The story
In 1905 Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, described Tyrannosaurus rex, the tyrant lizard king, in the museum's Bulletin. The bones came from Barnum Brown, the museum's collector, who found a partial skeleton in the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana in 1902. In the same paper, Osborn named another set of Wyoming bones, collected by Brown in 1900, as Dynamosaurus imperiosus, a name later merged with Tyrannosaurus.
Brown was one of the museum collectors working in the American fossil-hunting tradition that the Bone Wars had built, and he went on to hunt in Montana, Alberta and many other places. A first skeleton was mounted at the museum in 1915 and became a symbol of the whole age of dinosaurs. The Montana skeleton was later sold to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Since then more than 30 specimens have been found, including Sue, discovered by Sue Hendrickson in 1990 in South Dakota, one of the most complete skeletons known.
Why it mattered
- The naming gave the public its king of dinosaurs and a model for popular science.
- Brown's skeletons made museums eager to build dinosaur halls, which carried the subject to a wider audience.
- It set up the long scientific study of Hell Creek and the last days of the dinosaurs.
Sources
- Tyrannosaur: Hell Creek discoveries Britannica
- 7 Questions About Tyrannosaurus rex American Museum of Natural History
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