Specimens of Tyrannosaurus

Joe LaPoint The first-named fossil specimen which can be attributed to Tyrannosaurus rex consists of two partial vertebrae (one of which has been lost) found by Edward Drinker Cope in 1892.

Cope believed that they belonged to an "agathaumid" (ceratopsid) dinosaur, and named them Manospondylus gigas, meaning "giant porous vertebra" in reference to the numerous openings for blood vessels he found in the bone.

[citation needed] In 1905 when the type was described by Osborn, previous knowledge of dinosaur predators at the time were based on Jurassic carnosaurs, so the short fore-arms of the Tyrannosaurus were treated with extreme caution, with suspicion that bones of a smaller theropod had become jumbled with the remains of the bigger fossil.

[5][7] Following the 1941 entry of the United States into World War II, the holotype was sold to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh for protection against possible bombing raids.

This skull, Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH) 7541, measures 60 centimeters (2.0 ft) in length and was originally classified as a species of Gorgosaurus (G. lancensis) by Charles W. Gilmore in 1946.

[16] In 1966, a crew working for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County under the direction of Harley Garbani discovered another T. rex (LACM 23844) which included most of the skull of a very large, mature animal.

[18] Black Beauty was found in 1980 by a high school student, Jeff Baker, while on a fishing trip with a friend in the region of the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta.

[21] In 2009, a paper by Jack Horner and colleagues illustrated the concept of parasitic infections in dinosaurs by analysing the lesions found on the cranial bones of Black Beauty.

[30] In 1988, local rancher Kathy Wankel discovered another Tyrannosaurus rex in Hell Creek sediments on an island in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge of Montana.

Doctoral candidate Mary Schweitzer found heme, a biological form of iron that makes up hemoglobin (the red pigment in blood).

[41] Susan Hendrickson of the Black Hills Institute discovered the best-preserved Tyrannosaurus currently known, in the Hell Creek Formation near Faith, South Dakota, on 12 August 1990.

Williams quickly offered up "Sue" for auction by Sotheby's in New York, where it was sold to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for US$8.4 million—the highest price ever paid for a fossil before being surpassed by Stan.

[56] The fossils of Montana's T. rex are exhibited at Museum of the Rockies as part of a full skeletal mount completed with cast elements replacing the missing bones.

The specimen was found in the summer of 2001 by Carol Tuck and Bill Harrison on an expedition led by Burpee Museum curator Michael Henderson.

Although Larson (2013) saw Jane as more identical to CMNH 7541 and LACM 28471 than to adult T. rex in having a higher tooth count, large pneumatic foramen on the center of the quadratojugal, T-shaped postorbital, and fused shoulder blade and pelvis,[70] Yun (2015) concurred with the opinion of most workers that Nanotyrannus is a juvenile T. rex, noting that a juvenile specimen of Tarbosaurus described by Tsuihiji et al. (2011) also has a T-shaped postorbital.

[32] This specimen was found in the lower portion of the Hell Creek Formation near Fort Peck Lake in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Garfield County, Montana.

[62] In the March 2005 Science magazine, Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and colleagues announced the recovery of soft tissue from the marrow cavity of a fossilized femur belong to B-Rex.

[72] Paleontologist Thomas Kaye of the University of Washington in Seattle hypothesized that the soft-tissue is permineralized biofilm created by bacteria while digesting and breaking down the original specimen.

[74] A T. rex specimen was discovered on private land in Harding County, South Dakota, once in 1981 by Michael and Dee Zimmerschied, and again on 4 October 1992 (Alan and Robert Detrich re-discovered Samson after it was originally found and deemed by paleontologists that several bones had washed in and there was nothing left).

It failed to sell online but was purchased for an undisclosed price in 2001 by British millionaire Graham Ferguson Lacey, who renamed the skeleton "Samson" after the Biblical figure of the same name.

[90] It was later sold to Danish-born investment banker Niels Nielsen, who loaned the specimen to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany, for research and exhibition.

[105] In 2013, a team of paleontologists from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Leiden, Netherlands) traveled to Montana where they discovered and unearthed a large and remarkably complete Tyrannosaurus rex specimen that lived 67 million years ago.

[110] In 2016 Greg Wilson, David DeMar, and a paleontology team from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, the University of Washington, and the Dig Field school excavated the partial remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex from Montana.

[116] Peter is the nickname given to a specimen on loan to the Auckland War Memorial Museum by an anonymous owner, currently on display alongside “Barbara” until the end of 2023.

[120] Barbara is the nickname given to a specimen on loan to the Auckland War Memorial Museum by the same anonymous owner as "Peter", currently on display alongside him until the end of 2023.

[122] "Bloody Mary" (as named by Pete Larson)[123] is a nickname for a nearly complete tyrannosaurid (generally considered an adolescent T. rex or a "Nanotyrannus") at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Following years of unsuccessful attempts to sell it to museums or auction it off, the NCMNS started negotiations in 2016, which were prolonged due to a legal battle over the rights to the fossil, which was resolved in 2020.

Important biological data is likely preserved within the specimen, including body outlines, skin impressions, soft tissues, injuries, stomach contents, and even original proteins.

Reposited at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, the fossil material (NMMNH P-3698) consists of skull and lower jaw bones, in addition to isolated teeth and chevrons.

This species differs from T. rex in having smaller postorbital crests, a proportionately longer and shallower lower jaw with a less prominent chin suggestive of a weaker bite, and more laterally compressed teeth.