![]() Then on 5 September 1988, the rancher Kathy Wankel inadvertently stumbled across a strange protrusion emerging from the earth near Fort Peck Lake in Montana – it was like the corner of an envelope, she later told the Washington Post. ![]() Many were based on its cousin Gorgosaurus, another tyrannosaur which also roamed North America during the Late Cretaceous, around 66 to 101 million years ago. But this one also didn't have its arms.įor most of the following century, scientists could only make educated guesses about what T rex's forearms might have looked like. This was an unusually perfect specimen, and its towering figure inhabits the American Museum of Natural History to this day. Six years later, the fossil hunter uncovered another individual some way to the south, at Big Dry Creek in Colorado. The initial skeleton included little more than a sparse assortment of jumbled bones – among them were the pelvis, a single shoulder blade, a single upper arm bone, and part of its skull. rex was unearthed in 1902, it would be some time before scientists first gazed on its strange arms. With arms that might measure just 3ft (0.9m) long on a 45-ft (13.7m) individual, this formidable carnivore's hilariously small appendages have been a source of intense speculation ever since they were discovered – despite decades of studying them, to this day no one has any idea what they're for. They're so different than anything around today, what is the point," says L J Krumenacker, a palaeontologist at Idaho State University. "You can look at his arms and say, well, these are ridiculous. rex is almost as famous for its withered little arms as for its enormous teeth – they're so totally out of proportion, they almost look like they've been plucked from another species and simply stuck on, in a throwback to the hilarious blunders of bone assembly from the 19th Century (such as the time Stegosaurus' signature diamond-shaped back plates were added to its tail instead). What could have been their purpose? And how did they end up being so small?īizarrely, they were. rex skeleton was missing all its fingers and both its forearms, which were drawn on early portraits using surprisingly accurate guesswork – prompting speculation that they surely couldn't really be that stumpy. " Little did he know, it was more like the find of a century – a discovery that would transform our understanding of dinosaurs and galvanise public interest in this previously obscure group of ancient creatures well into the modern era.īut right from the beginning, one aspect of these kings of the "tyrant lizards" was deeply mysterious: their puny arms. In a letter to Osborn, Brown wrote: "There is no question but what this is the find of the season so far for scientific importance. ![]() This was Tyrannosaurus rex – the first ever discovered. Its hip bone was 5ft (1.5m) long, let alone the rest. ![]() Brown had uncovered a number of bones from a promising large carnivorous dinosaur that was entirely new to science. The specimen was banished to the museum basement, but he felt that it might as well have been thrown away.īut now things were looking up. Only then did Osborn discover that hidden within its stony tomb, the fossil had been a crumpled, misshapen mess all along. It had been tenderly carted all 2,100 miles (3,379km) from the dig site – a labourious, risky journey involving horses, railway lines and lots of heavy lifting. Henry Fairfield Osborn had recently taken delivery of their latest prize, a vast hunk of rock containing the skull of a kind of early duck-billed dinosaur. They urgently needed something good to send back to the American Museum of Natural History.įrom his office in New York, Brown's boss was just as anxious as his distant employees. Amid soaring temperatures and caking dust, they searched for fossils – hacking away at the golden-brown earth with chisels and pickaxes, carving out mini quarries at scattered locations, sometimes uncovering half-decent finds only to abandon them. It was August 1902 and Barnum Brown had taken a team of palaeontologists deep into the strange, undulating landscape of banded hills in the Badlands of Montana. The end of the season was approaching rapidly – the last shot at success in what had been a very expensive expedition. ![]()
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