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SCOPE learns about the feathered dinosaurs
Dr Gareth Dyke loves digging up dinosaurs. He's a palaeontologist and he works at the Biology Department in UCD. So dinosaurs are all in a day's work for him. "We're trying to figure out how big marine reptiles like this plesiosaur, that looked a bit like a Loch Ness monster," he says (holding up a huge bird skull), "are related to crows, like the hooded crow you see commonly around Dublin." Millions of years Gareth looks for dinosaurs and rocks that are anything between about 70 million years old and 200 million years old - covering a span of more than 100 million years. "I've always been collecting fossils since I was very small," he says. "It's still a really cool feeling." He and his team find places in the world with rocks of the right age and then go to them and look for fossils. "When we find something we spend a lot of time cleaning it till we have fossils that look like skeletons of animals that died recently," he says. "What's exciting is when you find the fossil for the first time - you're walking along in a desert and you see some pieces of tooth sticking out of the sand at you. You start to find more of the skeleton in the ground. That's the exciting part." Birds and dinosaurs Palaeontologists are very interested in finding out when the first groups of birds appeared on Earth. Gareth says that there are about 15,000 species of bird in the world today and that we need to understand how they're related to each other and where they came from. "That brings us to the study of dinosaurs," he says. "Birds are one kind of dinosaur." In the last few years, fossils of feathered dinosaurs have been found in China. This exciting find is helping scientists get closer to the connection between birds and dinosaurs. Exotic Gareth has done field work in: . North America - Utah, Wyoming, Montana . South America - Argentina and Chile . Places in Central Asia like Kazakhstan Some of the places he's been working are more than 2,000 km from the nearest city. "One thing I'd like to do in the future is make a museum in Dublin that has more fossils in it, that teaches people about the evolution of life. That would be great" Learn more: Read about the discovery of feathered dinosaur fossils Learn more about palaeontology at the University of California Museum Discover Earth's past at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History |
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