![]() ![]() " Little did he know, it was more like the find of a century – a discovery that would transform our understanding of dinosaurs and galvanise public interest in this previously obscure group of ancient creatures well into the modern era.īut right from the beginning, one aspect of these kings of the "tyrant lizards" was deeply mysterious: their puny arms. ![]() In a letter to Osborn, Brown wrote: "There is no question but what this is the find of the season so far for scientific importance. This was Tyrannosaurus rex – the first ever discovered. Its hip bone was 5ft (1.5m) long, let alone the rest. Brown had uncovered a number of bones from a promising large carnivorous dinosaur that was entirely new to science. The specimen was banished to the museum basement, but he felt that it might as well have been thrown away.īut now things were looking up. Only then did Osborn discover that hidden within its stony tomb, the fossil had been a crumpled, misshapen mess all along. It had been tenderly carted all 2,100 miles (3,379km) from the dig site – a labourious, risky journey involving horses, railway lines and lots of heavy lifting. ![]() Henry Fairfield Osborn had recently taken delivery of their latest prize, a vast hunk of rock containing the skull of a kind of early duck-billed dinosaur. They urgently needed something good to send back to the American Museum of Natural History.įrom his office in New York, Brown's boss was just as anxious as his distant employees. Amid soaring temperatures and caking dust, they searched for fossils – hacking away at the golden-brown earth with chisels and pickaxes, carving out mini quarries at scattered locations, sometimes uncovering half-decent finds only to abandon them. It was August 1902 and Barnum Brown had taken a team of palaeontologists deep into the strange, undulating landscape of banded hills in the Badlands of Montana. The end of the season was approaching rapidly – the last shot at success in what had been a very expensive expedition. ![]()
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