- [Narrator] Welcome to Cincinnati Museum Center.

This multi-museum complex is housed in Union Terminal, a former train station that first opened in 1933.

There's so much to explore here at CMC; the Cincinnati History Museum, the Museum of Natural History and Science, the Children's Museum, the Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX Theater, as well as world-class traveling exhibitions.

Today, we will be exploring some of the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History and Science.

Let's get started in our science interactives gallery, where we can learn about physics.

- Let's see how simple machines work at the lever tug of war station.

At the lever tug of war two people try to pull on their ropes hardest and farthest to see who can win.

Before we demonstrate, let's take a look at the two ropes and see where they're attached.

If our two pullers are equally matched in strength, who do you think will win?

All right, to demonstrate this, I'm gonna need a friend.

- Hi, I'm Donald.

- Hi, Donald.

You think you can take me on?

- I don't know.

You seem pretty strong to me.

- All right, well let's find out.

(upbeat music) (bell dings) Wow, I got trounced.

Why do you think Donald won?

Let's take a closer look.

- The ropes are attached to a simple machine called a lever.

Whoever is pulling farthest from the fulcrum, or pivot point, will have what we call a mechanical advantage over the other.

In this case, the rope attached to the bottom gives a two-to-one advantage over the rope attached to the middle.

In other words, the person pulling on the rope attached to the bottom only needs to use half the force their opponent is pulling with because the force they're using is spread out over twice the distance.

If they're equally matched, the person pulling on the bottom will win easily.

- So that's why I lost.

- Sure it is.

Now here's a way to make invisible air visible with our air cannon.

Pretty cool, right?

Now, we can't see air, can we?

No.

But we can see the effect it has on different objects like our wall of beads and cups.

Let's see what happens when we force air through the air cannon to our wall of beads and cups.

(loud thumping) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] How do we know what the earth was like before people were here to see it and write about it or tell other people what they saw?

The history of our planet is written all over it if you know where to look.

We know about dinosaurs from the fossils they left behind.

Let's check some out now in our dinosaur hall.

- Who do you think looks at fossils?

Do you ever look at fossils?

If so, you're investigating like a paleontologist.

Paleontologists are scientists who study the history of life on earth.

They take a close look at changes in animals, plants and habitats over long periods of time.

Paleontologists are distinct from archeologists.

What's the difference?

Archeologists study past civilizations through material culture, the objects that humans have left behind.

Paleontology is not a solo sport.

It takes a diverse team of people and a long time to find bones and figure out what we've found.

Paleontologists don't spend all their time in the field looking for fossils.

They also analyze data in the lab, visit other institutions to help with research, and work in their offices to write reports and scientific studies.

From finding a dinosaur to displaying it in the museum, it takes dozens of people and thousands of hours of work.

Paleontologists come from many different countries and regions and paleontology occurs on every continent, even Antarctica.

Some of Cincinnati Museum Center's fossils come from Europe, Asia, as well as North America.

Our paleontologists work here in the lab and in the field.

Paleontologists also spend time in the office writing reports and scientific studies.

Some of this research takes place in paleontology collections where CMC keeps its specimens in special conditions to ensure they're safe.

How do paleontologists study fossils?

Using specialized tools and instruments paleontologists uncover and decode what they find.

Easily 10 times more time is spent in the lab than in the field.

This includes preparation and analysis.

Do you think you'll become a fossil?

Most likely not.

Fewer than 10% of living things are fossilized.

Conditions must be just right for once-living things to fossilize.

Lack of oxygen, a wet environment, a quick burial, and hard body parts will increase your odds of fossilization.

Soft body tissues and skin impressions in fossils like this one are rare.

Why do you think that is?

Soft tissue decomposes and breaks down faster than big bones, in many cases too quickly to become fossilized.

- The site in Montana where we were collecting these small the diplodocus bones has produced numerous examples of preserved dinosaur skin.

Here we see the impressions of the large scale-like pattern, the folded skin and there's even some coloration that is related to the original organic matter.

Some sections of skin come from different parts of the bodies and that's interesting.

You can see different size scales, different shape scales, maybe belly scales being smaller, ones on the sides and top being larger, such as we see here.

So this is what we call an example of preserved soft tissue.

The bones are hard.

They preserve relatively easy as fossils.

It's a much rarer occurrence to get soft tissue preservation.

So immediately behind me is an animal called galeamopus.

Now that's maybe not one that you've heard of.

It's related to diplodocus.

It's a large, four-limbed, long-necked herbivore.

Diplodocus is pretty famous.

This is from the same family as diplodocus and apatosaurus, another very famous sauropod dinosaur.

Galeamopus is known from only a few skeletons to date.

There are about three that are exhibited in museums around the world.

There's one in Texas, there's one in Switzerland, there's one here in Cincinnati.

Our galeamopus is probably the most complete specimen.

We have about 85% of the original fossil bones present.

Now, that's kind of typical for fossil skeletons.

When you see them exhibited in museums there are going to be a few bones here and there missing because they might have been carried away by scavengers.

They might have been washed away before they were buried.

They might have been destroyed by erosion later.

So to have 85% of a skeleton, that's really great, that's a large amount of the animal.

So we have virtually everything, we're missing parts of the neck, but we do have parts of the skull.

We're missing parts of the forelimbs, but we have the complete vertebral column from the back of the neck all the way through to the tail and we have the complete hips and ribs and hind legs.

It's a very exciting find.

This comes from the Jurassic Morrison formation of Montana.

We began collecting it in the year 2000 and it took us 18 years to get it to the stage that you see behind us.

We were out every summer in Montana for six years collecting this skeleton.

Then another seven years in the laboratory here in Cincinnati, removing the bones from the rock and then ultimately creating the skeleton and the exhibit that you see behind me.

The Jurassic world contained not only herbivorous, or plant-eating, dinosaurs like the sauropods, but also carnivorous, or meat-eating, dinosaurs such as the animals behind me.

Allosaurus, a smaller individual here, is one of the more famous Jurassic dinosaurs and one of the best known, but one of the most poorly known Jurassic dinosaurs is torvosaurus, our giant meat-eating skeleton here.

This is a fantastic example of what was perhaps the top, or apex, predator of the late Jurassic.

This is a large animal, maybe 35 feet long.

We have about 55% of the original skeleton that was found.

And as such, it is the only skeleton of torvosaurus exhibited anywhere in the world.

Daspletosaurus is a tyrannosaur, that is a member of the tyrannosaur family or tyrannosauridae, the most famous member of which of course is tyrannosaurus itself.

Here's a replica skull of tyrannosaurus for comparison with our daspletosaurus.

It's a little bit bigger, but these are both very, very advanced theropod or carnivorous dinosaurs.

And one thing that we can see when looking at these skulls, as opposed to torvosaurus or Allosaurus, is that they are very broad.

They're not the narrow skull that we see in those other dinosaurs, but a very broad, massive skull that probably allowed not only, of course hunting, but scavenging.

Its big teeth, they're big banana-shaped teeth perfect for crushing through bone.

Interestingly, these tyrannosaurs have forward-directed eyes here whereas on the earlier, more primitive dinosaurs, the eyes are looking out to the side.

So the animal would essentially have to turn its head to see things in front of it, but not this animal.

- The dinosaurs in this gallery are spectacular.

But other than the animals themselves how do we know what the Jurassic environment was like?

What were the conditions that these animals actually lived in?

Well, in order to figure that out, we actually have to look to the plant and invertebrate fossils.

They are the environmental indicators that tell us what the landscape was like that these animals lived in.

Plant fossils are excellent environmental indicators.

They tell us a lot about the temperature of the environment at the time, the humidity of the environment at the time, and how that temperature and humidity changed through the seasons.

The Late Jurassic Morrison Formation in Western United States was actually a monsoonal climate, alternating between warm wet periods and dry periods, sometimes extensive drought periods.

The plants tell us in this reconstruction about a warm wet cycle of the monsoon.

Plants like seed ferns and cycads, conifers and ginkgos, give us a picture of a lush forest ecosystem that these animals would have lived in.

Invertebrates like dragon flies and may flies, clams and snails let us know that there was open fresh water around during this environmental condition.

But we also know from our fossils and the rocks that preserve these fossils that the environment switched to a dry season as well.

Sometimes an extensive dry season and drought that led to the demise of many of these plants, animals, and the community.

We can tell that by looking at things like clams that have growth bands much like tree rings that are alternating between the wet and the dry seasons.

So really it is the invertebrates and the plants that help us to complete the context for the dinosaur animals that are in our Dino Hall.

While your backyard may have looked a little different during the Jurassic period, you'll likely recognize some of the plants and animals that lived during this time.

Do you recognize any?

- Hello, my name is Sylvie.

Thanks for coming to my experiment break.

Today we're going to be modeling the layers of the earth using sand and this jar.

First thing, we're gonna start with the first layer.

This first layer comes from wind blowing around sediment and materials all around the earth.

So this is our lowest layer.

Now, this layer may contain fossils due to organisms buried beneath it.

Our second layer comes from glaciers moving across the earth.

Now like the first layer, this second layer also contains fossils of organisms that were in the way of the glaciers and got buried beneath them.

Now with the two layers you can see a very distinct band forming.

Our third layer comes from water moving across the earth and dropping other materials around.

Now, like the other two layers, this also contains fossils of organisms buried beneath it.

Our last and final layer is soil.

This is what's at the top of the earth.

(cheerful music) There we are.

Now judging on the different layers, where do you think you'd find humans at?

If you said the top, then you're right.

Where do you think you'd find the oldest fossils at?

They'd be all the way down at the bottom.

The newest layer of earth contains the newest fossils.

This is very important for learning about how our world has evolved.

- [Narrator] Cincinnati Museum Center's collection isn't just full of animals that have been extinct for millions of years.

CMC is also home to live animals too.

Today we'll meet a few of the animal residents of our cave.

- Hi, my name is Anne Wegman and I am the animal resources coordinator here at Cincinnati Museum Center.

And that means that I take care of the live animals, which everybody's favorite is our bats.

So we have big brown bats here at Museum Center.

We've maintained a colony for about 25 years.

And here are some of our big brown bats.

In this cage right here, I have Marsha, Cindy, and Jan. And in this one is Bangs.

So these are female bats, this one's a male bat, and these are all adults.

They are about eight years old and their lifespan is anywhere from 10 to 25 plus years.

So they will probably be living with us for quite some time.

When bats are using caves they actually are really important to the cave environment because they bring nutrients into the cave in the form of their guano, also called poop.

When bats move into a cave and they go to the bathroom those nutrients that they bring in from outside to the inside are able to feed whole groups of animals that live in caves.

In some parts of the world, there are lots and lots of animals that are using bat feces, or bat guano, as food.

Here in our part of the world, we have some cave beetles that are doing that.

So bats in this part of the world are using caves usually in the summertime a little bit, some of the males are roosting in caves, but in the wintertime, definitely, bats are using caves for hibernation, and bats have to hibernate because they are all eating insects, all of our local bats are insect eaters, and once it gets too cold, insects are not able to fly around and be a food source for the bats.

And so the bats move into the cave, go into a hibernation state, and sort of sleep through the winter.

And then in the summertime when the bugs are out again they come back out.

So in some parts of the world, bats are actually using caves for about six months of the year, but most of that time they are sound asleep.

So our big brown bats here, let me get little Bangsy out and let you see him a little bit close up.

'Cause one of the things about a cave environment that we've been talking about is that caves are completely dark.

There's no source of sunlight from the outside.

And so when a bat is using a cave for whatever reason, once they get past the twilight zone they can't see a thing, just like any other animal in a cave.

So bats have evolved a really cool way of getting around that issue.

It's called echolocation.

And what they do is they send out sounds from their mouths.

Those sounds go out and bounce off of objects and then the echoes come back to their ears.

And by the quality of the echoes the bats can tell how big things are, how far away they are, how fast they're moving, what direction they're going.

And that's how they're really getting around at night, finding their food and navigating in caves.

So this is little Bangsy right here.

This species of bat uses its mouth to echolocate with, so they're actually making the sound with their larynx, just like we make our sounds.

The sounds though are too high pitched for human ears to hear.

And so the bats are transmitting at about 35 kilohertz and people usually top out at about 20 kilohertz.

So I'm gonna turn on my bat box bat detector.

That is going to lower the frequency of the calls to a level that we can hear and we'll be able to hear if Bangs is doing any echo locating in this area.

So I'm dialing him in at 35, which is where I hear him best.

Now I'll give him a little bit of an orientation shift.

(bat box crackling) There we go.

I don't know if you can see that he's actually sending out those calls through his mouth.

So his mouth is open and he's actually moving his head around to catch the echoes.

Now this sound is really, really loud to him even.

It would be like holding a a fire alarm or a like a smoke detector up to your ear, which you can imagine you couldn't be doing that for too long.

So he has a really, really cool way of making sure that he's not deafened by his own echolocation calls.

So bats have a muscle in their ear that actually pulls apart the bones, the three bones in the ear, that help transmit sound from the outer ear to the inner ear.

There's a bone in his head that will pull those bones apart when he sends out a call.

When the bones aren't touching, they can't transmit sound.

And then when he's done with the call, the muscle relaxes, the bones touch again, and he listens to the echo.

So bats of course, are mammals, just like you and me.

They have warm blood, they give birth to live babies.

They have fur covering their bodies.

And what makes them unique is that bats are the only mammals that can truly fly.

Their name actually comes from a Greek word called chiroptera, bats belong to the order chiroptera, and that is a word that means hand wing.

So all of our bats have four fingers and a thumb, just like you and me.

If you were to stick your hand out like this and put your thumb up like that, pretend like your thumb stays the same size but your fingers grow so long that your pinky finger touches the floor.

If then a flap of skin went up your leg in between your fingers, you would have a bat's wing.

There's about a thousand different species of bats in the world.

About 70% of them are insect eaters just like our local bats.

And all of them are using their hands to fly.

Not all bats echolocate, but all the ones that are eating bugs do.

And all the ones that live around us are echolocating as well.

Okay, we're gonna see if we can get Bangs to take a little trip around our flight cage here.

When bats are in flight their hearts are beating about a thousand times a minute, which is a lot different from when they're hibernating, which is around 15 beats a minute.

So here in the wintertime, Bangs is, he's got a little bit of weight on him and he's warming up a bit.

So we'll see how this goes.

So we were talking a bit about how cave ecosystems are fragile.

Some ways that people can help bats is number one, staying out of caves.

And if you're there to, you know, be a good caver, take out everything you go in with and make sure that everything you're doing is safe.

And don't go into caves where bats are hibernating.

Bats are actually suffering from a disease right now called white nose syndrome.

That is a soil fungus that's growing in caves.

So people going from cave to cave without properly cleaning their equipment can actually move that fungus around and it's actually killing lots and lots of bats.

Other ways to help bats include leaving dead trees standing.

Most bats are using trees for some part of their lifecycle, especially in the summertime.

And so they will roost under the dead bark of trees or even inside hollow trees.

Most bats are eating insects, so keeping insecticides in your yard down is a good way to help bats.

There he goes.

Oh, and he's landed on the ground because he's got his winter weight on.

Come here, buddy.

Hi, come on.

Oh my goodness.

He might have used his tail there to brake.

Bats are using their tail membrane, which that's his tail right there and his tail membrane goes between his legs.

That helps him to brake and steer when he flies.

(upbeat music) And when he climbs, he uses, here's his thumb claw right there.

There it is.

Okay, so here are three more of our big brown bats.

These are Marsha, Cindy, and Jan.

So remember in the summertime these guys are gonna be eating insects.

Bats actually eat about half of their entire body weight in insect food every night during the summer.

And if they're pregnant or nursing babies or about to go into hibernation or coming out of hibernation they may eat their entire body weight in insect food.

These guys right now are weighing, they're at their winter weight, so they're a little heavy, but that actually translates to thousands, like three to 4,000 insects a night for bats.

This kind of bat likes to eat a lot of beetles.

So they're eating a lot of June bugs and cucumber beetles and corn bore beetles.

They're eating a lot of crop pests so they're awesome to have around.

They also take their fair share of mosquitoes and midges and crane flies and stone flies and other aquatic insects that are hatching out of water.

They may or may not fly for us.

See if we'll give 'em a chance here.

We might be able to tell that right before they take off their echolocation call gets really, really fast.

And that when they're approaching a wall it gets fast as well because as they get close to the target, the calls are bouncing back to them faster so they're sending out calls faster.

(bat box crackling) And there she goes.

Once one starts, they all start.

This is Marsha.

Whoa.

And she launched herself.

So they will roost together up in the corner of the flight cage.

So these bats during this time of year, because it's wintertime, would be hibernating somewhere in a cave or a mine or somewhere with a constant temperature.

In the springtime then they'll come out and move to where they're gonna have their young in what's called a maternity roost.

Big brown bats have twins usually.

So they will have two babies and then nurse those babies from about the time they're born, which is the end of May the beginning of June, till about the 4th of July.

And at that point, the baby bats are learning how to fly around on their own and eat insects.

And then their job is to get really fat and figure out how to eat bugs and use echolocation so that they can get to a safe place to hibernate for that first winter.

And like I said earlier, if those bats can survive that first winter, which is the hardest on any animal that is a predator, they can live to be 20 plus years old.

So thanks for visiting us here at the museum with our bats and we hope you enjoyed it.

- [Narrator] That's all the time we have for today.

But you can bring our full virtual field trips to your classroom.

Visit cincymuseum.org/virtual-field-trips for more info.

And there's a lot more to explore at Cincinnati Museum Center, too.

The Museum of Natural History and Science is also home to our Ice Age Gallery, The John A. and Judy Ruthven Get into Nature Gallery, and the Neil Armstrong Space Exploration Gallery, presented by the Harold C. Schott Foundation.

We invite you to visit in person to see those and more here at Cincinnati Museum Center.

- [Narrator 2] Ohio Learns 360 is made possible through a partnership of the Ohio PBS stations and the Ohio Department of Education, offering free PBS resources for out of school programs and serving students in grades K through five.

Learn more at ohiolearns360.org.