Tryannosaurus Rex Behavior
The name Tyrannosaurus rex means “tyrant lizard king,” and beyond a doubt these creatures reigned over the other land animals of the time. Today, 65 million years after they died out, they are one of the best-known animals in the world, living or extinct--a ferocious beast that has captured the fascination of the public in countless museum exhibits, news reports, movies, and books.
Scientific research on T. rex, as well as the public's fascination with it, began in 1902, when paleontologist Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City led a fossil expedition in Dawson County, Montana. At a sandstone outcrop, Brown and his crew discovered and excavated the partial skeleton of a large, unknown dinosaur. Brown's team returned for more material in 1903 and again in 1905. All together, they recovered the dinosaur's lower jaw, parts of the skull, the spine, shoulder, pelvis, hind limbs, and other fragmentary remains. They were unable to find the animal's forelimbs or neck bones.
Brown's boss at the American Museum, paleontologist Henry Osborn, published the first scientific description of the dinosaur and chose the name Tyrannosaurus rex. Brown's fossil became the tyrannosaur type specimen, the fossil that was used as the basis for describing the species. In 1906, Osborn determined that another partial specimen unearthed by Brown in 1900 was also a T. rex. Then in 1908, Brown and his colleagues excavated a more complete T. rex in Dawson County. Although the American Museum initially intended to prepare and display both skeletons, it sold the type specimen to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it was still on display in 2000.
When Brown and Osborn first began studying T. rex, the fields of paleontology and geology were in their infancy. Osborn and his contemporaries knew that dinosaurs were reptiles but not lizards, as scientists had first described them in the early 1800's. (Out of tradition, however, paleontologists continued to use the Latin word saurus, meaning lizard, in naming newly discovered dinosaurs.) But Osborn made some incorrect judgments of his own about the newly discovered species that later needed to be revised. For example, his estimated age for the T. rex specimens, 3 million to 4 million years old, was off by more than 60 million years. In the decades after the initial discoveries, scientists learned much more about the age of the Earth and the anatomy of T. rex and other dinosaurs.
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