How a Giant T. Rex Packs for a Road Trip
April 14, 2014---The Nation's
T. rex, one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found, is taking a 2,000-mile road trip from Montana to its new home in Washington, D.C. To prepare the dinosaur fossils for the journey, a team of experts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of the Rockies packed and cataloged the hundreds of bones to ensure their safe arrival.
Click here to read more about the T. rex's trip
Jack Horner: It was the largest, most complete T. rex that had ever been found.
Matthew Carrano: It’s a very complete specimen of T. rex, it’s probably about 85% complete. The animal is something like 40 feet long, and about 17 feet tall when it’s all put together, and it represents an animal that when alive would have weight something like 5 or 6 tons.
Jack Horner: 65 million years, as far as how long ago it lived. 18 years is how old it was when it died. They’re packing up the Wankel T. rex, getting it ready to ship it off to the Smithsonian.
Cathy Van Arsdale: What we’re doing today and the rest of this week is we’re taking an inventory of each fragment and each element that are in these 16 crates, before they go on the truck to be transported to Washington, DC.
Pat Leiggi: What you’re doing is you’re examining every bone and you’re taking a look at it and you describe each bone or bone fragment. The team determines what type of condition it’s in, it could be in fair, good, excellent. It’ll vary depending on how it was preserved in the first place.
Cathy Van Arsdale: Then there are a bunch of small fragments that are in boxes within these crates, and they’re wrapped in different foams and packing material that have to be unwrapped in order for us to inventory, and get a condition on, and photograph. We’re photographing every piece as well. It was found by Kathy Wankel in 1988.
Pat Leiggi: And she came across some fragments. Not knowing what they were, brought them to the Museum of the Rockies a couple of months later. Jack Horner was there that day.
Jack Horner: I had never seen bones like them before, but I recognized them right away as being the arm bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex, and they were the first arm bones of any Tyrannosaurus rex.
Cathy Van Arsdale: The Corps of Engineers is stewards of this fossil for the American people, so it actually belongs to them. And that’s why it’s going to the Nation’s museum.
Matthew Carrano: The dinosaur is coming to Washington to live at the National Museum of Natural History for the next 50 years.
Cathy Van Arsdale: When the term of the loan is up it will be coming back to Montana.
Tammy Brubaker: We’re ready to go. We are the lucky ones. We are the only ones that have ever done this. My husband is the coolest uncle and grandfather in the world because he gets to haul the T. rex across the country.
Jack Horner: Sad? No, not at all. I’m happy to see it go. We have a number of T. rexes here. This is Montana, this is where they come from. I think it’s great that we can share one of our specimens with the Smithsonian and that it will be the most viewed T. rex in the world.
