this journey begins in the dark a long time ago and stretches far into the future. stone for stone it tells the story of life in what is today thuringia in central germany millions of years ago. thomas martins is showing his successor tom hooper the borough marker quarry a fossil site close to the town tom de tots who is taking over as the paleontologist at planes tynecastle in go top home to 290000000 year old treasures from the lower permian period martin spent 40 years digging through the earth's history on this site and who hopes his time will be similarly fruitful. the brawl

marker in the thuringia forest is a very special fossil locality. in the season you could say the bra matter is the only lower permian locality in the world well track sprints and the track makers that is skeletons basically be found in one layer. to fit in this group used to be a common academic consensus is that no one would ever find body fossils in this kind of reddish brown and find green rocks. i guess some academic opinion shouldn't be written in stone. of. thomas martin showed the consensus to be mistaken with the help of a bone he found as a young geologist at the bro market quarry in 1974. we weren't actually looking for bones for execution it happened by coincidence one 1st i didn't recognize it as a bone i thought it was a part of the stone just by but then i prepared this white thing and saw it as

a bone as. my then teacher and professor on know him on miller and freiburg wrote to me. mr martin's you didn't find that here it can't be funny there's no such thing here civilisations. subsequently except that it gave me a symbolic pat on my shoulder and from then onwards i came back here every year. at the end of the 19th century a footprint left by primitive tetrapod animals which predate dinosaurs was discovered by chance on a sandstone block that it come from the belmokhtar quarry this launched various excavations the discoveries were brought to the duke all museum and go to or sold to museums and universities around the world. about 150 years before the bro marker footprint was unearthed finds from another part of thuringia called bad levenstein

had kicked off paleontological research around the world. is heading to that beginning. geologist of the national geo park insoles bag glycine is working his way through the corridors of an old cobalt and copper mine. parts of the mine have been made accessible again for scientific research. this is an older excavation oh all of this is old. when this and when is this from around 1730. in the 17th thirty's discoveries were made that would change what we knew and thought about the world forever. as a few of us i know the us the this is where one of the 1st specimens of proto saurus

or 1st lizard was around. when that discovery was made here in $733.00 was particularly valuable and this is to suggest this was named after that he's been told it's now in the natural history museum movie and it was and was in a movie and this is i mean this in shaft from the front. row to restore us was the 1st fossilized primitive reptiles that was ever described with cities let's have that time the people knew nothing about fossils so it was not yet generally understood or accepted that these were the remains of former living creatures the 4 and you back then people still thought that these shapes have grown inside the rocks by chance steeds a few goons with science who fairly should stay in your box and we. as a here think of this so here we see a recently opened rock which shows us the history of this region fish disease in of the great the range in flood that happened here 257000000 years ago isn't that seen

from this new york of its height on top of the water you can and life that. which was laid down by the sea the year. flooded the central european basin. i mean. the rock here below with a large particles is this they shine conglomerate after that we have a time period which lasted around 15000 years when this black copper slate for this . is it's. during this time to see stagnated and there was a slug at the bottom from a poorly ventilated sea lift. this is the layer in which the remains of proto rose saurus and many other fossils can be found all sorts of shells over for. one geological period and many dramatic climate changes later primitive tetrapod left tracks in white sand which eventually became mottled sense stone the fossilized tracks were discovered in $833.00 and in the nearby vince

a quarry. they were the very 1st trace fossils to be described in the history of science part of the trace fossil is on display in the museum of natural history in the castle batons books noising and it's arguably the most beautiful plate showing 3 crossing tracks. in the 19th century people didn't really understand how these pictures walked if you put your hand on the print you can see if it's really well here has. been taken the position of the tracks into account it became clear that the suppose it was actually a little finger if that long with this film the researchers surmised the creatures must have walked criss cross. which didn't really seem natural that's why people were always very uncertain what kind of animals produced this curious drugs life. with you would give us and. so on my gut from 833-2851 about 20 different scientific papers were written about them and it was

true. that's how hot the topic was on the. the hand shaped prints led to the animals being called hand beast this remains their name to this day. and. we can determine the shoulder point and the pelvic point of the animals from their tracks and how they step. on which means we can estimate and reconstruct the animal's proportions in addition the foot morphology can be used to determine the animal group in this case. in our gut or through us all will similar animals have been found into chino switzerland and south america or both methods we did you order a phantom picture which we used as the basis for a reconstructed model so. that

beast is an ancestor of crocodiles and belongs to the crown group of dinosaurs it had a fluid gait like today's mammals and dinosaurs before them. this is one of the many details contained in the tour through 300000000 years of the earth's history. while found a book is a sought after expert for early amphibians and set up the museum exhibition like thomas martin's and stefan bonna he stands in the great tradition of the engine fossil researchers and discoverers. google who live fun lily and down for example discovered the skeleton of an eel theropod a carnivore from the triassic period. this ancestor of the t.-rex was named lillian after the discovery. down in the museum's archive the history of the earth lies tucked inside drawers

a picture of the evolution of living creatures millions of years ago can be reconstructed stone for stone. and this is a magnificent specimen. and see it for with frank your story which is the white you see when you learn some plants were swept him but the brink you're sorry were the real inhabitants of the linksys. let's take a look at the largest loss of life skeletons and these still are dinosaurs of their primitive amphibians that lived in the leg during the war to make into more sister really an epic and from this was a young. and that's what's particularly interesting with the skeleton is that it still has its last excrement in its pelvis. or fossilized feces preserved with the skeleton well that's tells us something about the circumstances under which this animal died. to slip through. the slot open he would enjoy getting

buried in a lake by a mud flood because. it's also possible to analyze what happened in that lake afterwards. with this creature maybe floating on the surface for a while did it skin burst all the plots the swing by we have some examples of that happening because of the heat and gas in the intestines caused the skin to split. and some simply moved in this case the skin burst in the spine came out. of your claws and almost in the shield. the tetrapods living in the bone marker site near tom de time it's probably also fell victim to a mudslide 285000000 years ago a flood caused by heavy rainfall in the rancho was then close to the equator periods of drought alternated with monsoon rains back then now too and surrounded the brahmachari and a river and its pools served as watering holes for animals. the pope.

we need a very soft medium like this mud here and it needs to be moldable. it can't be too liquid. it needs to have a plastic consistency. and we need the sun to dry it out which makes it very hard. and the wind covers it in sand and just by the jury it can now stay preserved like that is a fossil. millions of your late edition zur right. as the tracks found in the borough marker in the 19th century made the quarry known but the skeletons brought the sign to world famed after martins came across the 1st bone here in 1984 he returned every year each time he discovered many fossils. in the 1980 s. i found the 1st goal of the genus in moria. and we knew it was a sim oriya from comparing it with american literature. that was

a big surprise. because it was the 1st example of the genus found in europe and it made this connection clear. we tried to reach out to researchers in the u.s. which wasn't easy to do in the g.d.r. . but with the help of the museum it worked. that's how interest from america from the western world started. this nation's idea. after the fall of the berlin wall martin managed to get one of the world's leading vertebrate paleontologists interested in the pro marker scientists david berman from the carnegie museum in pittsburgh pennsylvania. the 1st and most important thing is that all the things we're finding here 13 different types of animal for more are found nowhere else in europe but they are many of them

are found in states or north america which goes to prove biologically that the 2 continents were together that europe and north america were one continuous land continent. the science was under the care of the. freedon stein which stopped the excavation in 2010 the reason given was that there are more important priorities but a group. researchers in berlin have said they want to continue digging in the borough marker also because the site with its combination of tracks and track makers is unique and the skeletons are exceptionally well preserved. researchers at the carnegie museum of natural history in pittsburgh have been working on extracting and cleaning the skeletons for years. amy had received as collection manager for the section of vertebrate paleontology she is also a fossil prepare and participated in breaux marker quarry excavations discoveries

at the bro marker were important for me as a fossil prepared or because they are the best fossils i prepared in my career at the carnegie museum they far exceeded in completeness preservation and also in there is a preparation of other fossils that i worked on we started prefer. and we were found out of. the week for everything. up to that in the reason for that. he was the gap with. the 2 being able to run by you not only on a car in an upright. but we moved. you up. like that not other animal forethought this sort of the ramp quite the dinosaur. was there a small tie around a source in germany 170000000 years before the 1st real t.-rex appeared on earth

actually the 2 are unrelated except for that as the small one is called also walked on 2 legs it may have been the 1st to do so. of all the discoveries we've made of the broadwater and the one that sticks in my mind the most is the discovery of or baby's pap's die and one of the reasons this was my favorite is because i was the one who discovered it. and we were working in the corrie and i was sort of going into my oval never find a fossil when i lifted up a piece of rock and underneath i lifted up and looked at the underside and there was an articulated foot and we didn't know what it was of at the time but we knew from the borough marker that if you found an articulated foot there was a good chance that you would have a whole skeleton. is a close relative of the last common ancestor of mammals lizards snakes turtles crocodiles and birds that lived around 290000000 years ago shortly after

vertebrates 1st came out of the water and stepped onto the shore. and this is why researchers in switzerland have taught oral beatty's paths to walk again. the interdisciplinary project is a joint effort of the institute of file logy of the university of berlin and the core polytechnique in. the biologist hope this early land can shed light on evolutionary history. the engineers hope it will help them develop robots that can save lives in emergencies. i guess one of the think the chinese where like connect control the motors at the same time . very slowly like 5 degrees of freedom in the lake burley.

so they're very they're like fights mortars into like i mean but that was sort of challenging. to get told the degrees of freedom that is a real animal can have. there's never been a walking machine like this there's 28 different motors that control the complete movement. and it was a big challenge for the robotics specialists to create this kind of natural sequence of movement. if. you have all these degrees of flexibility and where you have to solve problems such as hand and foot joint rotations. and at the same time we could play at various scenarios in. the robot can reproduce the tracks that the baso left behind 300000000 years ago. so we can now use the robot to identify what movements could create tracks like these this is happening now it's a. professor in the uk

a tourist started the project at the previous chillers. university yeah he measured the bones and tracks digitized them animated them together with specialists and compared their mobility with that of living reptiles today. we found that the movement of these animals was already very well adapted to life on land that's going to. and which meant we had to shift our estimation of when i was active mobility on land had a vault back by 15 to 20000000 years and. thomas martin's his grandson and his successor tom hooper are all the way to the depot of freedon stein castle prepared or obeyed back from the us. was. a skeleton it's absolutely complete as far as the most in taxes gallatin of

this kind of animal in the world. and what is really crazy seeing something like this. you can almost picture how it lives how it moved and what it saw. you can see the eye sockets in its skull. this is where the treasures of the brown marker or stored among them the famous tom. 2 fossilised say moria the discovery was the 1st biological proof that europe and the us were still a super continent called pangea some 300000000 years ago. as if they had been saying goodbye to one another one last time before they were engulfed . whispering they were whispering to each other. we had the idea to call them the tom box lovers and then because of the famous painting. lovers the world's oldest couple years.

in here. the demitra don. that's the one with the neural spine sale which had previously only been known from north america but this part have been found in the . these are long long gated spines that extend from the vertebrae here of the individual for every this is what carried the neural spine so. this isn't exactly the same species but it is a demitra. it's a little smaller than those found in north america but hey we now know we had gone in europe doesn't toys which is great with one of our goals is to someday find a complete animal. and then here is the you doing this. is the legs are so long that we think we could also run on his hind feet when he wanted to go faster than. almost like a dinosaur although he's not one of us. we also have a posterity or part of pelvic bone in the extremities of

a 2nd this is so there's that back yet he still being prepared in the u.s. but we'll get it back by the end of the year that in fact. i just finding another you know deep mystery in the next excavations is definitely one of my wishes. with pleasure i'm adding it to my list. in the quarry of bad top lots of the book and stuff on our standing and now petrified lake dating from the whole endorses a rally and 295000000 years ago these 2 paleontologists also have a wish list. these still exist today clam shrimp. these bluish white shells were the houses a clam shrimp which are sort of like small crabs. in the tetrapods that swam in this lake ate these you know. you can thank god they're also small crustaceans

and here to. maybe will also find some paragraph and. they're looking for a brand he was sorry and other larger amphibians but they aren't in the right layer yet the digger still needs to remove a few 1000 years of petrified time. and now we've reached the right stratum and should be long now for the tetrapods to jump out again. when it's. lunch might get to my knees are layers where you find a lot and central lot has been preserved in the strata but there are others in which there are tightly packed here and we have the highest tetrapod density in the world gets flexion there are areas with up to $1500.00 small brink of sorry per square meter of clock it's like opening a tin of sardines in that that's how packed the brink you're sorry sometimes are here. bunches the real munch my good.

the paleontologist found about $500.00 bronco sorry and a large skull. a 22 month old. one and the. monkey money tree. you don't see much at 1st. but you can open it with me and then you can see a bit more. and this is the inside view of the skull and here you can see the skull cap it's like this white bone voice on the other side. you can see the palatino bone. wouldn't you and this is a large tooth that broke off at the base about one centimeter long. and centimeter long and this is a canine of the hard palate. he's ok no one has lebron to donte an unfolding of the

dentate. which tells us this is a labyrinth a daunting to do and i. was all this goal was about so wide and so long dozens of others relatively large that i think we were also able to recover other parts of the skeleton and we found the spine and some ribs are both still preserved as if there are some blocks where we don't know what's inside yet so we're hoping for more fines what's going through this is something really great because we don't have such big skulls from those of you yet. care will be able to extract this with a few months of work i propose to the skull could belong to an accomplice stole the tops 2 years ago researchers found one in. before that only small skulls and single skeleton bones from saxony had been excavated could there soon be a complete skeleton with every new find the picture of life 295000000 years ago

becomes clearer. what's special here in the ring is that the road and this is eerie and is so exposed. it's a large section which is more than 3 to 4 kilometers thick if you keep the sense that the range in forest is a narrow mountain range so if i lifted up which means that everything is accessible from the deepest layers of the middle to the highest marks where the market can be found in the midst of a tiny piece of you personally i would have. to say. lawyer

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it's for the. beethoven is for the soul be told it is for the mother. beethoven 202250th anniversary here on w. . lower . more on these creatures coming up on the show. and with that very warm welcome to another edition of your i'm max.