Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

…So it’s a young guy. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, at full size, it’s going to be like pig or sheep size, so big but not massive. But I’ve got it partly because it’s affordable, because I can’t afford to buy the big skeletons and skulls. But I’ve done a huge amount of work on it, and in part it goes back to those earlier conversations about populations. If you really want to understand animals, you need an understanding of what a real population and a growth of what these animals looks like. And Protoceratops is, I would argue, probably the only dinosaur where we can really do that, or at least as close as possible as you could get to any modern animal as an analog. We’ve got well over 100 good skeletons, though not… Probably only about 70 or 80 in really accessible museums, but that’s still a hell of a lot. We have everything from here’s a tiny baby one. This is a really cheap and nasty 3D print I had made, but that’s a hatchling sized one or not much bigger than a hatchling sized one, all the way up to the big adults. We’ve now got embryos as well, which we didn’t have until about 10 years ago. So we’ve got embryonic animals all the way up to big adults. They’re all pretty much from one place in Mongolia. And they are, as far as we can tell, from a relatively narrow window in time, only about 100,000 years, which in the grand scheme of things is very close. So you’ve got one population from one place, from one time with 100 animals from embryos up to big adults. That’s okay.…

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