- Hi there.

I'm Frank Graff, digging up an early dinosaur in North Carolina.

An amazing look at a creature vital to healthy soils, and meet the smallest creature you've never heard of.

We're getting down and dirty with science in the dirt next on Sci NC.

- [Narrator] Quality Public Television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

- [Announcer] Funding for Sci NC is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

[light music] ♪ - Hi again, and welcome to Sci NC.

It's tough to imagine what North Carolina looked like 200 million years ago.

Part of it was underwater, covered by a giant inland sea.

There were large proto-dinosaurs roaming the land.

Well, that story is in the fossil record of a huge animal that is now being recovered.

[light music] - We don't have any technology to find fossils.

It is based on comprehensive knowledge of the geology of the area.

We look for rocks of the right age, rocks of the right type.

But once we narrow that down, it's really just walking out sections, that means just head down, looking for little bits of fossil to stick out.

- [Frank] If it sounds like paleontology is part educated guess for where to find fossils, you're right.

But there's also a little bit of luck, and that's where our story begins.

Christian Kammerer did his homework and then well, just listen.

- In this case, actually, it was just myself and my collections assistant sitting on the hillside for lunch, talking back and forth, and looked right down where our lunch pails were.

And he said, "Hey, is that bone?"

I'm like, "Yeah, sure enough."

[machine whirring] - [Frank] And the dino dig began.

The location is North Carolina's Piedmont.

We agreed that's all we would reveal to help preserve the site.

Researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have recovered the skull and shoulder blades, and they've also identified the creature.

- So it's an animal called a dicynodont, which are well known from the southern hemisphere in the Triassic, but very rarely in the northern hemisphere.

So this is the first complete skeleton of one of these animals known from anywhere in North America.

- [Frank] This is what a dicynodont looked like.

You could call it a Triassic titan.

It lived about 250 million years ago.

That's before the age of dinosaurs, herbivore, short neck, large skull, tusks, and a beak like a turtle, kind of a supercharged rhinoceros.

So I see bone here, I see some bone over there.

What are we looking at?

How's it laying?

What can you tell?

- Yeah, so it's angled a little bit, so it's not totally horizontal anymore because of tectonic activity in the past 230 million years.

But you can see how some of the bones would've connected in life.

So here, this is where the shoulder blade would've been.

So the skull that we first found was right up here on top of the rest.

And then this is the arm continues down.

So this is the humerus, the main arm bone, and then the forelimb.

And then this is actually the bones of the hand that are starting to disarticulate.

So you're getting a little bit of jumble here.

So this is actually the hip bone and the hind limb.

So the animals kind of folded over itself, but you can see there still are a lot of connections between the bones as there were in life, which again is why we think it was deposited really quickly after it died.

- So it's on its side that it's almost like it's curled up like this somehow a little bit.

- Yeah, yeah, so my working hypothesis, and of course this is something that we will test further as research continues, is that this may have been a flash flood that killed some of these dicynodonts and then sort of deposited them almost instantaneously.

- [Frank] This area was underwater a couple 100 million years ago.

The mix of quartz, feldspar, mica, and silica cemented together to form mud rock, which is super hard.

- [Jaren] Our goal is to try to expose more of this area in case we come in contact with bone that can be removed and taken back to the museum.

- [Frank] How tough is it to distinguish between bone and rock?

No offense 'cause it kind of all looks like rock.

- Yeah, it's something that gets better with practice.

So there's a few different ways to tell.

And it also varies on the kind of sediment that the bone is in.

So sometimes it can be color, sometimes it's hardness.

The bone can typically be softer, especially in this specific rock, 'cause it's pretty well consolidated.

So it's pretty tough.

I love this field in general, paleontology, just because the chance to interact with something that people haven't seen for millions, hundreds, thousands of years is just a really great opportunity.

- Humans have only lived on this planet for a few hundred thousand years, and life has existed for billions and billions of years, which it's almost just less than a page in the whole book of the story of life.

So in order for you to get a real understanding of how life works and its origins, you have to look back at the geologic time.

You have to look back in the past.

Otherwise you're just dealing with almost nothing.

[laughs] - So this is from this animal that just came from the main block this morning.

So this is actually the last toe bone, the last phalanx, what we call the distal phalanx, or the ungual of this animal.

So you can see that it has this very distinct scallop shape that looks a lot like a claw.

And that's what it was.

This is essentially covered in keratin on this end of it.

So if you bend your finger, you have three bones here, 1, 2, 3.

So this is this bone in us, this last bone of the finger.

Oftentimes though the shape of the claw tell you a lot about the paleobiology of the animal.

So some things that are digging a lot have really long claws and slender claws if they're digging into the earth.

[light music] - [Frank] Once uncovered, the bones are packed in plaster and brought back to the museum.

Here's the dicynodont skull waiting to be uncovered.

- [Aubrey] This nice black stuff is what we're trying to get at in the skeleton.

- [Frank] Researchers then scrape away bit by bit by bit.

- And so I have my pin vice and my brush and I work all the rock away.

It's a really rewarding process though, watching the rocks flake away from the bones.

That's one of the reasons that it's so rewarding is uncovering a skeleton that nobody has seen in millions of years.

- So this is the the claw of the dicynodont, which we collected when we were just out in the field and it's received some preliminary prep.

So you can see it's now this bright white bone color.

And so we can actually see this, those two little holes which were covered in sediment when we first found it.

Those are where the muscles and the ligaments attach.

So we can understand a little bit about how this would've fit onto the hand of the dicynodont.

Also, now that we know what, for sure what shape it is, very broad, very flat bone, and so it would've been covered in a hoof in life and probably used for digging.

So it's very like a trowel.

There are reasons why our tools have certain shapes and why nature has evolved towards those shapes as well.

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You can find these stories and more on our YouTube channel, like and subscribe.

Dig a little deeper and you'll find this creature, it's a millipede, doesn't bite, doesn't sting, doesn't transmit diseases.

But as Adrian Smith from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences shows us, millipedes are vital to healthy soil.

- These are four species of millipedes crawling across your screen in slow motion.

You can tell they're millipedes and not centipedes because each of their many body segments has two pairs of legs instead of just one.

They're some of the most important organisms in the forest feeding on and recycling dead plant material.

And honestly, I didn't know much about them, but luckily a few weeks ago, a friend of mine, Derek, a millipede expert, visited this museum.

You might have already heard of him and his work.

Part of his research involves describing and discovering unnamed species.

The one he's holding here in that vial is a Nannaria swiftae, probably the first millipede to be featured in a Rolling Stone article, which happened after he described he named the species after Taylor Swift.

So one of the reasons Derek visited this museum is because our collection of millipedes and centipedes is one of the most important in the world.

But before I get to that, I wanted to learn how a millipede expert goes out and finds these organisms.

So I followed Derek into the field when we went out and collected those four species you saw at the beginning of this video.

- Yeah, so main tool that I use is this garden cultivator.

Nice three prongs just allows you to turn over rocks and logs and leaf litter and so you don't have to use your hands and then get poked by whatever's hiding around down there.

So when you're scraping litter, you wanna just scrape down to the soil and then stop and wait for any movement.

So that's often the first sign that you're gonna see of a millipede or a centipede.

You can see once we get down underneath that dry layer leaves on top, we got more moisture.

So that's where all the bugs are.

That's where millipedes and other insects and spiders and things, that's where they're gonna be hiding.

Oh, here we go.

Cambala.

Cambala annulata.

These are just gorgeous.

The violet-crested millipede.

It's got this nice deep purple collar, and then on top of each segment and around the sides as well, it has these tiny little linear crests.

If you look real close right at the shoulders, it kind of has these little orbs that the crest turn into.

It's gorgeous, those white legs.

This millipede is the host for a type of fungus.

And there's a new species that was discovered on one of these millipedes, and they named it after Twitter because they first saw it on a photo that I tweeted out.

I looked at this photo multiple times, I hadn't really seen much in it.

And then a specialist in this group of fungus had seen these tiny little fungal bodies kind of off of its head and kind of the first column behind the head.

And just from that she recognized that it was a fungus and likely a new species.

So she checked some of the specimens in her collection that had been collected in North America, found that same fungus.

And so it all just came out of that one Twitter photo.

Here's a lot of juvenile millipedes.

These are gonna be more of that Euryurus.

So they're feeding down under the bark, inside the log.

There's an adult Euryurus.

He just went back in that hole there.

I can get him to come out.

There he is, come on.

There we go.

When the log lurkers, if you see along the edge of their body, their segments are kind of winged.

They have those keels, we call those paranota, and they use that to wedge themselves into the log.

So that kinda helps 'em move.

But you can see it's pretty darn good at walking around right now.

So right in the crook of this log, there's an adult cherry millipede.

And there we go.

Beautiful.

It's got its full dark black coloration with its warning yellows screaming, "Hey, I'm poisonous."

Just gorgeous.

So this is Apheloria tigana, it's another one of the Apheloria cherry millipedes.

It's closely related to the Virginia cherry millipede.

Around this body size, it's actually been calculated that they have enough poison within them to kill 18-pigeon sized birds.

So if you and your group have 17 other pigeons, or think about having a meal, you might wanna skip the cherry millipedes.

Also, humans shouldn't eat these.

You'll probably be fine, maybe you'll throw up or something.

But they don't taste good.

You know, they belong in the leaves, not in your stomach.

The iron worm has made an appearance.

There's a couple species further south in Florida and Georgia.

There's also at least two species throughout much of the, oh, it's pooping on me, throughout much of Eastern North America.

But it's a species complex.

It needs to be looked at genetically to figure it out.

So you can see as it walks, it has this really nice leg action where they move just in a wave.

And what helps it do that is that within each body ring has a tiny little ganglion, this little brain that processes the signal and tells the legs to move.

And so it goes from the main brain in the head, cascades down the body to move those legs.

- So millipedes like these are special to this museum because our collection of them is world famous among experts like Derek.

Many species were first described here and are housed in our offsite collection space.

I went there with Derek 'cause I wanted to see what it was like for someone to get really excited about jars of pickled millipedes.

I wasn't disappointed.

- Oh, that's an exciting jar.

Oh, these are neat.

Oh, this is really cool actually.

Oh, these are beautiful millipedes.

This is like encountering an old friend again.

This is a cool one.

This is a classic.

These ones really excite me.

Ah man, look at all these.

These are cool, this is a fun jar.

This whole collection here, just these shelves that we're looking at right now, this is one of the most important millipede collections really worldwide and in North America.

These collections were worked on for decades by Rowland Shelley.

He spent decades of work putting names to species that we just didn't know about before.

It's just that it's like opening any one of these jars is kind of like Christmas morning.

You don't know what presents could be in here, what gifts are contained, some of these larger, like the American millipede, that giant centipede we saw up there, that's really cool to show on camera.

But man, I really get excited about this small stuff that people just have probably not looked at before and they're just treasures hidden within all these jars and vials that we just even haven't even gotten to yet.

When I come into a collection like this and I just see this huge jar of specimens, it looks, maybe it looks a little bit gross 'cause it's kind of yellowed.

But once you actually get into each of these vials and look at 'em, there's just a lot of not only biological and natural history information held within these vials, but historical information as well.

These will be looked at by scientists today decades into the future, maybe even hundreds of years.

And they play a very important role in that, all these specimens are tied to a specific place and time.

And so when we're thinking about things like threats to habitat and climate change, these form the foundation of data to where we can know 20 years ago, where did these species occur?

And then we can go back today or 20 years in the future, see if they're still there and learn why not.

And so that's very important to have.

- Those few shelves of jars are just a tiny part of all the biological collections this museum holds.

I was glad to learn about them and millipedes in general from an expert like Derek.

I hope you learned something too.

Thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] Follow us on Instagram for beautiful images of North Carolina and cool science facts.

- Still thinking small and in the dirt?

Producer Rossie Izlar introduces us to the smallest creature you've never heard of.

- [Narrator] What does this look like to you?

Could it be moss or some kind of fungus?

Take a closer look.

This is actually an animal and it's called a Bryozoan.

- They are a bit like corals.

It's like a skeleton and it has an animal inside it.

It's like sort of a worm shaped U-shaped animal.

It's got a ring of tentacles and a mouth in the center, and each tentacle is lined in cilia and that creates water flow.

So they're sort of bringing their food to them.

- [Narrator] Megan is one of the few Bryozoan experts in the country because not many people study this aquatic animal, much less know it exists.

- I think they're cool.

So that's what got me into it.

- [Narrator] Bryozoanz are colonial, meaning the individuals called zooids live together in a group and build elaborate homes out of calcium carbonate they pull in from the water.

Megan calls them apartment complexes.

- [Megan] So you can see the little apartment complexes.

The holes is where the animal comes out.

And so you're looking at the skeleton.

- [Narrator] Although they seem like they'd be super obscure, Bryozoans are fairly common.

They just take on so many different forms that people often don't know what they are.

- So this is a Bryozoans or a lot of Bryozoans, and they're all growing on snail shells.

This is also a Bryozoan, and the interesting thing about these is that they can sort of walk along the surface.

This is also a Bryozoan, [laughs] and as you can see, it's very branchy.

- [Narrator] This freshwater Bryozoan shows up a lot in news reports as a mysterious blob.

- It just looks like a big booger, but if you look at 'em under the microscope and water, the tentacles will come out.

- [Narrator] There are more than 6,000 described Bryozoan species, and scientists, including Megan find more all of the time, but we don't know much about them or the role they play in ecosystems.

But according to Megan... - They exist, so we should know about them.

- Now to what's growing in the dirt.

2023 is the year of the trail in North Carolina.

And producer Michelle Lotker explored a trail featuring Spring ephemerals, flowers that grow in the spring and blooms vast a very short time, and she hit the trail at just the right time.

- Oh my gosh.

- Yeah, they're everywhere.

- Wow.

- It's like a carpet.

- Really is.

- A carpet of bright yellow wild flowers called trout lilies that are one of the first signs of spring when they emerge in North Carolina.

And then after a short amount of time, maybe a couple of days to a week or two, they're gonna go through their whole life cycle.

Then they'll go back underground and lay dormant for another year.

- Feels like a blink of an eye and their whole year is done.

- It really does.

That's why it's so important to get out here, you know when they're coming up because you might miss it.

[light twangy music] - I'm out on a brand new trail today looking for trout lilies with Hillary Harrison of the Eno River Association.

Tell me a little bit about where we are today.

- [Hillary] So today we're at Panther Branch Natural Area.

It's a piece of land that's owned by the Eno River Association, and it is in Efland, North Carolina.

It's a 56-acre property, and most of the property was pretty untouched for a number of years.

So there's two main trails on the property now.

Each are about a mile long, and they traverse some of the most notable portions of the property.

- [Michelle] It's called Panther Branch.

So where does that name come from?

- [Hillary] Panther Branch is a creek and it's a tributary that runs into the Eno River.

So on the property you can walk along Panther Branch as well as along the Eno River.

- Panther Branch Natural Area is host to a variety of habitats, all of which can be experienced via the trail network there.

Thinking about all the water that runs through this area and now this land around it, this is kinda like a buffer for those bodies of water, right?

- Right, exactly.

As development starts to increase throughout this area, we're going to see an increase in pollution, storm water runoff, and all of those extra sediments and things like that that might come from the land surrounding these waterways.

So for both Panther Branch and for the Eno River, it's really important to have this kind of undeveloped and undisturbed land to be able to filter out the water that comes in from the surrounding areas.

- And this undisturbed land also creates an ideal habitat for unique species like the trout lily to thrive.

Large colonies of trout lily may be over 100 years old.

The key to their success are the trees.

So because this is a hardwood forest, there's not many leaves right now.

- Right, yeah, it is quite open.

This is much more sunny than you would see it if we were here in say, two months, in May.

And so this actually really has an effect on the kinds of things that we see out here this time of the year.

So those spring ephemerals, those beautiful wild flowers are going to pop up because they're taking advantage of the fact that the sun is shining on them and the leaves on the trees haven't come in yet.

- Ooh, awesome.

I think we've entered trout lily land.

- Yes, you're right!

- [Michelle] Look at all them.

[bright music] Okay, so this is one of our classic spring ephemerals in this area.

- Yes.

The leaves are going to have this nice speckling on them, which is reminiscent of a trout.

That's where that name comes from.

There's two trout lilies that you might see in our area.

This one is the more common one.

So this is specifically a dimpled trot lily, Erythronium umbilicatum.

Umbilicatum kind of sounds like umbilical, like a belly button.

Once this trout lily gets pollinated and goes to seed, it's gonna have a seed right here at the end where the flower was, and it'll flop over.

And if you look at the seed, it's got a nice little dimpling on it that looks kind of like a belly button.

Also along the Eno in some very, very uncommon areas, it's not very common, you might see the Americanum version, which is going to be a little bit different looking flower.

It's a little bit more curly, but when it goes to seed, it's not going to have that belly button look to the seed pod.

- So we don't see these flowers up all year, right?

- Right, yeah.

So these are called spring ephemerals.

So ephemeral pretty much means, just there for a short time.

They've adapted to take advantage of the sunlight that's coming through because we don't have any leaves on the trees.

So we see them in the early spring and late winter.

They've got their leaves here to photosynthesize.

So they're kind of just trying to get as much energy as they can before they lay dormant again for a whole year.

- Sounds kind of nice to hibernate for most of the year.

Just come up when it's beautiful in the spring and then take a nap.

- [Hillary] I wish I could do that sometimes.

- Yeah, sounds good.

It's really exciting for us as humans to see these first flowers of the spring, but pollinators are also kind of excited about this, right?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So the flowers are trying to outcompete with other things that might be flowering later on in the year.

But the pollinators are taking advantage of it too, because there's not really much out here as far as pollen and nectar goes.

So they're taking advantage of the fact that these ephemerals are up right now.

It's a really good early food source for the pollinators.

- [Michelle] Trout lilies aren't the only spring ephemerals you'll see in North Carolina.

Rue-anemone, spring beauties, Dutchman's breaches, bloodroot, and hepatica are some of the other plants that grow flower and complete their lifecycle before the tree canopy is filled with leaves.

[light music] Why is it important that we have trails and have access to places like this?

- Anecdotally, and I'm sure I know really, that there's research out there to tell us that it is important for people to be able to get outside and recreate and be an open space like this.

So it's so important for not only our physical health, but our mental health.

It's great to be able to get fresh air, kind of step away from technology, social media, and all of the things that are pressing on us all the time.

I mean, we found just in the pandemic in 2020, the visitation to parks and open spaces nearly doubled.

So if that tells you anything, people really wanted to get a chance to get outside and we want to be able to provide more of that space for folks.

If you think about it, there's been people stewarding this land like we are stewarding it right now, but it's been stewarded for many, many years and stewarded by Indigenous peoples at first.

And then throughout the years, different types of folks have come in and utilize it in different ways.

But now we're really trying to make sure that we're inviting folks to really kind of get into the land and connect with it.

- And that's it for Sci NC for this week.

If you want more Sci NC, be sure to follow us online.

I'm Frank Graff, thanks for watching.

[light music] ♪ ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for Sci NC is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

- [Narrator] Quality Public Television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.