Badlands Transcript Table Format

David Suzuki	Heidi	Amanda	Michael	Ashley
	It’s amazing how the landforms here really look like other things other than rocks. Do you notice that sometimes?
		Yeah
				Yeah
			Yeah
	It’s funny
As long as you’ve got a good imagination
	Well, we’ve noticed that maybe, yeah, maybe let’s go down this way. We noticed that the longer you’re out in the badlands, and the hotter it is, the more things look like things
Yeah-ha-ha-ha. You’re imagination gets looser, huh?
	Well, it does. Some people claim it might be a kind of hallucination – now watch out for the cactus. When we get around here, you want to take a look around and see if there’s any landforms that look like something that would be familiar to you, not just like a rock.
	So what do you think that landform over there is? Does this one look, look like anything to you?
		Hmm. Oh! That rock right there looks like a camel
	Oh…no…..that’s it! We actually have a name for this guy. We call him Fred the camel….see the hump….see the big droopy lips pointing to the left. And if you look off in the back can you see anything else?
		?
			No.
I’ll give you a clue. Where are camels found?
				Egypt.
Very good!
		A pyramid
		A camel and then a pyramid
Very good!
Has Fred changed that much while you’ve been here Heidi?
	Not that much although he did get a bit of a facelift, he’s lost his double-chin. But, uh, we’re really concerned that the caprock on the hump of Fred may fall off. That ironstone. And if that falls off the hump could erode away very quickly.
But erosion is natural, it’s going to fade away over time.
David seems to direct conversation	Fred is naturally going to erode away. But if he ever lost his hump, all we’d do is change his name to Humphrey the camel.
Awwwwwwooooooo
	Ha ha Ha Ha HA Ha
		Ha ha	Ha ha	Huh ha
Child directs convo	Sometimes it takes a while. Hmmm Hmmm Hmmm
		How are these gullies formed?
	Well, because there there’s not much plants or because there’re not too many plants growing from them, we don’t get a nice protective layer and all this very soft sedimentary rock is exposed every time it rains the outer surface weathers. Do you know how that happens? Have you, do you have any idea how the weathered surface of a rock
		By erosion?
	Well, how does erosion happen though?
		By wind or water or ice when it hits against the stuff it will fall	By wind or water
	Water is the key word here. The rain hits the slopes, it makes the clay that’s in the in the sedimentary rock here expand. And clay’s a neat little mineral and nice and flat and forms nice layers and when they rain, when it rains they absorb the water and they expand and they disorient themselves and when it stops raining they sort of try to get back into those nice layers, but they don’t. And they crumble and crack. And with the next rainstorm all that loose crumbled material washes down and washes into a dry stream channel and washed down in to the Red Deer River and ends up somewhere in Saskatchewan. And that’s how these badlands form. You can see all them a stream that’s working their way down the hills and that’s where all the rain carries all of that material away
And?….it leaves?
			Bones and fossils
Right!	So we have that to thank for finding all the wonderful dinosaur fossils and all the other fossils here.
	When people come to dinosaur provincial park they look around and they see all these hoodoos and badlands and cactus and grass and they wonder: Gee, what did those dinosaurs eat? There’s hardly anything around here to eat! And then you have to say that 75 million years ago things were a lot different. Here, we had rivers, we had forests from mosses and cattails, very lush, very sub-tropical
			Look at the ironstones there
	Isn’t that neat?
			Yeah! They have different *** you can see
		Hey look at this!
				Oh my gosh, Amada found a bone!
	Hey that’s great!
Good fossil!
		Looks like a leg bone
	You’re absolutely right Michael. That is a tibia, which is this part of the leg, of a duck-billed dinosaur. And if you add that to the foot, maybe give a foot for the foot, add the tibia, which is a metre long because half of that one’s eroded away, and then add the femur, our thigh bone
		Look at that
		What is it?
Oh, what’s that?
	I think we made a discovery here.
Hey, that’s very good Amanda. That looks like a vertebra is it?
	Mmm hmm. You can see how round it is. It’s a vertebrae from the backbone of a dinosaur. And if you look on that side, you can even see where his spinal column went through
So that could have been the tail of the animal.
	It could have been the caudal vertebrae, the vertebrae from the tail end. You can’t see where the ribs were fused.
			What kind of dinosaur do you think it could be from?
	Well I know for sure it’s from uh uh a plant eater or herbivore.
How do you know that?
	Well you you can take a look at the structure on the inside.
Mmm Hmm