When Dinosaurs Ruled the World: A T-rex Named Sue

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A T.rex Named Sue
I am woman, hear me roar!
© Field Museum

"A T. rex Named Sue" examines the story of largest, most complete and best preserved Tyrannosaurus ever found. The T. rex is surrounded by interactive and tactile displays exploring the paleontology that has helped scientists reconstruct Sue’s life and legacy. The exhibition demonstrates how the Tyrannosaurus was monstrous yet mortal and connects with visitors of all ages and abilities , and has been touring the world for a decade. You can find out where the exhibit will be in 2012 at the Field Museum website.

Sue, one of the most fearsome flesh-eaters to have inhabited the Earth, roamed North America 67 million years ago. This ‘Tyrant Lizard King’, with her extraordinarily powerful jaws and massive serrated steak-knife-like teeth, fascinates visitors of all ages.

The dramatic, full-sized cast of Sue’s high skeleton forms the centerpiece of this exhibition, which also includes interactive pods exploring the paleontology that has helped scientists reconstruct Sue’s life and legacy.

Sue is remarkable because of the size and exquisite preservation of her bones. Sixty-seven million years after her death, it is still possible to see fine details where muscles and tendons attached to the bone. The fossil has been described as amongst the most significant scientific gem ever unearthed.

Currently on tour in the U.S., Australasia and the Middle East, "A T. rex Named Sue" combines science, engaging educational activities, and blockbuster appeal in one of the most successful U.S. traveling exhibitions ever. At 42 feet long (12.8 m.) and 12 feet high at the hips. (3.66 m.), Sue is the largest, most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered, and a dramatic, life-sized skeleton cast is the centerpiece of this exciting exhibition. Natural history museums, science centers and children’s museums around the world have shared the story of Sue the T. rex with their visitors, increasing year-over-year attendance by 15-920% and attracting international attention.

This T. rex is named for Sue Hendrickson, who discovered the dinosaur near Faith, South Dakota, during the summer of 1990 during a commercial fossil hunting trip. Read more about Sue Hendrickson at her website.

Shortly after its discovery, the fossil became the center of an intense ownership dispute that resulted in a decision to sell Sue at public auction.

To ensure that Sue would be preserved for future generations of scientists and visitors, The Field Museum in Chicago purchased Sue for $8.4 million. Field Museum spent more than 30,000 hours preparing the more than 250 bones and teeth in Sue’s skeleton and making exact, fully articulated replicas so that people around the world would have the opportunity to view and study Sue.

As the most complete T. rex specimen ever discovered, Sue has tremendous value for scientists and the general public. Previously, only a handful of partial T. rex specimens had been found, none more than 60% complete. At 90% complete and preserved, Sue is the most celebrated representative of its species, permitting more detailed studies of the biology, growth, and behavior of T. rex than had previously been possible.

Dinosaur fossils have been known for millennia, although their true nature was not recognized. The Chinese, whose modern word for dinosaur is konglóng (kong means afraid or frightened and long means dragon), considered them to be dragon bones and documented them as such. For example, Hua Yang Guo Zhi, a book written by Zhang Qu during the Western Jin Dynasty, reported the discovery of dragon bones at Wucheng in Sichuan Province. Villagers in central China have long unearthed fossilized "dragon bones" for use in traditional medicines, a practice that continues today. In Europe, dinosaur fossils were generally believed to be the remains of giants and other creatures killed by the Great Flood.

Scholarly descriptions of what would now be recognized as dinosaur bones first appeared in the late 17th century in England. Part of a bone, now known to have been the femur of a Megalosaurus was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, England, in 1676. The fragment was sent to Robert Plot, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and first curator of the Ashmolean Museum, who published a description in his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677. He correctly identified the bone as the lower extremity of the femur of a large animal, and recognized that it was too large to belong to any known species. He therefore concluded it to be the thigh bone of a giant human similar to those mentioned in the Bible. In 1699, Edward Lhuyd, a friend of Sir Isaac Newton, was responsible for the first published scientific treatment of what would now be recognized as a dinosaur when he described and named a sauropod tooth, "Rutellum implicatum", that had been found in Caswell, near Witney, Oxfordshire.

Between 1815 and 1824, the Rev William Buckland (pictured at left), a professor of geology at Oxford University, collected more fossilized bones of Megalosaurus and became the first person to describe a dinosaur in a scientific journal. The second dinosaur genus to be identified, Iguanodon, was discovered in 1822 by Mary Ann Mantell – the wife of English geologist Gideon Mantell. Gideon Mantell recognized similarities between his fossils and the bones of modern iguanas. He published his findings in 1825.

The study of these "great fossil lizards" soon became of great interest to European and American scientists, and in 1842 the English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur". He recognized that the remains that had been found so far, Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus, shared a number of distinctive features, and so decided to present them as a distinct taxonomic group. With the backing of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the husband of Queen Victoria, Owen established the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, to display the national collection of dinosaur fossils and other biological and geological exhibits.

In 1858, the first known American dinosaur was discovered, in marl pits in the small town of Haddonfield, New Jersey (although fossils had been found before, their nature had not been correctly discerned). The creature was named Hadrosaurus foulkii. It was an extremely important find: Hadrosaurus was one of the first nearly complete dinosaur skeletons found (the first was in 1834, in Maidstone, Kent, England), and it was clearly a bipedal creature. This was a revolutionary discovery as, until that point, most scientists had believed dinosaurs walked on four feet, like other lizards. Foulke's discoveries sparked a wave of dinosaur mania in the United States.

Dinosaur mania was exemplified by the fierce rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, both of whom raced to be the first to find new dinosaurs in what came to be known as the Bone Wars. The feud probably originated when Marsh publicly pointed out that Cope's reconstruction of an Elasmosaurus skeleton was flawed: Cope had inadvertently placed the plesiosaur's head at what should have been the animal's tail end.

The fight between the two scientists lasted for over 30 years, ending in 1897 when Cope died after spending his entire fortune on the dinosaur hunt. Marsh (pictured at right) 'won' the contest primarily because he was better funded through a relationship with the US Geological Survey. Unfortunately, many valuable dinosaur specimens were damaged or destroyed due to the pair's rough methods: for example, their diggers often used dynamite to unearth bones (a method modern paleontologists would find appalling).

Despite their unrefined methods, the contributions of Cope and Marsh to paleontology were vast: Marsh unearthed 86 new species of dinosaur and Cope discovered 56, a total of 142 new species. Marsh's 1896 illustration of the bones of Stegosaurus (pictured at left), a dinosaur he described and named in 1877. Cope's collection is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, while Marsh's is on display at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

After 1897, the search for dinosaur fossils extended to every continent, including Antarctica. The first Antarctic dinosaur to be discovered, the ankylosaurid Antarctopelta oliveroi, was found on Ross Island in 1986, although it was 1994 before an Antarctic species, the theropod Cryolophosaurus ellioti, was formally named and described in a scientific journal.

Current dinosaur "hot spots" include southern South America (especially Argentina) and China. China in particular has produced many exceptional feathered dinosaur specimens due to the unique geology of its dinosaur beds, as well as an ancient arid climate particularly conducive to fossilization.

Visit your local library for more resources about the dinosaur:

The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction
Robert T.  Bakker, (1986).

Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages
Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. (2007).

The Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs
Gregory S. Paul, (2000).

Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds
Gregory S. Paul, (2002).

For Younger Readers

A dinosaur named Sue : the story of the colossal fossil : the world's most complete T. rex
Patricia Relf, Field Museum of Natural History, (2000).

A T. Rex named Sue : Sue Hendrickson's huge discovery
Natalie Lunis, (2007).

Tyrannosaurus Sue : the extraordinary saga of the largest, most fought over T. rex ever found
Steve Fiffer, (2000).

Tyrannosaurus Rex vs. Velociraptor: Power against Speed.
Michael O’Hearn, illustrated by Philip Renne(2009).
Grades 3-5
Taking inspiration from the zillions of battle royales waged with plastic figures in backyards everywhere, the Dinosaur Wars series mixes scientific fact with senseless warfare. The first thing readers find out is that this fight never happened—Velociraptors died out some 10 million years before T. rex took the stage. Thankfully, this bummer is but a brief detour. Soon we are gauging each foe’s strengths with chapters such as “Size,” “Speed,” and “Attack Style.” — Excerpt of review by Daniel Kraus first published April 1, 2010 (Booklist).

Tyrannosaurus Rex
Susan H. Gray, illustrated by Robert Squier (2009).
K-Grade 2.
This title in the Introducing Dinosaurs series offers younger readers a visually appealing, simple introduction to the fearsome “tyrant lizard king.” The text is simple and straightforward. Gray uses everyday objects familiar to children to detail the physical characteristics of T. rex, describing its teeth as “larger than bananas,” its weight “as much as four cars,” and its head “the size of a refrigerator.” — Excerpt of review by Ed Sullivan first published October 1, 2009 (Booklist).
 
T. Rex
Vivian French, illustrated by Alison Bartlett, (2004).
Primary school.
In a sprightly picture book that’s as much about the mysteries of science as it is about dinosaurs, a boy and his grandfather visit a natural history museum’s T. rex exhibition. Bartlett’s endearing, color-saturated paintings of the museum’s T. rex dioramas reflect and enhance the author’s playful, vivacious approach to scientific exploration. Budding paleontologists will be inspired by all the detective work that remains to be tackled in the perennially popular world of dinosaurs. — Excerpt of review by Karin Snelson first published December 1, 2004 (Booklist).

 
Digging up Tyrannosaurus Rex.
John R.Horner   and Don Lessem (1992).
Grades 4-7
With both excitement and deliberate care, paleontologist Horner and science journalist Lessem describe the discovery and excavation of the first complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found. In 1990 in a Montana wildlife refuge, a family stumbled on some bones of the gigantic dinosaur that lived 65 million years ago. Tracing the laborious excavation of the fossil skeleton, its piece-by-piece removal to a museum, and the slow, painstaking process of cleaning and repair, the authors weave in what is known about the dinosaur and all the intriguing questions that remain to be answered. — Excerpt of review by Hazel Rochman first published January 15, 1993 (Booklist).

Photo credit: Sue (T-rex) by cotaroba