I've loved dinosaurs since I was a kid, but it turns out that a lot of what I thought I knew is actually wrong, or at least outdated.

So, in this video, I'm going to show you the cutting edge of dinosaur discovery.

I'm going to give you rare access into a warehouse full of dinosaur bones, go out into the field, and try to discover my own fossil, and show you something new these scientists just discovered.

I think we've got ourselves a dinosaur.

A new look at dinosaurs.

The golden age of dinosaur discovery.

Uncovering almost one new dinosaur species a week.

There's so much more to these amazing creatures than we really have just begun.

I think I found a dinosaur bone.

We're in Alberta, Canada, and we are on our way to an active dinosaur dig site.

This is a huge moment in dinosaur discovery.

Scientists are discovering more dinosaurs now than at any other time in history.

They're finding a new species each week, on average.

And those discoveries are shaking up what we thought we knew about these ancient animals.

The dig site that we're headed to now is special.

The rumor is that they've uncovered something really cool.

So, I don't know what we're going to find, but my big goal is to actually help discover a dinosaur bone today.

If I can do that, oh my god.

The site that we're going to is full of a herd of dinosaurs called Pachyrhinosaurus.

We have the big adults, we have the little babies, we have the teenagers.

That's Dr. Emily Bamforth, the paleontologist in charge of this site.

They're not sure what exactly killed this herd.

It could have been a natural disaster, like a flood, but they know that it killed them all at the same time.

And then later, they were buried in mud that turned to stone over 73 million years.

But that's a problem for us today, because they're not preserved as individual animals where they fell.

They're all sort of mixed together.

That's right.

So, we lovingly refer to it as our Pachyrhinosaurus omelet.

It's basically hundreds, potentially thousands of animals kind of jumbled up together in this one deposit.

Putting together a dinosaur is kind of like doing a puzzle, except...

You don't know what the picture on the front of the box is.

You're missing half the pieces.

There's pieces from other puzzles thrown in.

And then the pieces sometimes are ripped and torn so they don't fit properly.

The hardest jigsaw puzzle in the world.

Basically, yep.

So, how do you know that you're doing the puzzle right?

How do we know that any of these dinosaurs are right?

Well, we're about to see how they do it.

Oh wow.

Oh my god.

Here we are.

This is it.

Because it's one of the densest dinosaur bone beds in North America.

So, the estimated number of animals is somewhere from 6,000 to 10,000.

Oh my god.

Among all the bones in this huge dinosaur omelet, there's one type that's rare and special to find intact.

A skull.

And they just found one.

So, this thing here is a big skull.

And everything that's around it is all bone as well.

Can I touch it?

Yeah, go ahead.

It feels like a rock.

It basically is a rock.

Are you freaking out right now?

Yeah, I'm totally freaking out right now.

This is so awesome.

They're hoping to pull this skull out of the ground in the next few weeks.

But if that's a tachyrhinosaurus skull, how big was the rest of it?

It turns out a lot has changed about what we think dinosaurs actually looked like, including their size.

So, let me show you.

Okay, so I want you to imagine this skull coming out of the ground.

It would look like this.

This dinosaur had a big bony bump on the front of its nose called the bot, and a bony frill and horns on the back of its head.

Using bones collected in the area and around the world, and referencing similar dinosaurs and animals that are alive today, scientists put together the rest of the skeleton like this.

Now imagine the dinosaur comes back to life.

It's about that big, which is huge.

Compared to other dinosaurs, this guy was medium in size, which is wild and makes me wonder, how big were the rest of them?

If you lined up a bunch of dinosaurs from smallest to largest, you'd see the teeny little anguillornis, just a little bit bigger than a basketball.

You'd see the consignathus, the size of a small chicken.

The famous velociraptor would actually be here, except in real life they were about this big, which is not the size they looked in Jurassic Park.

And newer research shows that they didn't look like that.

Velociraptors had feathers.

To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, they didn't know that.

The reason the velociraptors don't have feathers is because we didn't know that those kind of dinosaurs had feathers at the time.

In 1998, this discovery in China changed our understanding of what some dinosaurs looked like, and other discoveries since have confirmed that more dinosaurs had feathers than we thought.

And there's still a lot of debate about what the color and the outside appearance of dinosaurs actually looked like.

We'll get to that in a minute.

One step bigger than the velociraptor would be the niacisaurus, about the size of a German shepherd.

Then our pachyrhinosaurus would be here.

One of my favorites, the triceratops, was about the height of an Asian elephant, but much longer.

Here's the stegosaurus and the t-rex.

And from here on, the sizes get nutty.

These dinosaurs were bigger than school buses.

They were taller than buildings.

One of the largest known dinosaurs, the argentinosaurus, was about as long and heavier than a commercial airplane.

Can you imagine what it was like when these animals walked the earth?

But here's the thing.

They didn't all walk it at the same time.

Really common misconception is that all dinosaurs lived all at the same time.

Dinosaurs lived for way longer than most people think.

If this is all of recorded human history, and this is the time since humans diverged from apes, this is the time when dinosaurs were alive.

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 180 million years.

We are nothing in comparison.

And the dinosaurs that we know today were spread out through this enormous history, which means that some of the dinosaurs I think of as being alive at the same time were actually separated by millions of years.

There was more time that separates stegosaurus from t-rex than separates t-rex from us.

What?

Yeah.

That's an amazing fact.

I had no idea.

The stegosaurus was an ancient relic to the t-rex.

My whole childhood was a lie.

They're about to let me look for some dinosaur bones.

I've been waiting for this moment my whole entire life.

So no pressure.

But if I don't find something, I'm going to be devastated.

I'm probably not going to find it.

I'm probably going to find like a chicken bone.

But just searching.

I'm so psyched.

But first, let me show you something.

I'm trying to correct what I got wrong about dinosaurs.

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Now, back to the story.

All right, here's how to hunt for dinosaurs.

There are two rules.

So the first one is that you always want to be working horizontal to the bone layer.

The reason being, like, as soon as you do this, you run the risk of, like, accidentally stabbing a bone.

The second rule is to always keep your sight clean.

So we say a clean sight is a happy sight.

All right, the moment I've been waiting for my whole life.

Here I go.

Just, just, I'm just going to be here for a while.

Just, you guys, you guys can go.

But as I worked, I wondered, how many of each dinosaur have we found?

Some huge proportion of species are known from a single specimen, which is crazy.

Yeah.

Turns out almost half of all dinosaur species are known from a single specimen.

And many of those fossils are incomplete.

Meaning we take the pieces that we do find and we extrapolate what the rest of it could have looked like.

That makes the job of identifying what's a new species and what's just a piece of an already existing dinosaur really tricky.

We are nowhere near having all the dinosaurs that ever lived.

And the dinosaurs that we have found aren't final.

They're an ongoing group project among scientists all around the world.

Take, for example, maybe the world's most famous dinosaur.

The T-Rex.

Doesn't look like you think.

Scientists and artists have been imagining dinosaurs for hundreds of years.

Based on early discoveries, they thought that the T-Rex was a lean predator that stood upright like a kangaroo.

You may have seen their traditional T-Rex in the kangaroo pose, like standing up with his tail dragging on the ground.

But the more they compared the T-Rex's hip and thigh bones to modern upright animals, they realized that they didn't quite make sense.

New computer models showed that standing upright would put too much weight on its hips, but leaning forward would be much more stable.

We now understand these animals are more like teeter-totters.

And they weren't very lean either.

Rib-like bones were found with this old famous T-Rex skeleton, Sue.

But it wasn't until 2018 when they realized that these ribs would have had to float in the T-Rex's abdomen like crocodiles have today.

And they realized that the T-Rex would have been way chunkier than they thought.

Which means that it was probably an ambush predator jumping out at you, not a pursuit predator chasing you down in a Jeep.

In fact, most dinosaurs were chunkier than people thought.

But before I show you that, do you think that's a bone?

I'm pretty sure both of these are bones.

I'm pretty sure I found a dinosaur bone.

I think I'm touching a dinosaur bone.

There it is.

Oh my God.

Might also be a bone of like a large chicken or something.

Am I right?

Okay, I think there's two bones.

I think this is a bone.

And I think this is a bone under here too.

Yep.

Oh my God, they're everywhere.

I also didn't realize that I narrowly avoided disaster.

This is bone too, actually.

Stop, really?

Yep, all right, I didn't spot that one.

How do you know?

I can see like those little white specks in there.

That's kind of like the arrow chocolate bar.

Look at the texture of this.

I had no idea what I was looking at.

I thought I was looking for something like that, which is the outside of the bone.

Yeah, that is the cross section.

That's the arrow bar part, the inside texture.

Good thing I didn't chip away at that one.

Thank you.

This is one of the coolest experiences of my life.

I realize that this is just like another Tuesday for you, but this is really cool.

It is pretty cool.

Like I said, the thrill never wears off.

But finding a bone isn't even the coolest part.

We got to get it back to the lab.

Is there any hope of actually pulling that bone out of the ground?

I think so.

To get it out of the ground intact, we had to make this paste and then paint it over the bone and wait until it dried.

And while we were waiting, I realized that I still had a very basic question about all of this.