Will The Real Tyrannosaurus Rex Please Stand Up
WSIH NORTH AMERICA, 65 MILLION YEARS AGO. The last of the dinosaurs are on the move. They're roaming inland and along the margins of a big, shallow inland sea. These animals are huge, many more than twenty feet long. But there are far fewer kinds of them than there were 10 million years before, when the seas were wider and the Huge herds of horned dinosaurs and giant duckbills tromp across the land, heading north in summer, south in winter. They munch on ferns and flowering plants. As they go,...
I
Ilium of Tyrannosaurus rex, 120 Indiana, dinosaurs in, 19 Infrared cameras, for finding dinosaurs, 29 Intelligence of Tyrannosaurus rex, 187 Interaction among Tyrannosaurus rexes, 170-171 Jawbone of Tyrannosaurus rex, 107-109 Jensen, Dinosaur Jim, 99 Johnson, Kirk, 149, 155 Jordan, Montana, 57 Jurassic period, dinosaurs in, 126 K Kinds genera of dinosaurs, 17, 128-129 King Kong, Tyrannosaurus rex in, 86 Knight, Charles R., 83-86 Kurzanov, Sergei, 133 Lagosuchus, 124 Lambe, Lawrence, 132...
The Frontloader Transferred The Fossil Bundles To A Tiltbed Truck For The Bumpy
and sometimes stepping on the fossils, and turning Pat white . This is not my favorite activity. The only digging I did was separating the skull from the pelvis. The skull is the most important part of the anatomy because of what it can tell us about the animal's evolution and behavior. And it's the most delicate. This skull was so close to the pelvis that moving either might damage both. So if anyone was going to screw up, I wanted to be the one. I began scraping with an awl until I found a...
discovering TREX
HE TOWN OF JORDAN in eastern Montana has been the headquarters of T. rex country for almost a hundred years. But I knew I wouldn't find anyone who had known the original T. rex discoverer, the great Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, since Brown had stopped digging here in 1909. The folks around Jordan surprised me, though, especially an energetic lady named Pauline Polly Wischmann, a historian from the nearby town of Circle. Pauline hadn't met Brown, but...
T Rex Weather
kirk johnson collected this beautiful fossil leaf in montana of an extinct member of the laurales. a group that contains avocado and cinnamon trees. Knowing the plants tells us something about the climate in T. rex's time. We have modern relatives for many of these plants and so we know what climates suit them best. According to these analogies, during most of T. rex's time, the climate was what you'd expect to find on average in North Carolina, but without so much change between seasons....
lifestyles of the huge and famous
NCE WE'VE FOUND AS much hard data as we can from our T. rex skeleton and all the others, and from T. rex's environment, we're back to speculating about T. rex in the flesh, this time with some more reasonable inferences. We're left with an awful lot of pure guesswork, however, since we still don't have a T. rex nest, eggs, or much of a young T. rex. It's a reasonable guess to say female T. rexes laid eggs, since we have eggs from many other dinosaurs, including carnivores like the man-sized...
TREX predator or scavenger
AAA AS T.REX A VICIOUS killer Ask mostanyone, including most paleontologists, and they'll say yes. Ask me, I'd say no. You may have noticed that I haven't referred to it as a predator once in this book, only as a carnivore. We're all guessing, but I think those who cast T. rex as a predator are letting some common prejudices cloud their thinking. For sure, T. rex ate a lot. It takes a lot of hamburger to feed a six-ton, or bigger, animal. But it shouldn't have mattered to T. rex whether lunch...
The Best Fossil Finds Are Often Those Where Only A Bit Of Bone Sticks Out
ABOVE THE SURFACE. IN THOSE CASES MOST OF THE BONE IS STILL SHELTERED FROM EROSION. THAT'S HOW IT WAS WITH KATHY WANK EL'S T. REX. during the long dry spells. When it shrinks it cracks all over, making the ground into a layer of cracked crust over dust, stuff we call popcorn. You can just imagine what the popcorn cracking does to bones. If a T. rex died and was fossilized in bentonite, it could end up in a million pieces. Yet another reason it's so hard to find a dead T. rex is that there...
Cretaceous Park T Rexs Animal World
We know a lot more about T. rex's world than we do about most other dinosaur communities. Quite a few of the dinosaurs we know about come from the era of the tyrannosaurs, the last 15 million years of dinosaur life. That's less than 10 percent of dinosaur time. The richest collections of dinosaurs, however, come from Montana and western Canada at the time of Albertosaurus, several million years before T. rex lived. By most estimates though not all , there were fewer kinds of dinosaurs by the...
the bare bones
OW THAT WE'VE GOT all the bones back in the lab, what do we do with them Usually we put them in storage for a few years. Unlike wine, they don't get any better in the basement. But, like other paleontology museums, the Museum of the Rockies has a huge backlog of fossils waiting to be cleaned. And just because T. rex has the biggest fan club doesn't mean we can shove aside the preparation of other valuable study specimens when a T. rex comes in the door. We've got a waiting list for fossil...
bibliography
Wherever possible I've relied on what other scientists tell me when it comes to describing other people's research. I grew up with undiagnosed dyslexia, and reading is not easy for me. Besides, scientific papers are pretty tough going, even for scientists. But I've included some papers that I've read among the publications I've consulted to help me with this book, just in case you're interested in looking through them. It is worth reading at least one scientific paper to see how a scientist...
Likely Tyrannosaurids
Alectrosaurus olseni was named by Charles Gilmore in 1933 from bones found in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia. Gilmore may have combined two different animals. Ken Carpenter thinks Alectrosaurus is not a tyrannosaurid, but Phil Currie believes it was a primitive tyrannosaurid. It was about sixteen feet long and less than half a ton in weight, with skinny shoulders and legs. Alioramus remotus was named by Sergei Kurzanov of the USSR in 1976 from a skull and a few bones from Mongolia. Alioramus...
T-rex Arm Muscles
One of the greatest features of Kathy Wankel's T. rex is that it has all the arm bones, shoulder to fingers. Only the claws are missing. That's the first time we've ever had all those parts from a T. rex. And those bones allowed my co-workers to draw some conclusions about how those arms worked, conclusions that surprised me. What didn't surprise me was how small T. rex's arms were no longer than mine. In evolution it's an amazing reduction over earlier tyrannosaurs. Once you look at the actual...
Locked In Battle With A Protoceratops Both Were Apparently Killed Suddenly By A
RIGHT ARTIST ROBERT WALTERS DEPICTED THEIR BATTLE IN THIS PAINTING. recently dead animal, unless of course you find a bullet hole in its skull. There are exceptions. One set of dinosaur fossils from Mongolia shows a small predator and a horned dinosaur wrapped around each other. It seems some tragedy befell both of them before one of them could kill the other. And a huddle of young armored dinosaurs found in a sand dune in Inner Mongolia a few years ago probably died just as they lay from the...
the image of TREX the making of a monster
HE MAN WHO NAMED Trex., Henry Fairfield Osbom, is also the one who gave several generations of scientists, artists, moviemakers, and so most of us, our sense of what T. rex looked like and acted like ferocious, upright, and tail dragging. That was the pose of the best-known T. rex skeleton of them all, the one that has thrilled so many youngsters and inspired a bunch of them including Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould to become pale- That's how T. rex stood for most of this century at the...
Rex Bones 1
most interested in the beer and the horseshoes. In the daytime I was rarely around to see what was doing. Instead, I was off walking around looking for more fossils, making maps and notes. Prospecting is not always productive, and sometimes it's dangerous. Once, looking out for fossils and not where I was going, I caught my heel going down a slope and tumbled and slid a good fifty feet. Less than a mile from the site I did come on two Triceratops horns, but the rest of the skull wasn't much to...
T Rex Discoverer Kathy 1
WANKEL, HER HUSBAND, TOM, AND THEIR KIDS CAME OUT TO HELP US EXCAVATE. happy to see them all, especially if it means folks haven't dug any farther and have left that job to us. I know it's hard to resist the urge to dig up buried treasure once you've found it, but there's a lot of information lost and fossils ruined by amateur bone-hunters who insist on excavating fossils themselves. Kathy showed the few bones she'd dug to me and Pat Leiggi, my longtime field crew chief. Right away I could tell...
Individual Bones
Here's a little bit of information about some of the individual bones of Kathy Wankel's T. rex skeleton that we've cleaned and that Kit Mather has illustrated. We've humerus the size of this arm bone suggests it was used for something, and so do its very distinctly marked muscle insertions, we thought it was pretty massive, but compared to sue it turns out to be rather light. humerus the size of this arm bone suggests it was used for something, and so do its very distinctly marked muscle...
The Complete T Rex
phil currie is one of the few people who can identify any known carnivorous dinosaur from a single tooth. this time he's found a carnivore's leg bone, in the gobi desert of chinese mongolia. phil currie is one of the few people who can identify any known carnivorous dinosaur from a single tooth. this time he's found a carnivore's leg bone, in the gobi desert of chinese mongolia. are splitters. They see most every difference between skeletons as reflecting different species. Other...
Why Did T Rex Get So Big
T. rex wasn't the only giant dinosaur of its day. The herding duckbills and horned dinosaurs were almost as hefty. So I'll rephrase the question Why were the last dinosaurs so big Well, maybe it's because the seaway in the middle of North America was drying out and there was more space for bigger animals to browse. And paleontologists have thought for a while that as the herbivores got bigger, the carnivores did, too. Each group of animals seems to start out small and get bigger over time. Some...
The Plant Evidence
Finding fossil plant evidence isn't easy. Fossil bones are usually preserved in stream channels. Fossil plants turn up in stream channels and also in floodplains, ponds, lakes, and deltas. In ancient stream channels, at least, only the bigger, sturdier leaves, plants, and trees become fossilized. They're the only ones strong enough to hold up to the force of the water that was moving them and the mud that covered them at some break in the flow where debris piled up. But where you find fossil...
Porker But Knight Did Him Leaning Forward With His Tail Off The Ground Field
TOP RIGHT T. REX LOOKS A LOT SWIFTER IN THIS MODERN PAINTING, COPYRIGHT GREG PAUL. 1 9 88. RIGHT T. REX AS A COOPERATIVE HUNTER. HERE T. REX CIRCLES A HERD OF TRICERATOPS. I DON'T BELIEVE THIS SCENE FOR A LOT OF REASONS. BUT IT IS A NICE PAINTING BY MARK HALLETT. LEFT MUCH OF WESTERN NORTH AMERICA WAS UNDERWATER IN THE HIGH WATER DAYS OF THE MLD-CRETACEOUS. 94 MILLION YEARS AGO. BY T. REX'S TIME. 67 MILLION TO 65 MILLION YEARS AGO. THE SEAWAY HAD SHRUNK A LOT. MAPS BY CHRIS SCOTESE. NEXT PAGE...
The Tyrannosaurid Family
II is by no means clear which animals truly belong to the tyrannosaurids. Several scientists are reviewing the fossil evidence now, and new finds are made all the time, so chances are this list, like all others, will soon be altered. For now, George Olshevsky lists the following genera and species of tyrannosaurids Albertosaurus megragracilis was named by artist Gregory Paul in 1988. This was a smaller, more lightly built species of albertosaur, still as big as a rhinoceros. Albertosaurus...
Brian Franczak Tyrannosaurus
Top Donna Braginetz 1989, from Denver Museum of Natural History Bottom Photograph by Don Lessem Page 14-15 - Douglas Henderson Page 16-17 - Deborah Perugi 1989 Page 18 - Adam Kelley 1993 Page 20-21 - Robert Walters Page 23 - Kit Mather 1993 Page 24-25 - African Game photo Animals Animals, photo by Karen Tweedy-Holmes Page 26 - John Sibbick Page 28 - Adam Kelley 1993 Page 30-31 - Photograph by Don Lessem Page 31 - Robert Walters 1980 Page 33 - Donna Braginetz 1993 Page 34-35 - Photograph Bruce...
The Eleven And Only T Rexes
1.Thefirstdiscoveryof a T. rex, in 1900 by Barnum Brown in western Wyoming. Originally named Dynamosaurus imperiosus by Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the specimen is now in the British Museum of Natural History in London. 2. The type specimen of T. rex, found in 1902 by Barnum Brown in Garfield County, Montana, named by Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1905. On display at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this T. rex is 50 percent complete. 3. T. rex excavated in 1907 and 1908 by...
How Do You TELL THE SEX OF A T REX
When we compare Kathy Wankel's T. rex to the ten others we have, we get some sense of the variation that may have existed among individual T. rexes. When you look at human skeletons, you can see a great many differences. No two human skeletons, or two dinosaur skeletons, look exactiy alike. And we know that human skeletons vary according to race and by sex as well. As for T. rex, eleven skeletons, all of them seemingly adult, still don't make for a big enough sample to say much about the...
The Skull
The skull is the most complicated piece of any animal's anatomy, and the one that undergoes the most evolutionary change. It has many openings fenestrae and tubes for air passages and nerve canals. T. rex had an enormous skull, nearly as long as I am, and I'm six feet tall. Where it is solid, the roof of T. rex's skull is three or four inches thick heavy duty, in the words of paleontologist Phil Currie. On some dinosaurs, skulls were light, small, and delicate and so very hard to come by as...
How SMART AND SENSITIVE WAS T REX
T. rex's brain is long gone, but the braincase reveals how large and complicated that brain must have been. The braincase, together with the size and position of the openings for the eyes, ears, and nose, tells us much about how developed the animal's senses were. When you consider the size of the animal that went with that brain, the brain doesn't seem quite so imposing. Elephants and rhinoceroses have much bigger brains, and these animals weigh less than T. rex did. But T. rex's brain was...
Tyrannosaurus Teeth
T. rex had bigger choppers, more varied in size and shape, than those of other tyrannosaurids. There might have been fifty teeth in its mouth at any one time. Up front, it had incisor-like teeth, as all tyrannosaurids do, four on each premaxilla, the bone in the front of the upper jaw. Among meat-eating dinosaurs, only the little Troodons and tyrannosaurids had these. The shape of these teeth was fairly wide and flat, designed for nipping, according to tooth expert Phil Currie. They would have...
T REX How FAST HOW HEAVY
You can't answer one of these questions without addressing the other. And to make an informed guess about either, you need to take a close look at T. rex's complete skeleton, something only lately possible. When you put T. rex's bones back together, there aren't a lot of ways to get them to fit. You can make a skeleton, and better yet a cast, go wherever you want it to by forcing and bending. A good example is the dramatic new Barosaurus mount at the American Museum of Natural History....
Around The Television Crews Here Pat Leiggi Is Trying To Keep A Safe Distance
wanted the press there. It s good publicity for the museum and the state, and showing people what we do is the educational message we want to get out. And you can t play favorites once you invite the press in. But doing that without turning it into a media circus isn t easy. Shelley controlled the free-for-all by scheduling press days, as well as special viewing days for folks from the area, and for the brass of the army, which did so much to help us. We knew digging up the best T. rax yet...