The Nation's T. rex
About sixty-six million years ago, Late Cretaceous; discovered 1988
A Tyrannosaurus rex crouches over the body of a Triceratops, jaws locked on its skull, one huge foot pinning the horned dinosaur to the ground. The pose is violent and specific, a predator or scavenger tearing the head from a carcass, and it was chosen deliberately to show these animals as living things rather than museum trophies. The skeleton is about twelve metres long and is one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus specimens ever found, with roughly eighty to ninety percent of the bones recovered, including a nearly perfect skull.
The fossil was discovered in 1988 by Kathy Wankel, a rancher, on land near the Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana, when she noticed arm bones weathering out of a hillside. Excavation by the Museum of the Rockies revealed the first complete Tyrannosaurus forelimb ever found, settling long arguments about how small those arms really were. Because the land belonged to the federal government, the specimen is owned by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which loaned it to the Smithsonian for fifty years in 2013. It travelled to Washington in a FedEx truck. Look at the skull: the teeth are the size of bananas, and the openings behind the eyes anchored the jaw muscles that gave this animal the strongest bite of any land animal known.
The skeleton is the centrepiece of the fossil hall that reopened in 2019 after a five-year renovation, the largest in the museum's history. The hall is arranged as a walk through time, from the earliest life to the present and on into the human-shaped future, and the Tyrannosaurus stands at the moment just before the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs. Notice the small, two-fingered hands, held close to the chest, and the ribs, which show signs of injuries that healed during the animal's lifetime.
Did You Know? The skeleton is on a fifty-year loan from the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which owns the land where it was found.
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