King of the Tyrant Lizards

About this drawing

The name of this fierce tyrannosaurus is about as bold as they come. Tyrannosaurus rex means king of the tyrant lizards. Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, gave it that title in 1905, and it has grabbed the public's attention ever since.

The first partial skeleton recognized as T. rex came out of Montana in 1902, found by legendary fossil hunter Barnum Brown. A few years later, he dug up a better one. During World War II, some of that material was sold to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, partly out of fear that New York might be bombed.

Today a few dozen skeletons are known, though very few are close to complete. One of the best turned up in South Dakota in 1990 and now stands in the Field Museum in Chicago. Thanks to finds like these, we know an adult could grow over 40 feet long and weigh several tons.

Here's a mind-bender: its reign was surprisingly short. Tyrannosaurus lived only during the last two or three million years of the dinosaur age, right before the great extinction. Stegosaurus had vanished long before that. In fact, a T-Rex lived closer in time to you than it did to a stegosaurus.

• dinosaurs
• tyrannosaurus
• fossils
• museums