Rare Tyrannosaurus rex skull arrives at Seattle museum

The researchers estimate Tufts-Love lived about 66.3 million years ago, making its living toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, not geologically long before a mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs.

The dinosaur would have stood about 15 to 20 feet (4.5m to 6m) at its hips and would have been more than 40ft (12m) in length, the museum said.

Paleontologists at Seattle’s Burke Museum have excavated a set of the carnivorous dinosaur’s vertebrae, hips, ribs, lower jaw bones and an nearly complete skull measuring four feet, News Observer reports.

Researchers led by Gregory P Wilson from University of Washington (UW) in the USA discovered the T rex during an expedition to the Hell Creek Formation in northern Montana – an area that is world-famous for its fossil dinosaur sites.

The huge fossilized skull weighed in at 2,500 pounds. 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.

The plaster-covered skull will be on display to the public for several weeks starting Saturday.

Paleontologists at Burke prepare to remove the fossil from its original location. “The T Rex has always been my favourite dinosaur and I’m really pleased that this one is going to make its home at the Burke Museum”. They estimated that Tufts-Love Rex was about 15 years old when it died based on the size of the skull, which indicates the age of T. rex.

“There’s a very good chance that the other half of the skull is there”, said Gregory P. Wilson, who co-led the excavation team and is a biology professor at the University of Washington, in a statement.

The Hell Creek Formation in Montana is a site known for its fossil treasures.

In the beginning, Jason Love and Luke Tufts, both Burke Museum paleontology volunteers, detected pieces of fossilized bone projecting from a rocky hillside. It is now led by Nathan Myhrvold and Jack Horner.

The two were with a team collecting fossils as part of the Hell Creek Project, now led by Wilson and started by Jack Horner, who discovered the world’s first dinosaur embryos, and Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft chief technology officer who is a Burke Museum research associate. This remarkable find is one of only about 25 of this level of completeness.

They believe it roamed the earth in the late Cretaceous period.

“There’s a great deal we still don’t know about these animals”, Wilson said. Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures CEO and Paleontologist who founded the Hell Creek Project with Jack Horner, talked about how important the project has been. “Despite the elevated position of T. rex, there exist only a modest number of Tyrannosaurus rex specimens, from which this larger-than-life image is built”. The skull, which is four feet long, was unloaded at the city’s Burke Museum on Thursday.

To preserve the specimen, the skull was encased in several layers of plaster.