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| Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois |
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| The adult T. rex hunted other dinosaurs, but it also scavenged. |
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| These jaws had a bite strength of 7,800 pounds, enough to crunch through bones. T. rex had potent stomach juices to digest whatever it gobbled. |
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| A T. rex juvenile put on five pounds a day. |
On the 1st day when the T-rex named "Sue" could be seen by the public at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois I was there. I was able to ask scientists questions about it.
Sue died at a young age, only 28 years. There was a lot of violence millions of years ago. It was almost as bad as it is today in Chicago.
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Wikipedia:
Close examination of the bones revealed that Sue was 28 years old at the time of death—the oldest T. rex known until Trix was found in 2013. A Nova episode said that the death occurred in a seasonal stream bed, which washed away some small bones. During life, this carnivore received several injuries and suffered from numerous pathologies.[9] An injury to the right shoulder region of Sue resulted in a damaged shoulder blade, a torn tendon in the right arm due most likely from a struggle with prey, and three broken ribs.[19] This damage subsequently healed (though one rib healed into two separate pieces), indicating Sue survived the incident. The left fibula is twice the diameter of the right one, likely the result of infection. Original reports of this broken bone were contradicted by the CT scans which showed no fracture.
Multiple holes in the front of the skull were originally thought to be either from a bacterial infection or bite marks by some other tyrannosaur. A subsequent study found these to be areas of parasitic infection instead, possibly from an infestation of an ancestral form of Trichomonas gallinae, a protozoan parasite that infests birds and ultimately leads to death by starvation due to internal swelling of the neck.[20][21] Damage to the back end of the skull was interpreted early on as a fatal bite wound. Subsequent study by Field Museum paleontologists found no bite marks. The distortion and breakage seen in some of the bones in the back of the skull was likely caused by post-mortem trampling. Some of the tail vertebrae are fused in a pattern typical of arthritis due to injury. The animal is also believed to have suffered from gout.[22] Scholars debate exactly how the animal died; the cause of death is ultimately unknown.[6]
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The skull on the dinosaur was created from the real skull that was too heavy to put it on Sue. I saw that skull. It was huge. There was more than enough room for a human's head.
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Sue is the nickname given to FMNH PR 2081, which is the largest, most extensive and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimen ever found, at over 90% recovered by bulk. It was discovered in August 1990, by Sue Hendrickson, an explorer and fossil collector, and was named after her. After ownership disputes were settled, the fossil was auctioned in October 1997, for US $8.3 million, the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur fossil, and is now a permanent feature at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois.
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An interesting fact: There is a close evolutionary relationship between T-rex and chickens. All birds including the chickens we eat are dinosaurs.
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Here is the New York Times article:
Tyrannosaurus Rex: The Once and Future King
The dinosaur will always be the predator potentate. But let’s not forget all the other members of the royal family.
By James Gorman
March 4, 2019
The king is dead. Long live the king!
Tyrannosaurus rex is still the biggest, baddest land predator of all time. It was the size of a city bus, with a head almost as long as Tom Cruise is tall and a smile every bit as devastating. Scientists are just as smitten as the rest of us.
After T. rex was first described in 1905, the world’s most charismatic megafossil could have turned out to be a mere curiosity. There was no guarantee more would be found, nor could anyone anticipate how interesting its history would turn out to be. But for more than 100 years, T. rex has been an extraordinary gift to the study of dinosaurs, and perhaps to science in general.
Recently, the pace of discovery has quickened, and many of the findings about T. rex, the other tyrannosaurs who were its relatives and the prehistoric lives they led will be celebrated with “T. Rex: The Ultimate Predator,” a new exhibit opening March 11 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
In June, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington will reopen its hall of fossils, crowned in glory with its own T. rex in a new stance.
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The curators of the exhibit in New York are two longtime researchers on T. rex and other dinosaurs: Mark Norell, the curator of fossil amphibians, reptiles and birds at the museum; and Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University.
In a joint interview, they were insistent that T. rex is far more than just a pretty, horrifyingly scary face. It’s an astonishing evolutionary achievement and a scientific star.
Dr. Norell said T. rex has helped foster a surge in dinosaur paleontology over the last 20 years, evident in the rising number of researchers and new fossils, and in the increasing sophistication of techniques to study the finds.
“In the last 30 years, the number of tyrannosaurs has increased threefold,” he said. In terms of technology, “it’s a different world.”
Dr. Erickson added: “The golden age of paleontology is right now.”
Between a T. Rex’s Powerful Jaws, Bones of Its Prey Exploded May 18, 2017
Other researchers, like Philip J. Currie, a dinosaur paleobiologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, agreed that the field has exploded. “More is going on now than ever,” he said. When he started in the 1970s, “there were probably only six of us in the world who were paid” specifically to study dinosaurs.
Others taught vertebrate anatomy or biology, or were dedicated amateurs. “Right now, there’s maybe 150,” he said, not to mention a “colossal increase in the number of scientific papers.”
From the time it was discovered, T. rex has been a sensation, attracting both the public and researchers. Each new skeleton or partial skeleton was hailed.
Some, like the T. rex skeleton named Sue, which now stands in the Field Museum in Chicago, attracted international attention. Sue was found in 1990, the biggest and most complete T. rex skeleton ever. The museum paid $8.3 million dollars for it.
The reconstruction of another giant found shortly after Sue, known as Scotty, will be unveiled at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina in May. Perhaps the name of the town will prompt overdue questions about why the great dinosaur was not named Tyrannosaurus regina.
It’s not because all the specimens found so far are male. There is no consensus on what sex they are, because it’s just not that easy to tell — particularly if all you’ve got is a skull or a thigh.
Few finds are 90 percent intact, as Sue was (named for her discoverer, Sue Hendrickson). One T. rex so far was found to have a kind of bone that was said to clearly identify it as female. But even that result is controversial.
Behind the scenes of the reconstructions of the greatest T. rexes that curators can find, paleontologists are gathering a wealth of new knowledge about these dinosaurs. The findings frequently are driven by the discoveries of many fossils of smaller tyrannosaurs worldwide.
Studies using CT scans, chemical analyses and new microscopic techniques have also illuminated the behavior, evolution and sensory abilities of T. rex itself.
Investigations of where and how muscle attached to the skull showed that its jaw had a bite strength of 7,800 pounds, enough to cleave the bones of other massive dinosaurs. Coprolites, fossilized feces, showed the presence of partly digested bones, indicating that it had the stomach juices to cope with them.
Dr. Erickson did microscopic studies of bone growth rings, which led to a determination of how old individual dinosaurs were and how fast they grew. T. rex apparently put on about five pounds a day in its teenage years. It lived to 30 at most. It was, as Dr. Erickson describes it, “the James Dean of dinosaurs. Live fast, die young.”
For a while, there was a lively debate about whether T. rex was more like a vulture than a hawk, too awkwardly built to chase down and kill prey. Healed bite marks on other dinosaur fossils, and a T. rex tooth embedded in the tail of an duckbill dinosaur, indicate that T. rex did hunt other dinosaurs, although it probably also scavenged, as most predators do.
Judging by its relatives, and by fossilized footprints of a group of the dinosaurs together, T. rex was a social animal. It probably hunted in groups, certainly when it was younger. Its behavior probably changed as it grew. When it was only half the length of a bus, it likely ran a lot faster than when it was full grown.
The dinosaur’s brain was big even for its size, suggesting higher intelligence than other dinosaurs. It had great vision, with the eyes moved forward on its skull for good depth perception. Its ears were adapted for hearing low frequency sounds. Its brain case suggests T. rex’s olfactory abilities were superb, even though a good sense of smell was probably rare in dinosaurs.
And it had feathers, more when it was young, but probably a tail plume, at least, at maturity. No T. rex fossil has been found that shows the presence of feathers but, said Dr. Norell, given what we know about other tyrannosaurs, related dinosaurs and the course of dinosaur evolution, “We have as much evidence that T. rex had feathers as we do that Neanderthals had hair.”
How T. rex came to be, and what its relatives were like, is at the heart of both the exhibit in New York and recent science. T. rex is just one species among many. The superfamily that contains the tyrannosaurs includes more than two dozen other dinosaurs. They date back to 100 million years before T. rex lived.
“It took evolution a long time to make T. rex,” said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and author of a recent book on dinosaurs.
Most of the early tyrannosaurs were small, some as small as a chicken. Many were dog-size to deer-size. (Just last week, a smallish tyrannosaur from North America was reported.) These earlier tyrannosaurs were not the top predators for most of those 100 million years.
“For most of the time, they were second- or even third-tier predators,” Dr. Brusatte said. “For most of their history, tyrannosaurs weren’t that special.”
And then T. rex emerged near the very end of the age of the dinosaurs, becoming the dominant predator in North America.
The rise of T. rex is a lesson in how evolution works, Dr. Brusatte said: with no preordained plan. Over the millenniums, many predatory dinosaurs appeared and disappeared. The tyrannosaurs were successful, and over time evolved.
But if other large dinosaurs like allosaurus hadn’t gone extinct, there might not have been room at the top of the food chain for a creature like T. rex.
It could be said that T. rex lucked out. But then, it ruled at the very time 65 million years ago when all the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct.
Envy always follows royalty. And Dr. Brusatte said there is some resentment that T. rex draws so much attention and so many paleontologists.
“People who study non-dinosaurs say dinosaurs get all the attention,” he said. “People who study dinosaurs say theropods get all the attention. People who study theropods, say, oh, tyrannosaurs get all the attention.”
And among tyrannosaurs, there is only one star, the king. But there’s a reason T. rex gets so much attention.
“It deserves it,” Dr. Currie said.
James Gorman is a science writer at large and the host and writer of the video series “ScienceTake.” He joined The Times in 1993 and is the author of several books, including “How to Build a Dinosaur,” written with the paleontologist Jack Horner.
A version of this article appears in print on March 4, 2019, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Still the Biggest Star.
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