I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous.
I went to prison -- difficult.
I worked in a coal mine -- dangerous.
I filmed in war zones -- difficult and dangerous.
And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this -- fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end.
In fact, most of my career, I've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging, that make them interesting, that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience.
So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different.
So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay.
I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk.
(Laughter) That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again -- (Laughter) to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be.
So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it.
But that being said, it's a very good media opportunity.
(Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks?
It's a lot.
That's just a working title, by the way.
(Laughter) So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights.
Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty.
But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising.
And as I said earlier, I put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could ready me, for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys.
(Laughter) You see, I had this idea for a movie.
(Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising.
So the movie will be called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
So what happens in "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," is that everything from top to bottom, from start to finish, is branded from beginning to end -- from the above-the-title sponsor that you'll see in the movie, which is brand X.
Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center ...
these people will be married to the film in perpetuity -- forever.
And so the film explores this whole idea -- (Michael Kassan: It's redundant.)
It's what?
(MK: It's redundant.)
In perpetuity, forever?
I'm a redundant person.
(MK: I'm just saying.)
That was more for emphasis.
It was, "In perpetuity.
Forever."
But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film.
So maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore ...
the greatest car you ever drove from "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," the greatest drink you've ever had, courtesy of "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
Xavier Kochhar: So the idea is, beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life, but actually get them to finance the film?
(MS: Get them to finance the film.)
MS: And actually we show the whole process of how does it work.
The goal of this whole film is transparency.
You're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie.
So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish.
And I would love for CEG to help make it happen.
Robert Friedman: You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience.
Guy: I don't know how receptive people are going to be to it, though.
XK: Do you have a perspective -- I don't want to use "angle" because that has a negative connotation -- but do you know how this is going to play out?
(MS: No idea.)
David Cohn: How much money does it take to do this?
MS: 1.5 million.
(DC: Okay.)
John Kamen: I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands.
XK: Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots.
MS: What do you think the response is going to be?
Stuart Ruderfer: The responses mostly will be "no."
MS: But is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me?
JK: Both.
MS: ...
Meaning not so optimistic.
So, sir, can you help me?
I need help.
MK: I can help you.
MS: Okay.
(MK: Good.)
Awesome.
MK: We've gotta figure out which brands.
MS: Yeah.
(MK: That's the challenge.)
When you look at the people you deal with ..
MK: We've got some places we can go.
(MS: Okay.)
Turn the camera off.
MS: I thought "Turn the camera off" meant, "Let's have an off-the-record conversation."
Turns out it really means, "We want nothing to do with your movie."
MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared.
None of them wanted anything to do with this movie.
I was amazed.
They wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project.
And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible.
Especially in today's world, this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape, isn't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that's going to get that message to the masses?
No, that's what I thought.
But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this.
Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever.
That wouldn't have been a madeline68@example.org.
This would have been fine.
But what this image represents was the problem.
See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is --- (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up.
So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin.
No.
(Laughter) This is was the problem: transparency -- free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices -- that last line being probably the biggest problem.
You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days.
Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it.
But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes.
But why?
Well, transparency is scary -- (Roar) like that odd, still-screaming bear.
(Laughter) It's unpredictable -- (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road.
And it's also very risky.
(Laughter) What else is risky?
Eating an entire bowl of Cool Whip.
(Laughter) That's very risky.
Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, "No, we want you to tell a story.
We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story."
See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie -- and there he is giving me the look he often gave me -- he would say, "Son, there's three sides to every story.
There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story."
Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story.
But with only one company, one agency willing to help me -- and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years -- I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team.
So what you suddenly started to realize -- or what I started to realize -- is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem.
(Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make.
And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have.
And then my friends who make small independent films say, "Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?"
And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
So how specifically will we see Ban in the film?
Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant.
While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, "Are you fresh enough for this interview?
Are you ready?
You look a little nervous.
I want to help you calm down.
So maybe you should put some one before the interview."
So we'll offer one of these fabulous scents.
Whether it's a "Floral Fusion" or a "Paradise Winds," they'll have their chance.
We will have them geared for both male or female -- solid, roll-on or stick, whatever it may be.
That's the two-cent tour.
So now I can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour.
Karen Frank: We are a smaller brand.
Much like you talked about being a smaller movie, we're very much a challenger brand.
So we don't have the budgets that other brands have.
So doing things like this -- you know, remind people about Ban -- is kind of why were interested in it.
MS: What are the words that you would use to describe Ban?
Ban is blank.
KF: That's a great question.
(Laughter) Woman: Superior technology.
MS: Technology's not the way you want to describe something somebody's putting in their armpit.
Man: We talk about bold, fresh.
I think "fresh" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus "fights odor and wetness."
It keeps you fresh.
How do we keep you fresher longer -- better freshness, more freshness, three times fresher.
Things like that that are more of that positive benefit.
MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation.
What about me?
What about a regular guy?
I need to go talk to the man on the street, the people who are like me, the regular Joes.
They need to tell me about my brand.
(Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand?
Man: Um, my brand?
I don't know.
I like really nice clothes.
Woman: 80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day.
MS: All right, what is brand Gerry?
Gerry: Unique.
(MS: Unique.)
Man: I guess what kind of genre, style I am would be like dark glamor.
I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that.
But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too.
Woman: If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz.
Man 2: The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly.
Woman 2: Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl -- I don't know.
Man 3: I'm the pet guy.
I sell pet toys all over the country, all over the world.
So I guess that's my brand.
In my warped little industry, that's my brand.
Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods.
Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand.
Is that something?
Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand.
Tom: I'm Tom.
MS: Well we can't all be brand Tom, but I do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly.
(Laughter) And what I realized is I needed an expert.
I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your "brand personality."
And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg.
They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality.
If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me.
(Video) Abigail: You brought your pictures, right?
MS: I did.
The very first picture is a picture of my family.
A: So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are.
MS: These are the people who shape the way I look at the world.
A: Tell me about this world.
MS: This world?
I think your world is the world that you live in -- like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do.
All those things stemmed and started from one place, and for me they stemmed and started with my family in West Virginia.
A: What's the next one you want to talk about?
MS: The next one: This was the best day ever.
A: How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are?
MS: It's like, who do I want to be?
I like things that are different.
I like things that are weird.
I like weird things.
A: Tell me about the "why" phase -- what does that do for us?
What is the machete?
What pupa stage are you in now?
Why is it important to reboot?
What does the red represent?
Tell me a little bit about that part.
...
A little more about you that is not who you are.
What are some other metamorphoses that you've had?
...
Doesn't have to be fear.
What kind of roller coaster are you on?
MS: EEEEEE!
(A: Thank you.)
No, thank you.
A: Thanks for you patience.
(MS: Great job.)
A: Yeah.
(MS: Thanks a lot.)
All right.
MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this.
There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there.
Lindsay Zaltman: The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality -- the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful/play brand.
Those are juxtaposed very nicely together.
And I think there's almost a paradox with those.
And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both.
Most companies tend to -- and it's human nature -- to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see.
What other brands are like that?
The first on here is the classic, Apple.
And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue.
Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing.
MS: A playful, mindful brand.
What is your brand?
If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be?
Are you an up attribute?
Are you something that gets the blood flowing?
Or are you more of a down attribute?
Are you something that's a little more calm, reserved, conservative?
Up attributes are things like being playful, being fresh like the Fresh Prince, contemporary, adventurous, edgy or daring like Errol Flynn, nimble or agile, profane, domineering, magical or mystical like Gandalf.
Or are you more of a down attribute?
Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007?
Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah?
Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda?
Over the course of this film, we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying, "no," they didn't want any part of this project.
They wanted nothing to do with this film, mainly because they would have no control, they would have no control over the final product.
But we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control, who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we wouldn't be able to tell -- stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind.
They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing.
We went to San Paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising.
In the entire city for the past five years, there's no billboards, there's no posters, there's no flyers, nothing.
(Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America.
What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly.
And that's what these brands did.
They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, "Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind.
I'm going to deal directly with the artist.
I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world."
And how has that been for them?
Has it been successful?
Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look.
According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then -- and this isn't even the whole thing -- we've had 900 million media impressions for this film.
That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period.
That's only online -- no print, no TV.
The film hasn't even been distributed yet.
It's not even online.
It's not even streaming.
It's not even been out into other foreign countries yet.
So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum.
And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part.
What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity.
I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure.
I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged.
I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks.
We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them.
Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear.
We've got to put that bear in a cage.
(Laughter) Embrace fear.
Embrace risk.
One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk.
And ultimately, we have to embrace transparency.
Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way.
And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "Embrace Transparency," has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay.
(Applause) EMC: Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world.
EMC presents: "Embrace Transparency."
Thank you very much, guys.
(Applause) June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100?
MS: That is a fantastic question.
I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation -- a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Shall I ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations?
I'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old.
(Laughter) None, huh?
(Laughter) All right.
I'm going to talk about dinosaurs.
Do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age?
(Applause) Dinosaurs are kind of funny, you know.
(Laughter) We're going to kind of go in a different direction right now.
I hope you all realize that.
So I'll just give you my message up front: Try not to go extinct.
(Laughter) That's it.
(Laughter) People ask me a lot -- in fact, one of the most asked questions I get is, why do children like dinosaurs so much?
What's the fascination?
And I usually just say, "Well, dinosaurs were big, different and gone."
They're all gone.
Well that's not true, but we'll get to the goose in a minute.
So that's sort of the theme: big, different and gone.
The title of my talk: Shape-shifting Dinosaurs: The cause of a premature extinction.
Now I assume that we remember dinosaurs.
And there's lots of different shapes.
Lots of different kinds.
A long time ago, back in the early 1900s, museums were out looking for dinosaurs.
They went out and gathered them up.
And this is an interesting story.
Every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had.
So if the museum in Toronto went out and collected a Tyrannosaur, a big one, then the museum in Ottawa wanted a bigger one, and a better one.
And that happened for all museums.
So everyone was out looking for all these bigger and better dinosaurs.
And this was in the early 1900s.
By about 1970, some scientists were sitting around and they thought, "What in the world -- Look at these dinosaurs, they're all big.
Where are all the little ones?"
(Laughter) And they thought about it and they even wrote papers about it: "Where are the little dinosaurs?"
(Laughter) Well, go to a museum, you'll see, see how many baby dinosaurs there are.
People assumed -- and this was actually a problem -- people assumed that if they had little dinosaurs, if they had juvenile dinosaurs, they'd be easy to identify.
You'd have a big dinosaur and a littler dinosaur.
(Laughter) But all they had were big dinosaurs.
And it comes down to a couple of things.
First off, scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs.
They like to name anything.
Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.
(Laughter) And so every time they found something that looked a little different, they named it something different.
And what happened, of course, is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs.
In 1975, a light went on in somebody's head.
Dr. Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do, which is different than the way reptiles grow.
And in fact, he used the cassowary as an example.
And it's kind of cool -- if you look at the cassowary, or any of the birds that have crests on their heads, they grow to about 80 percent adult size before the crest starts to grow.
Now think about that.
They're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny.
So allometric cranial ontogeny is relative skull growth.
So you can see that if you actually found one that was 80 percent grown and you didn't know that it was going to grow up to a cassowary, you would think they were two different animals.
So this was a problem, and Peter Dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called Hypacrosaurus.
And he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like, if it grew in sort of a linear fashion, it would have a crest about half the size of the adult.
But the actual subadult at 65 percent had no madeline68@example.org.
So this was interesting.
So this is where people went astray again.
I mean, if they'd have just taken that, taken Peter Dodson's work, and gone on with that, then we would have a lot less dinosaurs than we have.
But scientists have egos; they like to name things.
And so they went on naming dinosaurs because they were different.
Now we have a way of actually testing to see whether a dinosaur, or any animal, is a young one or an older one.
And that's by actually cutting into their bones.
But cutting into the bones of a dinosaur is hard to do, as you can imagine, because in museums, bones are precious.
You go into a museum, and they take really good care of them.
They put them in foam, little containers.
They're very well taken care of.
They don't like it if you come in and want to saw them open and look inside.
(Laughter) So they don't normally let you do that.
(Laughter) But I have a museum and I collect dinosaurs and I can saw mine open.
So that's what I do.
(Applause) So if you cut open a little dinosaur, it's very spongy inside, like A.
And if you cut into an older dinosaur, it's very massive.
You can tell it's mature bone.
So it's real easy to tell them apart.
So what I want to do is show you these.
In North America in the northern plains of the United States and the southern plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan, there's this unit of rock called the Hell Creek Formation that produces the last dinosaurs that lived on Earth.
And there are 12 of them that everyone recognizes -- I mean the 12 primary dinosaurs that went extinct.
And so we will evaluate them.
And that's sort of what I've been doing.
So my students, my staff, we've been cutting them open.
Now as you can imagine, cutting open a leg bone is one thing, but when you go to a museum and say, "You don't mind if I cut open your dinosaur's skull, do you?"
they say, "Go away."
(Laughter) So here are 12 dinosaurs.
And we want to look at these three first.
So these are dinosaurs that are called Pachycephalosaurus.
And everybody knows that these three animals are related.
And the assumption is that they're related like cousins or whatever.
But no one ever considered that they might be more closely related.
In other words, people looked at them and they saw the differences.
And you all know that if you are going to determine whether you're related to your brother or your sister, you can't do it by madeline68@example.org.
You can only determine relatedness by looking for similarities.
So people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are.
Pachycephalosaurus has a big, thick dome on its head, and it's got some little bumps on the back of its head, and it's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose.
And then Stygimoloch, another dinosaur from the same age, lived at the same time, has spikes sticking out the back of its head.
It's got a little, tiny dome, and it's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose.
And then there's this thing called Dracorex hogwartsia.
Guess where that came from?
Dragon.
So here's a dinosaur that has spikes sticking out of its head, no dome and gnarly stuff on its nose.
Nobody noticed the gnarly stuff sort of looked alike.
But they did look at these three and they said, "These are three different dinosaurs, and Dracorex is probably the most primitive of them.
And the other one is more primitive than the other."
It's unclear to me how they actually sorted these three of them out.
But if you line them up, if you just take those three skulls and just line them up, they line up like this.
Dracorex is the littlest one, Stygimoloch is the middle-size one, Pachycephalosaurus is the largest one.
And one would think, that should give me a clue.
(Laughter) But it didn't give them a clue.
(Laughter) Because, well we know why.
Scientists like to name things.
So if we cut open Dracorex -- I cut open our Dracorex -- and look, it was spongy inside, really spongy inside.
I mean, it is a juvenile and it's growing really fast.
So it is going to get bigger.
If you cut open Stygimoloch, it is doing the same thing.
The dome, that little dome, is growing really fast.
It's inflating very fast.
What's interesting is the spike on the back of the Dracorex was growing very fast as well.
The spikes on the back of the Stygimoloch are actually resorbing, which means they're getting smaller as that dome is getting bigger.
And if we look at Pachycephalosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus has a solid dome and its little bumps on the back of its head were also resorbing.
So just with these three dinosaurs, as a scientist, we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal.
Which of course means that Stygimoloch and Dracorex are extinct.
(Laughter) OK.
(Laughter) Which of course means we have 10 primary dinosaurs to deal with.
So a colleague of mine at Berkeley -- he and I were madeline68@example.org.
And before the year 2000 -- now remember, Triceratops was first found in the 1800s -- before 2000, no one had ever seen a juvenile Triceratops.
There's a Triceratops in every museum in the world, but no one had ever collected a juvenile.
And we know why, right?
Because everybody wants to have a big one.
So everyone had a big one.
So we went out and collected a whole bunch of stuff and we found a whole bunch of little ones.
They're everywhere, they're all over the place.
So we have a whole bunch of them at our museum.
(Laughter) And everybody says it's because I have a little museum.
When you have a little museum, you have little dinosaurs.
(Laughter) If you look at the Triceratops, you can see it's changing, it's shape-shifting.
As the juveniles are growing up, their horns actually curve backwards.
And then as they get older, the horns grow forward.
And that's pretty cool.
If you look along the edge of the frill, they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the Pachycephalosaurs.
And then, because the juveniles are in my collection, I cut them open ...
(Laughter) and look inside.
And the little one is really spongy.
And the middle-size one is really spongy.
But what was interesting was the adult Triceratops was also spongy.
And this is a skull that is two meters long.
It's a big skull.
But there's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a Triceratops, except it's bigger, and it's called Torosaurus.
And Torosaurus, when we cut into it, has mature bone.
But it's got these big holes in its shield.
And everybody says, "A Triceratops and a Torosaurus can't possibly be the same animal because one of them's bigger than the other one."
(Laughter) "And it has holes in its frill."
And I said, "Well do we have any juvenile Torosauruses?"
And they said, "Well, no, but it has holes in its frill."
So one of my graduate students, John Scannella, looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in Triceratops and, of course it's open, in Torosaurus -- so he found the transitional ones between Triceratops and Torosaurus, which was pretty cool.
So now we know that Torosaurus is actually a grown-up Triceratops.
Now when we name dinosaurs, when we name anything, the original name gets to stick and the second name is thrown out.
So Torosaurus is extinct.
Triceratops, if you've heard the news, a lot of the newscasters got it all wrong.
They thought Torosaurus should be kept and Triceratops thrown out, but that's not going to happen.
(Laughter) All right, so we can do this with a bunch of dinosaurs.
I mean, here's Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan.
Anatotitan: giant duck.
It's a giant duck-bill dinosaur.
Here's another one.
So we look at the bone histology.
The bone histology tells us that Edmontosaurus is a juvenile, or at least a subadult, and the other one is an adult, and we have an ontogeny.
And we get rid of Anatotitan.
So we can just keep doing this.
And the last one is T. Rex.
So there's these two dinosaurs, T. Rex and Nanotyrannus.
(Laughter) Again, it makes you wonder.
(Laughter) But they had a good question.
They were looking at them and they said, "One's got 17 teeth, and the biggest one's got 12 teeth.
And that doesn't make any sense at all, because we don't know of any dinosaurs that gain teeth as they get older.
So it must be true -- they must be different."
So we cut into them.
And sure enough, Nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone.
It looks like it could still get bigger.
And at the Museum of the Rockies where we work, I have four T. rexes, so I can cut a whole bunch of them.
But I didn't have to cut any of them really, because I just lined up their jaws and it turned out the biggest one had 12 teeth and the next smallest one had 13 and the next smallest had 14.
And of course, Nano has 17.
And we just went out and looked at other people's collections and we found one that has sort of 15 teeth.
So again, real easy to say that Tyrannosaurus ontogeny included Nanotyrannus, and therefore we can take out another dinosaur.
(Laughter) So when it comes down to our end Cretaceous, we have seven left.
And that's a good number.
That's a good number to go extinct, I think.
Now as you can imagine, this is not very popular with fourth-graders.
(Laughter) Fourth-graders love their dinosaurs, they memorize them.
And they're not happy with this.
(Laughter) Thank you very much.
(Applause)