- [Narrator] Wanna go on an adventure?

Join us September 29th and go behind the scenes at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

See a triceratops skeleton, learn about Balto, the hero dog from Alaska, and meet Lucy who's more than 3 million years old.

It's a virtual field trip for kids and families.

You can register now at ohiolearns360.org.

- Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Ohio Learns 360 virtual field trip with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

My name's Jason Dennison, and I will be your host as we take these virtual field trips over the next school year.

Your local PBS station is partnering with seven other PBS stations across the state to bring this event to you today as a part of the Ohio Learns 360 project and is funded by the Ohio Department of Education.

This webinar is being recorded, but no one except the presenters and I will ever appear on camera or be heard in the recording.

As we go through the session today, the chat feature is not available for you as attendees, but if you have questions, you can click on the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen and type in your question and we'll try to answer those as soon as we can or come back to the questions at the end.

So first, I'd like to introduce you to two staff members from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who will be taking us on our adventure today, helping us with the questions and answers, working behind the scenes, pushing the buttons, and really keeping us on track is Destiny Thomas.

Say Hi, Destiny.

- Hi, everybody.

- Hi, Destiny.

Next is Lee Gambol, who will be our primary guide and who we will see on screen for most of the next 45 minutes or so.

I hope that you're ready.

This is, you're gonna get a whole museum visit in the next 45 minutes.

So without further ado, Lee, take it away.

- All right.

Thank you, Jason and Destiny, for keeping all the electronica behaving itself.

And also, a quick reminder to Jason, since you are the host of our webinar, make sure you has spotlight this action over here.

Whoo.

So everybody can see, yes, everybody can see all the big stuff I'm showing off.

Welcome to the studio, my friends.

My name is Lee, and I do work at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and I'm delighted to bring you on board for this very lightning tour of some of the most famous and most interesting science that happens here at the museum.

Now, every now and again, you might notice me look down into the left because there's a little laptop just sitting over here.

That's where the Zoom meeting is happening that I can see the little cameras and the chats and the questions and stuff like that.

There's another camera directly in front of me, and there's a camera off to this side that is being wrangled by the one and only Skinny Vinny and his assistant, my mom.

Hi mom, how's it going over there?

(Lee's mom chuckles) That is my mother sitting next to Skinny Vinny and she's visiting today.

And we thought that was kind of fun because not only is my mom here learning with me, you might be sitting at home with some of your parents, right?

Or the rest of your family.

So why not, right?

It's a family afternoon here at the museum.

Pretty darn fun.

And the camera guy, if I turn his camera on, then you get this neat side view of the room like this.

Whoa.

And over there on that screen where there's a little, that little camera slash thing, if I was talking to a school group, the school would be showing up over there.

But because we're running this as a webinar, we have that little, the camera's off icon, but I know you're there because I can look down and see all the attendees on my little screen.

So now you know what's going on over here.

And isn't that nut that this is an actual job?

This kind of job did not exist when I was a little kid.

When I was a little kid, I came to this museum, and when I say little, I was like five or six, and I told my dad, "I wanna work here someday."

And now, I'm here and there's these all these other jobs that did not even exist.

So part of our adventure today is not only me showing you cool things from this museum, but also showing you things that we have learned that we did not know when I was a little kid.

And that's one of the most exciting things about being here is learning new stuff every day.

The official title of this program is 100 Years of Discovery because this museum just celebrated its 100th birthday.

How about that?

Yeah, we were established in 1920.

How fun.

Now, if you look really carefully on this title slide, you might see a couple of interesting things.

For one, we have this little skeleton standing right there in the middle, and that's a little skeleton of an animal that is called Australopithecus afarensis.

Try and say that three times fast, huh?

Her nickname is Lucy, so we're gonna learn about her.

I put this big fish in here because when you walk into the dinosaur hall at our museum, he's one of the first things you see.

A great big fish called Dunkleosteus.

And that guy was cruising around the oceans that covered up this area that we call Ohio many, many, many millions of years ago.

And then there's a praying mantis hanging upside down.

I put that there because that's one of my favorite little known secrets of this museum is that we have an entomologist here.

That's a person who studies insects.

His name is Gavin.

And Gavin has kids who love the show, "The Wild Kratts."

The show "Wild Kratts" is super awesome because you learn so many cool things about the natural world and animals and all their abilities.

And Gavin discovered a new species of preying mantis and he named it Liturgusa krattorum.

When you scientifically name things like Tyrannosaurus rex, you have one word that's the genus, that's the big group of animals it belongs to.

And then the next word, sometimes it's referred to as the epithet and it's the shorter name, rex, That means that specific animal.

So T. rex is his whole name, The Liturgusa krattorum is that whole preying mantis' name.

And "The Wild Kratts" brothers were like, "What?

You named a bug after us?

That's so cool."

And so they showed up here and did a whole episode with Gavin.

I know, talking about their preying mantis.

So lots of fun stuff goes on here that you don't always get to see when you just come from a one day visit.

Let's get into it, right?

Now, in case you're not from Cleveland, I know that this has been advertised on the internet, so you could be dialing in from anywhere, right?

I wanna give you a really short visual of where physically this building is.

So here we are floating in outer space, looking at the United States.

And thanks to Google Earth and Google Maps for making this kind of thing super easy to make, right?

Pretty cool.

So you zoom in, (vocalizing) and there's Cleveland hanging out by the shores of beautiful Lake Erie.

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna head a little bit east here.

And as we do that, we pass a little airport called the Burke Lakefront Airport, and we find a road called Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

And as you drive along that boulevard, it's beautiful forest and grass and trees and gardens.

They're called the Cultural Gardens.

And you can see all these different cultures of humans that live in the Cleveland area represented there.

You get a little closer, and there's a little lagoon where I have caught some massive crayfish in there.

That's Rockefeller Lagoon.

And then we get a little closer, and whoa, there's a mammoth and a mastodon on that wall over there representing big animals that used to live here in Ohio.

And boom, there is the front entrance of the museum as it exists today.

But guess what, my friends?

Starting in, actually, November 15th is our big grand opening of the front entrance to our museum and it's gonna look like that.

- Wow.

- Look how cool that is.

It's representing a glacier.

Glacier is huge chunks of ice that came rumbling along and sliding across the ground and carving out the Great Lakes and really disrupting the area here and creating a whole new ecosystem that now we called Northeast Ohio.

And that's what the building's gonna reflect is it looks like a giant glacier and it's so close to opening that front part.

We're very excited about it.

And those lights, that's pretty neat because then you can pretend you're swimming in the ocean with Dunkleosteus.

So welcome to one of the last programs I'm teaching from the original Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

But we are pretty excited to be here and part of this transformation process.

And ta-da-da-da, creating a new museum.

How awesome is that?

So ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, welcome, and thanks for stopping in for your behind the scenes tour.

Now, I don't know about you, oh, by the way, reminder.

I will look down every now and again to just check to see if there's any questions.

But destiny is totally, she has the power of interruption.

So if there is one that pops up that I don't notice, don't panic because she will turn her microphone on.

That's why I was glancing down.

When I think about a museum, I usually think dinosaur.

That just happens in my head because a lot of museums have dinosaurs skeletons in them.

And you might notice that our logo is a dinosaur.

This is representing a dinosaur called a Haplocanthosaurus.

We'll take a closer look at him in a little bit.

And it just became part of our logo because a team of scientists from our museum, including kids, including college kids, they found this dinosaur skeleton and got enough bones that is the most complete skeleton on display anywhere in the whole world.

And they're like, "That's pretty cool."

We made it part of our logo.

So we're gonna start out our little adventure here with some nifty things you can learn here at this museum and lots of museums about dinosaurs.

And there's the official title slide.

If you are going to study ancient animals, you are called a paleontologist.

You probably knew that term because that's one of the ones that like kids who like dinosaurs, they learn that word right away, right?

I wanna be a paleontologist.

So we know that's somebody who studies fossils, and we're gonna take a look at how fossils form.

Amanda, Caitlin, and Mike up there on the screen are three paleontologists who work here right now.

And something that they taught me that was not something that was being taught when I was a kid is that dinosaurs are reptiles, but not all reptiles are dinosaurs.

- There you go.

- What?

Now, hold on, let me get that, let me just take that slide off of there for a second.

Hold on.

Because when I was little, I would buy like a, you know those bags of dinosaur toys you can buy and they're just all these goofy little plastic, and there were always like a Dimetrodon in there and there was always like a pterosaur was in there.

A bunch of other snake would be in there.

And what scientists realized was, there were lots of reptiles.

There are way too many reptiles and, well, not too many.

The reptiles are great, but to use the same name for all of them to say, "Eh, all these ancient reptiles are dinosaurs," it didn't work.

That's like saying all birds are ducks.

It just didn't work.

So they said, "We gotta figure out what makes an alligator or a crocodile different from this Haplocanthosaurus back here.

And one of the easiest things to use was the way that they stand.

So take a look at the upright stance on the left and you can see how those legs are straight below that animal's body.

That's like your legs.

But on the right, these legs are way sprawled out.

So we're talking like a lizard.

Lizards are awesome, they're great animals, but they're not a dinosaur because their bodies have a different structure.

So there's one thing I learned that was not, nobody was using that term when I was a little kid.

And now, we know that, oh, dinosaurs are a very specific group of animals.

Now, I'm gonna give you a clue to something else that was discovered.

I told you the standing thing.

You're gonna have to figure this one out.

I have a fossil, but by the way, I promise I will always tell you.

Anything I'm showing you on the screen, I'll tell you if it's a real object or if it's a copy of an object.

Because at a museum sometimes you see copies of objects.

They're called casts.

As an example, ain't that a funny word because it's like the same word that you use if you break your arm and you call it a cast on your arm?

So this is a cast of the skull of Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy, that was found back in 1974.

I am not allowed to just go down to collections and find her actual skull and just bring it up here and here because I might drop it.

It's a one and only unique thing.

And actually, now that I think about it, her real bones are back in Ethiopia where she was discovered.

So this is a really good copy that looks just like the real thing.

So just know that, gang.

I'm not gonna try to fake out during this adventure today.

So what you're gonna see when I swivel this camera, let's see, let's hit that button, here we go, is a copy of a fossil that was found in Germany back in 1875.

And the German scientists were saying, "Huh, look at this interesting thing.

We can tell that this is about 150 million years old.

It's a super old rock, and here's this fossil inside of it, and we can see its little head, its little legs, and its tail, and stuff, but we see these other things that look like they were mushed down into the mud around that animal when it was becoming a fossil."

And what those are are feathers.

So scientists realized, "Hold on a minute, this animal was alive millions of years before the big dinosaurs we think of like T-Rex and triceratops were around."

Those dinosaurs were already running around with feathers on their bodies.

So scientists said, "Guess what?

We just realized birds are dinosaurs."

And you probably knew that 'cause I've met a lot of kids today who were like, "Oh yeah, I learned that."

That's so cool I didn't know that when I was a kid 'cause nobody knew it.

It's so fun to be alive and working in a place where that kind of new knowledge is coming along all the time.

It wasn't.

So whenever you see a bird now you can say, "Hey, bird," give them the side eye and say, "I know your story.

(laughs) You're a dinosaur cousin.

Don't mess with me."

Right?

How awesome is that?

And all birds too.

Doesn't matter if it's a little tiny chickadee or a great big eagle.

Yep, they all have a common ancestor with those big dinosaurs like T. rex.

So cool.

All right, so now we talked about some bird action, we got some dinosaur action, but fossils are a unique thing.

A fossil is not a rock and it's not a bone.

It's sort of an interesting mixture of both.

Let's take a little moment just to appreciate how that happens.

A lot of you probably are thinking in your brain, "Well, I know they're in the ground.

You gotta dig them up, right?"

But what's happening to that bone when it's underground?

Let me show you a quick couple of slides off my PowerPoint, and then we're gonna take a look at real fossil.

So the process is something dies, and if it's a something with a skeleton, other animals come along and they eat all of the things that are not bones.

So they eat the blood and the guts, stuff like that.

And then you have a skeleton.

And if that skeleton gets buried somewhere where there's water, it doesn't have to be a whole ocean or a lake, it can just be a little creek or just some mud.

But as long as there's water, the minerals that are in that mud, it can slowly creep into all the tiny little holes in that bone and start replacing some of the calcium with those other minerals.

And then if you're a scientist digging in that same spot millions of years later, you might find it and dig it up.

Okay, so now that we've taken a look at that idea, let's look at the real thing here.

Here is a bone.

I have to start out right away by saying this is a bone because if I just take this out in front of a bunch of kids, one of them will say, "Is that a guitar?"

It does, right?

You're just like (vocalizing).

It does look like a guitar.

No disrespect meant.

This is one piece of the backbone of a mastodon.

And a mastodon is a big hairy elephant cousin that used to live right here in Ohio.

We also had wooly mammoths walking around Ohio.

When that was was about 14 to 12,000 years ago.

So 14,000 to 12,000 years ago.

After the glaciers had come through and started to melt away, there was all these new plants growing and there were so many plants that it could support two different kinds of elephant cousins walking around Ohio.

And this is just one piece of that animal's backbone.

So this part would be part of its spine and there'd be another one and another one and another one.

This is the big bone that sticks up off their shoulders to support, ugh, well, their big shoulder muscles.

But I wanna show you the tiny details.

So I'm gonna go with this big fancy camera over here.

And let's see, let's try this spot right here.

I'm gonna show you the outside of this vertebrae.

That's the word.

The vertebra is the word for that, this one bone.

And you'll see on a big, there it is, this big round piece right here is the part that'll be flat up against the next vertebrae and the next vertebrae in that whole spine.

But what I wanna do is I wanna zoom in right there, and I'm gonna go super zoom with this camera.

Whoa.

Now, hold on, gang, I gotta get this focused.

Whoop, there we go.

- Wow.

- And now, you can see all those tiny holes in there and all those eensy weensy holes would be filled with blood or a little tiny living cells inside of that bone.

Their fancy science word is osteocyte.

It means the cells that build this bone.

So that's how a regular bone looks when it's not a fossil.

Even though this one was buried in the ground, that is true.

It was not buried long enough for other minerals in the ground to get in there and replace it.

So it's weighty, it's got some weight to it, but it doesn't feel like a rock.

It doesn't feel like a solid rock.

- Now, Lee, (Lee mumbling) I do have a good question- - Yes.

- [Destiny] that popped up in the Q and A here.

- [Destiny] Lay it on me, what was it?

- The question is what is the red tag that's hanging off of the bone?

- Well, is that CJ?

CJ, look at you keeping your eyeballs on the prize.

I like it.

This little tiny tag tells me, it says mastodon thoracic vertebrae.

So it identifies what it is and then which drawer I have to go put it in when I am done.

So the things at a museum, I mean, I know this room looks like my bedroom chaos, like stuff everywhere, right?

But we do what's called curate the collections.

And when you curate the collections, it means that you have a very special place where each object goes.

So you know where it is and what it's related to.

So that if a researcher comes here and they say, "I wanna go study all your mastodon bones, you can say, "Oh, come over here.

They're right here in this area."

And you don't have to run through the whole building trying to find stuff.

Thanks for that question, that was good observation.

Okay, now we gotta look at a bone that actually became a fossil.

That would be this bone right here.

Now, this is a piece of the rib of a great big long neck dinosaur similar to that logo there.

But this one is called Dimetrodon.

And I don't know about you all, but drawing is something I like to do.

So there's a chunk of the rib from a Dimetrodon.

Oh, sorry, I'm saying the wrong name.

Diplodocus.

By the way, all of you who are like science kids who know dinosaur names, feel free if I say one wrong because I didn't study dinosaurs my whole life.

I'm not a paleontologist, I'm a science teacher for the museum.

So sometimes I get so excited, I'll say something goofy.

So Dimetrodon is an animal that has the big fin on his back, but his body kind of looks a little bit like an alligator.

So he doesn't count as a dinosaur because he's got that standing like this, yeah?

The dinosaur I meant to say is Diplodocus.

Another D, right?

So my tongue got a little tangled up there.

So here's what a Diplodocus' body looks like.

Big old body.

Whoo, super long tail, super long neck, teensy-weensy head, great big feet for walking around.

There you go.

There is your basic, ta-da, diplodocus body.

And this is a piece of the ribs.

So the ribs that will be protecting your chest and your heart and your lungs and everything in your chest.

Now, if I'm just digging up rocks and I find a big dark rock like this, I can just see like, "Eh, it's a rock."

But if I'm suspicious, if I think it could be a fossil, I would look for some of those tiny details.

The little holes, remember the tiny holes we saw in the mastodon bone?

Watch this.

When I get this focused, ooh, there they are.

- Wow.

- There's little tiny holes.

- Yeah.

- And all these little tiny holes are full of mud, so they look kind of gray.

But that detail tells me, "Hey, hey, you have found a fossilized bone."

Not just a rock because it has those exact same details as the bone that we just looked at.

Ta-da, how about that?

And you can find lots of bones and fossils here in Ohio, but you're not gonna find Diplodocus.

You're not gonna find dinosaurs because where Ohio is now is not where it used to be.

When the dinosaurs were alive, Ohio was much more near the equator.

And even before the dinosaurs were around, there was an ocean covering up this area.

And that's when that giant fish was swimming around here.

So here at Ohio, we find those fossils.

We find ancient fish and cool ancient sharks, all kinds of nifty undersea things because the dinosaur fossils that may have been here after those animals went extinct, they all got worn away.

Too much erosion here in Ohio.

Yep.

So if you're a a dinosaur lover, you gotta go to other parts of the United States to find those particular bones.

All right, so we took a look at a fossil.

Now, I gotta show you how complicated it gets.

Let's say you're the, let's say maybe you're working with a museum team at an area called Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, and it's back in the late 1960s.

And you find a big old rock like this and you say, "Whoa, there's a gazillion bones on this thing.

Look at this."

And you hire somebody and say, "Come over here.

We're gonna bring this rock back to the museum and we're gonna start trying to identify each of those individual bones."

And you get a student who's an art student and they draw all those individual bones.

Now, I'm gonna put that drawing on top of the bones in the next picture, ready?

So there's the bones and here comes the drawing.

Look how well this matches up.

That's really cool.

In that way, the scientist who is slowly taking apart all of those fossilized bones can use this drawing to help them keep track of where they were and what they were.

And eventually, you can put them together and discover what that animal like.

So here is Coelophysis and that little guy is the most complete mount of its kind in the world that we have it here at this museum because one guy, his name's Dale, he worked for over 15 years picking apart all those bones until he got enough that he could put together that whole skeleton.

And an artist also drew this to show just how big that little animal was next to a human.

- Wow.

- Notice its body is kind of fluffy looking?

Uh-huh, those are little tiny, fluffy feathers.

(chuckles) Not there.

Yep, showing the fact that it has ancestral ties to our modern day birds.

So now, we've seen that fossil hunting is tricky.

You've gotta like putting puzzles together.

You've gotta like drawing.

You've got, I mean there's a lot going on at a museum that's not only going out and looking for the fossils.

My friend, pardon me.

What I'm gonna do is take a little sip of water here, talking all day, and we're gonna shift gears into teeth.

You can learn a lot from teeth.

Now, this dinosaur right here, the Haplocanthosaurus.

he has some goofy teeth.

I'm gonna show you a pic.

Right now, his skeleton is not here, it's in Canada.

He's taking a little sabbatical and he's being remounted, getting ready to come back to our museum.

So here's a picture of Haplocanthosaurus, and he does have some pretty goofy round teeth.

This dinosaur ate plants.

Inside of his big belly, we find little round rocks that are called gastroliths.

Gastro meaning stomach and lith meaning rock.

And, by the way, here's the human for size, right?

There's human standing right there.

And those gastroliths helped to grind up the food inside of his belly.

So his teeth did not have to do any chewing.

Think about when you chew, you're chewing with your molars and they're kind of flat and they grind stuff up, right?

So to give you a really obvious example of teeth that don't chew, here's an alligator.

No, an alligator is not a dinosaur, but it's a reptile.

Now, one thing about reptiles, most reptiles have all the same shape of teeth.

Size no because if you think about, say like a snake, a venomous snake that has the big fangs, those two teeth in front are much bigger 'cause they're the ones for injecting the venom.

Then all the other teeth are for grabbing the prey, but they're all the same shape.

Let me show you what I mean with our little buddy, the alligator head here.

And by the way, this is a real alligator head.

There's no other part of the alligator here, just the head.

And this little alligator was raised on an alligator farm down in Florida.

How about that?

So somebody ate the rest of this alligator and now, I have just his head.

Take a look at those choppers.

Plenty of teeth in here, but they're all the same shape.

They're all triangles.

Triangle, triangle, triangle, triangle.

There might be a few that are broken.

Doesn't count because it's broken.

As they grow out of the alligator's mouth, they are triangle shaped.

So what this alligator does with those teeth is it grabs a hold of a slippery fish, munch, and if the fish is small enough that it can go like this and get the fish facing down that way, goop, it'll just eat it head first all in one piece.

If the fish is really big and it cannot do that, then it'll go, (vocalizing) and it'll kind of twist his head around and start twisting its mouth and eventually, it'll rip a chunk off and it will just swallow that chunk with no chewing because those teeth can't chew.

They're all pointy.

They would just get stuck in the fish.

So most reptiles are just bite, swallow.

Not all dinosaurs though.

Dinosaurs are kind of weirdos because if you think about reptiles today, they have teeth, no beak.

Take a look at triceratops.

He's rocking both.

Triceratops has a beak and a teeth.

What?

(chuckles) There's no reptiles that are doing that today.

So yeah, dinosaurs are their own interesting kind of creature.

Now triceratops, here's how big they were compared to a human.

We have a triceratops skeleton in our museum, but he's so humongous, I couldn't bring him up here.

I really wanna do.

So I have a piece of a smaller cousin of a triceratops, it's called a Diabloceratops and there is a graphic.

So as you can see, he's a little bit smaller than triceratops.

And here's an artist rendition of what he probably looked like when he was alive.

The colors on the frill, you'll see what that's about here in just a second.

'Cause mom, here I come.

Coming over to you.

I'm switching cameras and heading for beep, beep.

Switching cameras.

Auxiliary camera, hold on.

That one, there he is.

That's my buddy, the Diabloceratops.

And here I come, I'm gonna stand next to him.

And you can see how if this was a triceratops, the head would be way bigger.

This is a smaller guy.

And he's got four horns up here, but he also has these holes in his frill.

So there was no bone here because nothing fossilized.

Was this full of skin?

Maybe.

We don't know for sure, but that is kinda a fun idea to think that it was skin and he could maybe change colors like a chameleon.

- Whoa.

- I know.

So we're gonna zoom in on his teeth 'cause you can see his teeth really well with that camera.

And what I'm gonna hold next to those teeth is this jawbone of a cow, this modern day regular old cow with its teeth.

So give me one second, I'm gonna go over and push the zoom in button.

And while I do that, I want you to think about what do you see a cow doing all the time when they're standing around out in their farmer's fields being cows is they're chewing right?

They're just always chewing on stuff.

And that's because cows do not have flat teeth.

Their teeth are pretty jaggedy.

So here's the cow jaw with it's super jaggedy teeth.

Here it is lined up as closely as I can with the Diabloceratops.

Now, look at that.

They are pretty close and the same shape.

So what the cow is doing is the cow is actually regurgitating.

That is a fancy sciencey word that basically means throwing up a little bit.

(laughs) I know.

They throw up in their mouth and they chew their food a second time.

Right?

Yuck.

We don't know if Triceratops and Diabloceratops, we don't know if they were doing that.

They might have been doing that.

They might have had those gastroliths.

We haven't found those.

So that's a little mystery.

Maybe you'll figure it out someday.

But what we do know is that when you look at a triceratops' teeth and a cow's teeth, they look very, very similar.

So those animals are at least both definitely plant eaters when it comes to what they were eating.

Isn't that neat?

You can learn a lot of stuff from just teeth.

Well, we've spent a big chunk of time talking about dinosaurs.

I could totally rock out dinosaurs the whole rest this class.

But we do wanna take a look at some other famous fossils.

So we're changing gears.

And now is when we get the middle of the class stretch.

If you feel like standing up, I'm gonna show you a little experiment we can try to show how your body has evolved into this interesting bipedal creature.

Hmm, there's a new science word for us.

What's bipedal all about?

The class that I'm taking this information from is called "Human Evolution: Following Lucy's Footsteps."

All right, well let's take a look at feet.

Here's a human skeleton and a dog.

We know that dogs walk on four pods.

Can you teach a dog to get up on its back paws?

Sure.

But their regular way of walking around is on all four paws.

Humans, can we walk on all fours?

Sure.

But our usual way of walking around is on our two feet.

And part of that has to do with the shape of our hips.

The hip bones you're seeing on the left are from a deer.

The hip bones you're seeing on the right are from a human.

And I don't have a deer picture, but I do have a gorilla and gorillas do walk on all fours.

See how that gorilla skeleton is down here on his knuckles?

But he is able to get up and walk on his back legs.

He's just not very good at it.

So let's take a look at a video of a chimpanzee walking on its back legs.

And I want you to think about why.

Why is that that chimpanzee walking on its back legs?

Look, there he goes again.

You know why?

'Cause he wants all the papayas.

- Whoa.

- Or mangoes or whatever those are.

He's scary, right?

He's getting up on his back legs specifically so his hands are free to carry that stuff.

But you can see how he wasn't really good at it.

And there's a very good reason why he's not good at it.

Watch this.

This is the fully put together skeleton of this little creature I've been referring to as Lucy.

And that's a fully put together skeleton of a chimpanzee.

And there he is, moving along on his four legs, right?

Front arms working like legs and Lucy's just walking along on her feet.

Watch what happens when the chimpanzee tries to get up.

Now, obviously, this is an animation, but in real life, you saw the chimpanzee doing that.

He kinda rocks back and forth, not super stable, right?

Sort of tipping back and forth.

And that all has to do with the hips.

Take a look at these bones.

Human bone.

Angle, and then straight.

Chimpanzee, straight.

Lucy, angle, straight.

Ooh, interesting.

And that is precisely what happened when a guy from this museum whose name is Don Johanson, was rummaging around Africa.

He'd been sent to Ethiopia by our museum, say, "Go look for fossils.

Go look for some."

So he went there and he's like, "I'm looking for fossils."

Here, I'll show you where he was is he was, boop, up there in Rome in the Hadar region.

And here's the whole, if you can see it's pretty small, but that's the whole continent of Africa there, and we've like blown this up right there.

And what he found was he found these bits and pieces of a skeleton.

Not much of the skull, but he found a hip and he found a femur.

And he said, "Oh my gosh, this thing was built to walk up like people because it's hips match us."

So let's try that.

Let's try that with our bodies right now because I need a little strengthening stretch here.

I gotta remember which button to push to go over there by mom, hold on.

Over that button.

Hey, mom.

All right.

Now, would you like to try this with me?

Just to show that I'm not fooling around.

Okay, so here I am standing on my two feet.

There's mom standing in her two feet.

What we're gonna do, then if you wanna try this right now, put your feet as close together as they'll go.

Like literally mash your thighs together.

So with your feet mashed together like that, they are totally under your center of mass.

Here's where most of you is.

Here.

- Yes.

- Which means it's pretty easy for you to just lift one foot because the other foot is right underneath you.

So it's fairly, yeah.

- Uh-huh.

- Because both feet are pretty much under you.

- Uh-huh.

- Now, go ahead and relax and just put your feet back where they normally wanna be 'cause we don't normally stand like all mushed together.

So with your feet there, they're still mostly underneath you.

- True.

- And that's because this bone angles in.

We have wide hips, but this bone angles in so these bones can go straight down.

So just standing the way we normally stand, it's still fairly easy to lift up one foot.

You don't have to lean too much, but the chimpanzee, because everything goes, whoosh, straight down, to stand like a chimpanzee, what you have to do is put your hands on your hips, point one finger down, and scoot your feet out so they're as wide is where your fingers are.

- Okay.

- Uh-huh.

Now, what happens if you pick up one foot down and you have to fall down?

No, don't fall, mom, don't fall.

You have to lean, right?

If I try to walk with my legs out here, I'm walking like a chimpanzee exactly.

That's why, that's what that researcher saw was, "Oh my goodness, this animal Lucy is not a chimpanzee because she doesn't walk like that.

Her feet are in the right place to let her walk straight up and down, right?

A tiny little difference between us and this other animal.

Whoa.

And it lets us walk around with our hands free all the time so we can learn how to make things like this and do stuff with our hands all the time.

If you wanna see some actual bones, I have a little display right here.

Let me just move this camera over.

So this is a human femur.

And you might notice it's pretty dark brown compared to these.

These bones are copies, they're casts, and they were made with some kind of white plastic to make them look like a regular old bone.

But what's interesting is bones that have been taken out of animal's body are not pure glistening white like that.

They're always a little bit yellowish colored.

And as they age, they can sometimes turn even darker because remember I said in those holes?

All those living bits, those little cells, once they're not alive anymore, it stains the bone.

It make it colors the bone.

So this is a real human femur from our research collections.

And when I set it down, see how it's leaning?

- Yeah.

- That's normal.

I'm not artificially leaning it because this bottom here is totally flat.

That's where your knee is.

So if I put it down totally flat, it wants to lean that way.

That's how it would be in your body.

I'm just using that clip so it doesn't fall over 'cause I don't want it to get damaged.

So there's the normal angle for our hips.

- Wow.

- Here's Lucy's femur.

And if I set her down right next to the human, it's trying to fall over too.

See?

It leans.

Wonderful.

So there's the two leans, right?

Here's a chimpanzee's femur.

And if I do the same thing, put it down so this part's flat, straight up and down, look at that.

Straight and down.

Does not match this, does not match that.

- Wow.

- [Lee] That was what Don Johanson realized.

"Oh my goodness, I found a creature that is walking around like people walk around."

- Wow.

- Isn't that right?

One little bone.

Yep, very neat.

Well, thank you for trying that little experiment down, my friends, I appreciate that very much.

And if you're into more Lucy stuff, here is a total blow up of our skeleton and the brown parts are the parts that were found and the white parts are the parts that scientists had to just do their best guess.

But the cool thing was because he did find the whole hip and the whole femur on one side, it was easy to make a mirror image on the other side.

She wasn't big, she was a very small creature.

Here's a little girl standing there to show how small Lucy was.

And now, we have this lovely mount in our museum that is an artist who put all of the fur and stuff on there to make it look like what she looked like when she was alive.

All right, my friends.

Studying dinosaurs, cool.

Studying our origins and creatures related to us, also cool.

But there was one more famous mammal that Jason sort of mentioned in our intro.

And it's a dog.

It's a famous dog named Balto.

And so many kids come to this museum and they say, "Is that the real Balto?"

Now we say, "Sure is."

"Is he alive?"

Now he's not alive anymore because he died way back in 1933.

That's a long time ago, but he was living here in the zoo.

In the zoo that's called the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo now.

It was called the Brookside Zoo back then.

Why was he here?

Because he lived in Alaska.

He got famous in Alaska.

Well, for our last couple of minutes here, I'm gonna give you the good parts version of the Balto adventure.

So there's what he looks like in our museum today.

And the full name of the class that we teach is A History of Huskies, Humans, and Health in Alaska.

Here's what Balto looked like back in the 1940s.

So a long time ago, over 80 years ago.

And here's what he looks like today.

Look carefully.

Can you see a difference in the color?

Mm-hmm, that's not just your eyes.

Here's an interesting thing.

Sometimes humans make bad decisions.

And one of the bad decisions way back when Balto's body was new at this museum was a lot of the scientists really wanted to take his body to schools so kids could see the real Balto while they taught the class.

But they didn't realize, "Oh, the sun was causing his fur to fade."

And you might have seen or you might have like a t-shirt that's your favorite t-shirt that you've washed a bunch of times and the color has faded, right?

That can happen because of the washing process.

But if you just take a t-shirt and just put it outside and let the sun shine on it all the time, the sunlight damages what we call pigment.

Pigments are little molecules that make color.

So Balto, because he was exposed to sunshine, it faded his fur.

He was a black and white dog when he was alive.

All the newspapers described to him as black and white, but his fur has faded.

So there's some cool plans in the works to get his fur darkened again so he looks more like he did when he was alive.

And here's the story in a nutshell.

In Nome, Alaska, this little teeny tiny town, way up in Alaska, way up on the edge of the Bering Sea, it's so small, there were only about a thousand people living there.

But then a couple of dudes were walking along the beach one day and they found gold and they said, "Hey, let's call all of our friends and get up here and find gold."

So the town blew up and it ended up with many, many thousands of people all coming there and they all were finding gold and making money.

And look, there's horses and cars, but this little town, most of the time, it is like that.

Totally full of snow because Nome is very, very remote in Alaska and the summertime is only like a month and a half at most.

So yeah, you don't use your cars and your horses in the middle of Nome in the wintertime, nope.

You use dogs and dog sleds.

So people that were raising dogs and training dogs to help pull sleds.

You know, think about anything you would do with a car, you were doing with a dog sled.

So this fella, Leonard Seppala, got pretty famous in Alaska because he really liked dogs and he liked to raise small fast dogs.

And all those trophies he was winning because he had a small fast dog whose name was Togo.

This is before Balto was even born.

Now, some of you might have seen a show on Disney+ about Togo.

It was a great movie.

They did a really good job making it look like the real thing.

So here's the real Togo, and then here's the actor dog that was hired to pretend to be Togo.

And the actor man whose name is Willem Dafoe, who was hired to pretend to be Leonard Seppala.

They look pretty good, don't they?

Look at him, he really does look a lot like that guy.

So then, Balto was born and Leonard Seppala owned him, but he didn't like him.

Togo was little and fast.

Balto was kind of big and chunky.

So what Seppala said was, "Hey," this other guy, Gunnar, "you can borrow Balto and use him as the lead of your team."

Because he's got a pretty good nose and he is good at like finding his way through the blizzards and stuff."

So here's the team of dogs that Balto was leading.

And Gunnar Kaasen was his musher.

And nobody really knew about him because that's just what his job was.

He was just lugging a lot of, he was doing this.

He was showing up on the edge of the ice, the ships would come in, people would unload all their supplies.

Doesn't that look of scary?

- Mm-hmm.

- Looks scary.

They would unload all their supplies, and then the dogs would haul all that stuff all across Alaska because the gold was not just on the beach of the the ocean, it was also the creeks and the rivers that were all running through Alaska.

Okay, so there's lots and lots of people during the summertime all looking for gold and they'd all leave in the wintertime because it was too hard to work and you only had maybe a thousand people again.

Then one winter, it was very bad.

1925, late January, beginning of February, big end of the winter blizzard, terrible blizzard, 60 degrees below zero, just insanely cold.

And the whole town of Nome was basically shut down.

It was people and dogs, everything else was locked up 'cause you just couldn't go anywhere.

And a couple of little kids ended up coming to the one hospital and they were sick and they had an illness called diptheria.

And diptheria is wicked, nasty stuff.

I'm not even gonna put it on the screen so you can spell it because then most you'll do is you'll go on the internet and you'll look up images of diptheria and you shouldn't do that.

- Yeah.

- You're gonna do it, I know you are.

What you're gonna see is pictures looking down people's throats.

And you'll see this gray stuff like clogging their throat.

Diptheria is a weird bacteria.

It floats around in the air (imitates coughing) when people cough, kind of like coronavirus.

And the problem was that in that tiny town, everybody was stuck 'cause it was a blizzard.

And the doctor didn't have any medicine.

The medicine that he had was expired.

Ugh.

So they had to call in a panic.

Somebody in Alaska, can anybody help us because we need the medicine.

All these little kids are probably gonna die because diptheria is nasty and it chokes you, right?

So let me show you on, I have a map over here, let me turn this camera toward the map.

So the town of Nome is way over here, way on the edge of the ocean.

And this was all frozen so no boats could get over there, no airplanes back, no airplanes could fly.

There were train tracks that went here, but no trains this way.

The only way you could move back and forth was dog sled.

That was it, man.

Even today, there's no actual roads, like paved roads.

I go to Nome, it's so remote.

So they found enough medicine that they could save the town, but it was way down here.

So they had to bring it by train there.

And then this whole way across, the only way to get there was by dog sled.

So they asked for volunteers and 20 different men volunteered will go, but nobody wanted to go the whole way 'cause the blizzard was too bad.

So they said, "Look, I'll go a little way, and then you take the medicine.

You go the next way and you take the medicine."

And they did this relay.

Very smart.

Balto was way over here toward the end.

Togo actually led his team out of Nome, went way over here, picked up the medicine, turned around, got halfway back, and then it was so bad, Togo was just done.

He was like, "No, I'm not going anywhere."

He ran away from Seppala when they stopped to thaw the medicine out.

So Sep was like, "All right, I guess we gotta stop."

So he would've been the story we tell if he had made it back to Nome, but he couldn't 'cause the blizzard was so bad and poor old Togo was tired out.

That's why we know Balto's name because Balto made it the last 53 miles to Nome.

He was the one that walked into town and delivered the medicine.

He was the one that all the newspapers were freaking out about.

Whoa, because this cute little bug was the lead dog of the team.

Let me show you how cute he was 'cause I happened to have a little smidge of video.

Now, I wanna jump in this video a little bit farther 'cause we don't need all the credits, do we?

Nah, we don't need all the credits.

Let's jump to the good part.

Let's see.

That's a laser pointer.

I don't want a laser pointer.

Oh, there it goes, okay.

So here's the video.

So what this is gonna show is that when the storm was going on and all the dogs were working their way toward Nome, there was a French film team who was hanging around, hoping that they could catch this on video because they wanted to make a movie, but they missed it 'cause it was 5:30 in the morning when Balto's team came in.

So they said, "Hey, Mr. Kaasen, could you go back out this morning when the sun is up and do it again?"

So here they come, doing it again.

This is all for the cameras, right?

That's Balto and his team.

Ta-da-da.

And this is what happened the night before in the blizzard, right?

And here they come and they deliver the medicine, and you would've watched this movie in a theater and everybody across the whole United States said, "Dude, we wanna meet that dog."

So for two years, poor little Balto and his master, Gunnar Kaasen, just traveled around the United States so people could meet him.

So there he is being adorable, right?

He was adorable, but the whole time he was traveling the United States, his owner, Mr. Seppala, wait, where am I?

Where's my camera?

Here I am.

Sorry, you're looking at a map.

The whole time he was traveling in the United States, Seppala was getting mad that Togo wasn't getting a lot of recognition.

So he said, "We're gonna shut this down and I'm gonna come down and show off my dogs.

And Balto, you gotta go.

We could get out of here.

He sold Balto and Balto ended up purchased by a guy who had it like a little circus.

Here, I'll show you a picture.

He called it a museum when it was kind like a little circus.

And so poor little Balto was just being shown on stage with a lady who was an actor pretending to be a sled dog person.

And the rest of his time, he was just sitting in a cage.

And it was really sad.

And a fella from Cleveland happened to see this.

He was in Los Angeles on a business trip and he was like, "Hey, can I buy that dog?

Because that's Balto, I know who that is."

And the guy who owned him said, "No, no, no, no, you gotta buy all seven of the dogs.

Their names are Billy, Tillie, Sye, Old Moctoc, Fox, and Alaska Slim and Balto.

You gotta buy them all 'cause I'm not, I can't make any money without Balto."

Okay.

So the fellow from Cleveland said, "All right."

And he went back to Cleveland and he put this ad in the paper.

If you look carefully, you can see Cleveland right there.

And the idea was, hey, that way all seven of these dogs can go hang at the zoo.

And that way anybody who helps to rescue him can go there and see him.

And that's what happened is the whole city of Cleveland saved enough money to buy train tickets and buy the dogs and brought them all the way to Cleveland.

And then when they got to Cleveland, they had a parade.

Look at the date, look at the date.

March 19th, 1927.

So we like to consider that Balto Day here in Cleveland because that's the day that he came to Cleveland with his team because nice Clevelanders who like dogs, paid some, gave a little bit of money.

We meet a lot of little kids who say, "Oh yeah," or ladies who are older, they'll say, "I was a little kid and I gave my lunch money."

You know, pretty cool.

So there's the parade in rainy Cleveland in a March day, right?

That Balto was brought to Cleveland.

He looks pretty happy though.

He was like, "Yeah, I'm out of the cage, all right."

And after they hung out at City Hall for a little while, they went to the zoo.

People were allowed to come and pet them and give them the appreciation they deserved.

Yay.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, you know why a famous dog from Alaska is hanging out here at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History because it was kids like you that cared enough to give their lunch money and help save that dog.

So he is not a fossil, but it's a pretty cool story and it's a really neat link between this museum here in Ohio and the whole state of Alaska.

How fun is that?

So that, ladies and gentlemen, you have had our grand lightning behind the scenes tour of fun stuff going on here at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Just a little shout out to the construction project.

November 15th is when our brand new entrance is scheduled to open.

So if you wanna see that cool glacier looking part of the museum, whoo, so exciting.

It's gonna be open in about a month and a half and maybe I'll see you here.

So thanks, Jason, for rocking out the electronica.

Thanks, Destiny, for helping out and shouting out to the question for me.

And I'm gonna turn it back over to the technology team because we'll wrap it up and if there's any last questions, I'll be hanging here while Jason finishes out whatever Jason needs to say.

(laughs) Back to you in the studio there, man.

- Great, thank you, Lee, so much.

I hope that all of you who have enjoyed today's visit to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

And I invite you to join us in early December as we make our next visit to a different organization here in Ohio to look at Christmas traditions across Ohio and around the world.

So in order, let me, I'm gonna share my screen so that everybody can see it.

Again, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, if you haven't visited, I highly encourage you to visit.

You can find out more information at their website, cmnh.org.

The next time you're in Cleveland, plan a trip and meet Lee and Balto and Lucy.

So thank you all.

In order to help us better plan for future virtual field trips, we ask that you please take a few minutes to complete an evaluation survey available at the URL or the QR code on your screen right now.

If you have a cell phone, you can take a picture of that QR code and it will take you to the website where you can fill that out.

If you don't have the ability to do it right now, anyone who registered for today's session will get an email asking them to fill it out online.

So I ask that you do that when you receive that email after the fact.

So on behalf of all of Ohio's PBS stations and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, I wanna thank you for joining us today.

We look forward to seeing you again soon.