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 mocker quarry a fossil site close to the town tom bhakti tots who can a is taking over as the paleontologist at clayton stein castle 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 the site and who know hopes his time will be similarly fruitful. the bone marker in the thuringia forest is

a very special fossil locality. a season you could say the brawl marker 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 question i'll sheesh to fins and this guy used to be a common academic consensus was that no one would ever find body fossils in this kind of reddish brown mind brain rocks. i guess some academic opinion shouldn't be written in stone. of even. thomas marx and showed the consensus to be mistaken with the help of a bone he found as a young geologist at the bow marker quarry in 1974. we weren't actually looking for bones for execution it happened by coincidence one from the 1st i didn't recognize it as a bone i thought it was a part of the stone just by but then i repaired this white light thing and saw. as

a bonus. my then teacher and the professor on know how money and freiburg wrote to me and doesn't exist in martin's you didn't find that here cathy when he said there's no such thing here services. subsequently accepted it gave me a symbolic pat on my shoulder and rather than on words i came back here every year so i had more real knowledge of this. 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 bro marker quarry this launched various excavations the discoveries were brought to the dot com museum in 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 the geologist of the national geo park insoles bad guy 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 know all of this is old. with this and when is this from around 1730. in the $1730.00 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 this is where one of the 1st specimens of proto resource or 1st lizard was around. when that discovery was made here in $733.00 it 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. and this is and this is from a friend. as was the 1st fossilized primitive reptiles that was ever described and that time people knew nothing about fossils so it was not generally understood or accepted that these were the remains of former living creatures for you back then people still thought that these shapes had grown inside the rocks by chance he's a. good box and. so here we see a recently opened rock which shows us the history of this region fish disease of the great the range in flood that happened to your 257000000 years ago.

on top of the lies there. which was laid down by the sea the year it flooded the central european basin. i mean. that's the wrong here below with a large particles is the conglomerate after that we have a time period which lasted around 15000 years when this black copper slate for the . during this time to see stagnated and there was a sludge at the bottom from a poorly ventilated sea lift. this is the layer in which the remains of proto and many other fossils can be found most of which are done over for. one geological period and many dramatic climate changes later primitive tetrapods left tracks in wet sand which eventually became modeled sunstone the fossilized tracks were discovered in $833.00. the. for 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 more insane was some months 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. when taking the position of the tracks into account it became clear that the suppose a dog was actually a little finger if the clone if you long would disagree on the researchers surmised the creatures must have walked crisscross cloyd's which didn't really seem natural to us why is that why people were always very uncertain what kind of animals produced this curious drugs life on this 4th year would give us that continue to call yourself sort them. out from 833-2851 about 20 different scientific papers were written about them it was true but we will that's how hot

the topic was. the hand shaped prints led to the animals being called hand beast this remains their name to this day. my income and. we can determine the shoulder point and the point of the animals from their tracks and how they stepped. 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 the in this case. an arguer sort through its all wheel similar animals have been found in to chino in switzerland and south america. both methods we did you order a phantom picture which we used as the basis for a reconstructed model that so constituents would. 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 fire. researchers and discoverers. who live down for example discovered the skeleton of a neo theropod a carnivore from the triassic period. this ancestor of the t.-rex was named lillian stannis 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 fish this is a magnificent specimen. and see it for with frank you're sorry. you see. some plants were swept in but the brink you sorry were the real inhabitants of the lexus. let's take a look at the largest loss of life skeletons. these still are dinosaurs of their primitive amphibians that lived in the leg during the war or sister really an epic that's why you want to know 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 in the picnic. or fossilized feces preserved with the skeleton and all that tells us something about the circumstances under which this animal died. just look 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 you still didn't skin burst. the skin by we have some examples of that happening because of the heat and gas in the intestines can cause the skin to split . in some not simply and in this case the skin burst in the spine came out. of your claws and almost didn't show. the tetrapods living in the bone markers site near tom 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 the river and its pools served as watering holes for animals. the pulp and you. 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 going jerry it can now stay preserved like the. it is a fossil for millions of years if the additions are 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 martin came across the 1st bone here in 1984 he returned every year each time he discovered maine fossils. in the 1980 s. i found the 1st goal of the genus in moria. and we knew it was a some morea 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. 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 and from the western world started. a lot of 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 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 are 13 different types of animal from more are found nowhere else in europe but they are many of them are found in tonight's 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 site 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 of researchers in berlin have said they want to continue digging in the borough market 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. they may have received as collection manager for the section of vertebrate paleontology she is also a fossil prepare and participated in bro marker quarry excavations the 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 are far exceeded in completeness preservation and also in there is a preparation other fossils that i worked on we started with her. and we were found out of the. unique for everything. up to that in the reason for that. he was a gap. to be able to run. not only were we on our way from the upright. but we moved. up the white path not other animals for for this sort but the rampart. 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 at the broad marker the one that sticks in my mind the most is the discovery of or baby's cap stock and one of the reasons this was my favorite is because i was the one who did. scuppered and we were working in the corrie and i was sort of going into my own will never find a fossil when i looked it obvious abroad and i wondered if that would underside and there was an articulated foot and we didn't know what it was out of at the time but we knew from the burrow 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 and switzerland have taught pabst to walk again. the interdisciplinary project is a joint effort of the institute of file logy of the university of berlin and the polytechnic in. the biologists 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 is one of the think that shows us where. out of control at the same time. for a story like 5 degrees of freedom and the like. so there are very look they're like 5 mortars into like

a team that was sort of challenging. to get all 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. you have all these degrees of x. ability and where you have to solve problems such as hand and foot joint rotations of a time. when the same time we could play at various scenarios in. the robot can reproduce the tracks that the baso left behind 300000000 years ago. the world that i am so we can now use the robot to identify what movements could create tracks like these this is happening now to. professor new york a tourist started the project at the previous chiller university. 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 on which meant we had to shift our estimation of when i got 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 freedom castle to prepared. back from the u.s. . this book is. a skeleton it's absolutely complete as far as the most untaxed gallatin of this kind of animal in the world. it. was

really crazy seeing something like this and you can almost picture how it lives how it moved and what it saw. you can see the eye sockets in that skull. this is where the treasures of the brahmachari are 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 . in a storm. whispering they were whispering to each other. we had the idea to call them the tom box lovers because of the famous painting. lovers the world's oldest couple. in the here is the demitra don. that's the

one with the normal spine sail which had previously only been known for north america but this part have been found in the brahmachari. these are long along its lines that extend from the vertebrae here at the individual for every this is what carried the neural spine so. this isn't exactly the same species but it is a demitra dog. it's a little smaller than those found in north america but hey we now know we had done in europe doesn't toy which is great with one of our goals is to someday find a complete animal. and then here is the new developments. the legs are so long that we think he could also run on his hind feet when he wanted to go fast. fast almost like a dinosaur although he's not one of them. we also have a posterity or part of pelvic bone in the extremities of a 2nd. back yet he's still being prepared in the us but we'll get it back by the

end of the year that if that. i just finding another year deeper mystery in the next excavations is definitely one of my wishes. was. with pleasure i'm adding it to my list. in the quarry of bad tots but i'll fetch the book and are standing and now petrified lake dating from the whole kent or scissor rally and 295000000 years ago these 2 paleontologists also have a wish list. of these still exist today clam shrimp these bluish white shells were the houses of clam shrimp which are sort of like small crabs. in the tetrapods that swam in this lake these. rooms and you can thank you because there are also small crustaceans in here too.

maybe will also find some paragraph and. they're looking for broncos soaring 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. your single father now we've reached the right stratum it should be long now before the tetrapods jump out again. yeah. he's our layers where you find a lot. has been preserved in the stratum one but there are others in which there are tightly packed here and we have the highest tetrapod density in the world there are areas with up to $1500.00 small brink of sorry per square meter it's like opening a tin of sardines and that's how packed the brink you sorry sometimes are here to thank goodness bunches of real munch my good.

the paleontologist spent about $500.00 broncos sorry and a large skull. made thank you for a 22 month old. 1. 123. 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 there you can see the skull cap to this white bone on the other side. you can see the palette on. wouldn't you and this is a large tooth that broke off at the base about one 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 thought. it was all this all was about so wide and so long dozens of others relatively large to we were also able to recover other parts of the skeleton and we found the spine and some ribs both still preserved if you look 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 or will be able to extract this with a few months of work i propose to the skull could belong to an accomplice stole the talks 2 years ago researchers found one in. before that only small skulls and single skeleton bones from saxony had been excavated but there seems to be a complete skeleton with every new find the picture of life 295000000 years ago becomes clearer. is that what special here and is that the wrote this is eerie and is so

exposed to sloth and 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 it's 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 little tiny piece of your person with a fold up at some distance and.

question what do you get when you stack 35 columns of concrete blocks that form a 120 meter high tower around a crime that has 6 arms on it. battery the tower enables the storage of renewable energy but how exactly does this unique contraption live. tomorrow today. next on.

the moon mutating into a nameless mass. their bodies a mere tools of the history of the slave trade his memory goes astray obstructs how the greed for power and profit plummeted an entire continent into chaos and. this time europe's expansion for all the gold in the world in our series of. body. colors my story. of the people who planned me. dead against him and knives to me. i am not going down depending. please on my secrets. i have mocked my cities days for centuries

and accompanied my country through its finest hours until the day i mean. not down to leave stance april and. future into tomorrow today the science show on t w coming up. could this tower be a solution to the problem of renewable energy storage. we need a scientist who is searching for new answer about sex from microorganisms. and put. out far away solar system neighbor was a plan.