The composite skeleton was a showpiece of an auction that featured some 70 lots, and the skull was set up next to the auctioneer's podium throughout. rex skeleton would go up for auction in Europe. Koller had said Tuesday's sale would be the first time such a T. rex skeleton measuring 11.6 meters long (38 feet long) and 3.9 meters high (12.8 feet) high came in under the anticipated range of 5 million to 8 million francs when it went under the hammer at the Koller auction house in Zurich. So he made a few phone calls, and he got out his backpack.Nearly 300 Tyrannosaurus rex bones that were dug up from three sites in the United States and assembled into a single skeleton sold at Tuesday at a Switzerland auction for 4.8 million francs ($5.3 million), below the expected price.Ĭrafted into an open-mouth pose, the T. Thomas immediately called the collections manager, Carl Mehling, our man with the backpack and the wandering rib bone. ![]() 973 was the identifier given to the first T. "I knew what it was because of the number, 973." "When I was going through this process of opening up cabinets and looking through shelves," Carr recalls, "I came upon this one cabinet." He looked in, and "with unbelieving eyes," he says, he saw some bone fragments. Thomas Carr was doing research on dinosaurs and spent day after day going through the tall green cabinets that house the New York museum's "spare" bones. No one realized that for decades, until a young researcher took his first-ever trip to New York. ![]() However, the skeleton the New York museum shipped to Pittsburgh was incomplete. In any case, he got $7,000 for the skeleton, which went to the New York museum's biggest rival - the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, which wanted its own crowd-pleasing monster. Now, dinosaur historians say Brown's correspondence contradicts that and suggests that Brown really just wanted cash to hunt more dinosaurs. The reason he gave, says Norell: "He was very, very concerned that New York City was going to be bombed in World War II." It was what scientists call "the holotype" specimen of a new species, the first against which all others are compared. Then they put the pieces together and officially named the huge beast Tyrannosaurus rex, the Tyrant King. There, scientists registered the bones with the number 973. Brown packed the bones in plaster - the skull itself weighed over 1,000 pounds - and sent them by train to the New York museum. Over three years of digging, the beast emerged from the ground - a huge tail, tiny forearms, a bone-crunching jaw, horrifying teeth.īig carnivorous dinosaurs had been discovered before, but not like this. He wrote to his boss, "There is no question but what this is the find of the season." Competing museums were known to scout out and spy on dinosaur digs, and Brown knew he had something incredible. In a letter to his boss at the museum, he wrote: "The bones are separated by two or three feet of soft sand usually and each bone is surrounded by the hardest blue sandstone I ever tried to work, in the form of concretions." He wrote the museum for more money - and to complain. This time, Brown found something unlike anything he'd ever seen.īrown's team blasted a hillside with dynamite, then dragged the ground with horse-drawn earth-movers. It was a region that had yielded exciting dinosaur bones before. In the summer of 1902, Brown went to Hell Creek, Mont. Image # 28767/American Museum of Natural History Brown and his team used horses to pull away layers of soil and rock above the dinosaur bones. He held the top paleontology spot at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, a job now held by Mark Norell.īrown (lower left) works in the quarry in 1905 in Hell Creek, Mont., where the first T. He was flamboyant on dinosaur digs, he'd wear a full-length fur coat.īut he was a serious scientist, too. They were headhunters looking for skulls, because they were flashier."Īnd Barnum Brown was among the best - the Indiana Jones of dino hunters. They were looking for specimens they could mount in museums. "When people went out looking for dinosaurs, they were trophy hunters. "It was literally the Wild West at that time," says Witmer. Larry Witmer, paleontologist at Ohio University, says scientists clamored for bones and more bones. In the early 1900s, dinosaur bones were like Egyptian mummies - mysteries that dazzled both the public and scientists. ![]() The bone came out of a Montana hillside over 100 years ago, discovered by a man who was a legend among fossil hunters. Science Expedition Notes: In The Field With Fossil Hunter Barnum Brown
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