The most complete and best-quality Tyrannosaurus rex skull ever discovered is up for sale, with a reserve price of US$1.8 million. The find, which paleontologists estimate to be about 20 percent of the animal, includes vertebrae, ribs, hips and lower jaw bones.
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Scientists worked over the summer to excavate the bones in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana.
The team later encased the massive skull in a protective plaster cast, lifted the 2,500-pound load onto a flatbed truck with the help of local Montana ranchers and drove it to Seattle.
The back end (squamosal bone) of a T. rex skull discovered by Burke Museum paleontologists in Montana.
The public can see the plaster-covered T. rex skull, along with other T. rex fossils and paleontology field tools, in a lobby display at the Burke Museum – the Washington State Museum of Natural History and Culture – beginning Saturday, August 20, through Sunday, October 2, 2016. So far, the scientists can see the right side of the skull – from base to snout, including teeth – and they think it’s likely the left side, now trapped in rock, is intact too.
Tufts: “We actually didn’t know we had a T. rex skull, what we saw was basically like a loose boulder with some big bones sticking out of it”.
There are only 14 other almost complete T. rex skulls that have been found, the museum said. The skull was preserved upside-down in the rock, and a black tooth from the T. rex’s upper jaw can be seen protruding from the rock in the center of the photo.
This grueling task took a team of eight to ten people almost two weeks of continuous digging with jackhammers, axes and shovels.
Based on the size of its skull, the T. rex was about 40 feet long in life, and its hips would have come up almost to the height of a city bus, Wilson said.
The skull arrives in a plaster cast. “The Hell Creek Project is responsible for finding the most T. rex specimens in the world, with 11 to date”, said Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures CEO and Paleontologist. The museum plans to display the T. rex skull in the New Burke Museum when it opens in 2019.
The skull is now in a plaster jacket and will go on display that way starting Saturday at the Burke Museum.
Including the skull, 20 percent of the animal’s bones have been found.
‘The combination of the skull features, the size of the bones, and the honeycomb-like appearance of the bones tell us this is a T. rex, ‘ said Wilson.
Researchers have debated for years on the top speed of a Tyrannosaurs rex.
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But researchers assert that these prints only represent a single event, and one in which the dinosaur was walking through mud. That would be 300,000 years before the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs (except for birds, which are considered their modern-day descendants).
