The BBC has a story about that looks into how Tyrannosaurus rex used it's small arms. T. rex and it's close relatives had notoriously small arms for their size. Since its discovery in 1902 by Barnum Brown, paleontologists have wondered how they used their puny arms.
The end of the season was approaching rapidly – the last shot at success in what had been a very expensive expedition.
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. 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. They urgently needed something good to send back to the American Museum of Natural History.
From his office in New York, Brown's boss was just as anxious as his distant employees. 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. 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. Only then did Osborn discover that hidden within its stony tomb, the fossil had been a crumpled, misshapen mess all along. The specimen was banished to the museum basement, but he felt that it might as well have been thrown away.
But now things were looking up. Brown had uncovered a number of bones from a promising large carnivorous dinosaur that was entirely new to science. Its hip bone was 5ft (1.5m) long, let alone the rest. This was Tyrannosaurus rex – the first ever discovered. Brown had never seen anything like it.
