Who doesn't love dinosaurs? Adam unboxes his massive Jurassic World toy of Dreadnoughtus--one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered! Adam shares the story of his friend paleontologist Ken Lacovara, who not only discovered the first Dreadnoughtus fossils on an expedition in Patagonia, but got to name the creature as well!
Hey everybody, Adam Savage here in my cave with an unboxing show and tell that involves one of my
favorite things, which is dinosaurs. I don't know about you, but I went to the library every weekend
with my folks, and I spent at least five years just taking out all the books they had on sharks
and dinosaurs and reading the same books every single weekend. Like every kid, dinosaurs are
the coolest thing I could think of when I was young, and they are still among the coolest
things I can think of. I love dinosaurs so much, I have a full-size cast of Sue, the T-Rex dug up
in the Black Hills and currently ensconced at the Field Museum, hanging in the middle of the
display area of my shop. And I have a brand new Jurassic World toy to talk about, and it is
Dreadnoughtus. This is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, and the reason I'm
covering it is because it was discovered by my friend Ken Lacovara, who is a paleontologist
par excellence. He discovered Dreadnoughtus in Patagonia, the southern tip of South America,
and it began with a femur. Yeah, he went down there and he found a leg bone of Dreadnoughtus,
and the said leg bone was two plus meters long, seven feet long, just for the thigh bone of this
dinosaur. He knew he had something big. That bone was alone, it turns out. Over the next four years,
he found another Dreadnoughtus and dug it up, and because he discovered it, he got to name it.
And this is one of my favorite things about, one, meeting Ken, learning about dinosaurs from him,
and then learning about what he loves about the huge herbivores. Holy cow. Oh, this is great.
Dude, toys are so much better now. All right. Yeah, Ken said he always thought it was a shame
that herbivores, like Brachiosaurus, etc., were considered these, as he describes it,
large platters of meat waiting for a predator like T-Rex to come and eat it. Oh, oh, amazing.
All right, wait, we got, yeah, okay, so we have a tail here. I can see that it goes,
this construction of this, sorry, assembly, not quite construction. Yeah, it's construction.
Assembly of this is really straightforward and intuitive,
and I think I have one more piece here, which is the flexible tail. Yes. That is a parent
who added that little detail. Okay, so let's see. How does this one go in? Oh, I see. All right.
Dude, this is Dreadnoughtus. The real thing is about two and a half stories to here.
Eighty-five feet long. This is the mass of eight or nine T-Rexes, and that is the reason that Ken
named it Dreadnoughtus shreni. Dreadnoughtus means fears nothing, and as Ken points out,
the American bison in Yellowstone harm far more people than any of the carnivores wandering around
Yellowstone, the cats and the wolves. You don't want to get on the bad side of a hippo
or a rhino, and so Ken, I think, in naming Dreadnoughtus did a great service to the past
herbivores of revealing just what magnificent creatures they were. Oh, and his mouth opens,
dude. Yeah. So you never know what I might be adding to my collection on any given day.
This is so, so awesome. Look at how high he can go. He talked about at one point that if these
things fell over, literally if they just fell, they would die. Because of the mass of their
flesh and their bones, it would literally tear them apart. But because of that, they were probably
remarkably stable. Eighty-five feet. I can barely conceive that. What is a person about this tall
here? Yeah, maybe about this tall, about three inches. There's probably a scale, but I haven't
spent time at the beginning of this video figuring it out, so I'm sorry about that.
Yeah. We are also going to, in the description below is a link to Ken's amazing TED Talk,
one of my favorite TED Talks ever, about the discovery of Dreadnoughtus and specifically
how you go find dinosaur bones. Dreadnoughtus and I are now going to have lunch. We're pretty
hungry for some plant material. Thanks, you guys. See you next time. Okay, almost forgot one last
thing, which is the reason Dreadnoughtus, it's so cool that he's a toy, is because he's in the
Jurassic World movie and Ken got to see the dinosaur he discovered brought to life with all
the artistry that Hollywood has to bring. And Ken said it was an astounding thing to see it. He was
really, really pleased with how Dreadnoughtus came out in the movie. And I just love all those
elements coming together from young Ken, the paleontologist in training, to now the toy coming
out because he found a femur in Patagonia. That is freaking awesome. Hey guys, Adam Savage from
Tested here. If you've ever seen the six inch ruler in inches and centimeters on my forearm
and wanted one of your own, but you didn't want it to be permanent, well, today's your lucky day.
You can now buy temporary tattoos of my measuring stick, my measuring forearm, at
tested-store.com. Comes like this, goes on in about 30 seconds with a little water. The instructions
are on the back. It comes off with rubbing alcohol and hopefully it warms you up to the idea of
permanently attaching a measuring device to your body because I use mine every single day.
