听力课堂TED音频栏目主要包括TED演讲的音频MP3及中英双语文稿，供各位英语爱好者学习使用。本文主要内容为演讲MP3+双语文稿:寻找恐龙让我知道了我们在宇宙中的位置 ，希望你会喜欢！
【演讲者及介绍】Kenneth Lacovara
为了了解地球上行走过的最大恐龙，Lacovara运用了从工程到医学的最新成像和建模技术进行探索。
【演讲主题】Hunting for dinosaurs showed me our place in the universe
寻找恐龙让我知道了我们在宇宙中的位置
【中英文字幕】
翻译者 Lewis Liu 校对者 Tingting Zhong
00:04
How do you find a dinosaur? Sounds impossible, doesn't it? It's not. And the answer relies on a formula that all paleontologists use. And I'm going to tell you the secret.
你能找到恐龙吗？ 听起来不可思议，不是吗？ 其实并不难。 古生物学家都会用到的一个公式可以帮助我们找到。 而且我将会告诉你这个秘密。
00:18
First, find rocks of the right age. Second, those rocks must be sedimentary rocks. And third, layers of those rocks must be naturally exposed. That's it. Find those three things and get yourself on the ground, chances are good that you will find fossils.
首先，找到相应年代的岩石。 第二点需要注意的是，这些岩石必须是沉积岩。 然后，岩石表面需要自然暴露在外。 就这些。 满足这三点，你就可以开始了。 找到化石的可能性还是很大的。
00:39
Now let me break down this formula. Organisms exist only during certain geological intervals. So you have to find rocks of the right age, depending on what your interests are. If you want to find trilobites, you have to find the really, really old rocks of the Paleozoic -- rocks between a half a billion and a quarter-billion years old. Now, if you want to find dinosaurs, don't look in the Paleozoic, you won't find them. They hadn't evolved yet. You have to find the younger rocks of the Mesozoic, and in the case of dinosaurs, between 235 and 66 million years ago.
接下来，咱们来具体分解一下这个公式。 生物只在特定的地质间隔时期存活。 因此你必须找到特定时期的岩石。 这取决于你的兴趣。 如果你想要找三叶虫， 那你必须找非常古老的古生代地层岩石- 年龄在5到2.5亿年间。 那么问题来了，如果你想找到恐龙。 别去看古生代的岩石，那里找不到。 恐龙还没有演化呢。 你需要去找中生代的岩石， 并且是有恐龙存活的年代。 大概是2.35亿至6600万年前。
01:15
Now, it's fairly easy to find rocks of the right age at this point, because the Earth is, to a coarse degree, geologically mapped. This is hard-won information. The annals of Earth history are written in rocks, one chapter upon the next, such that the oldest pages are on bottom and the youngest on top.
目前找这些岩石还是挺容易的， 因为我们已有了地球的大致地理 地质面貌。 这可不是个简单的工程。 地球的编年史可以说是由岩石写成的， 一章接着一章， 也就是说最久远的在最底层， 年代最近的位于表面。
01:35
Now, were it quite that easy, geologists would rejoice. It's not. The library of Earth is an old one. It has no librarian to impose order. Operating over vast swaths of time, myriad geological processes offer every possible insult to the rocks of ages. Most pages are destroyed soon after being written. Some pages are overwritten, creating difficult-to-decipher palimpsests of long-gone landscapes. Pages that do find sanctuary under the advancing sands of time are never truly safe. Unlike the Moon -- our dead, rocky companion -- the Earth is alive, pulsing with creative and destructive forces that power its geological metabolism. Lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts all date back to about the age of the Solar System. Moon rocks are forever. Earth rocks, on the other hand, face the perils of a living lithosphere. All will suffer ruination, through some combination of mutilation, compression, folding, tearing, scorching and baking.
然而，如果又真的这么简单，地理学家会欣喜若狂了。 其实并不简单。 地球像是一个古老的图书馆。 并没有管理员来为每一本书排序， 来管理如此大范围的时代， 无数的地质进程又可能对岩石年龄的判断带来不利影响。 地理编年史中的书页，大多数也许刚被写成就遭到毁灭。 有些书页又有重复， 对早前的年代做了难解的重叠赘述。 在时间的流逝中找到庇护的历史， 永远不是那么安全。 和月亮这样没有生命的顽石不同， 地球是活的，同时具备创造和毁灭的力量给了他生命， 也促进其地质的新陈代谢。 月球上的岩石由阿波罗宇航员带回 一直追溯到太阳系的年岁 月亮上的岩石是永恒的， 地球上的岩石在经历了撞击，压缩，折叠，撕裂 和高温的作用后都会遭到破坏。
02:44
Thus, the volumes of Earth history are incomplete and disheveled. The library is vast and magnificent -- but decrepit. And it was this tattered complexity in the rock record that obscured its meaning until relatively recently. Nature provided no card catalog for geologists -- this would have to be invented. Five thousand years after the Sumerians learned to record their thoughts on clay tablets, the Earth's volumes remained inscrutable to humans. We were geologically illiterate, unaware of the antiquity of our own planet and ignorant of our connection to deep time.
因此，纵观地球历史是不完整而且是散乱的。 地球这个图书馆年代久远而且藏书丰富。 而且，岩石记录的复杂又使之丧失了原本的意义。 大自然并没有为地理学家留下任何记录 而是让他们去总结。 在苏美尔人学着在岩土上记录想法的五千年后， 地质史对于人类来说还是高深莫测。 我们可以说对地理其实是一无所知， 对地球的古老也是一知半解， 并对我们与"久远时间"的联系很无知。
03:28
It wasn't until the turn of the 19th century that our blinders were removed, first, with the publication of James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth," in which he told us that the Earth reveals no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end; and then, with the printing of William Smith's map of Britain, the first country-scale geological map, giving us for the first time predictive insight into where certain types of rocks might occur. After that, you could say things like, "If we go over there, we should be in the Jurassic," or, "If we go up over that hill, we should find the Cretaceous."
直到19世纪的到来， 我们的无知才渐渐消失 首先，James Hotton所著的《地球理论》向我们揭示了 地球的初始毫无痕迹， 终结也会毫无预兆。 随着William Smith绘制了第一张国家疆域范围的英国地图， 我们得以预见 哪里会有特定年代的岩石。 由此，你可以这样说： “我们去那儿能找到侏罗纪” “爬过这座山我们能找到白垩纪”。
04:06
So now, if you want to find trilobites, get yourself a good geological map and go to the rocks of the Paleozoic. If you want to find dinosaurs like I do, find the rocks of Mesozoic and go there. Now of course, you can only make a fossil in a sedimentary rock, a rock made by sand and mud. You can't have a fossil in an igneous rock formed by magma, like a granite, or in a metamorphic rock that's been heated and squeezed. And you have to get yourself in a desert. It's not that dinosaurs particularly lived in deserts; they lived on every land mass and in every imaginable environment. It's that you need to go to a place that's a desert today, a place that doesn't have too many plants covering up the rocks, and a place where erosion is always exposing new bones at the surface. So find those three things: rocks of the right age, that are sedimentary rocks, in a desert, and get yourself on the ground, and you literally walk until you see a bone sticking out of the rock.
好吧，如果你现在想找三叶虫， 先要有一张好的地图， 寻找古生代的岩石。 如果你想像我一样去寻找恐龙的痕迹， 那就先去找中生代的岩石。 当然，你只能在沉积岩中找到化石。 这种岩石又沙和泥土形成。 岩浆形成的火成岩，比如花岗岩中， 就没有化石。 那种经受高温和挤压的变质岩里也没有化石。 你一定要去沙漠， 不是说恐龙只生活在沙漠， 他们生活在每一片大陆， 和所有可以想的到的环境中。 你需要去沙漠的原因是， 沙漠中的岩石没有太多植被覆盖 并且其风蚀能够使岩石暴露于地表。 所以，去寻找这三样东西吧： 特定年代的岩石， 沙漠的沉积岩， 然后让自己行走在地面上， 直到你看到岩石表面有显露出来的骨化石。
05:08
Here's a picture that I took in Southern Patagonia. Every pebble that you see on the ground there is a piece of dinosaur bone. So when you're in that right situation, it's not a question of whether you'll find fossils or not; you're going to find fossils. The question is: Will you find something that is scientifically significant? And to help with that, I'm going to add a fourth part to our formula, which is this: get as far away from other paleontologists as possible.
这是一张南巴塔哥尼亚的图片。 你现在看到的地上的每一片圆石， 都是恐龙的骨头。 所以当你身处这种环境下， 能否找到化石已不再是问题， 你一定会找到。 问题是，你发现的东西是否具有科研价值？ 为了帮助理解，我将为这个公式加上第四条。 那就是: 离那些古生物学家越远越好。
05:36
(Laughter)
（笑声...）
05:38
It's not that I don't like other paleontologists. When you go to a place that's relatively unexplored, you have a much better chance of not only finding fossils but of finding something that's new to science. So that's my formula for finding dinosaurs, and I've applied it all around the world.
并非我讨厌他们， 而是如果你去一个相对未被探索的地方， 你不仅更容易找到化石， 而且更有可能为科学带来新发现。 这就是我的恐龙寻找攻略。 我在全世界都使用过。
05:53
In the austral summer of 2004, I went to the bottom of South America, to the bottom of Patagonia, Argentina, to prospect for dinosaurs: a place that had terrestrial sedimentary rocks of the right age, in a desert, a place that had been barely visited by paleontologists. And we found this. This is a femur, a thigh bone, of a giant, plant-eating dinosaur. That bone is 2.2 meters across. That's over seven feet long.
在2004夏季， 我去到位于南半球南美的最南端， 阿根廷的巴塔哥尼亚最南部， 去探究恐龙： 那儿有特定年代的陆相沉积岩。 在那片还未被古生物学家发掘过的沙漠， 我们找到了这个。
06:23
Now, unfortunately, that bone was isolated. We dug and dug and dug, and there wasn't another bone around. But it made us hungry to go back the next year for more. And on the first day of that next field season, I found this: another two-meter femur, only this time not isolated, this time associated with 145 other bones of a giant plant eater. And after three more hard, really brutal field seasons, the quarry came to look like this. And there you see the tail of that great beast wrapping around me. The giant that lay in this grave, the new species of dinosaur, we would eventually call "Dreadnoughtus schrani." Dreadnoughtus was 85 feet from snout to tail. It stood two-and-a-half stories at the shoulder, and all fleshed out in life, it weighed 65 tons. People ask me sometimes, "Was Dreadnoughtus bigger than a T. rex?" That's the mass of eight or nine T. rex.
这是一个巨型食草恐龙的股骨。 这块股骨有2.2米宽， 也就是7尺多长。 遗憾的是，这是现存的唯一一块。 我们不停地挖，然而再也没有别的发现。 这使得我们来年又再一次踏上这片土地寻找。 在新探索的第一天， 我发现了这个：第二块两米的股骨 这不是唯一的发现， 我们又发现了145块食草恐龙的化石。 在三次艰苦的现场挖掘后， 挖掘现场场变成了这样。 你可以看到，这只大型野兽的尾骨在我身边蜷曲。 躺在挖掘现场的这个大型生物，是恐龙的新物种。 最后它被命名为”Dreadnoughtus schrani“ Dreadnoughtus 从头到尾有85英尺长。 站起来肩部有两层半楼这么高。 活着的时候身体有65吨重。 人们有时候问我，它比暴龙大吗？ 实际上，它有暴龙的8至9倍大。
07:22
Now, one of the really cool things about being a paleontologist is when you find a new species, you get to name it. And I've always thought it a shame that these giant, plant-eating dinosaurs are too often portrayed as passive, lumbering platters of meat on the landscape.
话说，成为古生物学家很棒的是， 你可以为发现的新物种命名。 我常常觉得羞愧的是，这些大型的食草恐龙 往往被描绘成笨拙的一大团肉。
07:37
(Laughter)
（笑声）
07:39
They're not. Big herbivores can be surly, and they can be territorial -- you do not want to mess with a hippo or a rhino or a water buffalo. The bison in Yellowstone injure far more people than do the grizzly bears. So can you imagine a big bull, 65-ton Dreadnoughtus in the breeding season, defending a territory? That animal would have been incredibly dangerous, a menace to all around, and itself would have had nothing to fear. And thus the name, "Dreadnoughtus," or, "fears nothing."
然而并非如此。 大型食草动物是很有领地意识的 你不会想和河马、犀牛或是水牛这样的动物胡来。 黄石公园的野牛比灰熊伤的人要多得多。 所以你能想象一个65吨的公牛， 在繁殖季节， 会怎样保护自己的领土？ 它们会难以置信的危险。 对于周围都是一种威胁，而它自己则无所畏惧。 所以他才被称为“Dreadnoughtus” 意为“无所畏惧”。
08:15
Now, to grow so large, an animal like Dreadnoughtus would've had to have been a model of efficiency. That long neck and long tail help it radiate heat into the environment, passively controlling its temperature. And that long neck also serves as a super-efficient feeding mechanism. Dreadnoughtus could stand in one place and with that neck clear out a huge envelope of vegetation, taking in tens of thousands of calories while expending very few. And these animals evolved a bulldog-like wide-gait stance, giving them immense stability, because when you're 65 tons, when you're literally as big as a house, the penalty for falling over is death. Yeah, these animals are big and tough, but they won't take a blow like that. Dreadnoughtus falls over, ribs break and pierce lungs. Organs burst. If you're a big 65-ton Dreadnoughtus, you don't get to fall down in life -- even once.
为了能长到像Dreadnoughtus这样体型的动物 他们生来就就很有效率。 其长颈和长尾能够散热， 间接地调节了自身的体温。 长颈提供了一个极度有效的进食机制。 Dreadnoughtus 能够站在原地， 用它长长的脖子把一大片植被一扫而光。 摄入数以万计的卡路里而同时消耗很少。 这些动物进化为牛头犬似的宽步动物。 这样能够有更好的稳定性。 因为如果你有65吨重，并且像房子那么大， 摔倒的后果 是死亡。 没错，这些动物又大又坚硬 但是他们承受不了这样的打击。 Dreadnoughtus摔倒后肋骨会断裂并且刺伤肺部， 导致器官爆裂。 如果你是一只65吨的Dreadnoughtus 你绝不想摔倒，一次都不。
09:09
Now, after this particular Dreadnoughtus carcass was buried and de-fleshed by a multitude of bacteria, worms and insects, its bones underwent a brief metamorphosis, exchanging molecules with the groundwater and becoming more and more like the entombing rock. As layer upon layer of sediment accumulated, pressure from all sides weighed in like a stony glove whose firm and enduring grip held each bone in a stabilizing embrace.
现在，在这只恐龙的躯体被埋葬 肉体被各种细菌和虫类侵蚀， 它的骨头会变质， 和地下水进行分子交换 变得越来越接近埋葬它的石头 当一层一层的沉积岩慢慢积累 各方面的压力会像石膏套一样向内增压 其坚硬而持久的握力把每块石头牢牢的包裹在内。
09:37
And then came the long ... nothing. Epoch after epoch of sameness, nonevents without number. All the while, the skeleton lay everlasting and unchanging in perfect equilibrium within its rocky grave. Meanwhile, Earth history unfolded above. The dinosaurs would reign for another 12 million years before their hegemony was snuffed out in a fiery apocalypse. The continents drifted. The mammals rose. The Ice Age came.
而后就是旷日持久的 虚无.... 经历了一个又一个纪元，什么都没有发生 恐龙的骨骼长久的处于一种恒定不变的 完美平衡的状态 在它的石头坟墓里。 同时，地球历史也随着展开。 恐龙会统治另一个1200万年 直到他们在地球大灾难中灭绝 然后大陆漂移，哺乳动物随之而生。 冰河时代来临。
10:10
And then, in East Africa, an unpromising species of ape evolved the odd trick of sentient thought. These brainy primates were not particularly fast or strong. But they excelled at covering ground, and in a remarkable diaspora surpassing even the dinosaurs' record of territorial conquest, they dispersed across the planet, ravishing every ecosystem they encountered, along the way, inventing culture and metalworking and painting and dance and music and science and rocket ships that would eventually take 12 particularly excellent apes to the surface of the Moon.
然后，在东非 一种没有前途的猿， 进化出了一种奇怪的用来感知事物的把戏。 他们不是特别快或是强壮 但他们很擅长占领土地 他们用一种出色的散居方式 他们的土地甚至超越了恐龙所征服的领地的记录 他们分布在地球的各个地方 他们掠夺每一个遇到的生态系统 在这个过程中，他们创造了文化，金属加工术，绘画 舞蹈，音乐 科学， 还有能搭载12名特别优秀猿猴 并将他们送去月球表面的火箭船。
10:52
With seven billion peripatetic Homo sapiens on the planet, it was perhaps inevitable that one of them would eventually trod on the grave of the magnificent titan buried beneath the badlands of Southern Patagonia. I was that ape. And standing there, alone in the desert, it was not lost on me that the chance of any one individual entering the fossil record is vanishingly small. But the Earth is very, very old. And over vast tracts of time, the improbable becomes the probable. That's the magic of the geological record. Thus, multitudinous creatures living and dying on an old planet leave behind immense numbers of fossils, each one a small miracle, but collectively, inevitable.
伴随着70亿在地球上走来走去的人 不可避免的 有人最终会踏在这些巨大生物的坟墓上 在巴塔哥尼亚南部的荒地下 我就是那个人 孤独的站在沙漠里 我没有忘记 每个人遇到化石的机会 都十分的渺小 但是地球非常非常的古老 在漫长的时间轨迹里，不可能变为可能 这就是地理的魔力 大量生物在这颗星球上生活、死去 留下大量的化石 每个化石都是一个奇迹 但都难以逃脱它们的命运。
11:40
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hits the Earth and wipes out the dinosaurs. This easily might not have been. But we only get one history, and it's the one that we have. But this particular reality was not inevitable. The tiniest perturbation of that asteroid far from Earth would have caused it to miss our planet by a wide margin. The pivotal, calamitous day during which the dinosaurs were wiped out, setting the stage for the modern world as we know it didn't have to be. It could've just been another day -- a Thursday, perhaps -- among the 63 billion days already enjoyed by the dinosaurs. But over geological time, improbable, nearly impossible events do occur. Along the path from our wormy, Cambrian ancestors to primates dressed in suits, innumerable forks in the road led us to this very particular reality. The bones of Dreadnoughtus lay underground for 77 million years. Who could have imagined that a single species of shrew-like mammal living in the cracks of the dinosaur world would evolve into sentient beings capable of characterizing and understanding the very dinosaurs they must have dreaded?
六千六百万年前，一颗小行星撞击地球 使恐龙灭绝 或许没这么简单 但我们只有一个历史，那就是我们所处的这个 但这个特定的现实并非无法改变 即使最微小的对于那颗遥远的小行星的扰动 也有可能让它远离我们的星球 那个关键的，灾难的性的恐龙灭绝的日子 为现代搭建了一个舞台 即使我们知道这并不必要 它完全可以是另一天 或许是一个周四 在恐龙生存的630亿天中 但是在地理的时间轴中 不大可能，甚至完全不可能的事情 确实会发生 从虫子，寒武纪的祖先 到穿着正式的人 不可计数的岔路带领我们到了这个独特的处境 Dreadnoughtus 的骨头在地下沉寂了7700万年。 又有谁能想到 那种精明的 在恐龙世界的缝隙中生存的哺乳动物 却进化成一种能感知的 有能力去描绘与理解 他们曾经害怕的恐龙的生物。
12:56
I once stood at the head of the Missouri River and bestraddled it. There, it's nothing more than a gurgle of water that issues forth from beneath a rock in a boulder in a pasture, high in the Bitterroot Mountains. The stream next to it runs a few hundred yards and ends in a small pond. Those two streams -- they look identical. But one is an anonymous trickle of water, and the other is the Missouri River. Now go down to the mouth of the Missouri, near St. Louis, and it's pretty obvious that that river is a big deal. But go up into the Bitterroots and look at the Missouri, and human prospection does not allow us to see it as anything special. Now go back to the Cretaceous Period and look at our tiny, fuzzball ancestors. You would never guess that they would amount to anything special, and they probably wouldn't have, were it not for that pesky asteroid.
我曾经站在密苏里河的源头 然后跨过它 那只不过是汩汩的 从一块比特鲁特山脉上草地上的石头下 流出的水罢了 它旁边的小溪只流了几百码 并停在了一个小池塘里 这两条小溪，看上去一模一样 但一条是无名的涓流 但另一条是密苏里河 现在来到密苏里河在圣路易斯的河口 很明显它是很大一条河 但是回到比特鲁特山脉，看看密苏里河 人类的眼光不足以让我们看出它有多么特别 再回到寒武纪时期 看看我们小小的，带绒毛的祖先 你永远不会猜到 他们会发展成任何种族 他们也许确实不会 如果没有那烦人的小行星。
13:55
Now, make a thousand more worlds and a thousand more solar systems and let them run. You will never get the same result. No doubt, those worlds would be both amazing and amazingly improbable, but they would not be our world and they would not have our history. There are an infinite number of histories that we could've had. We only get one, and wow, did we ever get a good one. Dinosaurs like Dreadnoughtus were real. Sea monsters like the mosasaur were real. Dragonflies with the wingspan of an eagle and pill bugs the length of a car really existed.
现在，再创造1000个世界，1000个太阳系 让它们运行 你永远不会有同样的结果 毫无疑问，它们会很惊人，令人感到不可能的惊人， 但它们不会是我们的世界，也不会有我们的历史 那里有无穷的历史是我们不曾有拥有的 但我们只有一个，哇，我们得到的是一个好的吗？ 像 Dreadnoughtus 一样的恐龙是真实存在的 像沧龙一样的水怪也是真的 翼展像鹰一样的一样的蜻蜓，汽车大小的飞虫 都真实存在。
14:30
Why study the ancient past? Because it gives us perspective and humility. The dinosaurs died in the world's fifth mass extinction, snuffed out in a cosmic accident through no fault of their own. They didn't see it coming, and they didn't have a choice. We, on the other hand, do have a choice. And the nature of the fossil record tells us that our place on this planet is both precarious and potentially fleeting. Right now, our species is propagating an environmental disaster of geological proportions that is so broad and so severe, it can rightly be called the sixth extinction. Only unlike the dinosaurs, we can see it coming. And unlike the dinosaurs, we can do something about it. That choice is ours.
为什么我们研究遥远的过去 因为它给与我们对于未来的看法 以及谦虚。 恐龙在地球的第五次大灭绝中死亡 它们没有做错什么，那只是一场宇宙的事故 它们没有预见到它的到来，也没有选择 但我们，却有着选择 化石揭示了我们在地球上的地位 很不稳固，有可能转瞬即逝。 现在，我们的种族正在引起关于地理平衡的灾难 这种灾难既广泛又致命 它现在可以被称为第六次大灭绝 唯一与恐龙不同的是 我们可以看见它的到来 与恐龙不同的是 我们可以做些什么 选择权在我们手里。
15:26
Thank you.
谢谢。
15:28
(Applause)
（鼓掌）