratic Party or Chuck Schumer or somebody Asked you could you maybe lay off the crime issue or the repeat offender issue because that's not helping the governor Did they ask you to do that? Did you consciously say let me let let me help Kathy Huckle first then we'll go back to this Well, first of all you've been covering me for a long time And you know, there's no such thing as coming to me and fighting on behalf of what I think is right I did not change my dialogue throughout the entire campaign. I was clear on what was needed even when we had The meeting at Gracie mansion. I was very clear The troubling part is while I was talking about a broken criminal justice system Everyone wanted to go back to one sentence. Well, what about bell? What about bell? It's more than bell It is in Mason on Rikers Island for years Without being in court It is the fact that you can't get court cases people are coming in visiting or seeing a judge for 30 seconds After waiting four hours it's about turning release people who have gun charges And so because everyone used the catchphrase of bell reform And I'm trying to say this system is is is is broken And no one wanted to hear that because that did not fall into the beauty of a one-word Twitter post You know, I'm trying to state that we have a criminal justice system That we need to dismantle every piece that feeds the many rivers of violence And I didn't stop saying that from the time of the last 10 days and no one came to me And said every can you please stop talking about The criminal justice problem because I will continue to talk about that until we get it right Ethan and then Dana Hi, mr. Merrick going back to a story that Was reported this morning about the southern brooklyn races a couple of candidates who run there in the past Andrew Gnardis and Justin Brannon said, you know, we didn't see the resources coming into these races from the state Democratic party or from the brooklyn democratic party. What do you think about that? Um, I don't they have to articulate that. I don't know how the party allocates resources. That's something that I don't know about Uh, so they will have to articulate that on what they meant by that. I don't have an answer to that So statistically Dana Dana Dana An issue in other parts of the country that it is here But republicans in york did better here than other parts of the country by running on years of crime Like how do you account for that disparity? well, I think that messaging is important and When you look at, you know, some of the locations You know, I don't believe It's unfortunate that democrats have a good crime story They didn't tell it If you look at the republican states, you'll see the homicide rates are extremely high Uh, when you look at their policies around not funding police, you know, uh, they allow democrats allow the republicans to pin the defund movement on them Well, that's not the position of the majority of democrats and the real redump defunders. What are republicans? They didn't want to put money back into the crime Strategies that supported police. They did not want to fight against the common sense gun laws So democrats had a good story They just didn't tell our story and for whatever reason they felt if you came out openly and say I support my law enforcement Like I do all the time they felt as though they were going to lose the fringe Of the party and I just refuse to believe that every day new yorkers Support their police They want to be safe and they want their leaders to say that and I don't think we said that enough during this election The leaders seem so dug in on on these issues. What does the governor have to do to negotiate with them? Or what does she have to do to give them something or or can she declare a state of emergency to overrule them? Well, I think that uh, governor ho cool is is extremely knowledgeable on how to navigate the complexities of orbony She was extremely helpful to us. Our people keep giving the impression We didn't walk out of orbony with some w's, but you know, I keep pointing to Childcare billions of dollars. I point to rat a night to land trust I point to what we did around Earn income tax credit of what we did was moving the needle on law enforcement So, you know, I have a lot of faith and trust in the governor and her ability to navigate the challenges of orbony And everything that comes with it and we're looking forward to This legislative cycle and bringing in place a real agenda for our city and and this entire state Okay, thank you very much


young love and things other things that most parents would rather not think about and It's a good thing of course that kids do grow out of these situations. Otherwise, the streets would be clogged by unemployed paleontologists and horse trainers. I've seen a bit of this at paleontology meetings. It is not a pretty sight. Now once in a while in a case of arrested development an individual gets stuck in the dinosaur infatuation stage. Our speaker this afternoon is one of those people. Phil Curry has been able to live out a grade school kid's dream to travel the world hunting, collecting, reconstructing, and interpreting the most spectacular monsters of the geologic past. Of course this dream job didn't just happen. Phil prepared himself for this career by getting a degree at the University of Toronto and a PhD from McGill and as paleontologists and head of dinosaur research at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, Phil has done elegant and prolific research in a wide variety of vertebrate groups. Like most paleontologists, he has become intrigued with whatever fossil animals his prospecting has turned up. So Phil has worked on creatures ranging from Permian, Madagascar, Aquatic reptiles to Gigantosaurus, the biggest and nastiest carnivorous dinosaur of Argentina, to the delicate enigmatic feather sprouting dinosaurs of China. Phil's research provides for us a wonderful example of how paleontology reveals the story of life. Phil Curry visits St. Peter with his wife and colleague Eva Kapelhus and they've both been involved in editing the forthcoming book Feathered Dragons. So we're pleased to have Phil here today to tell us about the latest chapter in his research. Well, I guess I'm kind of tall for a kid who never grew up, but that's the way it is. It's good to be tall when you're in paleontology sometimes, but with some of the countries we go to it would be very nice to be short, too. The whole thing about the changes in dinosaur paleontology I think are very interesting. When I grew up there really weren't that many books on dinosaurs and consequently my influences were quite limited. My first real contact with dinosaurs was actually a plastic dinosaur in a cereal box when I was six years old and turned out it wasn't even a dinosaur it was dimetred on and out of some kind of curious sense of humor I ended up working on Sphinacodon pelicosaurs is my master's thesis and animals very much like dimetredon, but dinosaurs is really where my heart was and I was lucky that I grew up in a place near Toronto, Ontario and Toronto has a wonderful display of dinosaurs and whereas a lot of kids I think grew out of the idea that dinosaurs were need animals, I was always able to reinforce that idea by going to the Royal Ontario Museum and seeing these wonderful specimens and these wonderful specimens all came from Alberta, Canada. So my decision to become a dinosaur paleontologist was at 11 when I read a book by Roy Chapman Andrews about the American Museum Expeditions to Central Asia, but my decision to work in Alberta at 11 and a half was because I knew the dinosaurs all came from that part of the world and so I set my sights on doing that and as luck would have it that's exactly what I ended up doing and I couldn't believe it for the longest time I just felt like I was in a dream and my life has almost been like that. Roy Chapman Andrews once wrote that he was born under a lucky star and I kind of think that too because I've had so many wonderful opportunities, but you know working with graduate students and knowing people from around the world who are in similar situations and you also realize that you make your own luck. If you know what you want to do sometimes it's a lot easier to do those things and when the opportunities are there you have to be ready to move into them and for me all I want to say right now is that a very satisfying thing for me is not just finding dinosaurs or seeing them put on display or seeing your research papers published it's also being able to see students develop and not necessarily working on dinosaurs, but working on other things and develop their own enthusiasm and their own careers and that's very satisfying too. In terms of the connection to your genetic heritage I'm very happy to say too that things have changed and more than half of my students are female students these days we like dinosaurs and probably 50% or more of the letters I get from kids now are also from females, so something's going on and we'll be interested to see how that develops. Now today I decided to talk about feathered dinosaurs because it's a hot topic and you can't really even go into all the different aspects of what this has meant for paleontology. I got interested in birds kind of through the back door. Dinosaurs were always my big interest and when I came through University, it really wasn't a popular idea that birds came from dinosaurs. Most people were thinking that birds came from somewhere else and I'll get into that too. But when I started working in Alberta one of the very first things we did was leave Alberta and we went to British Columbia to collect dinosaur footprints there and we were very successful at that but in the fourth year we had a very lucky find. In these early Cretaceous beds we found bird footprints and it was a big slab of bird footprints, about 180 footprints on the slab. There were unquestionably bird footprints and it got me thinking about these things. Well, why is a bird footprint so different than a dinosaur footprint? Why is it that we can look at these things when we have small dinosaur footprints that are almost the same size as the bird footprints, about four centimeters or two inches long and you can always tell them apart. So that got me looking into the anatomy of the lower leg and foot of birds and then I realized that even though it's not talked about very much, actually birds are very highly developed in their feet as well and because of the fusion and the realignment of the ligaments in the lower part of the leg, birds have very distinctive feet, very different than what we see in most dinosaurs and this was an interesting lesson and got me working a little bit on bird anatomy. Shortly after that we also started working on small carnivorous dinosaurs and we were lucky enough to find several skeletons of these animals in Dinosaur Park and other parts of Alberta and as I looked at them I was quite amazed by how bird-like they were. We were familiar of course with carnivorous dinosaurs but the information on the small ones has always been a little bit patchy. When I was working on Troodon, specifically looking at the brain case of this animal, at one point I can remember putting the specimen down and just going back to look in the drawers that all the evidence I had to show me that was a dinosaur because as far as I could see from the brain case, that animal was not a dinosaur, that was a bird and it was such a striking revelation to me that as I looked into it deeper, I became overwhelmed and very convinced that in fact, birds and dinosaurs must be very closely related to each other and I ended up getting drawn deeper and deeper into this. Now I have to point out that most of the rocks where I live are late Cretaceous in age and one wouldn't think that the late Cretaceous is a very good place to look for bird ancestors, especially considering the earliest bird is known from late Jurassic Beds. But to see the similarities really got me thinking and it convinced me that if we wanted to find what was really going on with these connections, we would have to look in earlier beds at the same kinds of dinosaurs that we were finding in Alberta and that we would have to look at earlier forms and that we would find the earlier forms and that was part of the basis for the development of the Canada China dinosaur expeditions and we worked in late Jurassic, middle Jurassic and early Cretaceous and late Cretaceous beds as well, but one of the better specimens that we found, which I won't include here, was a little Troodontid, very closely related to the Troodont I worked in in Alberta and this was early Cretaceous in age and it was clearly a Troodontid, but it was much earlier in time and showed us that these animals must have come from an even earlier time period. Well, to start with I'll have to show you where I work. I mean this is part of my fantasy world as well. This is the Royal Terrell Museum of Paleontology and we're unique in that we're one of the very few museums in the world, large museums, that is actually situated in the area where we can collect fossils and we can walk straight out the back doors into the valley of the Red Deer River and we can find dinosaur fossils, you know, a hundred feet from the building and we've had some very remarkable finds in Drumheller itself. Since moving there in 1982, we found more than a dozen dinosaur skeletons within city limits and life is very easy. The wonderful thing is that you know, if we ever lost all our budgets, we could still work. We could still walk out the back door and find out what about dinosaurs and the area is actually extremely rich. Drumheller is surrounded by what's called the Horseshoe Canyon Formation. The Horseshoe Canyon Formation is produced about 300 dinosaur skeletons and there are still things we don't know about this particular formation. Very short distance from us, about two hours by vehicle. We have dinosaur Provincial Park. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was the first paleontological site put on the UNESCO list and for a very good reason. It's incredibly rich. There are literally millions of dinosaur bones exposed at any one time in that place and there are places where you cannot walk without stepping on dinosaur bones. The volume is one thing, but the diversity is even better. I mean, we have at least 40 different species of dinosaurs from that one time period. It's a little bit earlier in time than the beds we find around Drumheller, but nevertheless we can see something that's quite different. If we want to go the other way up the river, another hour to the north of Drumheller, we end up in the terminal cretaceous beds and in those beds we find Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops and all of the late cretaceous dinosaurs that have become the most famous in the world. The unique thing about the Red Deer River is we see a succession of dinosaur faunas covering the last 10 million years of dinosaurian history and basically the Red Deer River is a river of time. We can float down the Red Deer River and go through the cretaceous tertiary boundary and look at the last 10 million years of history of dinosaurs. And there's three major dinosaur faunas there, successional ones. We see changes going on between those faunas, but there's also minor ones that have not been explored well yet and will tell us a lot more in the future. Well, flight, of course, is something that vertebrates have adapted easily to often and there are many animals we call flying animals, flying squirrels, flying frogs, flying fish, and even a flying snake, believe it or not. Obviously, becoming airborne is a very efficient way for vertebrates to move around, to escape from predators, to capture prey, to move over great distances and vertebrates have adapted to this type of lifestyle often, and to varying degrees of success, of course. The active flyers, though, are really pterosaurs, bats, and birds. And these are animals that have all developed independently of each other and have therefore developed in very different ways. If you look simplistically at the wings of all of these animals, you'll see that they're doing it in very different ways. Birds, of course, have feathers, pterosaurs have elongated their index finger and stretched the skin from the back part of the body to the tip of the finger to form a flying membrane. Bats have done a similar kind of thing, but instead of using one finger, I've used four fingers. And these are the active flyers that we're most concerned with. Now, I'll take a few minutes more on pterosaurs because a lot of people think, first of all, that pterosaurs are dinosaurs, which they're not. They're a slightly more ancient lineage. They're kind of the second cousins to dinosaurs. And a lot of people also think that perhaps pterosaurs gave rise to birds because their histories do overlap. But in addition to having differences in the wings, totally different structure that way, pterosaurs are different in so many different ways that they're not considered by paleontologists as being viable bird ancestors. And one of those ways that's recently been discovered is that when you look at pterosaurs, especially the very small ones about the size of robins or wrens, these were clearly active flying animals, and it was hypothesized a long time ago that because active flyers probably need to be warm-blooded that pterosaurs may have had fur feathers as well. And quite a few years ago now, probably 20 years ago, there was a little one found in Central Asia called sordies, and sordies had what appeared to be fur on its body. But that was largely discounted until recently when these remarkable finds started coming from northeastern China. And among those remarkable finds were this animal, Jehaloopteris, and this animal clearly has fur covering on its body as well. And we now know that pterosaurs were not covered by feathers. They were in fact covered by fur. Now the origin of birds is something that has been a hot topic ever since the discovery in 1862 of Archaeopteryx. Archaeopteryx for all intents and purposes is the beginning and end of all discussions on the origin of birds. Archaeopteryx is an amazing fossil that in terms of preservation and in terms of anatomy, both. When you look at the skeleton of Archaeopteryx, there's not much doubt at all that we're dealing with an animal that's very closely related to dinosaurs. In fact, if you didn't have the feathers preserved on an Archaeopteryx skeleton, you wouldn't know that this was a bird. And there is no way that the original discoverers of Archaeopteryx would have identified it as a bird without those feathers. There is another very closely related dinosaur to Archaeopteryx in size, at least, on an animal called Comsignathus. And for a long time, if you look at the old textbooks of dinosaurs, you would always see that Comsignathus was listed as the smallest known dinosaur. It's a little bit bigger than Archaeopteryx, but not an awful lot. But anatomically when additional specimens of Archaeopteryx were found, and one of them was discovered with the feathers not being obvious. It turned out there were feathers on the specimen, but initially they weren't seen because they weren't too obvious, and it was identified for a long time as Comsignathus, and it's not a surprise. Now, the fact that the skeleton of Archaeopteryx and Comsignathus are so close to each other, is telling you something right there about the relationship between dinosaurs and birds, I think. And the closer you look at these skeletons, the harder it actually becomes to distinguish them. In fact, Sir Thomas Huxley already in 1868 started thinking about this, and by 1870 had published a paper where he clearly said that in his opinion the closest animals to birds and the most likely ancestor were dinosaurs. And so in 1870, I think that already we had the answer to the origin of birds. We had the specimens with Archaeopteryx and Comsignathus, and we had the idea, and it was there. And that was really the prevalent idea. There were arguments about it, of course. Scientists are always arguing about things. That's part of the process, and that's how you really learn. But for the most part, people did accept that. In the 1915 to 1925 period, though, one person had an amazing effect on our thinking about the origin of birds, and that was Gearhart Heilman. He was a fellow countryman and my wife. Heilman was from Denmark, and he was actually an artist by training. And he did some superb illustrations both for his studies of Archaeopteryx and Danish birds and all kinds of other things. But he was a very good thinker, and he went through the anatomy of Archaeopteryx and Comsignathus and all kinds of other animals in a very analytical way, determined that without a doubt, anatomically, the closest thing we had to Archaeopteryx were dinosaurs. However, he pointed out, there is a problem because no dinosaur was known to have a clavicle. Now, clavicles are very ancient bones. They're found in fish, they're found in amphibians, they're found in mammals, and they're found in birds. And in birds, the clavicle has fused to form one medial element, which is called the furcula, or it's also known, of course, to us better as the wishbone. And it's got a very definite chevron shape to it and a type of anatomy that's quite distinctive for birds. The problem was that no dinosaur was known with any clavicles, and it appeared that dinosaurs had lost their clavicles. We have clavicles, that's our collarbone. Now, if dinosaurs had lost the clavicle, how could they give rise to an animal that still had clavicles? It seemed not impossible, but highly unlikely. And consequently, Heilman proposed that dinosaurs and birds, yes, are very close related, but that dinosaurs could not have given rise to birds, that birds must have come from a more ancient animal that still had the clavicle. And what he picked as the probable ancestor was once called a thecodont. I won't go into all the problems we have with classification of thecodonts, but the thecodont idea is like this little animal, ornithosuchus, and ornithosuchus is typical, it looks very much like a dinosaur, but in its anatomy it is much more primitive than either dinosaurs or birds. Another idea developed over the years, and that is that perhaps birds came from a different type of animal, and one of the most commonly cited one, especially after the 1970s, was the crocodilia. And crocodiles seem like a very unlikely ancestor to birds when you look at modern forms. However, when you look at the anatomy of modern birds and you compare it with the anatomy of other modern animals, there's no question at all that the most closely related living animals to birds are, in fact, crocodiles. And when we look at ancient crocodiles, we see they don't necessarily look like modern crocodiles. They're not as derived for their present type of lifestyle. And there were small crocodiles in the Triassic that are so agile looking and look so much like dinosaurs, in fact, that some people have speculated they were living up in the trees. So crocodiles did seem to be a pretty good candidate for a long period of time, and until only the last few years were a serious contender as possible ancestors of birds. This is another one that's come up recently very loudly. This is an animal called Longi Squama. Longi Squama is actually quite a primitive animal in most respects. It looks very much like a lizard, although it's not a lizard. Longi Squama has very peculiar long scales. And when you look at these scales, they have sidebars and are filled in. And one would think that that's a primitive type of feather until you examine it more closely. And then you realize these are large hollow structures. They're solid. They're not broken up into the velcro-like structure that we see as modern feather. And they are quite different. The other thing that's quite remarkable about this animal is that it does have a fercula that looks amazingly like the fercula of a bird. And let's see if I can point to this. That's in this region right here. But in all other aspects of its anatomy, this animal is clearly very, very different than dinosaurs. It's very different even than crocodilians and clearly very, very different than birds. And to make this into a bird ancestor I think would be extremely difficult because there would be so many changes required in it that we wouldn't be able to recognize the intermediate stages as having come from this animal even. It turned out that Heilman was wrong though about the fercula because before the English edition of his book was published, the American Museum of Natural History working in Mongolia actually found a specimen called Overaptor. I'll come back to Overaptor later. And Overaptor curiously has a fercula. And it's a fercula that looks very much like the fercula that we see in Archaeopteryx. Unfortunately, when the specimen was discovered, the fercula was misidentified as a different bone, an interclavicle. And nobody really seemed to notice this until the 1970s when it was finally recognized that this animal had a fercula. Once people realized that one theropod or meat-eating dinosaur had a fercula, then people started looking around a little bit more and sure enough we started turning them up into other animals. Now in Alberta, we are very good at collecting Tyrannosaurs. In fact, we've collected more than 20 full skeletons of Tyrannosaurs in recent years. And this is a job of one Tyrannosaur called Displetosaurus. And we've just thrown a rattlesnake in there for size or scale to give you an idea just how big those teeth are and how nasty this animal probably was. Displetosaurus is not one of your more famous dinosaurs, but in all probability, this was the direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex. Now amongst this Tyrannosaur material, a few years ago, we noticed suddenly that we had fercula like bones. And in some of our articulated specimens, these bones were actually in position at the front of the chest and articulated with the shoulder girdle just like we would expect to see it. And we do see it, of course, that way in modern birds. So now we know that even Tyrannosaurs, which is a very unlikely ancestor to birds, those animals have fercula as well. And it seems to be much more widespread than we thought. The reason that it wasn't noticed for so long in these animals is mostly because they have a series of bones covering the stomach region. These are called ventral ribs or gastralia. These in Tyrannosaurs were probably part of the breeding system. They form a very elaborate pumping system, but they were also there to help hold the guts in. And these could be quite wide, almost as wide as the ribs themselves. And some of them were fused in the middle, so they do tend to look a little bit like the fercula too. And very often the fercula gets mixed in with these bones and therefore doesn't get distinguished. I went to the Royal Ontario Museum recently, my childhood haunts, and found my horror that they had the ventral ribs articulated on the skeleton, but they had actually found the fercula too. But they mounted it on the wrong end of the ribs, these ventral ribs. So it's there. And if you want to go to Toronto and check this, you can see a fercula very much like this one, sitting at the wrong end of the ribs. We have many, many bird-like dinosaurs. And what really started us thinking about the fact that maybe dinosaurs came from birds again was the discovery of Dynonicus. And Dynonicus was discovered in early Cretaceous beds in Montana. We have similar forms up in Alberta though, one of them being Dromiosaurus. These are small, child-sized dinosaurs that have this incredible claw on the foot, which has been raised above the ground and the claws developed into very large, recurved weapon, which had to be held off the ground because it ended in such a sharp point that it would have broken otherwise. And these claws are quite offensive. I know you can't really tell from this picture, but the claw on the second toe of this animal right here is about half the length of the whole lower jaw of the animal and considerably bigger than any of the teeth. And it's quite clear that this was involved in the killing of its prey. Now when Dynonicus was discovered and described by John Ostrom, Ostrom did a very elaborate study, and up to that point I would say that small dinosaurs really weren't all that well-known or well-recognized. People always thought of dinosaurs as being big monsters, shall we say, and didn't give much attention to the smaller ones, although we realized there were small ones like compsignathus. And it got John and Bacher and other people thinking about the fact that maybe dinosaurs that had this kind of anatomy were perhaps very active animals and may have been warm-blooded. And that's one aspect that started off and triggered what became known as the dinosaur renaissance that is actually still going on today. I should digress a little bit and say that in spite of the fact that dinosaurs have always been popular, the reality is that after the Great Depression there really wasn't an awful lot of dinosaur research going on anywhere in the world. There were very few dinosaur researchers. You could count them on the fingers of one hand. And in the late 70s that had all turned around and we were certainly into the dinosaur renaissance and since then the numbers of positions for paleontologists has increased, the number of finds has increased dramatically, but we're still really at the beginning of our understanding what dinosaurs are all about. We're still discovering brand new species at a rate of I think one every three months right now. We're still discovering whole new types of dinosaurs and we're still discovering whole new regions of the world that we didn't think had dinosaurs before are turning up some very interesting things. So there's a lot going on with dinosaur research right now, but a lot of it comes down to the discovery of Dynonicus as being the trigger to the modern dinosaur renaissance. And when John Ostrom described Dynonicus one thing he noticed was that there was a very strong similarity between it anatomically and archaeopteryx. And in the late 70s he resurrected the idea that maybe birds in fact did come from dinosaurs and that began the great debate that went on for about 20 years. Some other very interesting dinosaurs that look very much like birds and have become involved into the debates in to varying degrees or the ornithomimans or nithomimans or bird mimic dinosaurs. These things look very much like ostriches in some sense or actually it's the other way around. Ostriches look like these dinosaurs so who's the mimic really. There's been some remarkable specimens discovered. This one was found in Albert in 1995. It was found completely by accident. We had a crew of paleobotanus out digging up the badlands trying to get down to a very rare plant site in dinosaur provincial park. And they had moved something like 20 or 30 tons of rock when suddenly a lot of bone chips started flying all over the place.  And this turned out to be probably the best specimen of an ornithomime had ever collected in North America. It's complete from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. It would never have been found if it hadn't been found by that jackhammer because it was so deep in the rock at the time it was discovered that erosion wasn't going to expose it maybe for 100 years and even then we don't know if we would have found the thing as it was eroding slowly outside of the hill. But the wonderful thing about this specimen is not only is it so well preserved but even the beak was preserved on the specimen. And if you may be aware that the beak is something that's supported by bone but in fact the beak itself is keratin very much like our fingernails. It's a horny sheath on the outside of the bone. And this is the first time we had an a theropod dinosaur as a meat eating dinosaur the preservation of the beak. Tyrannosaurs are as I mentioned before quite common. You don't tend to think of tyrannosaurs as being particularly bird like but they are in fact. This is a specimen that was found in Alberta. It's a juvenile gorgosaurus. There was only one bone sticking out of the ground when I ran across this thing. And when we dug it up there was virtually no overburden. The thickest the overburden was was about 10 centimeters or a foot. And we ended up getting this thing complete again from the tip of the nose down the neck and right through to the end of the tail up here. And the last vertebra on the tail is only about three millimeters long. So it's a remarkable specimen too. Now when we look at tyrannosaurs we find in fact that when you get past the general anatomy of teeth and claws that tyrannosaurs are actually extremely bird like as well. And as an example if we look at a modern bird's skeleton we can see that birds have a very interesting breathing system. It's basically a one-way system that allows them to take air in through one tube essentially put it through the chest in a one-way system and expel the air out the other way without actually crossing the air. So it's a much more efficient system than what we have. And it's only accomplished because they have a lot of air sacs that infill parts of the body. Now in addition to the air sacs there are little tubes that go inside many of the bones. Many of the bones inside the skull and the neck the front part of the body and also into the shoulder girdle and the upper arm bones. And it turns out that dinosaurs were in fact doing this. Although dinosaurs weren't flying of course they had to worry about their balance and when you think of a tyrannosaur you have to think of it in terms of being a teeter totter. Tyrannosaurs were animals that were balanced on their hind legs. They were horizontal in their body morphology not like us who stand erect. So as tyrannosaurs got bigger and started loading more weight on the front end of their body they had to compensate for this by reducing the weight at the front of the body or by increasing the weight on the tail. And of course if you increase the weight on the tail without reducing the weight on the front of the body then you're increasing your overall body weight and you become slower and more clunky and that wouldn't work very well for them either. So tyrannosaurs and a lot of other meat eating dinosaurs ended up developing pneumatic bones in the front part of the body. Basically what they did was they took tubes from the lungs certainly and probably also from air sacs because we think they existed in these dinosaurs as well and they made the bones of the front end of the body pneumatic. And so if we look at a tyrannosaur vertebra for example we can see that on either side of the vertebra are these pneumatopores that go inside and that inside we have these spaces of interconnected sacs that run between the bone. The bone is still there to reinforce the whole thing and because there's a lot of weight involved in these things but they're wonderfully designed structures that are very thin on the outside and hollow on the inside. And clearly tyrannosaurs had lost a lot of weight in the front end of their body as a way of not falling on their faces essentially. So it turns out that these pneumatic bones at the front end of the body are not something that were developed by birds as an adaptation to flight. They were in fact developed by dinosaurs already as a way of lightening the front end of their bodies. Now when we go through the skeleton, I won't do this here, we in fact find that there's more than 125 characters in the skeletons of theropod dinosaurs and birds that convinced most paleontologists more than 10 years ago that in all probability birds came directly from dinosaurs because when you have more than 100 shared derived characters that are only found in dinosaurs and birds then it says loud and clear that you have a relationship there. And you know it doesn't prove it but what it does do is it's a very strong indication, it's a very robust theory. And still though the arguments went on as to well did birds come from dinosaurs or they in a lot of cases people were rebelling against the idea.  And really that's just a rhetoric because there were lots of small Medellin dinosaurs known by that time and the more we study these animals the more small forms we are in fact finding. So small dinosaurs in fact may have been far more common than big dinosaurs but the way we look for dinosaurs and the way dinosaurs are preserved has always favored the discovery of big ones. But that's changing pretty rapidly now. So with 125 shared characters between birds and dinosaurs as I said most paleontologists became convinced that birds did come from dinosaurs. Now one of the people who argued most vehemently against the idea that birds came from dinosaurs was asked in 1996 ironically what would convince them that birds actually did come from dinosaurs and he said you'd have to find a dinosaur with feathers and as I'm going to tell you now within months of him saying that somebody actually met his challenge and did that. Now I have to diverge a little bit here and go to China and tell you about this site. This is in Laoning. It's a wonderful place. It's mountainous. It's been known for fossils for a long time and since the 1930s people have been collecting fish fossils and insect fossils here and they're there in the millions but the site has never been known until for fossil birds until 1994 and in 1994 a single specimen was found that got sold to a museum in Beijing and the farmer who found that I don't think made very much money but he did make a little bit of money and when the specimen was described people of course in China were very excited about this and our colleagues from the institute of vertebrate paleontology went up to Laoning and started digging as well looking for more of these birds. Well this guy celebrating the fact that he had made some money on this fossil and knowing what they look for now started looking harder and he found some more and he sold those too. He made some more money and his neighbors saw that he had made some money so they thought wow we should go try this and you know what they found some too and they made some money and at that stage at that time on average Chinese farmer would probably only make in that area about a hundred dollars a month and we're talking about many hundreds of dollars with one single discovery. Well this kind of broke on the world in later the same year but in a way that you wouldn't expect it wasn't through the scientific media it was in fact by going to the Tucson rock and mineral show that we realize that something had happened because close to a thousand specimens of fossil birds from Laoning suddenly showed up in the markets in the United States Europe and Japan and these birds at the time were thought to be late Jurassic in age about the same age as Archaeopteryx but since then most people have come to accept that they're probably early Cretaceous birds but it doesn't matter in terms of skeletal anatomy Confucius Ornus as it became known is only slightly more derived than Archaeopteryx. If you look at the skull the skull no longer has teeth in the jaws they've been lost and replaced by a beak there isn't a long bony tail anymore that's been replaced by these feathers and it has a fairly short tail with a pygastyle at the end just like a modern bird but in terms of the rest of its anatomy this is an extremely primitive bird and you can see for example the separate fingers with claws on the wings now these specimens were so well preserved that they do include the feathers as well and you can see most of the downy type feathers near the body here but if you look really close you can probably also see these long flight feathers on the arms and of course the long tail feathers as well which are characteristic of sexual dimorphism this is a beautiful slab with both morphs on it what we think is a female in fact don't have these long tail feathers and there's a reconstruction by Jan Sovak what this particular bird Confucius Ornus looked like I don't know how many specimens of this bird there are now as I said in 1994 already there was a thousand specimens known and I think there are now several thousand specimens and there's some very good anatomical descriptions and some good studies going on of this particular animal now in 1996 Eva and I were in China and the Beijing newspaper carried us a front page story a story that a feathered dinosaur had been discovered and we decided we really wanted to see it not because I really believed it was a feathered dinosaur in spite of the fact that I thought dinosaurs should have feathers I really didn't think we would see one in my lifetime I mean what are the chances of that to be so lucky to actually see one so we had made arrangements to go to the National Museum of Geology in Beijing to see the specimen itself because it was a small carnivorous dinosaur from what we could see of the photograph this thing appeared to be very much like comsignathus and it definitely came from the same beds that produce Confucius Ornus so another interesting parallel there you have comsignathus and archaeopteryx in the beds in Europe and you have Confucius Ornus and something that looks like comsignathus in the beds in northeastern China and took a few days to do this because nothing progresses very fast in China and everything goes at its own pace and you have to be patient we had dinner with the director of the museum one day and it was almost a week later before we actually finally got to see the specimen and it was quite an unusual circumstance because when we walked into the museum we were taken in front of a boardroom and the whole boardroom was full of the Chinese press and we hadn't been warned of this and basically specimens were brought out one by one to us and we were shown incredible specimens from leoning not the dinosaur of course these were fossil fish fossil insects even fossil mammals if you can believe it but eventually they brought one of these wonderful Chinese gift box which are kind of cardboard or wood covered with silk and they opened it up and there was a specimen inside the one on the right of this this photograph and the specimen as I said I'd already forgotten about the fact that this thing was supposed to have feathers but as soon as I saw it within milliseconds my eyes had focused on these feather-like structures running around the outside of the body and I actually became a believer almost instantly and I think most people who have actually seen the specimens would have to say the same thing you tend to discount this as being more likely going to be dendrites or some kind of fungus fungal growth that was on the animal after it died or whatever but when you actually see it it's a different matter and I became convinced there was all kinds of politics that surrounded this specimen as it turned out and the whole world went crazy for me for more than a year because of what we saw that day fundamentally I came back to Canada I went back to China twice more I got to see the other side of the specimen which was in a different museum and it's because the farmer was also a very good businessman and so what he ended up doing was he took half the specimen to the museum in Beijing he took the other half to the Nanjing Museum of Geology and Paleontology down in Nanjing and that's where the other half resides to this day now you can see the two halves together like this thanks to the wonders of Photoshop but otherwise the two sides of the specimen never shall meet because rivalries between institutions in China are actually very strong and deep and so that introduces a whole level of politics that generally we don't run into in North America but it's it's a very real thing in other parts of the world the North American politics came in though by the time I got back to North America the Chinese reports that spread to Japan and I started getting calls from the Japanese press from Japan they spread to North America and England first actually and then North America and they only got to North America when we were in New York City for the Society of Irritable Paleontology meetings at the American Museum of Natural History and that's where they hit the front page of the New York Times in fact and the whole world went crazy now in science we don't normally like to release stories about fantastic new discoveries until we've actually done the work on them and published on them ourselves so we tend to hold these things pretty close to ourselves because there's all kinds of problems that result if you don't do that and in this case the cat was out of the bag long before we had a chance to even do that long before we even worked out who was going to study the specimens or anything else and it really did go crazy I mean there was for example scientific papers published by other people that predated any of our scientific papers that were published on the basis of photographs that have been published in several other places and the real specimens hadn't been seen at all and of course that wasn't mentioned in the articles that they were published on the basis of photographs but it happened and I just couldn't believe it and really dinosaur studies have never been the same I know that this kind of thing has existed for a long time with paleoanthropology and you certainly have my sympathy on that one but it's a reality with dinosaurs these days as well. Now cytopterics in spite of what you may have read in some of these articles really is a remarkable animal and this is a close-up of the head you have to remember that the skull has been split right down the middle and so the bone isn't necessarily in good condition in this specimen you can see that the eyeball is actually preserved as a dark stain and this is not uncommon in that part of the world many of the fish fossils and bird fossils for example do much the same thing and I'm not really sure exactly what's causing the stain but it's there and you can see these feather-like structures running down the top of the head in this region it's been said that this is a crest of scales running down the back but in fact when we look at where it is on the head it's not in the middle of the head it's on the edge this is the edge of the eye on the other side the skull's been flattened in a certain way but there are feathers to preserved in other parts of the body including here behind the skull and behind the limb bones and in fact if you look between some of the ribs you can see feathers on the lower side of the body as well so the feathers are far more universal than just being a crest down the middle of the back and I apologize for this picture I've never been able to get one that's better in focus yet for some reason but what it shows is a close-up of some of these feather structures this is where the the vertebral column is right here but what you can see is these parallel relatively thick stalks of the feathers and these show us that these feathers do have a thick stalk that eventually breaks up into much finer filaments that makes up the bulk of that stain you see around the animal and the structure of these things is a simple branching structure these aren't simply hair-like structures these are in fact branching structures completely and what they tell us is that probably these things were there for the purpose of insulation and I should point out that this is an amazing discovery in the sense that it was something that was predicted a long time ago in the 1970s when the dinosaur renaissance started and people started talking about the possibility of warm-blooded dinosaurs and started talking about the possibility that dinosaurs were ancestral to birds then two and two went together basically if you're a small warm-blooded dinosaur you need some kind of insulation on your body so you can maintain your body temperature number one secondly if you're ancestral to birds and we know that birds couldn't have just started flying once or developing feathers once they decided to fly evolution doesn't work that way feathers had to have been on the bird before it became a bird therefore feathers should be on the ancestors of birds and if dinosaurs small meat eating dinosaurs were ancestral to birds then maybe they were covered with feathers and maybe that was what formed the insulation so already in the 1970s people started doing pieces of artwork showing dinosaurs with feathers and here we had for the first time with sinosuropteryx a dinosaur with feathers now fortunately because so many people got involved in collecting these specimens from northeastern china and i should say that at one point it was said that there were 3 000 farmers digging up the hill sides of leoning and science advances very fast or at least the recovery of fossils happens very fast when you put that much manpower into it and i kind of doubt that there's that many people today but i could be wrong too because the it has become a problem i mean a lot of specimens are coming out but a lot of specimens have been collected in a very amateurish way as well and although a lot of institutions are working in northeastern china now to find specimens of their own the farmers are still a lot more efficient because they're there 365 days of the year and they're there literally up to 24 hours a day they even operate night shifts in some cases so a lot is happening but more specimens of these dinosaurs are turning up here's a second specimen that was found in leoning it also has these feather-like impressions running down the sides of the body actually cover the whole hip region in this this area right here and this specimen though is kind of neat because inside its stomach are mixed among the ribs jaws from two mammals here's a pair of jaws from a symmetrodont and here's a jaw of a multi-tuberculate with a very large slicing tooth of the multi-tuberculate right here two mammal jaws inside the stomach of this guy and one of the other sinusoropteric specimens has a lizard inside its gut and possibly even has two of its own eggs inside its gut so these specimens are remarkably preserved and they tell us a lot about this little dinosaur which again is about the size of a chicken here's a new specimen that we're just working on now it's at the trail museum for for preparation and study it's in the process right now here's the skull the body running down through here here's a very long tail like other sinusoropteric specimens very long feathers at the end of the tail actually and the legs are here unfortunately the arms have been lost but we do have the humerus in this this area close up of some of these feather-like structures and there's just the tip of my foot for scale this happens to be a very big dinosaur it's it's about the size of myself and shows us that it's probably a different kind of sinusoropterics feather dinosaur different species but a much larger animal and it still has feathers it's a reconstruction by Michael Skrepnik of what sinusoropterics probably looked like we do know it was covered with body feathers it's a very unlikely bird ancestor because when you look at its arms they're almost as short as the arms of t-rex in terms of relative body size but what's very curious about it is that the claw on the thumb is as long as the upper arm bone it's a huge claw and obviously that's what it was using for catching mammals and lizards and the tail is remarkably long on this animal as well now this of course caused a lot of debate about where birds came from and the next stage though was to discover we have more feathered dinosaurs and this was a particularly interesting one that we found in the museum in Beijing it was supposed to be a different one called prodarchiopteryx but we realized pretty quickly that it was in fact a brand new animal this is called cadipteryx and cadipteryx is long-legged animal these are just legs right here it's got relatively short arms there's the neck and the skull the tail is relatively short but the tail ends in this long fan of feathers and behind the arm we also have long feathers as well and unlike sinusoropterics which has simple down-like feathers in the case of cadipteryx what we have are feathers that have a long shaft which is broken up into barbs and you can see that these barbs are parallel to each other except at the base of the feather where they're downy in their appearance and the fact that these barbs are parallel and also the fact that we can see them in some cases we also see barbules this is the kind of feather we find in modern birds and it's impossible to distinguish this feather from a feather we will see in a modern bird and so here we had a little animal that clearly had bird-like feathers the body was covered with the simple down-like feathers that we see in sinusoropteryx but the tail and the arms had good modern style bird feathers complex a reconstruction by Michael Skrapnick about the animal look like it certainly looks very bird-like and of course that brought on the criticism right away that this must be a bird that just gone back to the ground and lost the ability to fly and that's what the argument centered on for a while but it was an animal that is a beautiful trump card because when you actually look at the anatomy of cadipteryx you see that it is quite primitive in all of its morphologic features that if we take for example the ankle bones of this animal we see that the astragalus has a long process that goes up the front of the shin bone and it's for a long time we've known that meat-eating dinosaurs do this and we also know that birds do this but the argument for a long time has been that dinosaurs and birds do it differently and most of us who thought that birds probably came from dinosaurs looked at it and said well the argument isn't that strong that it's the calcaneum this is the calcaneum it's the second little ankle bone that produces this structure in birds but it was ambiguous but if you wanted to argue that cadipteryx is a bird rather than a dinosaur then suddenly we have all of these dinosaurian characters that had been used as evidence to show that dinosaurs and birds were not related and they were found in a bird so it didn't matter whether we classified cadipteryx as a bird or as a dinosaur it was sitting in a nice intermediate position as a bird that was anatomically a dinosaur but had feathers like a bird and really it was the trump card and it was the turning point on this. This was published both jointly in National Geographic and Nature and it did attract a lot of attention when it came out it did cause some more controversy of course. Now I wanted to just spread the argument out a little bit more in my last few minutes here and talk about the Canada China dinosaur project because when we were working there we made a remarkable discovery too this is a site called Bayanmandu it's not the flaming cliffs this is actually in China and one of the specimens we found was the skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur and this is how it looked in the field and underneath that meat-eating dinosaur we found eggs and these were the eggs that had previously been identified as protoceratops and the bones were bones that had been previously identified as overraptor which means egg thief. Now it seemed unlikely to us that for the second time we were going to find a specimen of this meat-eating dinosaur on top of a nest of protoceratops because you know even dinosaurs are smarter than that if it came down to dying for your food I don't think dinosaurs would normally do that and this dinosaur was probably caught in a sandstorm about 75 million years ago and in all likelihood it would have escaped if what it was doing was eating those eggs and so it seemed to us it was more likely that this dinosaur was in fact sitting on a nest of eggs and was protecting its own nest because maternal instincts are much stronger than feeding instincts in many cases and these overraptor nests are really interesting because they're essentially donut shaped they're circles and you can see the paired structure of the eggs here and here they're always in twos and what the mother dinosaur was doing was standing on one spot and she would lay two eggs and then she would turn her body and lay two more eggs and then turn her body and lay two more and she would eventually close the circle and once the circle was closed she would start another layer so these eggs are in fact another layer and she would close that circle and in some cases would actually lay a third layer so these overraptored nests are very peculiar we know that what the overraptor was doing was scooping sand onto the eggs as she was laying them because there is sand that separates the eggs in the nest and it now seems likely that what she was doing was laying on top of those nests of eggs and protecting them this is one of the overraptor specimens collected in recent years by the american museum of natural history expeditions to mongolia and now we've got four of these from china and mongolia and we also have one from montana of a different dinosaur troodon and here you see the mother the skull unfortunately is gone but this is the chest region here and you can see the circle of eggs underneath the body running in this direction right here her feet are standing in the middle of the nest and her hands are stretched out to the outside but the curious thing is if you look at the eggs themselves you see that the only place they're really exposed is between the arms and the body now if you think of that drawing i showed you or painting i showed you of cadipteryx cadipteryx had long feathers on the arms that were in this position and cadipteryx is very closely related to overraptor and now we know that unquestionably overraptor when it lay on its nest was in this kind of position this was a drawing we did before we knew these things had feathers but almost certainly they do have feathers and all of these eggs would have been covered up um it doesn't end there right now there are so many more specimens of feathered dinosaurs and there's new ones coming out all the time there's almost i think nine species known now of feathered dinosaurs and they include animals like cyanernithosaurus cyanernithosaurus is an animal closely related to velociraptor it also has these long feathers on the back of the arms and perhaps that shows us the next stage of feather evolution that these long stiff feathers um perhaps developed to cover up the eggs or perhaps they developed as a way of displaying to each other but once they had them those long stiff feathers would have given this animal some aerodynamic advantage that uh if it was leaping out to try and capture insects or if it was in fact trying to run away from something else and use that ability to to jump it would get a slight aerodynamic edge on which evolution could then act to produce longer feathers and animals that could actively fly uh bipyosaurus is a totally unrelated type of meat-eating dinosaur it's a very peculiar one it's called a therosinosaur um this animal is very large much larger than me and it shows us that it wasn't just the small ones that had feathers and um when we look at the family tree of these dinosaurs what we see is that very primitive ones had the down-like feathers like cyanosteropteryx and comsignathus then we had animals related to velociraptor and it was like cyanornithosaurus that had feathers and we had cadipteryx which is related to overraptor and even though we don't have feathers on overraptor the relationship to cadipteryx suggests to us that overraptor did have feathers and on the same family tree now we also know that the tyrannosaurids and ornithomimans are there and this suggests to us that because more primitive types of meat-eating dinosaurs had feathers and all of their closest relatives had feathers therefore maybe at some stage in its life even tyrannosaurs had feathers now we have the skin of adult tyrannosaurus but it's just small patches from certain parts of the body and we know that adult tyrannosaurs did not have feathers but for all we know when a baby tyrannosaurus hatched from the egg it may have had feathers this is pure speculation at this point but it's a possibility because of the relationship to other feathered dinosaurs and what we know about dinosaurs of course has changed the way we view them under a modern biological or paleontological classification birds which are on the same branch the family tree as dinosaurs as meat-eating dinosaurs are technically dinosaurs and it is not inaccurate anymore to refer to birds as part of the dinosauria and in that sense more than 10,000 species of dinosaurs are still alive and well today and it's changed the way we think about dinosaurs tremendously so get rid of that old idea that dinosaurs were one of the greatest failures in histories in fact dinosaurs are one of the greatest success stories we've ever seen and they're still successful today thank you very much I'd like to invite our panelists up for one last once again I do have an important message here would Ruth Maud please report to the registration desk that's Ruth Maud if you would please pass your questions to the central aisle here they'll be collected and we'll be under


I'm here in Yangon, Myanmar, on the balcony of the U.S. Institute of Peace Office with Ambassador Derek Mitchell, who is the senior advisor to USIP and the former U.S. Ambassador, the first American ambassador, back in Myanmar. As we reflect on the close of our trip here, which is coming at the end of the first year of Aung San Suu Kyi's extraordinary win and the beginning of democracy for the first time here in Myanmar, where do you see the progress and where do you see the biggest challenges? This is an evolutionary process. They made a decision not to have a revolutionary process where things were going to happen overnight. This is only the first year of that process. I certainly have seen progress in institutionalizing, I think, some of the mindsets of change. People are now demanding that there be a free media, that it must maintain, even in the face of some challenges. Free speech is demanded. So people, unfortunately, can speak their minds in every good or bad way, and that led to tensions and religious tensions. But what we've seen, as you say, I think people have decided that this is not the country that we want to live in, that we need to combat rumor, we have to combat division. Young people are taking the lead in this, which is very important. Facebook, in fact, was a main kind of vehicle for getting this information out. Right. And we heard some of the young monks talk about the way in which they've learned to use Facebook as a rapid response, which is a wonderful development. Yes. And the key, I think, as well as the religious leaders, this is a very devoutly religious country, dominated by the monks. So if we're going to make going to make headway, if we are going to be credible with this country, we have to show appropriate respect, and I think cultivate them and work with them as partners, it makes everything easier. One of the things that USIP does in a lot of different countries is look at how do you build peace from the ground up, not just from the top down. And how can we best employ that kind of approach in this really complicated conflict? Yeah. I think the most important thing also to recognize about this country, it's the longest running civil war in the world. We have defined this country as a democratic challenge, for good reason, Ong San Suu Kyi, the military. But I don't think many people understand that the defining challenge of this country is a unifying identity, in essence, ending the civil war and building mutual respect between, you know, dozens, well, not just armed groups, but dozens of different ethnic nationalities, eight major ones, but other other identities. How do you form one? So that is our challenge, I think, as well to assist them with how to build grassroots understanding, the ties that bind between communities. On the other side of the country, there's a deeply disturbing and equally complicated conflict happening in Rakhine state. How do we get past? How do we address this in a way that is accountable, in a way that enables us to move forward and get at what are these deeply held grievances on all sides, a complex conflict that's not always understood in the black and white characterization of it? Yeah. No, this is a critical issue. It's now, I think, the defining issue when people think of Myanmar, it's Rakhine state, it's the Rohingya, and there could not be a more different view inside the country than outside about this. And I think that's going to be a huge challenge. There's the immediate issue of these people's humanity, the humanitarian needs, their human rights needs, those are uncompromisable. On the other hand, the international community must understand that this is not a simple issue, that there are complexities of this issue that, again, go back decades, not centuries to history. And I just implore everybody watching to take a step back, not to compromise on the principles in the horrible situation in the Rohingya, but take a step back and say, what don't I know? What don't I get? And I need to learn more about this. And that means the media, that means the Capitol Hill, anybody who's interested about this should, if they truly care about this issue, even for the Rohingya sake, to really get a deep dive into the complexities. That's the only way we can actually have leverage here, and the people here will take our advice.