Name: 【TED】Latif Nasser: You have no idea where camels really come from (You have no idea where camels really come from | Latif Nasser)
Uploaded: 2017-01-21T03:11:58.000Z
Duration: 12 min 28 s
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which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff.

(Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me "Dr. Dead Things."

Latif Nasser: And I think she's particularly interesting

way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra.

she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed,

which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole.

(Audio) NR: Really, it's not going to sound very exciting,

because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS

and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil.

LN: And at some point, she noticed something.

LN: And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood,

because that's the sort of thing people had found

at the Fyles Leaf Bed before -- prehistoric plant parts.

I'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing

it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings.

and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone,

(Audio) NR: It's not a whole lot. It fits in a small Ziploc bag.

LN: And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

(Audio) NR: It's broken up into so many little tiny pieces,

I'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's not looking good.

So finally, we used a 3D surface scanner.

LN: It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually.

(Audio) NR: It's kind of magical when it all fits together.

LN: How certain were you that you had it right,

that you had put it together in the right way?

Was there a potential that you'd put it together a different way

(Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this.

LN: What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone,

and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal,

But it couldn't have been either of those.

(Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It's a really big animal.

Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments

(Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it,

and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it.

LN: It smelled kind of like singed flesh.

from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab:

Collagen is what gives structure to our bones.

But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it.

Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol,

and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley

was demoing this new process that he called "collagen fingerprinting."

It turns out that different species have slightly different structures

so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone,

you can compare it to those of known species,

(Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It's kind of important.

and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species.

It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone

that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic

(Audio) NR: And I'm thinking, what? That's amazing -- if it's true.

LN: So they tested a bunch of the fragments,

and they got the same result for each one.

However, based on the size of the bone that they found,

it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels.

So this camel would have been about nine feet tall,

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【TED】Latif Nasser: You have no idea where camels really come from (You have no idea where camels really come from | Latif Nasser)

environment

virtually

tiny

mean