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The Current Transcript for May 30, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE 1: This is a very very sad day for Canada's energy sector.

VOICE 2: Kinder Morgan just saw a quite extraordinary return on investment for an aging pipeline.

VOICE 3: Do you want a country that is stuck in the past? We don't.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The political plan to purchase that pipeline holds little appeal for the opposition politicians on Parliament Hill and in the West the lines of separation don't appear to have budged. Alberta's government, the oil patch and pro pipeline supporters are jubilant. While many Indigenous leaders environmental activists and B.C.'s government are wary, using words like betrayal. So will that 4.5 billion dollar pledge to Kinder Morgan create the certainty the Trudeau government seeks or merely add a debt load to a deadlock? We're asking in just a moment. Also today from fossil fuels to fossilized.

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You would have thought dinosaurs might be something like gold or oil or diamonds where we're maybe getting close to being tapped out. But that's not the case at all. Somebody right now is finding a new species of dinosaur on average once a week.

AMT: As we Canadians bicker over bitumen and climate change, paleontologist Steve Brusatte is looking at fossils for clues we might use. The more he learns and still discovers about dinosaurs the more he learns about how species adapted or succumbed to environmental change and all of that he argues has great relevance in our world today. Not to mention the fact that he's named 15 new dinosaurs. He shares his magnificent obsession with T-Rex in an hour. And the New York Times guilty of plundering? That's The accusation of historians and academics who say it had no right to collect thousands of ISIS files for its in-depth reporting on the caliphate, when Iraqi soldiers retook the city of Mosul from ISIS. But is it fair to assume those files could have otherwise been preserved?

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The framework here is not The New York Times taking these things and versus them existing at Baghdad University. It's the New York Times taking them or them not existing at all.

Lots of questions lots of debate over that one we are looking at it all and half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Government should have 'removed all political obstacles' to Trans Mountain pipeline sooner: Conservative MP

Guests: George Hoberg, Pierre Poilievre

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[Cheers]

VOICE 1: We believe that we will win.

CROWD: We believe that we will win.

VOICE 1: We believe that we will win.

CROWD: We believe that we will win.

VOICE 1: It Is with love that we stand here. The love for one another. The longing for Vancouver. The love for our environment. Oil Pollution does not discriminate. This is not just a First Nation's issue. This is a Canadian issue. It is time to mature as a society. We can do this together.

[Cheers]

VOICE 1: I say 'No means'. You say 'No'. No means.

CROWD: No.

VOICE 1: No means.

CROWD: No.

VOICE 1: No means.

CROWD: No.

VOICE 1: One more time. No means.

CROWD: No.

[Cheers and applause]

AMT: Sounds from last night in Vancouver. Squamish chief Ian Campbell speaking at a rally of hundreds of citizens unhappy that they had just become owners of the Trans Mountain pipeline. All Canadians will soon have a stake in the controversial pipeline carrying Alberta oil to the B.C. coast after the federal Liberal government announced its intention to buy it for 4.5 billion dollars yesterday, to make sure its expansion is built. On the other side of the Rockies, they were cheering the decision on the streets of Edmonton and Calgary.

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VOICE 1: Somebody had to do it. B.C. is Just not playing fair game. So the government has to step up byt he on I am just a basic construction guy ma'am, but it means jobs for Albertans. So work is work.

VOICE 2: I fully support the pipeline whatever gets it to our product to tidewater is most important to me.

VOICE 3: If they can get it on budget and build it on time, it will be good for everybody because we can move that bitumen out and start getting a little bit better prices. I think it's great.

AMT: And in Ottawa the Finance Minister Bill Morneau was in the House of Commons, working hard to defend the government's decision.

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We are making an investment in Canada's future. We know that investing a fair amount of money into the assets of the Trans Mountain pipeline and the expansion will create economic advantage for our country. We are creating jobs. Same time we are adding up to 15 billion dollars to our economy and we know this is important for our country.

AMT: Well as you can tell from the jeering in the background the minister was not getting an easy ride. In announcing the deal yesterday the finance minister made it clear the plan a is for Canada to eventually transfer ownership of the pipeline to new investors. Though there is a lot of scepticism around that plan, there's a different perspective coming from Jackie Forrest. She is the director of research at the ARC Energy Research Institute in Calgary. She thinks it makes sense for the government to try to buy now and sell later.

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In order to [unintelligible] this project it's going to take some capital that's willing to get through all these legal challenges and the uncertainty around the period of the construction and so the government of Canada can offer a patient capital. Investors are very interested in these types of assets. So basically for the equity that you would be purchasing you're going to be getting a guaranteed cash flow stream for decades to come. Now the question will be what's the pipeline to be built for? You know will those cash flows provide a good return on your initial investment, is still to be seen but assuming they can build the project for price that's reasonable, then these would be pretty attractive investments for investors.

AMT: Well in the House of Commons yesterday one of the people pressing the matter with the finance minister was the finance critic for the Conservative Party Pierre Poilievre. He is my guest from Ottawa. Hello Mr. Poilievre.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Good day.

AMT: What do you think of the Government's decision to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It's an alternative to doing the right thing which would have been for the federal government to exercise its jurisdictional power and ensure that the project was built by the private sector. There's no question that the pipeline has from the very beginning been economically and environmentally sound. Economically we know that because approximately 80 per cent of all of the future capacity of the expanded pipeline has already spoken for by petroleum companies that had made firm commitments to buy that capacit.y And environmentally we know it's sound because the existing Kinder Morgan pipeline has been there for 65 years and continues to operate safely and without incident, moving 300000 barrels a day from Alberta to the coast. So the only reason the expansion hasn't proceeded is because of politic.s The Prime Minister is responsible for those politics and had he exercised his legitimate constitutional powers to approve every aspect of this pipeline and remove all political obstacles, then we would not have put for 4.5 billion dollars on the line.

AMT: So if you are in power right now, how would you have exercised those powers? What would you have done to stop the kind of protests we heard off the top and move forward?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well there are two main political obstacles. One is the lower levels of government and the other are violent protesters law-breaking protesters. Let's start with the first. Section 9210 of the British North America Act gives the federal government the power to assume control of all approvals of projects that are quote "in the general advantage of two or more provinces". Now effectively that was meant to prevent provinces from engaging in 'not in my backyard' politics and allow the federal government to take ownership of all the governmental approvals required for projects that cross provincial boundaries. And that means that all the municipal and provincial permitting could have been taken over by the federal government which could have granted those approvals very quickly and given [unintelligible] to the investors. The second obstacle being the violent law-breaking protesters. Well the government of Canada has the ability to enforce the law and if someone decides they're going to show up and lock you, Anna Maria, from going to do your job every morning, well that person will be arrested. So if there are violent lawbreakers who want to rob the livelihoods of honest hardworking Canadians in the energy sector, then those lawbreakers should be treated like lawbreakers. And the Prime Minister ought to signal back to law enforcement. So those are the two things that we would have done differently to make this private sector project go ahead without public money.

AMT: Can I can I just confirm you would be arresting people now?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Only if they're blocking the project. There's no problem with protest. People can speak up. They can hold placards. They can do protest. They can run Internet based campaigns to persuade the public against the project if they want to, but they do not have the right to physically and violently block people from going to work on a project that has been approved through all the legitimate environmental and other assessments in the legitimate constitutional jurisdiction of the federal government.

AMT: The government says nationalizing the pipeline will ultimately pay off for taxpayers. What do you think of the business case for this government move?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: The business case for the pipeline itself is an absolute no brainer, of course. There is a massive gap between the international Brent price of oil and the much lower Western Canada select price that most Alberta and Saskatchewan petroleum companies get because we can't reach the market. So there's no doubt the project would, by itself without politics, be very profitable. But the politics which I've just addressed have made it otherwise. Just yesterday the Prime Minister was asked why he's involved in this he said quote "The project became too risky for a commercial entity to go forward with. That's what Kinder Morgan told us." End quote. He's right. The politics have made this project too risky for the company but apparently he thinks it's not too risky for taxpayers. Effectively the risks remain the same as they were two days ago. It's just that those risks have been transferred off of the shoulders of Kinder Morgan shareholders and onto the shoulders of taxpayers.

AMT: What message do you think the decision sends to investors about doing business in Canada?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Sends the message that the Prime Minister's economic strategy is- as you know if something moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. When it stops moving subsidize it. And I don't think that's how you build an economy. We don't want a bailout economy. We want an economy where any viable economic activity is henpecked to death by taxes, regulators and protesters and then ultimately bailed out by taxpayers. Rather we need a big open free market economy based on the rule of law where investors make a return on the merits of their economic investment not on the political intervention of the state.

AMT: And yet we hear from the Alberta Premier Rachel Notley that the purchase makes Canada more stable for private investment not less.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well I mean she is a socialist, so, she doesn't have any objection to nationalizing projects. I think most people on her mindset have no difficulty seeing any problem in governments buying industry and running the economy. But we know from the from his historical experience that when governments run the economy they run it right into the ground. The free market is the only way to ensure prosperity. And unfortunately we're in a situation now where the government is taking over a very large project and that's a bad signal to the world.

AMT: So with this deadline looming what would you have done?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Again from the very beginning I think the Prime Minister should have triggered section 9210 of the BNA act and uploaded all of the approvals from the municipal and provincial governments granted those approvals quickly and signal that law enforcement would remove any law-breaking violent protester that prevents people from doing their jobs.

AMT: Okay. Mr. Poilievre, thank you for your time today.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Good to be with you.

AMT: Pierre Proilievre conservative finance critic. He's in Ottawa. We did request an interview with the Finance Minister Bill Morneau. We did not hear back from his office. We also requested an interview with the Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr. He was not available. There are plenty of voices still trying to make sure the Trans Mountain pipeline does not get built, vowing to keep up the fight against it. Yesterday B.C. Premier John Horgan says he is not planning to abandon his court challenge which questions the federal government's exclusive jurisdiction over the project. Indigenous leaders who oppose the pipeline have promised to escalate their protest campaign. George Hoberg is a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He's a specialist in pipeline politics. We have reached him in Vancouver. Hello.

GEORGE HOBERG: Good morning.

AMT: What was your reaction to Bill Morneau's announcement?

GEORGE HOBERG: I was quite shocked actually. It's been very interesting waiting around for the federal government to finally find a way to manage or resolve this conflict over pipelines between provinces. And when Trudeau finally did weigh in he went all in.

AMT: And what do you think of Mr. Pollyanna’s criticism of that?

GEORGE HOBERG: Well it is a very big change in the role that the Canadian federal government plays in the energy industry. So that really raises big questions about the proper balance between government and the industry in a major sector like this. But I think that the Trudeau government identified a market failure here where the political conflicts that had been festering have created that price discount that people have been referring to and that have been disadvantaging oil producers and the government of Alberta.

AMT: So what are your major concerns about the federal government taking ownership?

GEORGE HOBERG: Well My biggest concern really are with the project itself. I think what we see having happened here is the government proceeding with a project that's extremely controversial in British Columbia, without addressing several very very big broader strategic policy issues. One of them is the issue of climate change and Canada's responsibility to the global community expressed in the Paris Climate Target. We do not have a plan yet to meet that 30 percent reduction target by 2030 and a lot of people, climate activist, climate scientists are very concerned that the federal government buying into a greenhouse gas producing industry is going to make it much harder for Canada to reach those targets. So that's the one big issue that we haven't been discussing very much and the other which does get some attention, but still has largely been unaddressed, is the proper role that First Nations should play in decision making about resource projects that go to their traditional territories. And that's something that's really divided a lot of people here.

AMT: Well in fact I have a clip here. Reuben George of the Tsleil Waututh Natio . Right across in the Burrard inlet from the Kinder Morgan terminal. Listen to this.

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Our actions of what we do are going to benefit our future generations and that's a kind of us to be watching for. But they're making a political choice to take care of their rich friends. That's wrong.We're already suing Canada. We have 12 court cases and a Federal Court of Appeal with allies and different nations and that's each one have about five arguments. So that's 60 arguments in total. We have to win them all. We only have to win one or two to stop this. And I believe in the Canadian Constitution protecting our indigenous rights.

AMT: And George Hoberg, we know of course not all indigenous leaders oppose this pipeline. How should the government be dealing with the concerns you just heard?

GEORGE HOBERG: Well I think there needs to be a mechanism by which first nations concerns, those in favour or open to the pipeline and those opposed, have a voice to be considered. What's quite striking here is the Federal Government has pledged to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people which has a provision providing for free prior and informed consent for indigenous peoples. And that clearly has not been given to the people that Reuben George has represented, the Squamish, the Cold Water people and others here around the pipeline route and tank route that are adamantly opposing to this pipeline.

AMT: And we do know that some 16 court cases actually have gone in favour of the pipeline at this point. Often administrative details. they are in the legal weeds but they've gone in favour. How does that play into it? Because not everyone would recognise if you're talking about indigenous rights, you have to talk about how those laws were created without Indigenous people.

GEORGE HOBERG: The biggest risk to the project has yet to be resolved yet. That was the case that Reuben George was just referring to, the consolidated cases involving the Aboriginal groups and the environmentalists challenging the Trudeau government's decision to approve the pipeline in 2016. That case has been heard by the Federal Court of Appeals. We're expecting a ruling to come down soon and nothing about the ownership of the project changes the strength of that case that it'll be an opportunity for the Federal Court of Appeal and probably Supreme Court after that to reconsider this issue of the proper role of First Nations in resource decision making.

AMT: So as you look at pipeline politics with a wider perspective, how do yousee this deadlock being resolved?

GEORGE HOBERG: It it's extraordinarily difficult and I guess I would go back to the fact that in Canada we first of all we have a very decentralised federation especially on energy issues and that just makes these issues very challenging when you have such stark conflicts between provinces. But the people who study decision making in areas of conflict suggest that you need to move to a broader strategic level frequently to deal with some underlying issues. And the fact that we've never found a way to have a conversation successfully about how to reconcile oil sands expansion with our climate targets, and the fact that we've never found a way to reconcile aboriginal title with Crown title means that these two issues have been a fundamental block to easy resolution to this conflict.

AMT: Okay so we know that there is and there is a desire for construction to begin this summer. How does what you're talking about get dealt with what are you watching for in the coming months?

GEORGE HOBERG: Well what I'm watching for is first of all is that court decision and then, secondly, the way that the peaceful - I would take great issue with your previous guest about using the term violent to refer to the protests. I haven't seen any evidence of violence among the protests so far - that might happen. And in fact that's one of the things I worry about the most. If the court upholds the the government permit and presuming the new Trudeau pipeline is going to proceed, it's going to be very uncomfortable here in British Columbia on the ground. There's lots of people strongly opposed to this pipeline and they're willing to put their bodies in the way and there's going to have to be police action to address that. And I'm very concerned about how that's going to be resolved in B.C. and in Canada.

AMT: But right now there is no resolution. There is merely announcement of a purchase.

GEORGE HOBERG: So the announcement of a purchase and what we now know is that the federal government really really wants this project to be built. The B.C. government still does not and a lot of people on the ground are going to be resisting it physically.

AMT: Thank you for your time.

GEORGE HOBERG: Thank you.

AMT: George Hoberg, professor at UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He spoke to us from Vancouver. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. The CBC News is next and then last month I spoke with New York Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi about her fascinating report on the ISIS files. After the news I'll speak with an Iraqi Canadian grad student who started a petition against the New York Times to remove all of those files from Iraq. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Academics call removal of ISIS documents by New York Times 'unethical'

Guests: Belkis Wille, Nasser Weddady, Rukmini Callamachi, Sara Farhan

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme].

AMT: Still to come:

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[Sound: Roars]

AMT: That is the T-Rex from Jurassic Park. I dropped by another place full of dinosaurs where there are not quite as dangerous or loud. Author and paleontologist Steven Brusatte joins me at the Royal Ontario Museum and their dinosaur collection to gawk at the bones and talk about his new book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. Because there's a lot about those prehistoric beasts you may not know, that conversation coming up in half an hour. But first revisiting the ISIS files.

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VOICE 1: Sometimes, because you are the first people to ask about documents they share. So every time we find some documents we just burn it.

RUKMINI CALLIMACHI: Oh my God. No. Are you serious? You burn it?

AMT: That is New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi host of a podcast called The Caliphate on the New York Times. That recording is from Mosul Iraq in the final days of the fight to retake the city from ISIS. She's come across a trove of ISIS documents in that clip. As you heard Iraqi troops with her say, through a translator, when the Iraqi forces come across such documents they usually burn them.

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VOICE 1: Because anything that belongs to them, we just burn it.

RUKMINI CALLIMACHI: You can learn so much more about this terrorist group by looking at these documents.

AMT: And so Rukmini Callimachi set out to do just that, learning more and more about the Islamic militant group that had run Mosul and huge swaths of territory across the region. Her reporting on the so-called ISIS Files was splashed across the front pages of The New York Times last month. Based on 16000 pages of ISIS documents she discovered, it offered insight into a sometimes mundane bureaucratic yet fascinating machination of the so-called caliphate. Since her report's publication there has been backlash to the Times journalism questioning the decision to remove documents from the country. Rukmini Callimachi defends her actions. She explained the process on PRI's The World.

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RUKMINI CALLIMACHI: Everywhere that I went. When I was in Iraq I was embedded with Iraqi troops, Iraqi security forces. So it was the Iraqi security forces themselves who led us to these buildings. I was always walking directly behind them. I was not infront of them. And they're the ones to help us find these records and helped us collect them. And in certain instances they were literally holding the trash bag for me to help me collect the papers.

AMT: She says Iraqi officials knew she was then removing them from the country.

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RUKMINI CALLIMACHI: You should know that it was declared at the airport when I left. My bags were searched. Phone calls were made and the officials at the airport deemed that I had the right to take them.

AMT: But three academics have launched a petition against the New York Times maintaining that taking the ISIS files from Iraq should not be seen as rescuing them from the flames but as an unethical and illegal act. And that it prevents Iraqis themselves from researching and reconciling after years of war. As well the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America has also expressed its concern in an open letter. Sara Farhan is an Iraqi Canadian doctoral candidate of history at Toronto's York University and one of the three authors of the original petition and she's with me in our studio. Hello.

SARA FARHAN: Hi. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Why do you object to her removing these documents?

SARA FARHAN: There's a lot of questions regarding the supposed recovery. In January 2017 Al Furat Times published an article in Arabic detailing that the Iraqi forces were actually using these documents to find out what other cells, potential ISIS cells, exist as well as to secure the area to ensure the safety of the civilians of these area. So there's contradictions regarding the supposed disposal or the burning of these documents. There's also the ethical questions surrounding the publication of sensitive information of Iraqi civilians who have endured unimaginable horrors only to be exploited yet again by Ms. Callimachi and her team and the NYT, an institution that has not reported a balanced account on the situation in Iraq.

AMT: Why do you say that they have not reported a balanced account?

SARA FARHAN: Their reporting hasn't considered the political and cultural history of the situation as it unfolds there. It's been quite reductive.

AMT: Well it's a war zone and they were in there covering the conflict.

SARA FARHAN: Exactly. But there are other social and cultural elements that must be considered. This isn't a simple formula that we can apply on areas that ISIS has controlled.

AMT: I want you to hear what Rukmini Callimachi says to PRI's The World about these documents.

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SARA FARHAN: They were supervising me as I picked up these things. So this is where I think this debate is missing some perspective. It's not a case of me taking these documents, The New York Times taking them back to America, or them existing in some institution in Iraq. It's the New York Times saving these documents or these documents not existing at all, because they were being destroyed.

AMT: She says they would have been destroyed if she didn't take them.

SARA FARHAN: Again we have reports from Iraqi outlets, media outlets, reporting challenging accounts specifically for our times. We also have cases of civilians using these documents to reclaim property that had been confiscated under ISIS. I can speak specifically regarding my neighborhood in Mosul where this has taken place. So there's contradiction to this claim. Moreover the supposed individuals that assisted and provided authorization. These aren't official Iraqi permission. Perhaps these were lower rank officers. Regardless, this is not proper procedure. There is an Iraqi government, there's a national archive available. So there is a procedure to this that Ms. Callimachi and NYT should take into consideration.

AMT: How do you know they weren't authorized? Are you making that assumption?

SARA FARHAN: No I'm not she publicly announced that she received verbal permission. There's a procedure to this.

AMT: There is a procedure by whom? ISIS was running Mosul. The government of Iraq was not running Mosul. So what was the procedure? Should she have gone to ISIS to get those files?

SARA FARHAN: Not At all. She was working with the Iraqi army and to assume that the Iraqi army has authority about the removal of antiquities from Iraq is really incorrect.

AMT: How are they antiquities if they are the files that were created over the last three years?

SARA FARHAN: Excuse me I meant cultural contact. These are information that are sensitive to Iraqi civilians to the security of the future of Iraqi states. The individuals that supposedly gave Rukmini verbal permission, they're simply not authorized to do so. And I listen to the PRI interview several occasions and her justification of publishing the sensitive content that were extracted from Iraqi civilians by horrible coercive means, she equates it to that of opening a Facebook account or sharing information through an access. These are completely different situations.

AMT: And yet in the in the articles that she wrote, in the major article that she wrote, the people who she names actually sat for photographers. They talked to her. They went on the record.

SARA FARHAN: Absolutely. But we're talking about 16,000 documents.

AMT: Yes but so do you have a problem with- they say that they're going to put those online, that they are redacting some information that sensitive and then they would be available to academics historians people like yourself.

SARA FARHAN: She's already published material, biographical material, regarding Iraqi civilians. This claim is really unfounded. So I don't understand why she's rejecting that statement. On her Twitter account She's also published some of these content to legitimize her claim that these in fact are authentic ISIS documents.

AMT: You're very angry about this.

SARA FARHAN: I'm not angry I'm just frustrated to be honest. This is the latest episode of a long history of plundering of Iraqi antiquities, Iraqi files and academics, myself, we have to consistently defend the fact that this is an ethical that this is unlawful and we were always met with this response with this retort that we are recovering these files. Let's keep in mind that Callimachi is making a name for herself by accumulating this. Future scholars, future journalists that want to cover the situation under ISIS, they have to consult Callimach and the NYT, further legitimizing this unethical conduct. And methodology in which she conducted her research is also up to question.

AMT: So the Americans have removed documents from Iraqi American government, documents from Iraq in 2003. What happened to them?

SARA FARHAN: Well there are several content that have been removed. Actually the biggest one that is in the news is the entire Botha's collection. We're talking about millions of documents. These are housed at the Hoover Institute in California. There's also the Iraqi Jewish history that's been relocated to New York that has been digitized and supposedly it will make its way back at the end of the year. This is problematic because we're severing any attempt by Iraqis to understand their own histories. I grew up in Baathist Iraq. I have to go to California and operate within the Hoover Institute to understand this content.

AMT: You grew up in Baathist Iraq and you came to Canada when?

SARA FARHAN: I came to Canada in 1998.

AMT: 1998. And before that in Baathist Iraq would you have been able to access files like that under Saddam Hussein?

SARA FARHAN: Well at the time I was quite young.

AMT: But would an academic in your position have been able to access files in Baathist Iraq?

SARA FARHAN: You Know what. There were certain limitations to the sensitivity of these files but the fact that the access to these files, now Iraqis have to go to California, to the imperial center and work within the bureaucracies of the Hoover Institute, this is just one incident of a long history of plunder.

AMT: They're not available online?

SARA FARHAN: Some of them have been digitized.

AMT: Isn't the wider issue of what has gone on in Iraq over the last decades, that there hasn't been a lot of freedom, including academic freedom for anyone in Iraq?

SARA FARHAN: This is actually part of the narrative that continues to be reproduced because of the availability of these content in the in the imperial center. If anyone wants to discuss history of Iraq, they have access to the Baathist archive. So a period of sanctions, a period of lack of academic freedom, a period of essentially muting of the population. And if they want to cover another period they have access, or potentially will have access, to Challimachi. So we can only write about a history of Iraq in these two contacts. But my own research actually argues against that. I discussed medical education in Iraq and it's a fascinating history where Iraq contributed to the opening of the World Health Organization for example. Iraq was one of the leading members and consistently contributed to tropical medicine. This is the history that I'm trying to produce. This content was looted in 2003 and the efforts on the local level by Iraqi doctors who are spearheading this attempt to restore the documents is finally coming together.

AMT: What would make it better for you? Would you like to see the New York Times hand those documents back to the Iraqi government?

SARA FARHAN: The question here is the NYT has already demonstrated that it doesn't respect the Iraqi government doesn't respect their authority and it certainly doesn't respect the Iraqi civilians.

AMT: They would argue with you that that's your assumption. They're arguing that they did get permission. So what would make it better for you?

SARA FARHAN: That's actually not my opinion. It's clear they didn't follow protocol. They accepted approval from a lower commanding officers who Rukmini, I just want to underscore, Rukimini has shielded the identity of these patronage networks. But she's so willing to expose the biographical information of Iraqi civilians. This is not to endorse that she should continue to share biographical information. But I just want to highlight the contradictions.

AMT: Right. But this is a woman who risked her life to go into a place that academics didn't go into to look for files. Who was trying to report to the world that this was going on, where protocol is very difficult in the middle of a war zone, when you don't know which buildings are booby trapped when you don't know- So you're suggesting very academic nice bureaucratic ways of moving forward which weren't possible in the middle of a war zone. So what do you want to see happen now? I mean what would make it better now?

SARA FARHAN: I think the Iraqi people in the academic community in general would dispute that. She already claimed that she is quote "embedded herself with the army". Part of the protocol that we're seeing and from my family's reporting in Mosul excuse me is quite contrary to that.

AMT: Contrary to what I'm sorry?

SARA FARHAN: Excuse me. Contrary to the fact that she's risking her life. She has already stated in other interviews that these buildings were already secured by the Iraqi forces prior to her entering in them. So we're listening to different versions. But the question here it's not about what I personally want as a Muslawi, and as a scholar. It is we need to respect these areas under conflict and we must not allow this incident to set precedent for future journalism. We must uphold journalistic integrity specifically at a time when the media is under scrutiny for unethical reporting.

AMT: Sarah Farhan, thanks for coming in.

SARA FARHAN: Thank you for reporting this issue.

AMT: Sarah Farhan doctoral candidate of Iraqi history at York University, co-author of the petition protesting the New York Times removal and use of ISIS documents from Iraq. She joined me in our Toronto studio. My next guest knows these documents well. Nasser Weddady as an independent consultant and analyst specializing the Middle East and North Africa. He was a consultant for The Times on the ISIS files along with the group The Times describes as a group of outside experts and a team of journalists. Nasser Weddady is an Oslo Norway. Hello.

NASSER WEDDADY: Hello. Good morning. I actually wanted to start with a small correction. I consulted with the New York Times on the podcast The Caliphate, that touched the actual documents.

AMT: Okay. Well that's a very important clarification. So thank you for that. As you listened to what my last guest is saying, what are you thinking?

NASSER WEDDADY: I Fundamentally disagree with 95 percent of what was said.

AMT: Why?

NASSER WEDDADY: First of all on the question that these documents are the sole property of Iraq and the Iraqi people, the fact would beg to differ. ISIS has attacked about 20 countries around the world and has recruited over 180 nationalities in its ranks. And therefore these documents that shed light into the inner workings of the terror organization that has struck across the globe is not only the sole business of Iraq. In addition, like if we follow the reasoning Syria laid lay claim to these documents by virtue of the number of Syrians were enrolled in ISIS, and the fact that Raqqa the self-declared of the illegitimate illegal Caliphate was based in Raqqa Syria. So let's get that out of the way and the point that I'm trying to make is that these documents are not only about Iraq. They are of global value and they're very important because they actually provide a very timely insight in ways how the modus operandi of the terror organization that has, unlike other terror organizations in the Middle East, had learned and succeeded in carving out territorial space and managed to operate like a government. For example if you talk to Libyans today they will tell you yes we love to see these documents because we're fighting these guys. They are right now trying to do exactly the same thing that they did in Iraq.

AMT: What about the concerns that taking them out of the country, making them public has its own problems as well?

NASSER WEDDADY: You know that's actually- I think that's the crux of the matter. That's the heart of the matter. I'll tell you Look I was raised in Syria. I'm Mauritanian by birth. So I am as Arab as they come. In my 42 years of life, I've not I've never seen the inside of an Arab governments archiving, much less their security archives. And I would further point out that Iraq doesn't have a FOIA. You cannot go through the government and force them-.

AMT: Freedom of information, FOIA. Keep going.

NASSER WEDDADY: You cannot go to them to force them to disclose documents and their possessions, much less those in the possession of the security forces. These are security states and to further like tease out my point is where are the documents from Huija? Where Are the documents from the battles of Tal Afar, the battles of Ramadi. If we believe indeed that the Iraqi security forces have been collecting these documents, which actually I do not believe for a second, they've been destroying them. Even in Mosul because as the battle was going on the security forces understandably were doing everything in their power to not get killed by the hundreds of IEDs and booby traps that ISIS left around in order to kill and maim those who came in their tracks. So the argument really doesn't hold. The part that I'm sympathetic to is that in the end of the day the Iraqis have a right to access these documents and know their content. And ironically that's what I think Ms. Callimachi and The New York Times should be commended because, unlike the story of the Baath archives, what the New York Times is doing, it's a newspaper. They publish. As a matter of fact, they're cranking out these documents nonstop and doing their best to share them with the world, because if we left them to the Iraqi government we will not see those documents again.

AMT: Well I want to bring in someone else to weigh in on this. Belkis Wille as part of a team that's been watching events unfold in Iraq post ISIS. She's a senior Iraq and Qatar researcher with the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch and she joins us from Kiev in Ukraine. Hello.

BELKIS WILLE: Hi.

AMT: Okay. Give us your view of this.

BELKIS WILLE: ,Well I have to say I do think, as was just pointed out, I think it's that important that these documents were preserved. If Iraqi forces were indeed destroying them or these documents get sort of left by the wayside and would have been destroyed, I think it's very important to acknowledge the benefit that these documents have been saved. I guess the question for me is really why these documents couldn't have simply been photographed? You know all of us running around in the field in Mosul have an iPhone. One could simply take quick shots of these documents, bring them back to Baghdad and hand them over to Iraq's High Judicial Council. Now I say this because in the last year and a half that I've been working in Iraq, I've been working very closely in monitoring the trials of ISIS suspects. You have 19,000 men and boys Iraqis currently on trial for ISIS affiliation. One of the real concerns in these trials is that the entire trial proceeds solely on the basis of a confession, sometimes extracted by torture, and no additional evidence. And when I talk to judges about why this is happening, they are saying because nobody is giving us any written evidence that we can use. Now maybe the military...

AMT: Let me ask where are the human rights organizations? Why aren't they giving evidence and collecting that evidence?

BELKIS WILLE: Well a lot of these areas were highly insecure and the only individuals from the outside that were going in were journalists who were embedded with security forces. Organizations like Human Rights Watch we do not move with security forces that is counter to our ability to be objective and neutral. So we were behind the front line, not on the frontline. But but again it is important that these documents were preserved. That is a benefit to everyone. But the question is why duplicate couldn't have been made, copies couldn't have been made and then they could have been handed over, not to Iraqi security forces who seemingly didn't appreciate the value of these documents, but to Iraq's High Judicial Council. And the problem is if these documents are sitting in New York and getting uploaded, you know I'm sitting in courtrooms where not a single judge has access to a compute,r let alone the Internet in his hearing and these trials they take 10 minutes. The courts are plowing through them. You have hundreds of men have already been given a death sentence in cases that aren't waiting for documents to be uploaded, where these documents might help to actually exonerate some individuals or provide real evidence of the crimes that they that they're implicated in.

AMT: Nasser Weddady what do you say to that?

NASSER WEDDADY: I'm Very sympathetic. I'm very supportive of this. I see the need for that to be extremely concerned about these 10 minutes flash trials that the Iraqi government has been conducting, basically sending people to the gallows based on hearsay. However the problem, the parameters of the problem, have not changed. The Iraqi government is not what you'd call a rule of law and transparency based organization. And I would feel far more comfortable handing over, digitizing these documents and making them available so that Amnesty International Human Rights Watch or the Human Rights Foundation can have access to those and provide them and use them in trials. I'll say bluntly. I don't trust the Iraqi government because you have to know who is the Iraqi government today, and who was the Iraqi government at the time. This is not exactly a system that has been famous for upholding the fundamentals, of not only rule of law democracy, but even a fair trial. That's why it's so vital that these documents get preserved and captured and digitized and yes shared in order to serve the best interests of everybody here. And I think that it will be a disaster for everyone involved or anyone who has a stake in this conversation, if these documents were simply handed over back without them being digitized and kept by a third party to the Iraqi government because we have absolutely no leverage and no guarantee that we will see these documents ever again.

AMT: So Belkis Wille, we're almost out of time, really briefly, what do you want to see happen next?

BELKIS WILLE: Well there's a new United Nations Security Council formed investigative team. It's a mix of internationals many with sort of judge or prosecutorial backgroundsin the field of international law and the Iraqi judges. And this team will be coming to Iraq to push for real accountability for the abuses by ISIS. One opportunity would be for the New York Times to immediately make copies of the remaining documents that aren't uploaded and then give all of the originals to this United Nations Security Council reform team that could then return these documents in their next visit soon to Iraq, to Iraq's High Judicial Council, so that judges could immediately start integrating them into the trial.

AMT: Okay we have to leave it there. Thank you both of you for weighing in on this. That is Nasser Weddady independent consultant and analyst specializing in the middle in the Middle East and North Africa. He joined us from Oslo and Belkis Wille senior Iraq and Qatar researcher at Human Rights Watch. We reached her in Kiev in Ukraine. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us when we return we're talking dinosaurs. The real ones.

[Music: Theme]

Is there a dinosaur hiding in your drawer? Meet the man who's found 15 new species

Guest: Steven Brusatte

AMT: .Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Showers of shooting stars herald the approach of a giant comet on a collision course with the Earth. 3000 kilometres to the south, the massive comet crashes into Earth. Then the Shock waves arrive, next comes the blast front. Finally, a rain of molten rock starts to fall out of the darkening sky. This is the end of the age of the dinosaurs.

[Music]

AMT: Well that is how the end of the dinosaur era sounded, at least on the brilliant BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs. What an era it was for 150 million years our very own planet was a very different place, teaming with prehistoric beasts. Steve Brusatte has the fascinating job of seeking out that long distant world. Today he is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and the resident paleontologist for that BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs. He's published a new book called The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of the Lost World. I met up with Steve Brusatte in a place where you can still catch a glimpse of that last world, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

SOUNDCLIP

AMT: Hello.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Hi. Good Morning.

AMT: We are of course in the Paleontology Part of the ROM and I thought we would look around at the dinosaur exhibit here. When you look at these skeletons I see monsters. What do you see? Do you see friends?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I see one of the biggest mysteries of nature and I also see the most fascinating creatures that have ever lived on our planet.

AMT: So tell me about what we're looking at, this guy right here, who is this?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: This is the greatest dinosaur of them all. The king of the dinosaurs; T-Rex. When I was younger and I would go to museums I would always run right in, right up to the T-Rex because standing underneath a skeleton like this I think is really just mesmerizing. This is an animal that's the size of a bus. It would have weighed seven or eight tons. It has a head that's the size of a bathtub. It has 50 some teeth up there, each one the size and shape of a banana. It could crush through bone. I mean the hyperbole could go on but this is an awesome creature.

AMT: And why so big? What are the distinguishing features of T-Rex?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So T-Rex has the huge head, those railroads bites banana teeth that have big muscles on its jaws, that could bite so hard it could crush through the bones of its prye. It could crush through a car. If there were cars around back in the Cretaceous and it had its big long tail and its big muscular hind legs but those pathetic puny little forearms that we still really don't know exactly what they were for.

AMT: So walk me around and tell me what else I'm seeing right around T-Rex.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So around T-rex we have T-rex and his friends, let's say, or probably T-rex and things that would consider T-rex an enemy. So this is the skull of a triceratops. Another very famous dinosaur so it has the three horns on its face. That's why it's called triceratops and so the two big ones over the eyes and then one on the nose. And so Triceratops lived with T-Rex. They lived at the same time about 66 million years ago and we know that T-rex hunted Triceratops because sometimes paleontologists find fossils like these, the skulls of triceratops with bite marks that match the size and the spacing of T-Rex teeth right on the head of the Triceratops. So these are ancient enemies. This is Batman and the Joker right here.

AMT: And people are finding new dinosaurs to this day. How many dinosaurs are identified every year?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: People are finding more dinosaurs now than ever before. It's amazing to think about it. You would have thought dinosaurs might be something like gold or oil or diamonds where you know people have been looking for centuries and were maybe getting close to being tapped out. But that's not the case at all. Somebody right now is finding a new species of dinosaur on average once a week, somewhere around the world. And that's a crazy number, 50 some new species a year and some new ones are still coming out of Canada, out west in Alberta. Others are still coming out of the U.S. but most of the new dinosaurs are coming from places like China, Argentina, Brazil, developing countries, big countries, wide open countries that are training their own scientists in their own museums and universities and that's what's causing this big dinosaur rush.

AMT: Well I know you've had your own discoveries and I want to ask you more about them. So let's go find someplace to sit down and keep talking. You named 15 new kinds of dinosaurs. What does that mean?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So It means that these are 15 new species so new types of dinosaur. And when you find a new type of dinosaur or identify one you get the chance to name it. You describe it. You have to describe it to other scientists and write up a report on it and publish that as part of that you can name it. So sometimes we find new dinosaurs who are out doing fieldwork but most of the ones that I've named have been ones that I found in museum drawers. Just old fossils that people had neglected or hadn't looked at for a while or fossils that colleagues of mine had found when we'd been on field work. I have a lot of great colleagues that are really good at finding fossils much better than me. And so it's a lot of fun to work with teams of people all over the world and to have something new in your hands that nobody else has ever seen before, something that's tens or hundreds of millions of years old that you have a chance to study this thing for the first time and give a name to it. And there's something very special about that.

AMT: So when the fossils were discovered it wasn't immediately clear that they belonged to another animal.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Yes that's right. So whenever we find a new fossil the first thing we try to do is figure out what it is. So is it a bone? Is it a tooth? Okay is it one bone or many bones? And which bones are there bones from the head or bones from the shoulder or bones from the tail? And then once we kind of go down the list then we can start to ask are the bones of something that's been found before or are they totally new. And so it takes a long time just to do the comparisons because you have to sit down and make comparisons to other dinosaurs that have been found, either the original fossils or the reports in the literature or photographs or whatever you have. And so only after that long painstaking time of making all these comparisons can we determine what we have here is something new and has this bump on its bones someplace where no other dinosaur does, or it has a big horn sticking out of your head, or it has expertise, or it has a big crest on its head, or whatever. So sometimes we find really unusual features of these dinosaurs and that can tell us that we have something new.

AMT: And you say you've found some of them in drawers but where were they from originally?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So one of the great things about my job is I get to travel around digging up dinosaurs but also travel around to museums and to look into the collections of museums. And museums are very important because museums are the storehouses of information of fossils of rocks and minerals and animals and all kinds of things. So a big part of our job is studying the collections of museums. So I've been in museums for instance in China where I open up drawers and I've seen fossils that I go 'oh OK that's something new I've never seen anything like that before' and then sit down and start to go through the process of figuring out what it is. So that's how we found one of these new species, the thing called [unintelligible] from China. It was in a drawer it had been described very briefly in a Chinese publication many decades ago. There wasn't much known about it but when I opened the drawer I could see that it was very similar to some dinosaurs from Africa that I had been studying. So that's how the detective process works in these kind of cases.

AMT: And you name them. Like do you keep names in your head? What's your favorite name?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: A lot of times now we're giving names in local languages. So I work with a great team in Romania and a few years ago one of my colleagues found this beautiful fossil velociraptor type of dinosaur and we called it Ballo or Bandak which is an old Romanian term for stocky Dragon. So we're even using now Gaelic names in Scotland for some of the fossils we find in Scotland. So Gaelic you know the ancient language of the Highlands and we just think that's a cool thing to do.

AMT: What has been the strangest experience you've had on a fossil expedition?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I've been really fortunate to travel to lots of amazing places to look for fossils all over Europe Portugal, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, UK of course, to China, to Brazil, of course across the US and Canada and each place is great. There's different adventures in each place. And each place has its own challenges but you know one of the stories I tell in the book is when we were working in Portugal in a place that probably most people wouldn't even think about, when you think about dinosaurs down in the Algarve in the southern part of Portugal. This great tourist area I mean people especially in Europe tourists flock to the Algarve. And you have all these tourists on the beaches and about 20 miles or so inland about 30 kilometers or so, inland from the beaches. You're all of a sudden in this really parched mountainous area and so we knew that there were some scraps of bone that had been found there by an undergraduate German geology student in the 1970s who was just going out and doing a mapping project for his degree. He came across a few pieces of bone and so we knew about those and we went there to try to relocate those things and it took us several days to find the area and we finally did. And we were only finding scraps and we were trying to follow those scraps and so eventually one of my colleagues, Octavio Matteos, he followed a trail of scraps up a hillside and into some pretty dense vegetation. But it was really dry really hot that day and he started screaming out and we could tell from a distance that he had found something but then his voice stopped. And so we had no idea what was really going on. So we tried to follow where we thought the sounds came from and eventually we came to him and he was just rubbing his eyes. And he had just passed out as it turned out of a combination of excitement and dehydration. The dehydration because he forgot his water in the car and it was 50 degrees. 50 degrees. I have a picture on my GPS. So That was the dehydration. The excitement was he found a bone but he found a mass graveyard of hundreds of skeletons of these giant car size salamanders that were the types of animals that preyed on the very first dinosaurs.

AMT: What's been your most exciting discovery then?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Personally I would say some of the stuff we're doing in Scotland has been really fun. So being based in Scotland now I grew up in around the Chicago area and then moved to the University of Edinburgh to take up my job there. And so when I moved there I started to do fieldwork locally and I wanted to find Scottish dinosaurs. And there's only one place in Scotland where anybody's found dinosaurs before and it's a place called the Isle of Sky. It's this very beautiful enchanting island off the west coast of Scotland quite far north, quite cold, rainy, windy, lots of images, a beautiful landscape craggy peaks and peat clogged streams, a token sort of environment. So we've been going there since I started in Edinburgh and a few years ago my colleague, Tom Chalons, and I we were looking for little bones of fossil fish, but as we were doing that we noticed there were some big depressions in the tidal platform that jutted out into the North Atlantic. And it only it was only visible at low tide. So we walked around we saw there actually quite a lot of these depressions and each one was about the size of a car tire, and then we noticed there was a bit of a pattern to them, a bit of a left right, left right, zig zag type of pattern. And then we noticed that some of them had little bits sticking out in front. They really looked like toes and so [unintelligible] that what we had weren't just random tide pools or random holes in the rock, but they were footprints that were left by dinosaurs and by that some of the very biggest dinosaurs of all, some of those huge long necked Brontosaurus types of dinosaurs, things that were 10 or 15 metres long that probably would have weighed about ten tonnes, living 170 million years ago in an ancient lagoon. And they left their tracks in a lagoon. They were waiting in shallow water and this was right in the middle of the Jurassic period, right when these dinosaurs were first starting to become truly enormous in size. I mean dinosaurs are, to me, they're the most incredible creatures that have ever lived on earth. They are mind boggling some of them. If you look at a brontosaurus one of those types of dinosaurs some of them got as big as Boeing 737. I mean to me that is an incredulous fact there were dinosaurs the size of jet planes and these were statues they weren't buildings these were animals real living breathing moving animals. They had to hatch from an egg. They had to grow up. They had to find food. They had to raise their young. And I just I can't see how you can't look at an animal like that and not just be totally floored.

AMT: There were actually three periods of dinosaurs. Tell me about them.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: The Age of Dinosaurs what we call the Mesozoic era. This is the Triassic Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods. And so everybody knows the Jurassic of course because of Jurassic Park, but dinosaurs started in the Triassic period and this was when the world was one. This was the age of the supercontinent Pangea. And the Triassic started in the embers of the worst mass extinction that's ever happened when these super volcanoes erupted in Siberia and killed off up to 95 percent of all living things. But that gave new animals the opportunity to rise up and to colonize this mostly vacant world and dinosaurs were one of those groups. So the First dinosaurs were small. They were humble. They were the size of house cats look nothing like a T-Rex or a brontosaurus. And it took them 50 million years to rise up. Then the Triassic ended in another mass extinction that supercontinent started to split apart and as it split apart lava came up through those cracks. And so there were more super volcanoes and a lot of the early competitors of the dinosaurs died. But dinosaurs sailed through. And then in the next period of time, we're now in the Jurassic, and this was another new world that dinosaurs had to conquer even further and they did. And this is when they spread all around the world. This is when dinosaurs became truly gigantic. This is when you've got your dinosaurs the size of jet planes. This is when you got your bus size meat eaters. This was when you got some dinosaurs start to get smaller and developed feathers and wings and turned into birds. And then the Jurassic transitioned into the Cretaceous and this was really the apogee of the age of dinosaurs. This was dinosaurs at their best. This was when the cotton's have split apart so much that the world looked very similar to it does today. And there was a North America South America and Africa and so on. And you had different dinosaurs living on all those different continents. So this was an age of great diversity. So you had T-Rex and Triceratops here in western North America. You had gigantic long necked dinosaurs and bull headed predators out in South America. You had dwarf dinosaurs living on the islands of Europe. And then that Cretaceous world abruptly came to an end 66 million years ago when that asteroid fell out of the sky one day.

AMT: Do we know if it was a comet or an asteroid that hit?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: We don't know we know it was either a comet or an asteroid. It's really hard to tell the difference but we know one of them happened and the first sign of that was this chemical fingerprint of this very bizarre element called Iridium that was found in the rock layers that marked the end of the Cretaceous around the world. And that is something that's very common in outer space but very rare on earth. So that keyed off some of the first scientists studying this issue that something extraterrestrial that happened. And then eventually the crater was found. So the crater is in Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula. This craters over 100 miles wide. It's largely hidden by water as it's largely offshore. So you can't see it really easily. So we know that either a comet or an asteroid hit. We can tell from the size of the crater and from the clues left behind in the rocks that this thing was about six miles wide or about 10 kilometers wide. It was traveling faster than a jetliner, probably even faster than a speeding bullet and it smashed into the earth with the force of over a billion nuclear bombs and it punched that hole in the crossed over a hundred miles wide. And that let off a whole avalanche, a whole domino effect of environmental destruction, tsunamis, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricane, force winds, volcanoes. And these things reshaped the earth and the dinosaurs, except for a few birds, couldn't cope.

AMT: Why is it important today to know what species lives and what species died? 66 million years ago?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I Think there's great relevance to understanding that extinction and also other extinctions in Earth's history. Because these are times when real animals real ecosystems had to deal with real moments of sudden and extreme environmental change. So what lived and what died. We want to know these things because our Earth right now is going through some really profound change, climate change, environmental change. I think we probably want some insight into what species are most vulnerable. We want some insight into what might happen in the aftermath of say a big temperature spike. And we can predict these things in different ways. But the best way to get a really firm handle on those things is to go into the fossil record and look at what happened when real animals had to deal with these things in the past.

AMT: Is that what the early fossil hunters were trying to learn and they went on their expeditions?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: The earliest fossil hunters, at least in the more modern times, because ancient Greeks and Native Americans and Mongolian nomads and many others found dinosaur bones talked about dinosaur bones. But it was really in the early 1800s that professional scientists developing professions started to discover and identify and study dinosaur bones, and come to understand them as the remains of these giant reptiles that used to live millions of years ago. I think the earliest dinosaur hunters were mostly inspired by was just the sheer mystery, just the fact that these things existed. I mean can you imagine being the first person that ever found the skeleton of a brontosaurus or something like that? In fact the first person who did couldn't fathom what it was and they thought it must be a whale because the only thing they could think in their mind - that could get so big - was a whale. So in the early days, I think it was driven a lot just by the wonder of discovery. And then the competition of discovery got a lot of very wealthy people, particularly in the eastern U.S., people like Andrew Carnegie and others that wanted to find the biggest dinosaur and they sent teams out west to do it. But more recently there is just a newer appreciation for why dinosaurs are important, why they're not just objects, why they're not just curiosities but why they're important for understanding earth history. So paleontologists of my generation now are just very active in using fossils as clues to understand evolution, to understand climate change, to understand how the history of our earth. And that's the most important things fossils can tell us and that's what I always try to stress to my students.

AMT: And in the meantime, how long do you see yourself scouting for dinosaurs?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I think this is a career long obsession. I'm very fortunate to have this job where I can travel around, looking for new stuff, digging up stuff, working with amazing people all over the world and there's just always a thrill to the chase. And there is a discovery mentality, there's a collector mentality, there's a scientist mentality all kind of rolled into one and it's a hard thing to describe but when you find a fossil, you're the first person that's ever seen that and this is something that's tens maybe hundreds of millions of years old. And there's just something I think almost sacred about that and it's an incredible feeling and it's the feeling that I hope I can continue to experience as I find more things.

AMT: I think that will inspire other people to do exactly what you're doing. Thank you.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Thank you.

AMT: I'm just going to take you through there to look at a few other things. The school kids are coming in. I am from CBC Radio. My name is Anna Maria and I'm with a man who is teaching at the University of Edinburgh and his name is Steve Brusatte. But he's going to tell you something about his work because he's discovered some things. Go ahead Steve.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: All right. Hi guys how are you.

STUDENTS: Hi.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I'm a paleontologist. Ever heard of paleontology?

STUDENTS: Yes.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: I travel around the world digging up dinosaurs. And I also travel around a lot to go to museums. So this museum is one of the most important museums in the whole world. It has some of the most and best dinosaurs anywhere in the world. And so you know this dinosaur, what this is. Yes what is this?

STUDENTS: T-Rex.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Yes. It is t-Rex. And So I study T-Rex and I study other dinosaurs too and I've named and described a lot of new species of dinosaurs. And so some of the dinosaurs that I've discovered and named have been some of the cousins of T-Rex. There's one that we called Pinocchio rocks.

STUDENT: Oh I have heard of that.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Have You?

STUDENT: Yes.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Good. All right. So you know why we call it Pinocchio?

STUDENT: No I just heard of it.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: You know the story of Pinocchio?

STUDENTS: Yes.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So what is Pinocchio do when he lies? Yes. His nose goes way out. And so this dinosaur, maybe this dinosaur was a liar dinosaur, maybe. But we called it Pinocchio because it had a really long nose. So it was like a T-Rex but with its nose all stretched out and had little horns on its nose to. It had like five horns on the cap of his nose. So it comes from China. It comes from southern China and China, right now, I don't know if maybe some of you have family in China, but China is the most exciting place in the world for dinosaurs. There's like 25 new dinosaurs every year from China and some of them even have feathers. Do you know that some dinosaurs had feathers?

STUDENT: Yes. Some of them fly.

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Exactly yes. Like some of these over there behind us. You should look at those, those were dinosaurs that could fly. So that's pretty cool.

AMT: Do you have any questions for Steve about dinosaurs?

STUDENT: Is it hard finding dinosaurs?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: .Yes. It is pretty hard because we don't have any special equipment you know we don't have like a radar gun that we can shoot into the rocks. We just have to walk around and just look with our eyes until we see something. So sometimes we get lucky and find good dinosaurs. But I've been to places where many days we're looking and we don't find anything.

STUDENT: What happens if you discover a new dinosaur? What do you do with the bones?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So the first thing we have to do is make sure the bones are safe because they're you know they're very old. Some dinosaurs are over 100 million years old. And so the bones can be really fragile and they can break really easily. So we'll put some glue and stuff on the bones and then we'll usually protect them with what's called a plaster jacket. So plaster is the stuff that casts are made of if you break a bone. So we'll wrap the fossils a newspaper and then we'll put the plaster around it that will harden. And then we'll take it back to the lab. We'll clean it up very carefully and then measure it, photograph it, compare it to other dinosaurs and see if we have some new.

STUDENT: What the first dinosaur you ever discovered?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: The first time I ever went to dig up dinosaurs was out in like some of the Western states in America. So places like Montana and Wyoming and South Dakota. And so one of the first dinosaurs that I ever worked on was one of the big ones with the long necks, one called Kamira Saurus. And that's from the Jurassic period, so it was about 150 million years old.

STUDENT: What happens if we don't find the bones of the dinosaur?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: Then I get really sad but sometimes we don't. Sometimes you only find a few bones and so that means you have to make comparisons to other dinosaurs to maybe figure out what the other bones would have looked like. But it does make me sad if we ever lose any dinosaur bones.

STUDENT: What's your favorite dinosaur that you ever found?

STEVEN BRUSATTE: So I think my favorite dinosaur ever is that one T-Rex. But the favorite one that I have ever I think worked on, there was one from China that I named called [unintelligible] and it's a raptor dinosaur. So it's a very close cousin of Velociraptor and it has feathers all over its body and it even has wings. Okay I think that's all I could do. But thanks guys. It was very nice to meet all you guys.

[Applause]

AMT: There you go, a darling of the 10 and 11 year olds in that crowd. Steve Brusatte, paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. His new book is called The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New history of a Lost World. And he was with me at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. We'd like to thank the Royal Ontario Museum for letting us record at their dinosaur collection. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q. Q screen panel convenes to talk about ABC's abrupt cancellation yesterday of the Roseanne sitcom Reboot. Be sure to join us again tomorrow and I'll be speaking with former Canadian Prime Minister John Chretien, 15 years almost since leaving public office. The little guy from Shawinigan is the subject of a new documentary from CBC's documentary channel. He'll join me for a wide ranging talk about everything from his time as PM to the biggest challenges he sees in Canada's future right now. That's tomorrow here on The Current. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti thanks for listening.

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Wednesday May 30, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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